A few notes on the wonderful music and theory of ZIA for those who may not have heard of the project..
from http://ziaspace.com/
ZIA is an exclusively electronic band who began performing on the East Coast in 1992. Founded by Elaine Walker, ZIA bangs out pro-space and sci-fi music on futuristic instruments. All of the synths are triggered live with drum sticks. Microtonal musical scales run rampant throughout the ZIA repertoire. In the pop genre this is a monumental task which adds an eerie, futuristic edge to the songs. ZIA was together for 11 years in Boston and NYC, and relocated to Arizona 2003. ZIA has 3 full length albums and two EPs. The newest release, Martians, was officially released at the first XPrize Cup! The video for the title track was filmed on Devon Island in the Canadian High Arctic (75°North), commissioned by the Haughton-Mars Project. ZIA is currently developing a larger Vegas-stye show, complete with a spacey story line!
GENESIS P-ORRIDGE INTERVIEWS ZIA
Genesis P-Orridge interviewed ZIA at their Brooklyn apartment in 2000! It was an absolute pleasure.
Part 1 of 2
Genesis: "Can you give us a very brief history of ZIA? And I'll interrupt you and we'll go off in tangents, because that's always more interesting."
Elaine: "Well, ZIA started off in 1991 and our first show was actually in 1992, because I was trying to gather up some band members to play these very odd instruments. It's hard to find people to play these MIDI triggers with sticks."
Genesis: "So we need to know what these odd instruments are."
Elaine: "Well my idea was to perform the music using no standard instruments at all. No keyboards, no guitars, no regular drums. Just completely new and different instruments. One of the reasons is because the music's microtonal. We use different tunings other than just 12 notes per octave, and to play that on a keyboard, it's kind of difficult to keep track of where you are. So by putting the notes on these different MIDI triggers and hitting them with sticks, I could just teach people patterns that they'd memorize for each song."
Genesis: "And always be in the microtonal range."
Elaine: "Yes"
Genesis: "So you pre-program the microtonal side of it, and more or less wherever the musicians hit is within the parameters of the music."
Elaine: "Right. The musicians just need to know which pads to hit when, and just memorize patterns. So I was trying to find drummers to audition to do this, and drummers had a hard time, and guitar players didn't really use sticks and neither did keyboard players. So I was having a hard time finding anyone. Vibraphone players usually wouldn't be into the style, the fact that it was more hardcore industrial. I was screaming and what not. So finally, the two people from the other band I was in helped me with ZIA. So the original line-up was me, Lisa Sirois and Noel McKenna. We were also in D.D.T., another hardcore industrial band."
Genesis: "And this was in Boston?"
Elaine: "Yes, that was in Boston."
Genesis: "Where were you trained? How do you even know what microtonal is?"
Elaine: "Well I had classical piano all my life, and then I went to Berlkee for Music Synthesis. And it wasn't until my last year at Berklee that one of my professors introduced microtonal music to me. I'd always thought about it, I'd always wondered why people don't use the notes in between, but I never knew, really, how to go about it."
Genesis: "Or more accurately, why don't people in the West use those notes?"
Elaine: "Yeah, exactly. In fact, at Berklee, they call Western 12 tone jazz harmony just Harmony class. That used to bother me. So in 1991, I heard my teacher come in and perform this microtonal song, he actually sang the song and played a tape for the class. It made my hair stand on end, and ever since then, I haven't written a 12 tone piece."
Genesis: "So that brings us up to ZIA. Can you explain what your interpretation at this point of microtonal is? Not the traditional academic one, but your vision of what microtonal is, and why it's your bridge with music you create."
Elaine: "Well, I think people, over the years, over the centuries, especially in Western music, have experimented with different rhythms and different sounds. Now, with electronic music, people experiment with a lot of different sounds and timbres and styles of music. Really, the only thing left is pitch. People haven't been experimenting with different pitches. It's one of the three parameters of music, and it's like another dimension no one's dived into. And people in other countries have been using microtones, so I feel like I want to explore that whole area. Sooner or later, someone might look at it and analyse it and figure out a theory that they can teach for these different tunings."
