Month: December 2016 (Page 6 of 8)

 

A Brief History of Mauve Zone Recordings

I began recording music in the year 2000, initially under the name Death Head Moths, then shortly later Sypha Nadon: my initial sonic inspirations were Nine Inch Nails and Throbbing Gristle, hence my decision to focus solely on experimental electronic music, created primarily on a computer. But for many years, I had no real outlet for this music of mine to be heard. This situation changed in the year 2005, when my friend (and fellow musician) Ilya started up a netlabel (entitled This Plague Of Dreaming) at the Internet Archive. When he first began this netlabel he was in need of acts and, having heard some of my material previously, offered to release some of the recordings that I had done under the Sypha Nadon name. I took him up on the offer, and 2005 saw the release of my Enter Horus EP and an LP entitled 11 Chants for Russolo! I ended up doing one more release for Ilya, the Threnody for Zumb Zumb LP, which appeared in November of 2006. By this point I was in a state of feverish musical activity and was coming up with many other ideas for future albums. Not wanting to clutter up my friend’s netlabel, I decided to create a netlabel of my own. And it was that train of thought that led to the birth of Mauve Zone Recordings (also initialized as MZR for short).

When creating Mauve Zone Recordings, some of my initial inspirations (aside from This Plague Of Dreaming) were other indie record labels I had admired over the years, namely Industrial Records (home of Throbbing Gristle) and the Come Organisation/Susan Lawly (home of Whitehouse). Wanting to give it an occult glamor, I decided to nick the ‘Mauve Zone’ terminology from the writings of Typhonian occultist Kenneth Grant, who defined the Mauve Zone thusly in his 1999 book Beyond the Mauve Zone: “Mauve Zone: a loaded term signifying the region between dreaming and dreamless sleep, which has its analogue in figurative expressions such as the Crimson Desert, Desert of Set, Voids beyond Daath, etc. It is the state which dawns beyond the abyss that separates phenomenal existence from noumenal Being.” To further add to the mystique, I conceived of an alter ego named Arthur Limbo to serve as the label’s founder and official propagandist.

 

Arthur Limbo, Founder of Mauve Zone Recordings

 

Although I came up with the concept for the netlabel in late 2006, it wasn’t until the following year that MZR became a fully operating entity. February 19th, 2007 is the historic date that MZR appeared at the Internet Archive, and on March 6th, 2007, MZR released its very first album. This was Rise Horus Rise, and the band behind it was Boy Destroyer, a fake industrial/power electronics supergroup that I created for the occasion. I will now reprint the original liner notes/press release:

“Mauve Zone Recordings is pleased to announce the release of its first digital bullet, Rise Horus Rise, which is in turn the grand debut of noise supergroup BOY DESTROYER. This supergroup is composed of the following individuals:

Ray Pissed (Vocals and Lyrics). The lead singer for underground punk rock band Ricin, which has released many bootleg singles and is currently signed to Fireball Records, where they are recording their debut album, Drunk on the President’s Blood. Their live shows are legendary.

Isabelle Ducasse (Noise Guitar/Feedback). Isabelle Ducasse is best known as a “Feedback Artist,” world-renowned in the avant-garde community for her sonic sculptures of noise. Speaking of noise, she’s also the noise guitarist for the noise-drone band Deathdrone, who last year released the now-classic (and impossible to find) EP Drone Moon Headache.

Sypha Nadon (Rhythms). The cryptic Sypha Nadon is best known for his releases on the esoteric This Plague of Dreaming netlabel, namely the albums 11 Chants for Russolo! and the more recent Threnody for Zumb Zumb (not to mention the Enter Horus EP). Currently planning an EP for late 2007/early 2008.

From the liner notes: This is sacred racket, pure fucking aggression, punk noise of the highest order Thelemic Anarchy The conquering child manifested in this Aeon as ultra-noise music to immolate yourself to A symphony heralding the downfall of the right-wing reign This is a campaign, it has nothing to do with art BOY DESTROYER is a three piece group who are violently uncompromising both musically and lyrically while possessing a new sense of direction in the spectrum they have very little in common with the current crop of electronic bands and this album should not be confused with such

Keywords: Punk Rock; Noise; Power Electronics; Thelema; Horus; Kaos; Anarchy; Wild Boys; Industrial; Brutalisim

Track listing:

1. Welcome to the Machine (4:55)
2. War (4:49)
3. Spill Blood (1:53)
4. Intellectual Punk (5:09)
5. Raped by a Deer (3:56)
6. Rise Horus Rise (5:20)
7. Human Lab Rats (4:39)
8. We Hate You Conservatives (5:12)
9. Retail Hell (5:28)
10. Electro-Sadism (5:07)
11. Scream (For Terror) (3:56)
12. Boy Destroyer (10:00)

Total running time: 60:31

Recommended for fans of Throbbing Gristle, Whitehouse, Sutcliffe Jugend, Wolf Eyes, Crass,
Big Black, Foetus, and other sonic trouble makers.

Says Isabelle Ducasse: “Boy Destroyer declares war on civilization, on society, on reality itself. We will destroy anyone who gets in our way. We’re interested in chaos and anarchy, Uranian poetry, Apollonian Beauty and Dionysian Homosexuality. The world isn’t ready for Boy Destroyer. Too bad for the world, but it had it coming anyway, smug bastard.”

Says Ray Pissed: “I had to change my vocal style a bit for this one, as it’s the first noise record I’ve ever sang on. It was an interesting experience, to say the least. Seriously, though, this is some intense shit. Hardcore with a capital H. Total punk rock, just not rock & roll.”

Says Sypha Nadon: “The edge or stick some crush see baby not insect.”

 

* * * *

 

Following the release of the first Boy Destroyer album, MZR began releasing various Sypha Nadon anthology releases. When I first began the netlabel, it was my intention that it would initially function as nothing more than a depository for my Sypha Nadon albums, my albums recorded under other aliases, and for Cat Band archival releases (The Cat Band was a band created by my younger brothers back in the 1990’s… some of you may recall a Cat Band Day that I created for this very blog a few years back, in 2014 or so). But a few months after I began MZR I thought it would be pretty cool if I could get other artists involved as well, to at least give the impression that MZR was a record label of some sorts. The first album to appear on MZR that wasn’t a creation of my own was an album entitled Hard and Evil by our very own Thomas Moronic (the date of this album’s release was June 30, 2007). In the years that followed, a few other people contributed albums to MZR: mainly The People’s Tongue, Bryce Clayton Eiman, Michael Karo, and T3. But for the most part, MZR has mainly served as an outlet for my own musical projects, obsessions and fetishes: Sypha Nadon being the primary one, followed by Boy Destroyer, and also Zyklon Vagina, James Champagne, Cadaver Synod, and Death Head Moths.

When MZR first began, during its first year or so, I desired for it to have a kind of seedy, unpleasant image. Inspired by how Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse would often use questionable/disturbing imagery of little girls in their lyrics/album art/promotional material, I decided it would be funny to have MZR to do the same, just with boys (naturally, this all tied in with the homoerotic William Burroughs inspiration/influence as well). This can be seen especially in the early Boy Destroyer albums and the first issue of TRANS/MISSION. By 2008 I had grown a little bored with this tactic so I began restyling the label as a sort of cryptic occult-obsessed secret society. When MZR first began I classified it as the musical branch of the Necronomicon Transhumanism Society, the latter being a website I had created around 2005-2006. In September 2008 (no doubt inspired by Grant Morrison’s Batman R.I.P./Black Glove storyline that was ongoing at that time) I came up with the concept of the Dark Tentacle, a sinister umbrella organization made up of the Necronomicon Transhumanism Society (the philosophical branch), Mauve Zone Recordings (the musical branch), Black Dulia Press (the literature/publishing branch), The Sodality of the Holy Shadow (the religious branch), The Final Church of the Zumb Zumb Apocalypse, The Ghooric Order of the Shoggothian Nuns, The Cultus of the Locusts, and so on and so forth. This led to the first of many grandiose and bombastic press releases at the MZR blog, such as the following:

“We would like to tell our dedicated listeners that recently Mauve Zone Recordings was purchased by the Dark Tentacle. This will not change our present direction or ambitions.

