 |
|
|
Interlace, Cryo
2004-10-09
Vogon Variety, Indigo, Malmö
So I went to this club the other night, one of the more densely populated, overflowing, jam-packed, where mingling is not an option but a necessity if you want to move at all. Dressed up, fixed up, ready to revolve around my own axis I entered the club as a cloud of smoke and the promise of sweat engulfed me and all the other expectatious heads. I oozed myself over to the bar and watched the cats on the dance floor contorting, swinging, stomping and at times wriggling like eels, lights flashing iridescent chaos, noise attacking the senses, loving it, joining them. Then as if on command the hip swinging crowd all turned into a mass of black and like a nietzschean nightmare they moved, one mind, one body, one vision, a black hole and I was standing on the event horizon dreading the fall. A time tunnel thrust me back, I started reminiscing, started to think about how it all began, for me at least, to try to understand what had happened, where it all went wrong, where it all went so square, so bourgeois.
Let’s begin with my first memories of music, the Beatles, Elvis and ABBA, I was still wearing diapers. I’ve always listened to music thanks to my mother (sorry for all the ruined records). Later on when I was old enough to enjoy radio I heard this great music, sounding like nothing I’d heard before and I wanted an electric guitar so that even I could create that wonderful sound and noise. It took me years to find out that it wasn’t guitars at all, it was space age, sci-fi music machines called synthesisers, the future on radio. As I grew older I came to the realisation that there was more to it than music, a subculture that slowly pulled me in like fish trapped in net, though I at that time saw it as the pathway to freedom. I remember dressing in all black, head to toe, shaving the do into a hybrid of the fashionable German ‘30’s and the punk mohawks of the ‘70’s. I was a reaction to the pastel, neo-neon world that the, at least in the beginning, fairly promising ‘80’s had transformed itself into, trying to negate it, we all were. Guerrillas in a mist of hairspray, the iconic (or was it ironic?) rebels.
My dancing and train of thoughts came to a violent halt, a band had entered the stage. Never heard of them before, Cryo, and yes that singer sure looked deep-frozen. Man, if Adolf the carrot had this kind of charisma the world would have been a lot safer back in the ‘30’s and ‘40’s. Sporting leather pants and a blond ‘do with a vacant DOA face this singer, who for all accounts wasn’t that awful voice-wise, entered the stage and started to strut his stuff, though I’m not sure bashfully walking back and forth can be considered strutting but who cares. The music, rather basic not bad at all but basic, was rhythmic semi-hard Electronic Barley Music, EBM. In other words no dated pop of times to come that sound more like old techno revisions, just EBM (or is it TDM). Classic and also a tad boring but not without competence. Maybe with a better live/slide show and a singer who is not about to topple himself with shyness it could all work out fine for this trifle duo.
We, the subculture, were fashionably, politically and aerodynamically incorrect, the postmodern sleaze, no morals but the morality we made, promiscuous, iconoclastic, and of course utterly bored. Seeing nothing but aesthetics in symbols once political, sometimes religious now worn like accessories. Still we were hopelessly caught in the old structure of l’ancien regime, meaning of course the hierarchies and discourses we tried so hard to avoid, to fight, always resisting the status quo. Some went fascist far-left others fascist far-right with me the anarchic socialists an enemy of both “not with us? Then you’re against us”, so I guess I was against them. Our, or was it just my, sound bite politics, “Ni Upanja Ni Strahu” (no hope, no fear), “volle Kraft voraus” (full force ahead), “Rules + submission = culture”, “Resist the command”, “Stand up, React, Fight!” I wanted to “tear it all down and start again, from the top to the bottom and then…”. Later came the most popular of all “information wants to be free”. We thought, “finally, the revolution is here” and faster than you could say Neuromancer everyone got whacked out on cyberpunk. The enemy, the global conglomerate zaibatsus as was the COINTELPRO (or in Sweden IB) reality of modern “democratic” political freedom. The salvation, technology on a personal level. The heroes, Synergy and a handful of fictitious keyboard tapping, information hacking nerds on speed. The stage, reality, virtually, even Billy Idol was on our side; I guess that was the beginning of the end. In hindsight it was just a bunch of nerds tripping on Gibson.
Again I was interrupted, a band started to take the stage. This time it was the more well-known Interlace. A band I’d heard before, never really liked them, never really disliked them. Tonight they put on a show, a real one, not that frequent in this subculture. It was a re-enactment of the immaculate conception, the virgin replaced by technology, the pure, an essence of objectivity and logic, not clouded by emotion and human frailty. A new breed, I’m told was born. As this new-born started to metamorphose, I started thinking about bands who have done something like this before and done it better both musically and visually, the difference is the means I guess. Not technology but drugs, a deliverer of the mind I’m told. Squirming, this front-man was attempting an Imitatio Christi symbolically tortured, crucified, succeeding halfway resulting in an Imitatio Ogre, another theatrically skilled vocalist. I guess it was supposed to symbolise the awkwardness of being thrown into a nauseating world that you don’t understand, a world that doesn’t understand you, objectifies you. Alienated, alone, living for the sake of living, the endless repeating loop. Constantly questioning, constantly questioned. Freedom a goal, then be free Mr vocalist, don’t look back. Look straight ahead and find your self. There can be only one. Musically I guess their raison d’etre is the fact that it’s somewhat personal, talented even, though easily categorised and recognised, repeating repetition.
Now back in my past. Sinsemilla purple cool, the way out for some, Love’s Secret Domain, the womb, “junk turns you on vegetable it’s green see” hypo reality. New music, new age, new ranting and ravings. Our world collapsed in on itself, imploded, hyper reality, simulation, simulacra. And now we’re in the middle of a cultural Union Carbide disaster or, in the words of dearly departed Bill Hicks, a cultural train-wreck. We had developed a norm, a way of being, behaving, thinking. Apathetic, cynicism got the better of us, we gave up waiting for the end of days finding only the end of us, assimilated we began to rot. Maybe it’s true that what begins as a liberating function at the level of individual expression, gets turned into a repressive category. You have to be what you’ve become in order to stay what you are. The constant flux that made the subculture vigorous and potent, made it impossible to sustain, it had to be stilled in order to exist, had to become reactionary, harmless. Free thinking became idolatry, individuality suspect. And that’s where we are. Maybe I’m just romanticising, maybe we never were that much of a counter culture and what really is the moral of this story? I don’t know, maybe it’s just “remember Bhopal!”, but hopefully it’s more of “Worship The Glitch!” and “the normal is perverse”. Anyway I’ll end with quoting Dr Leary “The message is very simple: Think for yourself and question authority”.
/Magnus Nilsson
|
|
|