Genesis: "So you actually are interested in changing the face of music? We were talking before about punk, for example, and once, I was asked what was the difference between punk and industrial. I was formulating the idea of industrial music while I was auditioning Billy Idol, for example. So I'm yawning at the actual structure, the archetype of rock and roll. And this isn't a negative because I still think a lot of it was fabulous, the energy was amazing, so I'm not going to put it down. Punk was trying to change the face to rock and roll, specifically, I think, whereas industrial was trying to change the face of all music in the West. The rest of the world knew this already, that it was actually an open door for anything and everything available. Anything and everything is ultimately music in some way."
Elaine: "I feel that the 12 tone tuning is as arbitrary as feet and inches, or ounces and pounds."
Genesis: "So you're on the side of the brick wall."
Elaine: "Yes, because it's art. Feet and inches I wouldn't really protest because it's just a measurement, even though it's kind of silly. But with art and music, you have to smash down all the walls."
Genesis: [to Liz and Hae Young] "So you've both committed yourselves to this project ZIA, can you explain how you got drawn to work on this project?"
Hae Young: "Mainly because I was interested in the instrumentation, not using normal instrumentation and it being all electronic. And, also, the idea of microtonal music, I'm very interested in that as well."
Liz: "Well, I didn't have an outlet for any of my synthesis work I had done up to that point."
Genesis: "Are you also classically trained?"
Liz: "Yeah. All of us are piano players."
Genesis: "All piano players? Isn't the piano a fantastic instrument? It's one of the ultimate instruments."
Liz: "And all of my playing to the public has been piano and vocals and weird instrumentations, but it was not electronic at all. And that was my other interest. So ZIA has provided a good outlet to physically be able to play out, not in school, but in clubs and learn how the business works on that end."
Elaine: "To me, in Liz and Hae Young, I see me when I joined D.D.T. I was straight out of college, and I didn't really know how to go about being in a band. I'd been in bands in the 80's, but it was in New Mexico and wasn't anything that really went anywhere. I didn't have any experience with booking shows, or even getting the band gear set-up really happening. So joining D.D.T. really taught me everything I know."
Genesis: "What Zia is doing now is potentially as radical and innovative as what Throbbing Gristle were doing in 1975 . There are cycles that happen where one thing is built until it becomes a formula, which was not my intention, like industrial music. And someone else has to come along and break that down. The new generation is supposed to destroy the previous generation. One thing that fascinates me with ZIA is that it's confronting, if you like, the last bastion of westernization, western colonization, Judeo-Christian mechanisms, let's build printing presses, let's build weaving machines, let's make industry that deals with everything over and over again from the past. That's all based on repetitious formula and the expectation that you'll get the same thing again if you like it. We have factories to make things twice. Music is very much the same. That's why we called it 'industrial' to make that point. The whole way the west deals music is that it's repeatable. If someone's successful, we go 'oh yes, we can do that again.' 'She Loves You,' we can do that again, 'I Want To Hold Your Hand.' Even if it's someone like Iggy Pop."
Elaine: "You coined the word Industrial?"
Genesis: "Yes, on September 3, 1975, London Field's Park, in the morning, talking to Monte Cazazza. We were talking about what to call this music we were doing. Should we call it Factory Records? I thought that was too Warhol, too obvious. I said, 'well what about industrial'? We'd been talking about industrial this and industrial that all across the park. And the slogan was 'industrial music for industrial people."
Elaine: "See how much Genesis influenced me already? He hired Billy Idol, he coined the world Industrial."
Gen: "It's funny because people don't realize. It's odd to think that there was a specific hour of the day, and before that time, a genre didn't exist! How unusual in the terms of culture and music, that it should be so specific. The same with punk rock, Malcolm McLaren, in the same year, did the same thing. Although the word punk was already around, so there was a kind of a grey area. But he was the one who pinned it down. And then Mark Perry started 'sniffing glue,' made the first xeroxed fanzine at the same time. And he printed this page, learn 3 chords, form a band. Then, in the next issue, he interviewed me and I said, why learn 3 chords? Why learn any chords? Which is what you're saying in a way, why learn western music? One of the first premises of TG was no drummer, as that's rock and roll. And men always played lead guitar, so let Cosi play guitar, since she's a girl. But she said, 'I can't play.' That's even better! And she said 'it's too heavy' so we got a jigsaw and chopped the sides off. And she ended up with a stick guitar."