Mauve Zone Recordings is now the musical branch of the Dark Tentacle, just as the Necronomicon Transhumanist Society is the philosophical branch, and the Sodality of the Holy Shadow is the religious branch (more on this later). Coming soon will be Dark Tentacle Publishing, our literature and publications branch, whose purpose will be the distribution of Neo-Goth Narratives.

We would also like to welcome aboard our Insect Trust a new member: Dr. Gargoyle. A mastermind at sound experimentation, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and Induction Trigger Phrases, he’ll be hard at work on the ultra-secret Project Noir, which will be released to the public next year.

More details to come.

The Insect Trust:
H.P. Lovecraft: Our Spiritual Founder
Arthur Limbo: MZR founder and owner
James Champagne: Art, Production, Text, Promotion
Sypha Nadon: Mauvian Symphonist
Dr. Gargoyle: Science, Sound Experimentation
The Fabulous Mr. Meaningless: Dada Muse
The Booda Carrot: Our Godhead”

 

 

On October 28th, with great fanfare, the Dark Tentacle website was unleashed on an unsuspecting world. It was a short-lived triumph, as a week or so later my computer suffered a catastrophic crash, which resulted in the loss of many files that I was unable to back up. This led to a somewhat sheepish announcement on November 25th, 2008:

“The Dark Tentacle website is no more. With all of the computer problems I had, the original files I had for the pages I had up already were lost, thus making it impossible to edit (even though the site remained online). Even more galling, I lost the original HTML NTS pages, so almost all of the documents I had related to the NTS are gone (with the exception of some of the artwork and a few text documents). So I cancelled the site today. Probably for the best, really… trying to run 4 “secret” societies had become kind of a pain in the ass, to be honest. I still want to have an MZR website up one day, but it seems that now is not the time. I’m trying to simplify my life as it is right now. And it kind of makes sense to bring The Dark Tentacle to an end around the same time that the Black Glove storyline on Batman comes to an end.”

Some other notable dates in the history of MZR:

3/20/2007: The release of the first issue of TRANS/MISSION, the official newsletter of Mauve Zone Recordings (for more info on TRANS/MISSION, see the end of this article)

4/23/2007: On this day I created the official MZR logo, which features a photograph of Luigi Russolo posing with one of his Intonarumori devices.

 

the official Mauve Zone Recordings logo

 

For the curious, this is what the MZR prototype logo looked like:

 

 

9/26/2007: On this day I unveiled the official Mauve Zone Recordings blog, which still exists to this day (see “Links of Interest” section below).
12/22/2007: The release of the second (and final) issue of TRANS/MISSION.
10/28/2008: The release of A Dream as White as the Death of a Seagull, the first compilation album put out by MZR.
10/31/2009: the release of the netlabel’s one (and only) eBook, James Champagne’s Grimoire (eventually deleted when the book was published for real in 2012).

 

Our Latest Release: Beyond The Mauve Zone [MZR040]

Early on this year I realized that MZR had reached its tenth year of operation. To commemorate such a historic milestone, I decided that a number of albums should be released. First there was the re-release of the label’s very first (and long out-of-print) LP, Boy Destroyer’s Rise Horus Rise, in a deluxe edition meant to celebrate its ten year anniversary. Along with all 12 tracks off the original album, it also featured tracks from the Wild Boys EP, and a PDF/booklet containing the album’s original liner notes, lyrics, and other ephemera. Then on June 17th there was the release of Selected Ambient Twerks, the second Sypha Nadon “greatest hits” collection. The following month saw me releasing an album of all MIDI music entitled Second Report, and it was the first album I recorded under the Death Head Moths name since the year 2000. A few months later saw me releasing an album under my own name, this album being Experiment XX. However, all this was mere build-up to MZR’s 40th release: Beyond The Mauve Zone, the label’s second compilation album (and a sequel to 2008’s A Dream as White as the Death of a Seagull).

Track listing for MZR040:

1. Orchestra 23: Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman (Intro) 3:37
2. Boy Destroyer: Leonardo 4:38
3. ▼RIL Y▲: We Are The Void We Worship 8:08
4. Cadaver Synod: Five Billion Years of Hell-Engineering 5:52
5. The People’s Tongue: Shooby Laboof Propulsion 2:09
6. Thomas Moore: Sling 9:09
7. James Champagne: Beyond the Mauve Zone 7:19
8. Orchestra 23: Intermission 2016 1:54
9. M. Karo: Tiempo Peligroso 7:47
10. Zyklon Vagina: Bass Decay 3:19
11. Bryce Clayton Eiman: My Heart is a Muscle the Size of Your Fist 4:27
12. Death Head Moths: Eraser (Polite) 2:29
13. Sypha Nadon: Melenkurion Skyweir 4:28
14. Orchestra 23: Dark House (Outro) 3:37
15. Mystery Guest: The Grand Feline-ale 3:19

Total Running Time: 72:15

Although I’ve designed the album covers for a great majority of MZR’s releases, it’s very rare that I draw any of the art by hand (the exception to this rule are the first 3 volumes of The Cat Band anthologies, all of which I personally illustrated). Therefore, as a way to acknowledge the special nature of MZR040, I decided that I would illustrate the cover art by hand, the result of which may be seen below:

 

the front cover art of MZR040

the back cover art of MZR040

 

The back cover of the album utilizes the Steffi Grant illustration that appears on the back cover of her husband Kenneth Grant’s book Beyond the Mauve Zone, further modified by myself (namely, I added the rainbow filter, the text, and the MZR logo).

Beyond The Mauve Zone may be downloaded/listened to for free on the MZR page at the Internet Archive, the link of which is below:

https://archive.org/details/MZR040

 

The Future of Mauve Zone Recordings

There was a period of time earlier this year where I was thinking that maybe Beyond the Mauve Zone would be the last MZR record (the title of the album itself even hints at that notion). After all, I have been working on this label for 10 years now, and 40 is a nice number. But eventually I decided to maybe keep things going. Obviously, the label has had its lulls: though 2007-2009 were very busy years, there were only 2 releases in 2010, 2 in 2011, none at all in 2012, and only 1 in 2013 and 2014 (indeed, there is a two year hiatus between MZR026 and the release of MZR027). Yet 2015 saw 6 releases (granted, mostly Sypha Nadon archival material), and this year has seen 6 as well. I do see it going on another small hiatus in the future, as it’s become a distraction from my writing career. And yet, I do hope to have at least one new release of my own come out in 2017, and I’m toying with the notion of once again opening up the label for submissions (it has been closed to submissions for years now). The last 2 years the label’s pretty much been flooded with Sypha Nadon products, and I think greater diversity is needed to keep MZR from becoming creatively stagnant. I guess what I’m trying to say is this: if you’re a musician and you think your work would be a good fit for MZR, feel free to drop Arthur Limbo an e-mail at mzr777@gmail.com. Obviously I’m in no position to offer cash as MZR is entirely non-profit, but one could say the honor of being part of this illustrious family is payment enough!

 

Mauve Zone Recordings: Discography
(all cover art designed by James Champagne except where noted)
Below each album listing is a link to the relevant Internet Archive page, where each album may in turn be listened to/downloaded.
Key: album #/artist name/album name/catalogue #/release date/format

1. Boy Destroyer: Rise Horus Rise [MZR001] March 6, 2007 (LP)
DELETED (later reissued in a deluxe edition as MZR036)

 

2. Sypha Nadon: Universe A: Distant (Anthology 1) [MZR002] April 13, 2007 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR002
(This archival release was later made redundant by the far superior recording MZR030)

 

3. Sypha Nadon: Universe B: Closer (Anthology 2) [MZR003] April 13, 2007 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR003

 

4. Sypha Nadon/Zyklon Vagina: Malkunofat Disko [MZR004] June 8, 2007 (EP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR_4

 

5. Thomas Moronic: Hard and Evil [MZR005] June 30, 2007 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR005
(cover art by Sian Macfarlane)

 

6. The People’s Tongue: Sonny Bono’s Favorites [MZR006] July 7, 2007 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR_6
(cover artwork by ????)

 

7. Bryce Clayton Eiman [MZR007] September 6, 2007 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR007
(cover art by Bryce Clayton Eiman)

 

8. Bryce Clayton Eiman: Mono [MZR008] November 3, 2007 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR008
(cover art by Bryce Clayton Eiman)

 

9. The Cat Band: Anthology Vol. 1: The Early Years [MZR009] November 29, 2007 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR009

 

10. The Cat Band: Anthology Vol. 2: Cat Forever [MZR010] November 29, 2007 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR010

 

11. The Cat Band: Anthology Vol. 3: Cat Band’s Greatest Hits [MZR011] 11/29/07 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR011

 

12. Sypha Nadon: The Black Omen Soundtrack [MZR012] January 28, 2008 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR012
(the soundtrack to a non-existent computer game: perhaps my favorite SN LP)

 

(MZR013 Cover Art Lost)

13. Boy Destroyer: Wild Boys [MZR013] March 2008 (EP)
DELETED (though the majority of its tracks may be found on MZR036)

 

14: Various: A Dream as White as the Death of a Seagull [MZR014] October 17, 2008 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR014 The historic first MZR compilation album. Cover artwork by Erik Visser.

 

15. Sypha Nadon: Universe C: Beyond (Anthology 3) [MZR015] February 28, 2009 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR015

 

16. The Cat Band: Anthology Vol. 4: Off-White [MZR016] April 24, 2009 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR016
(cover art by Tom Champagne)

 

17. Bryce Clayton Eiman: Sex in Heaven [MZR017] May 18, 2009 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR017
(cover art by Bryce Clayton Eiman)

 

18. Sypha Nadon: The Nightmare Factory [MZR018] June 17, 2009 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR018
This was the first Sypha Nadon “greatest hits” album.

 

19. Sypha Nadon: Our Lady of the Flowers of the Red Night [MZR019] June 28, 2009 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR019

 

20. James Champagne: Grimoire [MZR020] October 31, 2009 (eBook)
DELETED
(you can buy it though: https://www.amazon.com/Grimoire-Compendium-Narratives-James-Champagne/dp/1608640388)

 

21. Boy Destroyer: Socialist Boy Scouts [MZR021] December 4, 2009 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR_21

 

22. M. Karo: Funky Afternoon + The Slow Fish Remixes #1-5 [MZR022] 12/19/09 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR022

 

23. Sypha Nadon: Orheculegenias [MZR023] August 14, 2010 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR023

 

24. T3: Frag Out! [MZR024] October 29, 2010 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR_024

 

25. Sypha Nadon: 4NIC8 [MZR025] August 22, 2011 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR025

 

26. James Champagne: Halloween Time [MZR026] October 17, 2011 (single)
https://archive.org/details/MZR026
(cover photograph courtesy of my mother)

 

27. Sypha Nadon: Litch [MZR027] December 1, 2013 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR_027

 

28. Sypha Nadon: Canadian Atheist [MZR028] November 11, 2014 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR028SyphaNadonCanadianAtheist
(along with The Black Omen, one of my personal favorite SN albums)

 

29: Sypha Nadon: First Report [MZR029] January 20, 2015 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR029

 

30. Sypha Nadon: Distant [MZR030] February 8, 2015 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR030

 

31. Sypha Nadon: Decadence [MZR031] March 6, 2015 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR031

 

32. Sypha Nadon: GAP [MZR032] April 1, 2015 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR032

 

33. Sypha Nadon: Society of the Spectacle [MZR033] May 2, 2015 (2xLP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR033
(to date, MZR’s only double album)

 

34. Sypha Nadon: Monolith [MZR034] August 13, 2015 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR034

 

35. Cadaver Synod: The Great Filter [MZR035] February 8, 2016 [LP]
https://archive.org/details/MZR035CadaverSynodTheGreatFilter01AbstractHorror

 

36. Boy Destroyer: Rise Horus Rise Deluxe Edition [MZR036] April 9, 2016 [LP]
https://archive.org/details/MZR036
(ten year anniversary reissue of MZR001 + select tracks from MZR013)

 

37. Sypha Nadon: Selected Ambient Twerks [MZR037] June 17, 2016 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR037
This is the second Sypha Nadon “greatest hits” album.

 

38. Death Head Moths: Second Report [MZR038] July 4, 2016 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR038

 

39. James Champagne: Experiment XX [MZR039] October 9, 2016 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR039

 

40. Various: Beyond the Mauve Zone [MZR040] , 2016 (LP)
https://archive.org/details/MZR040

 

TRANS/MISSION

 

Shortly after the release of the first Boy Destroyer album, I decided that it would be pretty neat if my label had an official newsletter. After all, Industrial Records had had their Industrial News, while the Come Organisation had their Katas. With this in mind, I created TRANS/MISSION, which became the official newsletter of Mauve Zone Recordings. Initially my goal was to have one every two months, but that seemed like a lot of work so in the end I decided it would maybe be one every 4 months (though I eventually dropped that idea as well: yeah, I’m lazy). The first issue of TRANS/MISSION (released 3/20/2007) was chiefly devoted to Boy Destroyer, and it was 23 pages long. The second issue of TRANS/MISSION came out later on that year, on December 22, 2007, and it was twice as long as issue 1. A third issue was to have been dedicated to The Cat Band, but it was never created. Because Mauve Zone Recordings has never had an official website, people who wanted to read TRANS/MISSION had to download it from my Necronomicon Transhumanism Society website. But when I suffered my big computer crash in 2008, I ended up losing all the HTML files associated with the NTS website, and thus no longer had TRANS/MISSION files on hand either.

For many years I despaired of ever being able to lay my eyes on TRANS/MISSION again (I had never even had the foresight of at least printing out physical copies). But then, on November 18, 2016, I did a Google search for “Mauve Zone Recordings Transmission” and to my surprise saw that on October 22, 2008, our very own Dennis Cooper had uploaded the PDF of the entire first issue on the Scribd website! It can be viewed/downloaded here: https://www.scribd.com/document/7448278/MZR1

Sadly TRANS/MISSION #2 seems to be forever lost to the mists of time. I forget most of the content but I do know that it featured 3 long interviews (with The People’s Tongue, Thomas Moronic, and Bryce Clayton Eiman), along with further Boy Destroyer lyrics. If anyone reading this has a copy of this PDF on file, PLEASE contact me ASAP. You have no idea how desperately I would like to re-read that document!

 

Mauve Zone Recordings: The Failed Projects

Although MZR has seen the release of many albums, there have been just as many albums that have never seen the light of day, for a number of reasons. Here is a list of a few such projects.

THE JAMES CHAMPAGNE SOLO ALBUM: mentioned as far back as the first Boy Destroyer interview, I initially intended to have a solo album released under my own name during the first year of MZR (on my birthday, June 17, to be precise). Alternately known as James Champagne 1 or Imagine the Music, this album was apparently finished but unreleased because it was deemed subpar (I say ‘apparently’ because I don’t recall finishing it, but the MZR blog says otherwise). Two tracks recorded for this project, “Worm Food” and “Vow of Violence,” would later appear on the Sypha Nadon/Zyklon Vagina Malkunofat Disko EP, with Zyklon Vagina given credit for the tracks. It would not be until October 9, 2016, that I would release a full-fledged album under my own name: Experiment XX (itself an album that I had initially recorded under the Sypha Nadon name back in the autumn of 2009, yet for some reason held off on releasing).

THE ROSS GELLER EP: mentioned in the first Boy Destroyer press release was this project (set for the spring of 2007) that I never bothered to actually carry out: there was an episode of the TV show Friends where the Ross Geller character torments his friends with his experimental/ pretentious electronic music: the idea was I would record the few songs they show him playing and release it as an EP.