Hae Young: "You invented the stick guitar!"
Genesis: "By accident! It was that simple. She said 'it's too heavy' and we went [makes cutting sounds] - how's that?"
Elaine: "Rotary saw or saber saw?"
Genesis: "Saber saw."
Elaine: "We've got to know the details."
Genesis: "So what I'm really getting at, we're at a dangerous spot. I have this feeling that there are hot spots in culture where something becomes inevitable. A really major shift in the way something's done. And I think that happened with TG, and that happened with Elvis, and that happened with the Beatles, although they were less conscious of what was happening. There are moments in time with popular culture, be it art, music, or writing, where a shift is inevitable and all the previous rules get thrown out the window once and for all. There are 2 things that I feel make ZIA potentially very important and potentially able to do this. One of them is that you've even abandoned the game of the destruction of traditional instruments, which is the source of industrial music. Destroy rock and roll by destroying its instruments, and including electronics and the classical electronic experimental concepts. You're saying, forget all instruments, and forget Western tone scales and all these control systems. So the first part of the question is, do you believe that ZIA is at one of these intersections where it's inevitable, whether it's you or someone else, there's another major change happening in music. And part 2 is that I think it's significant that it's 3 female virtuosos who are choosing to do this."
Elaine: "That's a coincidence, I wasn't looking for just females."
Genesis: "Well I would argue that that's the inevitability of the change. There's been a huge shift since the 70's in terms of acceptance of women of all types in all genres of music. But there hasn't been a spawning of music in an absolutely new direction as of yet. So my first question is, are you the intersection of where the next inevitable big shift will happen?"
Elaine: "I hope so. But my fear is that people don't notice that we're that different, as we play pop music. I'm somehow able to write pop music with 10 notes per octave. I think the only thing people notice as extremely different are the instruments. So I'm not sure how much of a huge change I'm going to make, breaking down the barriers of tonal music, when people might not even realize I'm doing that."
Liz: "The biggest thing that people notice is that we're not playing 'normal' instruments. We're hitting things. We're hitting things with sticks, but we're not drummers. We're triggering things, and everything has a technical reason behind it, but it's not a guitar, not drums, not bass, not anything conventional. And that is what seems to stick in peoples minds, other than the beats which drive them to dance."
Hae Young: "It kind of builds a bridge. There's lots of people who play total experimental music, but we're doing pop music."
Elaine: "I guess that's what I've been trying to do."
Hae Young: "People get into our music, and it gets them interested in unusual instruments and styles."
Genesis: "So you educate, you can lead people across that bridge. So they understand more of the technical side of things."
Elaine: "I think, through interviews, it helps people to learn, and maybe putting a little note on the cd saying this is microtonal. People gradually realize what we're doing."
Liz: "In the club scene, we're the type of band where they don't know where to stick us with other people. So we've played with reggae bands, with death rock, we've played with hard core, every possible style you can think of, we've played on the same bill. Because they don't know where to stick us. In Boston, there was a severe lacking of electronic bands. And they didn't want to stick us with DJ's, even though we're electronic. So we ended up getting put on bills with some of the most interesting combinations of musical styles. But it totally works."
Hae Young: "Or when there are other bands with samplers or electronics, we'd get put on the same bill just because of that. It doesn't matter what kind of music they are."
Liz: "Or it would be an all girls show, with 5 different styles."
Genesis: "How do you feel about the gender issue?"
Elaine: "I don't know, it's just silly. It's like reversed sexism, you know it's sexism but it's to your advantage."
[At this point the phone rang, and then it was decided to open a bottle of wine. Contact us if you’d like to be alerted when the 2nd half of this interview is finally up!]
note: I have never seen the 2nd part of this interview surface anywhere....
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Thee archive is catching on....