BOY DESTROYER: SEXY TERRORISM LP: Initially Boy Destroyer’s second album was to have been an EP entitled Disobey! As I worked on it in 2007 it gradually got longer and longer, until it became a full-fledged LP entitled Sexy Terrorism. Then in March of 2008 I decided to abandon it and just went back to my original idea of doing an EP (which became MZR013: the Wild Boys EP). Sadly I no longer possess the unreleased tracks for Sexy Terrorism.

ANTOINE ET AMELIE: longtime readers of this blog will need no introduction to the greatly missed Antonio Urdiales. Back in 2007 Antonio and I were in contact with each other constantly and he was very interested in MZR. Being a fan of his music I commissioned him to do an album for MZR (under his band name Antoine et Amelie). In the spring of 2007 he told me that he had locked himself in his closet/recording studio to do the album, and that he was apparently in contact with “beings from outer space!” In later e-mails he informed me that the album was done, that all that was left to finish was the artwork. But as the months went by this album was never delivered, and I gradually got tired of asking Antonio how it was going, so I eventually just dropped it. One of my big regrets was that MZR never got to release an Antonio album… I wish I could have heard what it was he was working on for me at the time, but I have no doubt it was brilliant.

THE CONGO LP: for some bizarre reason I thought it would be funny to create an album composed entirely of samples from the much-maligned 1995 film Congo. Though two tracks were created for this novelty record, they were lost forever in the aforementioned computer crash of 2008. Kind of a shame, they were pretty amusing from what I recall.

ZYKLON VAGINA: probably the most ambitious of the many failed MZR projects. In 2007 I came up with the idea of my netlabel “discovering” and releasing some long-lost albums put out back in the 1970’s by an obscure Industrial band known as Zyklon Vagina (an obvious spoof of Throbbing Gristle). I came up with the track listings for 4 albums, invented fake biographies of the 4 band members (I recall one of them was named Nigel Semen-Cornflakes, a parody of Genesis P-Orridge)… at one point I even planned on adding entries to these fake records on discogs to create a sense of myth about the project… in the end though my habitual laziness kicked in and I abandoned the project, though I did record one Zyklon Vagina album in May 2007. Entitled Zyklon Jubilee, it featured a total of ten tracks, and was something of a spoof of the most cliché industrial/power electronics album you could imagine (cue samples of Hitler, Charles Manson, songs with names like “Auschwitz Medical Experiments,” “Silling Castle” and “Nazi Disco”). I decided people might not get the joke behind the project so this album was never released, though 4 tracks did make it on the Malkunofat Disko EP, which was a split with Sypha Nadon (the 4 tracks being “Worm Food,” “Rape Machine,” “Viscous,” and “Prelude to Mass Slaughter,” though that latter track ended up being attributed to Sypha Nadon). Since then, Zyklon Vagina has only manifested on the two MZR compilation albums.

BRYCE CLAYTON EIMAN: THE BISEXUAL IS THE MAGIC NEGRO OF THE BEDROOM: this was a 12 track album mailed to me by Bryce Clayton Eiman many years ago, that I had planned on releasing at some point but for whatever reason never did. I would still like to release it one day: I re-listened to it for the first time in years a few months back and thought it sounded really great. Maybe a 2017 release?

PERICHORESIS: In 2008 the MZR blog made mention of an upcoming Sypha Nadon album to be entitled Perichoresis, which would be released in 2009. I have no information as to what became of this project… no doubt it was most likely never even started, though. In another blog entry I also make mention of Sypha Nadon working on an album entitled Funeral Music for Horselover Fat, which also never seems to have been finished.

THE CAT BAND VOLUME V: it was always my intention that there would be five Cat Band anthology albums, with the fifth volume being a recording of the Cat Band’s final live show (which was taped back in 2002). I still would like to release this one day, I’ve just dragged my feet on it, primarily because it’s not exactly the band’s most shining moment.

TAKIN’ IT ALL OFF: the softcore 1987 film Takin’ It All Off was the first “dirty” movie I ever saw, and a few years back I had the idea of releasing a soundtrack for it on MZR. The idea was to record the film, cut it up into individual tracks, and just release that. But though this project was completed, in the end I decided not to release it, perhaps for copyright reasons. Though who knows, maybe I will put it out there one day, just for the lulz.

 

Links of Interest

https://archive.org/details/mauvezone&tab=collection
The Mauve Zone Recordings Internet Archive page.
http://mauvezonerecordings.blogspot.com/
The official Mauve Zone Recordings blog.
https://archive.org/details/tpod
The This Plague Of Dreaming Internet Archive page.
https://www.scribd.com/document/7448278/MZR1
PDF of the first issue of TRANS/MISSION.

 

*

p.s. Hey. The blog’s lucky streak this week culminates in this weekend-long celebration of the author, music-maker, and net label honcho James ‘Sypha’ Champagne’s raucous and unique, 10 year-old Mauve Zone Recordings. James has put together a characteristically fascinating and thrills-packed guide for you, and it’s your golden chance to both get acquainted with this amazing project and score any titles you might not already have. Luxuriate accordingly please, and please give as much of your undivided attention to James and his efforts in your comments as you can, thanks! And biggest up and gratitude to Mr. Champagne! ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, David. Yes, I think Gus even included Clarke’s ‘Elephant’ among the extras on the DVD for his own ‘Elephant’. ** Bill, Hi. Sounds about right from what I’ve heard and would expect from Arnold’s film. I don’t know Francesco d’Orazio. I’ll change that. Nice that you’ve managed to see as much stuff as you have. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Yes, apparently it’s pretty serious and unusual. The free transport is a nice consolation. I’m from LA, so I’m more than used to being engulfed in smog, but not when it’s cold and wintery outside. Very strange. Yeah, I consulted with French friends yesterday, and setting up the French back account with a year’s rent is apparently what one has to do in my situation. If you’re an artist who makes money in odd, random ways and don’t have a regular job with regular paycheck receipts to provide, you’re considered distrustful. Anyway, so I have to set up the bank account and asap somehow. Oh, how did the work with your photo/video ideas go yesterday? That’s exciting! You’re always doing really interesting projects and things. It’s cool. It’s inspiring. My day was another one where not much ended up happening that wasn’t just me typing at my laptop. Today I’m finally, definitely seeing some art and meeting/working with Zac on the film and having dinner with friends, so the outdoors will at last get more than a glimpse of me, ha ha. I hope you have a fantastic weekend, and I’m of course curious to hear about it. ** Joakim, Hi. I know, right? About Milo. Trippy when that happens to your friends. Obviously, it’s a great thing, but it also feels like a really dramatic change and kind of eerie. That might just be me. I never eat sushi in Paris because everyone I know says that you can’t get good sushi in Paris even though that kind of makes no sense at all given that there are many hundreds of sushi places here and, surely, a few of them are good. And it’s expensive here too. But sushi is one of those foods that always seems massively overpriced no matter where you get it. Especially vegetarian sushi, which is the only kind I can eat, obviously. But then that might just be some built-in American thing because American food is usually served in giant portions. I’m rambling, sorry. Is your school right in the center of Copenhagen? I only know the very center of Copenhagen. Like, how close is it to Tivoli? Have a super sweet and all around great weekend! ** Steevee, Yes, indeed about Clarke. You’re not the first person to express bewilderment at the unavailability of Clarke’s films in the US. Steve Polta of the great SF Cinematheque said basically what you did on my Facebook feed this morning. I’m glad you enjoyed the post, thank you. Like seemingly everyone, at least on your side of the pond, I was a latecomer to his work too. ** _Black_Acrylic, Well, thank you very much for occasioning the post. Without you, I probably would have foisted more theme park rides on everybody or something, ha ha. Dude don’t let the overview post stop you from doing a ‘Penda’s Fen’ post if that idea and desire pan out. I would be thrilled and welcoming. ** Armando, Hi. Yes, I’ll pass on your congrats to Michael, of course. They had the baby in Italy, so I probably see them or the new Salerno in person for a couple of weeks. Well, yeah, old artists can definitely deliver. I mean Godard’s ‘Adieu au language’ might be my favorite of all of his great films, for instance. Okay, I’ll try to remember to let you know when there’s a Paris gig for Gisele’s and my work that’ll happen when I’m here. I totally understand your frustration with the publishing and agent process. It’s almost always very difficult, and it can make a writer feel very powerless. Unfortunately, that thing where a publisher says they’ll get back to you soon and then don’t is not unusual at all. All you can do is keep trying and also trying to stay as tough-skinned about the broken promises and rejections that happen as you can. What you’re going through happens to a lot of new writers, maybe the majority. That doesn’t make it easier, but there’s not much you can do about it other than staying diligent until you get a break. ** James Nulick, Hey. Well, apparently the hassles I’m having to get apartment are standard fare. So, I just have to do my best to fulfill the obligations. Like I said up above, the system is set up for ‘normal’ people who have regular jobs and a provable steady income, not for artists whose money comes in an irregular way. I have to find an apartment, so I will. No choice Thanks for the commiserating. ** Morgan M Page, Hi, Morgan. Yeah, Clarke’s work is very strong. Very worth getting to know. You can watch a few of his films in their entirety via the post, although, obviously, youtube is not a great way to see anything that’s lengthy and that matters. Oh, the French theater director I work with all the time, Gisele Vienne, plus my buddy Zac and I have submitted a proposal plus a partly completed script for a 3-episode TV mini-series to the French/German TV channel Arte. Kind of a strange, funny, bleak thing about a female ventriloquist and her dummy, whom she treats like a real person. That’s to make a complicated story very, very simple. Arte is apparently very interested in it, and we’re supposed to get a thumbs up or down on December 20th. So we’re anxiously awaiting their verdict. Take care! ** Sypha, Ah, the man of the 48 hours! Hi, James, and thank you a ton! I’m so sorry that your mom is going through that grief. That’s tough. It’s interesting how people can have such importance in your life even from great and even technically impersonal distances. ** Jeff Jackson, Hi, Jeff. Thanks, man, about the post. Good, no, great about their interesting and surprising response to ‘Novi Sad’. And that’s cool about that guy’s intrigue with ‘ZFE’. I like his reaction to it, of course. It’s kind of even ideal. Thank you for telling me that. I am an admirer of Susan Howe’s poetry, yes. She’s very, very good. I haven’t read her most recent books, but I would like to catch up. I definitely would recommend you try her poetry. She’s pretty consistently excellent, so you could start kind of anywhere, I think. ** H, Hi. Thank you for coming in. No, I’m past whatever trauma I was going through about the Google thing. Yes, I think Xmas is going to mostly pass me by this year too. It’s fine. Looking at Paris all dressed up for the holidays is enough for me. Have a fine weekend. ** Okay. Mauve Zone Recordings is calling to you. Heed its call. See you on Monday.

 

In the beginning of October 2016 Infinity Land Press launched ‘Alien Existence’, a disquieting selection of original artworks and all-new text by Philip Best. Amplifying the dark themes of recent Consumer Electronics albums such as Estuary English and Dollhouse Songs, ‘Alien Existence’ charts the shattered psychic landscape of the early 21st century in all its eerieness, wonder and confusion. ‘Alien Existence’ is sure to both disturb and enchant.

The book includes 40 pages of Best’s creative writings, over 200 colour reproductions and an extensive interview with the artist conducted by Martin Bladh.

As a musician Philip Best now records as Consumer Electronics and has previously been a member of Whitehouse, Ramleh and Skullflower. “Alien Existence” is his second book. The first , “American Campgrounds”, now commands high prices on the collectors market and interest will no doubt be equally strong for this handsome new volume.

260 pages, 280x210mm, hardbound

http://infinitylandpress.com/2999170-alien-existence-by-philip-best

 

 

——–
EXTRACTS
——–

 

BULL MARKET

staff sex films measure the speed / of pre-adolescent orgasm
graffiti as sexual data / take a look at this dying
commercialising appetites / gender identity disorder
rough and tumble / realms of natAure
women once boys / slaves to the token economy
repetition reinforcement / static information
obliterating interiority / time-travel machines
cages built of convention and consumerism
magpie cobbling of memorabilia / cartridges of blurry polaroids
ambient rock and spin / hostile fantasies of higher authority
accelerant tiny stars / on her tiny necrotic hands
child of the double door / somehow special somehow exempt
date-coded footage / kidneys barely functional
alien penetrations / uterine sarcoma
alien existence / filth paradise
servants of the gut and the groin
sette full fowle in synne / intimacy and shame
question the wounds / drilled back sex toys
shape of experience / syntax of events / inherited reflex
gears slipping / discharge of mares in heat / nausea and weight loss
rob the body / skirt-chasing wet cement
warmth fading / competitive suffering / greater london weapons systems
battered blue / inhuman openings / are women animals?
retching worlds entire loosening exercises in begging and the sexless
piecemeal voids crying

 

 

GOD’S NAME EVERYWHERE

We must accept the eventuality of bringing the USA to its knees; accept the closing off of critical sections of the city with barbed wire, armored pig carriers crisscrossing the streets, soldiers everywhere, tommy guns pointed at stomach level, smoke curling black against the daylight sky, the smell of cordite, house-to-house searches, doors being kicked in, the commonness of death.
George L. Jackson Blood In My Eye. Random House, 1972.

Jeannie tells me she used to be real pretty. She says she was popular in school, glee club, honor roll. She says she grew up somewhere across America but now sheís here. Jeannie says, “Guess I’m nothin’ new, huh?”
Scot Sothern Street Walkers. Powerhouse, 2015.

You see, with a logical mind like yours, or other people who try to think this out, or look for a rule that’s being followed, or for a certain way that they think, or had thought out and would do things — there was no such thing. There was no set rule. Just killing, that’s all.
“Joan B.” quoted in Lawrence L. Langer Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. Yale University Press, 1991.

the babies will win against their killers

Telegram sent by Wilhelm Reich, 1 April 1954, collected in Mary Boyd Higgins (Ed.) Whereís The Truth?
Wilhelm Reich Letters and Journals 1948-1957. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2012.

 

 

THE PUSH

woe to the bloody city full of lies and robbery
today i hear the beat of death in all things
i hear it in the streets and in the parks
you will all die
you will all die
you will all die
from mayfair and westminster
to camberwell and peckham rye
riverwheel aflame london capsized
and at night father when i pray
you are not there
you are not there
you are not there
all hail to the creatures and the sluts and the poor
in guarded isles of midday devils all prancing to war
money may fall
and towers may fall
and bodies will fall
but theyíll still want it all and theyíll still take it all
politicians profiteers all poison the well
ride their rough horses headlong pell mell
over layer upon layer of metropolitan sick

it’s a trick
it’s a trick
it’s a trick

so, woe to the bloody city
that covets fresh fields and flesh within the cauldron
this time is evil
woe to the bloody stage
and final blank page of the failed state
that hoards its wealth and arms itself
against the stranded and lost
at whatever the cost
whatever the cost
whatever the cost

o gods, break their teeth
o gods
break their teeth
i mean it’s the attitude that counts
as well as everything else it takes
you with me?
i mean we should never compromise
we wonít get anywhere in life
accepting second best
you get it yet?
if you don’t taste it
if you don’t feel it, baby
we haven’t come a very long way
have we?

so what exactly is it?
this grand unified theory
of female pain and wet cement
could it be the face that would sell condoms in a cunt?
or better yet
i had a lover once
some men came by
shot up the house she lived in
tore up the place
broke every fucking window
burned her out
she couldnít tell me why
i hate men and their violence
their weak murderous minds

 

 

TWENTY MINUTE TEST

1) Undeveloped rolls of film.
2) Two last shots.
3) Leg fracture.
4) More film, recovered then processed.
5) Betamax.
6) FC = Fuck.
7) Some in colour, good quality.
8) Punishment beating.
9) Deep black bruising.
10) Witness stated “His body was normal”.
11) Expressed preference that girl should be “flat”.
12) Wanted to see her stumble and fall.
13) “Bring her down”
14) Failed to pay attention and the lights touched her naked body.
15) Found burns exciting.
16) Had Houston amputation film (HWA).
17) Traced trauma to childhood accident.
18) Tension barely perceptible.