Thanks to all who have decided to follow thee archive here! As always, feel free to contact me with any requests for information topics...I will dig it up out of my own Gen archive or do my best to find whatever you guys and gals would like to see here.There is a lack of Throbbing Gristle material here on the site in comparasion to the other material but that will change soon. Any others you know with interest, please let them know about thee archive!
keep in touch...
Jacurutu:3
"information is like a bank
our job is to rob that bank"
—Genesis P-Orridge in Decoder
keep in touch...
Jacurutu:3
"information is like a bank
our job is to rob that bank"
—Genesis P-Orridge in Decoder
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Gibby Miller and Ryan Martin of Dais records discuss the "early worm" release and Gen's audio archives...
excerpt from an august 2008 interview conducted by Cory Card with Gibby Miller and Ryan Martin of Dais records,concerning their work with Gen,early worm,and the audio archives
A number of your titles revolve around reissuing the archival recordings of Genesis P-Orridge. How did you guys hook up with Genesis? Why do you think these recordings are just coming to light at this point in time?
GM: Ryan is the archivist to Genesis and he/r archives... I'll let Ryan tell this story. Our ability to release this fantastic material comes down to trust and friendship.
RM: Well, to make a very long and personal story as short as possible… A few years ago, I started working with Genesis P-Orridge, he/r wife Jackie, and Eddie O’Dowd by helping out with website stuff and archive maintenance. Over the course of a few years, we all became very close and personal friends and worked more in depth with research throughout Genesis’ massive and extensive archives. Having access to such a wealth of obscure knowledge and one-of-a-kind documents and artifacts makes it an invaluable resource. For years, I would make mention to Genesis that s/he should really make use of all the recordings/ tapes that are sitting unheard in the archives. I was always given the brush off and the excuse that “no one wants to hear that old stuff” excuse (the same excuse that William S. Burroughs gave Genesis almost 30 years prior upon finally giving Genesis permission to release the Nothing Here But The Recordings sessions on Industrial Records). Finally Genesis gave in and warned me that the recordings were old, dated, and just not good, but said if I wanted to put them out myself…that I had he/r 100% blessing. Upon listening to many hours of reels of tape, I was blown away by what I had heard... and so the story goes.
A number of your titles revolve around reissuing the archival recordings of Genesis P-Orridge. How did you guys hook up with Genesis? Why do you think these recordings are just coming to light at this point in time?
GM: Ryan is the archivist to Genesis and he/r archives... I'll let Ryan tell this story. Our ability to release this fantastic material comes down to trust and friendship.
RM: Well, to make a very long and personal story as short as possible… A few years ago, I started working with Genesis P-Orridge, he/r wife Jackie, and Eddie O’Dowd by helping out with website stuff and archive maintenance. Over the course of a few years, we all became very close and personal friends and worked more in depth with research throughout Genesis’ massive and extensive archives. Having access to such a wealth of obscure knowledge and one-of-a-kind documents and artifacts makes it an invaluable resource. For years, I would make mention to Genesis that s/he should really make use of all the recordings/ tapes that are sitting unheard in the archives. I was always given the brush off and the excuse that “no one wants to hear that old stuff” excuse (the same excuse that William S. Burroughs gave Genesis almost 30 years prior upon finally giving Genesis permission to release the Nothing Here But The Recordings sessions on Industrial Records). Finally Genesis gave in and warned me that the recordings were old, dated, and just not good, but said if I wanted to put them out myself…that I had he/r 100% blessing. Upon listening to many hours of reels of tape, I was blown away by what I had heard... and so the story goes.
"I.C. Water" Ian Curtis Remembered by Genesis P-Orridge in 2003
"I.C. Water"
Ian Curtis Remembered by Genesis P-Orridge
It has become an overworked phrase in our commodified and superficial times, but this is an "heartfelt" song. It waited 10 years to come through me and even then, staring at a wall as gray as the cover of "Still" as the words poured out, it was painful and distressing. I heard it as if I was hearing someone else sing. Like all the best songs, it wrote itself directly onto tape. The following excerpt of writing is taken from a chapter of my autohagiography "GENESIS - THE LAST BOOK OF CREATION" scheduled to be published by Creation Books U.K. January 1st 2000.
My feeling, looking back at my brief but precious friendship with Ian Curtis, is that he and I were intensely anomalous. We were born in the same post-industrial manufacturing slave vortex of Manchester, England. We both had an obsessive and sadly disturbed attachment to melancholic poetic lyricism and we both tended to view experience in a minute to minute way, as a metaphor and a fatalistic destiny. When the pseudo-political, and apolitical posturing of ³punk² was the norm we both felt stylistically sickly and socially stunted. There was a cynical disregard for society that could often express itself in self-hatred, for failing to make people understand, failing to make them really SEE the hypocrisies and the
betrayals, the ludicrousness of inherited ideas of relationships and reasons for living. Yet, coupled with that commitment to the point of death to try and make people share our feelings of ennui, was an equally deep distrust of empty, sycophantic acceptance. An isolation that knew no bounds. It is so hard at a certain point in one¹s material existence to make other people realize how real one¹s angst and frustration can be.
The only way that I can describe how that connection between us really felt, beyond the obvious fact of mutual recognition of kindred, spectral, lost souls; of the "little boy lost in a world of demons" syndrome is to concede what has since become a cliche. We had an almost genetic Mancunian grimness of vision. If you saw Salford in the fifties and early sixties, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady would vindicate all interpretations of the proposal of "cultural inevitability".
The brutal mundanity of the post-Blitz environment itself spawned a neo-romantic detachment and kindled a fire of massive messianic motivation that became almost entirely about compounding and validating undistilled pointlessness for its own sake, taking as its medium an highly individualized perversion of excellence, covertly clothed in the trappings of popular culture. Of that most despised of contemporary art forms, rock music. Joy Division was Ian¹s fantasy of the implications for himself
Velvet Underground catalyzed against the mainstream of fashion. Throbbing Gristle was, quite consciously, exactly the same fantasy for myself. Rather than be crippled by having none of the usual skills, or ingredients normally eschewed for such a mission, both of us chose to let the available resources mature and fester in equal amounts, believing as we did, that the form would inarguably appear and succeed by virtue of our determination. This was an act of faith, a leap of faith, into the unknown pleasures of an metaphysical, and emotional highwire performance that required, for its illumination, the refusal of any manner of safety net.
This is how it was. Can you feel that almost erotic sense of purpose and that exquisitely tormenting sensation of irrevocability that devoured us? It is an expression of an idealism for living, of a rarefied fanaticism that truly conceives of all creativity as an holy act, a sacred task that leads to immolation or salvation and the acceptance of that risk is what permeates this path with potency and a contemporary shamanism that sets its practitioners apart.
To build something, in this case an aesthetic "jihad", that was not already publicly desired, that nobody in their right mind could possibly want, and then to relentlessly prove that they did want it after all, indeed, leave them feeling that it always existed, and was always so, that was the meaning, the necessary agenda to extricate ourselves from the horror. In the end, they would crave our tortured visions despite themselves, even despising themselves. That was, at the beginning, as far as we could see. It was enough. How we imagined the Velvet Underground¹s nihilism to be, especially on that first album, was a crucial trigger to this beginning. Later we would discover that a knowing musicology and ambition flavored our personalized, and self-justifying interpretations. Later we would substitute Jim Morrison¹s spiritual and emotional psychic- implosion as closer to the process we had volunteered our "selves" for.
All the while we were converting the outside world to our inner aesthetic Ian and I were depressingly aware that really, in the end, the audience and critics understood nothing, respected nothing, and protected nothing of our vulnerability on parade, our genuine pain. They saw nothing of the bottomless dead souls that fueled it all, nor the charade of charisma that disguised the obvious detachment from actually feeling truly alive that
underpinned the paradox of seeming to discuss a seclusion of perception whilst actually describing a state of absolute discomfort laid bare.
Not even the other band members of our respective groups really understood this, or really saw it. What was so fatally affecting us, the exposed morbidity of our onstage, on record personas, was dismissed all to conveniently as affectation. They were so close to the open wounds, they couldn¹t even address them. At times they chose not to believe they were real, or to sympathize. This compounded our cardinal angst, possessing us with a terrible foreboding of the emptiness dwelling symbiotically alongside the pivotal vacuity of humanity, friends and lovers alike.