 

 

MIRROR WORLD

Julie was curling a young girl’s hair when I came in. She was styling it to be just like her own: wavy all round the sides and flat at the crown. But the girl’s hair was shorter and brown in colour; Julie’s was pure blonde.
They were grouped around the mirror. Julie smiled over. He was a mechanic, but he’d always wanted to try his hand at writing. He was telling me this, and fixing coffee, as the girls continued to do their thing at the mirror.
There were pictures of dolphins and killer whales on the walls.

I tried to show her exactly how the body had looked from what I could remember of the photograph [KP27, the “scene-establishing shot”], almost a year after I had seen it. Putting my palms on the ground, I lowered myself down on my left side and curled myself round into a sort of foetal position, knees bent and legs drawn up.

VOICE-OVER: I’d been having a recurring nightmare. I’m three years old dancing on my mother’s grand piano. I’m wearing her gold spiked heels. The grownups are clapping, stomping in rhythm. My ankles twist in the big shoes. I want to stop dancing but they cheer even louder.
IMAGE: PRESCHOOLER IN UNDERSHIRT AND UNDERPANTS, DANCING FOR THE CAMERA
VOICE-OVER: I don’t know what they want from me.

They wait their turn,
huddled shyly together on benches.
When the individual is called, his or her outer
garments are removed so that every bone,
every muscle, is exposed to the penetrating
gaze of the specialists.

I am so fucking up to my neck in debt & so badly need to do well. This is not a bad thing to do with JJ & I’m really happy for him. JJ gets everyone falling over themselves – I get fake numbers & stood up.
Johnny’s so well into it – making heaps of friends & as usual no matter where I am – I feel alone.
It’s not San Francisco, it’s me.
I can’t explain this feeling to anyone, this feeling of COMPLETE DETEST for myself
& this feeling of being so average. I’ve tried so badly to understand why & to make mother & JJ understand – but they think Iím being so silly – but I really feel like this so much.
It’s a feeling of being so invisible, being no-one, feeling like Iím never a part of something & never quite fitting in.
I know Johnny has been all over the place since leaving, but he never has that feeling of no self worth. The most beautiful people become spellbound. He always feels he deserves the best & BECOMING MORE RADIANT and confident all the time.
I really am not joking & this sounds stupid but I am so exhausted with feeling this shit & feeling so lonely despite being with JJ every day & feeling so low & so up to my eyeballs with debt – I sometimes really can’t be bothered to wait & find out what happens.
I just want to disappear.
I feel like I’m reeling & I don’t know what to do.
I feel so outside.
I’ve nothing anywhere.

 

 

BALLROOM BLITZ

CONSUMER ELECTRONICS Live at Tilburg 013, Saturday 15 Sept 2012

Set list: (You All Forget) Rudolf Hess. Gemini. Anne Frank v. Franz Kafka. Come Clean. Everyone Everywhere Fuck. Mothers Morals. Estuary English. Grendel Drone.

Band members: Philip Best, Sarah Froelich.
Set length: 60 mins.

CODY Review: Those for whom Mogwai is just “noise for girls” will find that there is plenty to do in Stage01, which tonight forms the backdrop for a trio of power electronics and harsh noise acts. Thus there is the duo Consumer Electronics, according proven shock-and-awe-prescription public body comes: exhibitionism, Rudolf Hess, screeching noise capes, Anne Frank, masturbation, Britney Spears, disheveled wanker paste booklet which work. Mr. Consumer Electronics is a fat Rob Halford in the uniform of a darts player and the dell-like lady to his right a few times does not keep her smile while turning knobs, so really shocking just can not be. Except for those few stray Yann Tiersen fans who accidentally ended up in the back of the hall, and after half a minute back out paddling, scarred for life.

PB Journal 14/09/12 [hotel, 2am]: I hate playing fucking festivals, co-opted by cunts, corporate logos all over the full colour 128 page fucking brochure. Bands are horrible. Only decent people are those hardy folk who have travelled and PAID for tickets. Nice guys/girls and thoroughly down to earth. A serious fucking minority. Rest of the cunts are either liggers or shit promoters promoting shit fucking labels of seriously shit fucking ‘music’, mostly American, polluting the fucking dressing rooms and all effort spent trying to score drugs rather than ‘promote’ the bands they ostensibly ‘represent’. Generally these vermin are both older and stupider than anyone else present. And the organisation of these fuckfests is particularly reprehensible. Thus, if you want to get a vegan brunch at 14.30hrs it will be served at site location 68, but if you need technical assistance on stage at 21.00 hours beacuse the amps are fucked you might as well forget it because the technical staff whose number is worthy of a D.W. Griffith epic have all fucked off to smoke ‘draw’, quaff the artists beer or update their fucking tumblr. You know one cunt actually said ‘peace’ to me. Non-ironically. Despite all this, the show itself was great, due, in part, to employing sound engineer worthy of the name. SF, as usual, was immense, and ploughing huge furrows of drone sound & intense stage charisma. Earlier in day had been strolling though town when random stranger called out “Hey Sarah!”. I’d better get used to this. Light guy had usual instruction of “imagine you’re auditioning for Van Halen”. And, again as usual, fucked off after 10 minutes. Still, volume throughout venue was truly unpleasant yet astonishingly clear. Needless to say, hated all support acts (War, Lust For Youth etc., though Ice Age intrigued me). My main problem is the 80s fixation of these young fucking cunts, thus you get familiar tropes of Robert Smith-style vox (tick), banks of horrid synths (check), wanky drum machines (ubiquitous), ‘new romantic’ strides (present and correct), added to floppy quiffs, ‘dancing’ and all-round OMD worship. Ugh.

 

 

PHILIP BEST INTERVIEWED BY MARTIN BLADH (extracts)

 

Photo by: Karolina Urbaniak

Let’s talk about your defunct blog from which the majority of the text material in this book is taken from. You did put a lot of energy into it. Tell me about your ambitions when you started it and why you chose to take it down?

The blog you refer to, “The Child Botanical”, served a number of purposes and was probably the only creative endeavour I’ve ever been involved with (save a few experimental live performances) in which the final outcome was far from certain, in which an almost complete surrender of control was required. Generally when I work I have a very definite idea of where I’m going, of exactly what I want to achieve. I actually think this is a prerequisite of making effective art. The ‘Child Botanical’ blog was a different, quite intimidating, but ultimately liberating way of working. It was a proving ground for fresh ideas, for the new connections I was teasing out through my reading, image-making and day-to-day life. The blog was somewhere I could post snippets of works-in-progress, juxtapose seemingly unrelated words and images, snatches of lyrics, extracts from reading and viewing, my personal responses to unfolding news stories and audience reactions to increasingly inflammatory Consumer Electronics performances. I’ll address those performances later but, again unusually for me, it wasn’t really a conversation I was looking for. I deliberately disabled comments on the blog so I had no idea how or even if this material was being received. I was just throwing this stuff out there, like shit against the wall in a dirty protest.

Some, but not all, of the text in “Alien Existence” originated from that blog, but I have quite painstakingly edited and retooled the material to create what I hope is a more coherent whole. You’re quite correct, I put a lot of energy into maintaining the original blog, working virtually daily on it and putting everything I was reading and viewing through the prism of it. After three or four years I was exhausted, and had also started to perform again as Consumer Electronics with fellow musicians Sarah Froelich and Russell Haswell. The first album we recorded together as a trio, “Estuary English” (2014), very much had its genesis in the pages of the blog – but as I honed the lyrical content of that album and readied it for release I needed the record to stand alone, as a finely crafted summation of where we had arrived at. That’s the main reason I took the blog down. This book, too, is me trying to get a grip on all the stuff I was trying to make sense of in the postings on “Child Botanical”. But hopefully with the benefit of reflection and greater understanding of what I was dealing with or trying, however clumsily, to get my head around. Now when I work, I just keep everything to myself, in notebooks and scrapbooks, safe from public viewing! The “News from Warring Tribes” section, for example, is an extract from a much larger prose text I’ve been working on for the last year or so. No idea if I’ll ever use it beyond the extract printed here, but I like the simplicity (and challenge) of just working with language and nothing else. No images, no sounds, no studio engineers, no small fortunes spent on professional (but totally invaluable) record mastering. When I was much younger, in my teens and obviously way before we had blogs or anything like the range of digital forums we have today, I had the idea of producing a weekly magazine which solely detailed what I was getting up to and my reaction to everything that stumbled across my path. For various reasons, most notably finances and a somewhat chaotic private life, it just didn’t work out but as I’m getting older I’m returning to the idea of publishing just one book a year. Focussing my energies on a single project, and if no-one pays attention, that’s really not a problem at all.

How much time do you spend going through source material for your collages and scrapbooks? How important is juxtaposition and choice of colour? Do you have a specific audience in mind? Is response and communication of importance to you?

As I think you can imagine it takes a fair amount of time to harvest the images for my collages and scrapbooks. Obviously I have a certain type of image I am looking for, and within that group I have a quite specific idea of what I ultimately want. As with a lot of things, it’s very much a matter of cutting away what is unneeded, of knowing exactly what you don’t want, to arrive at precisely what you do. Every small detail is vital so colour is obviously of strong importance. I haven’t trained as an artist so I have a fairly untutored eye and technique. That doesn’t matter. It’s all about juxtapositions and connections, either the ones that are readily apparent when you construct the collage, or the ones that emerge at a slower pace, as the material gathers and develops. I guess my fascination with scrapbooks as objects has its genesis (like many things) in my childhood wanderings in the streets of Plymouth. In the old Barbican area of the city there was a huge and baffling colour mural of numerous historical figures (some recognisable but many completely obscure) painted along the entire side of a building and beside it a dusty old shopfront window display stacked with oversized antiquarian folio volumes with patently false and incredible titles. I was mesmerised by these fake volumes, bound in old vellum and with wildly crazed titles inked painstakingly in hand on the ancient spines. I would return again and again to see fresh books added to the pile and to gaze in wonderment at the anatomical engravings that were occasionally on display. As I stood there nose virtually pressed against the dirty, darkened glass I saw people come and go, long-haired shuffling figures and beautiful, almost Pre-Raphaelite women. Trust me, not a common sight on the streets of Plymouth in the 1970s. Years later I discovered that this intriguing building was the working studio of the remarkable artist Robert Lenkiewicz (1941-2002), in fact I even ended up sourcing rare occult materials for his renowned collection of sorcery and witchcraft. It was during this time that Lenkiewicz sadly passed, and in due course his executors found a fully-preserved tramp that the artist had embalmed and placed behind the bookcase.

The question of audience reaction is a crucial one and my attitude towards how the work is received has varied over the years. When I first started making music in the early 1980s there virtually was no audience to speak of, so they were not really considered as a significant part of the equation. And if they were it was generally with a view of total contempt. It was a different time. I think that to make the music we were making, and then to take it out and play it with utter seriousness in standard rock clubs and established punk venues as opposed to welcoming avant-garde spaces (if, indeed, they even existed) you had to be pretty single-minded about what you were doing. Audiences and fellow musicians might have been young, but booking agents, venue owners and most crucially sound engineers tended to be older people with a very set idea of what was and what was most definitely not ‘music’. It might have been the 1980s but in many clubs and bars it was like punk never happened. One of the reasons Whitehouse, for example, had such a simple, but brutally effective, set-up was so that sound guys (and it always was ‘guys’) in venues could grasp it easily, once they’d recovered from the heresy of you not having a drummer. Another reason was so you could leave the venue as quickly as possible with all your gear in one bag – sometimes running directly from the stage and straight back on to the street. Did that a number of times! I guess that we were arrogant assholes in a way, but of necessity I would suggest, because I doubt we could have done it at all without that obnoxious cockiness and unshakeable self-confidence. Over time and as audiences grew you’d begin to receive feedback on how the records and concerts were being received. And that developed into an increasingly valuable part of the process, but let’s be brutally clear here – making music or creating art is not a fucking popularity contest. I enjoy all reactions to my music and work and have never particularly minded whether the feedback received is positive or negative. The Whitehouse album “Cruise” (2001) for example was absolutely detested by a reactionary old guard of fans who thought it too ‘digital’, or too ‘arty’, or not ‘extreme’ enough. That fucking word again. It was music to our ears to hear the complaints of these disappointed punters. As a performer you need to move on and not listen to the more conservative elements of your audience. Enough people in your existing audience will get it and you’ll probably attract new people to what you are doing as well. And, if not, well, at least you’ve stayed true to what you wanted to do and avoided becoming a fucking human jukebox where they put the money in and you pump out the song they want to hear. So negative reactions don’t bother me. The only exception to this I can recall was the (to my mind) sexist and misogynistic comments that were made when my wife Sarah joined Consumer Electronics. I couldn’t believe it! I hated those comments and was glad those idiots had shown their true colours and no longer liked us. It felt like a job well done. But having said all that, sometimes, as I mentioned above regarding my blog, it’s good to just put stuff out there and not elicit any reaction. Just do it for yourself.

There is a text passage called ‘Coitus And Collecting’, which seem to be quite revealing. It is of course a simplification, but I know that some people believe that this is what it all comes down to, a compulsive attempt to collect and pinpoint an obsession, sex by proxy etc. There is some truth there right?

Oh yes, I’d agree with you there, undoubtedly. You’re getting these guys now who are getting busted with hundreds of thousands of images on their hard drives. More images than you could possibly even look at. But that’s not really the point, is it? Collectors can be quite astonishing. In the real world (as it were) I’ve had occasion to work on and off with high-end antiquarian books and other collectibles and ephemera. You meet some quite extraordinary people, like Lenkiewicz for example. I’ve kind of worked my work up in that trade. One of my earliest calls was to a terraced house in a quite poor neighbourhood in Bristol. There was an obese man squashed into an armchair and his fingernails were completely uncut and curling over, his big paws brown from nicotine staining. His wife was a small bird of a thing, white-haired and neatly dressed. She immediately told me she was making her husband sell his collection because if he didn’t she would leave him after forty years of marriage. The “collection” was piled around the house. Literally each room upstairs and downstairs was piled high with porn magazines, complete collections in running order and the guy had a handwritten guide he’d assembled with remarks on each of the models (“Raven”, “Jacquie” etc.) and their characteristics. He thought I might find it useful when I came to sell the collection. Trouble is the magazines weren’t really old or ‘specialist’ enough to have much of a resale value (they’d probably be worth a small fortune today), just mountains of recent porn. I ended up selling them on privately to an academic at a local boys school and he then sold them on to a contact in the Israeli army. The modern day soldier requires a certain amount of adult stimulation I was told – and the army was happy to provide for its men. Other material I’ve handled or even turned down has given me quite an eyeopening perspective on the ingenuities and depravities of the human imagination. And, of course, collectors, enthusiasts and amateur photographers can be total pigs. Anton Pachinger, the great Austrian collector of antiquities, who also amassed an astonishing collection of erotica, is mentioned in the ‘Coitus and Collecting’ section; he’s notorious for robbing a grave so he could saw a silver chastity belt from a corpse. Just barged the gravediggers out of the way and got down in the dirt such was his fervour. View all collectors with deep suspicion!

Why did he have to make the tape? Why did everything have to be recorded, detail after detail, condemning them both to this living death? He was like a clerk, filing away his sordid little catalogue of murder mementoes. All that talk of liberation and immortality and all the time he was just a bloody stamp collector.

Jean Rafferty Myra, Beyond Saddleworth. Wild Wolf Publishing, 2012.

Let’s talk more about your lyrics (some of which are printed in this book). To my taste you’re probably the best wordsmith within the (excuse the term) “extreme” electronic music scene today. How do the words come to you, some concepts and motives seem to carry a deep personal meaning? There’s of course a big difference between the teenage anger of “Tit Pulp” (Right To Kill, 1983) compared to the lyrics from “Dollhouse Songs”. How do you feel that your writing has developed over the years, and are you trying to express yourself differently?

Not so a great difference as you might imagine. One prominent feature of my lyrics is that they tend to have many autobiographical elements within them, my numerous faults, fuck-ups and countless wretched times I’ve let myself or others down. Allied to this is my perhaps inexcusable inability to leave other people in my life out of my songs. So, “Tit Pulp” for example”, although on first look a prime example of the 1982 power electronics ‘aesthetic’ (for want of a better term), is actually a record of the miserable few months I spent living in London with a person who is actually named in the lyrics of that song (William wisely removed her name from the accompanying lyric sheet). Now I would never of course write a song quite like that these days – but even so, people like “bright-eyed Anne” in “Ruthless Babysitting” is a real person (or, more exactly, a conflation of this person with Anne Frank scribbling in her Amsterdam diary) and I could give numerous other examples from Whitehouse or CE lyrics based on real people, real conversations, real incidents. A surprising number of lines. Of course, the songs are not pure autobiography, but these elements are incorporated into other observations, narratives, investigations, self-reproaches. I am also a tireless proponent of Intertextuality. The final section of the song “The Push” (from “Dollhouse Songs”), for example, is based on events related to me by a lover interlaced with lines from Samuel R. Delaney’s novel “Dhalgren” (1975). The original conversation with my lover had astonished me at the time and stayed with me for over a decade, I’d written numerous songs in the meantime and hadn’t felt the need (or couldn’t find the way) to address what she had related to me but suddenly there it was, needing to be said. Ripeness is all.

For me, the literary underpinning from Delaney adds extra resonance to her words and empowers the song tremendously. As a small aside I can also be at times a useless judge of my own music. I’d shelved the song from the album until Russ and Sarah insisted it be included and for many people it proved to be a highlight of the record.

We achieved absolutely everything we wanted on Estuary English – in simple terms a state of the nation jeremiad crossbred with an honest catalogue of my own numerous personal failings.

Philip Best interviewed. Quietus, 12 January 2015.

 

 

 

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p.s. Hey. This lucky blog gets its second opportunity in a week to help usher an amazing book into the world. This time the tome is by the great Philip Best, co-mastermind of two of the most seminal and innovative noise-shaping music units of our recent lifetimes aka Whitehouse and Consumer Electronics. As you’ll see in the post, his talents obviously exist heavily outside of music creation as well, and the fine Infinity Land Press, whom you guys around here might know as the publisher of my scrapbook ‘Gone’, Michael Salerno’s ‘Childhood’, and other excellent books, has brought some of Best’s visual and textual work out for public scrutiny. I just got my copy of ‘Alien Existence’ in the mail yesterday, and it’s gorgeous. Enjoy the post/ introduction, consider a purchase, and thank you. And really big thanks to Mr. Best and to Martin and Karolina at Infinity Land. ** Armando, Hi. No, I’m not in ‘I Apologize’. Maybe you’re thinking of Ishmael Houston-Jones’ and my piece ‘Them’. I was in that. Mm, I think I sent my first letter to Bresson even before I saw ‘Le Diable Problement’. The first Bresson I saw, and the one that changed my life, etc. was ‘Lancelot du Lac’. His widow is alive. She edited the new book of Bresson interviews that was just published. I don’t watch Bresson’s films often because the experience is too intense and emotional for me. The ‘Jerk’ performances in Paris will be two in French, two in English. I have no idea if I’ll be here then yet. Dude, if an agent is saying he or she will definitely accept it in late 2017, that’s an offer to take very seriously. This shit takes a lot of time. Without patience, you’ll never succeed at it. Unfortunately, that’s the way it is. Anyway, I wouldn’t burn that bridge unless you already have. Try other places and use that offer as a fall back. I’m not that into painting, to be honest with you. It’s not very often that I respond to paintings. I’m drawn more to sculpture, installation, video, etc. I can’t even think of favorite painters. Strange. ** Joakim, Hey! Well, gee, that sounds incredibly intriguing and exciting that ‘The Sluts’ influenced or positively interfered with what you’re making. Thanks, gee. Right now is crazed with writing projects and the film, but I would love to contribute if I can, and something with Zac would be great. Let me talk to him and see what he thinks. Those are very cool tattoos. That’s coming from me who is not an inherent huge fan of tattoos. Nice. And good placement. Happy birthday a day late to Asger! <3, me. ** New Juche, Hi! Oh, it’s amazing, man. You’ve felt uncertain about it? That’s interesting. That can be a really good sign as long as you have a deep underlying faith in something beneath the uncertainty, and publishing it is probably due to that faith. No, it’s really beautiful! Be very proud. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. ‘Hair’, wow. I saw ‘Hair’ when I was a young teen at the Aquarius Theater across from the Palladium. That might have been before your time in LA. I practically had to blackmail my mom to take me because of that outrageous, at the time, moment when the cast stood naked onstage for about 30 seconds in very low light. ** Sypha, Ha ha. I told Kristen that everybody was going to think the darkest art in that show was my pick when, in fact, she chose most of the wild stuff. Coincidentally, there’s ‘Alien Existence’ right up there. So you beat the blog by 24 hours. I’ve only started looking at my copy, but it seems great, yeah. Ah, the tidal wave of initial no’s when submitting a mss. Urgh. Ride it out, man. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi, Dóra! Yeah, see, I totally, totally get your thinking about tattoos, and that makes absolute sense to me. I guess I feel like I’m into tattoos when one really thinks about what a tattoo does and means and how it effects people. I really get and respect that. Yes, if you do think of Hungarian writers you can recommend, I’m extremely interested. My day ended up being less active than I’d thought. Plans got delayed for practical reasons. I just worked and did some emailing and blah blah. Paris is having this weird, extreme air pollution problem right now. And it was weird to be outside and see the smog/haze over everything. Yikes. The art shows that I was going to see and will see probably on Saturday are this one and this one. And probably some others too. I’m looking at that apartment where I had that wrong address mix up tomorrow. Fingers crossed. Did Thursday treat you really well? How so? ** Steevee, Hi. Yes, Zac was very happy with your thoughts. Thank you again. That is tough: 2 to 3 weeks in advance. At the same time, it doesn’t seem strange and difficult for studios to do critic screenings quite early on. What a weird and self-defeating strategy on their part. Have you read Lim’s book on David Lynch? I haven’t but I’m meaning to. ** Morgan M Page, Hi! Thank you on behalf of Kristen and myself. Yes, the ice record is pretty good. I put it at the top for a reason. There are actually two other dissolving ice record works I came across while looking around. That one had the best video, which is basically why it got chosen, ha ha. Oh, wow, yes, I know Cassils’ work a bit, albeit mostly via the internet, and I’ve liked what I’ve seen very much, but I hadn’t seen that ‘Tiresias’ piece. I would’ve put it in the show if I’d found it. Thank you for hooking me up. I’ll see the next potential apartment tomorrow morning. Ugh, it’s stressful, but I’m just hoping to find a place and get it over with asap. Yes, ‘Jerk’ was revived from a long dormant period specifically because of that gig in Montreal. I hope you get to see it. I think it’s definitely one of Gisele’s my best works, and the performer Jonathan Capedevielle is really brilliant in it. Have an awesome day! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Me too, about Eggleston’s Xmas pix. They were among Kristen’s finds. ** Misanthrope, Thanks, G. Glad you had fun. Well, as you can imagine, I haven’t eaten at a McDonald’s in … God, decades? Not much there for me. I think the only thing of theirs I’ve ever eaten was a scalding hot, terrible apple pie-like thing. I would say that supporting Trump does not fall into the category of mundane, no. Aw, a bunny in your yard, aw. There probably isn’t a rabbit in ‘God Jr.’. It’s just the only work of mine where I could imagine it was possible. Poor, poor LPS. He’s got it bad. God, in a week that strapping young fella should be on fire again, no? I’m sure. Let me know what you think of ‘Manchester by the Sea’. I’m curious about it. ** Chris dankland, Hi, Chris! Thank you very much for your thanks, man! No, you’re awesome. How’s your Xmas looking? ** Okay. You know what to do around here today, so go do it. Please? Thank you. See you tomorrow.