We explained so much we appeared silent. We moved so many we appeared still.
This paradox of the "cry - for - help" misdiagnosed as superficial pop anthem has claimed others greater and lesser than Ian Curtis. Spirits that scream for acknowledgement. Hindsight maketh fools of us all.
I am forced to believe that Ian recognized a great part of himself in the role I was compelled to act out in Throbbing Gristle. An identical, careening, searingly adrift and isolated experience, desperately trapped in
the guise of radical self-destructive performer . Often bitter, suicidal and callously nihilistic.
We were never whole, nor never wholly connected, not even to the other members of the bands we were part of. We had secrets. Secrets kept from before those bands existed. Secrets that might have revealed why, for us, they were a necessity, not a contrivance. We had our own cathartic and therapeutic agendas. We suffered from an afflicted fanaticism of visionmbordering at times upon an individuated form of megalomania. No matter how the world chose to validate Joy Division or Throbbing Gristle, at the most private level of conception there remained a repulsing apprehension that it was all, in the sweet end, an enterprise of pearls before swine. A thing without substance.
The later lionization of both bands, by those self-same critics and arbiters of popular cultural taste who had ignorantly adored or hated us, became just more bitter-sweet evidence of the tawdriness of life in general and the music "business" in particular as it dilutes, absorbs, mythologizes and consumes into cultural impotence and obsolescence that which is actually a sincere crusade. Regardless of the very real mortal risks involved, we were engaged in a tenacious and careening search of the ultimate, yet detached, possibilities of daring to dream of the immortal. Of course, in retrospect this seems a flawed, naive way of looking at simply making music to some. Opening up the heart and soul in public. Learning in public, and experiencing pain as entertainment and entertainment as pain can consume even the recklessly strong. Nobody who is mediumistic can survive it without scars, without wounds, without weeping.
As far as I was concerned, in terms of the emotional turmoil eating away inside me, there was much I never bothered to tell the rest of Throbbing Gristle. Ian Curtis held back from Joy Division in this same way. Not onstage, but in his heart. Certain deeply uncomfortable considerations as to the hopelessness of life, certain connections between lyrics and secreted feelings and evenhidden references to the aesthetics and structures of personal ikons.
But I would share these secrets, these strategies and unspoken manipulations that were required by my insecurity to render the slightest touch of extracted absolution to my existentialism, in order to cosmetically lessen the burden of worthlessness. I shared these convoluted fears, and this underlying shame of even seeming to believe that I was, in private, that others imagined I appeared to be in public with Monte Cazazza and with Ian Curtis. I had no choice. The searing pain of seeing is so relentless and unforgiving. The contradictions are so crushing that someone has to be told. Otherwise the blackness opens up, we are sucked in, and it is the sensual annihilation our efforts have been so convolutedly designed to deflect us from that claims us. We begin by knowing intimately, and neo-sexually this seductive nothingness. Our flight leads us to posture and defy our fates in a grandiose copulation that, to maintain and protect our hardwon sense of being for a shimmering moment physically present and in time and place, requires, absolutely, an audience.
The audience is our anchor. They hold us here when the sirens and demons try to distract us. We hold on by our fingernails, unable to confess our terror, lest the mere movement of our jaw dislodge us and our sanity, slipping us effortlessly out into the abyss to the howling glee of the banshees. This sense of terror is very real. The puzzle is how it drives us towards that which we know wishes to consume us, committing us to purgatory. The edge of loss is within us, cutting its shape. The outline is blurred by the tumultuos mass. In solitude, it is clear. The white line around the lost body. Staying inside is so hard. Being outside is surrender. The audience is temporary camouflage.
Monte Cazazza understood, still understands ( Hello Monte!) . Ian Curtis
understood. I didn¹t HAVE TO EXPLAIN! Do you have any idea what a blessed relief it is to not have to explain anything? Not pretend anything? Not hide anything? Not have to remember what must not be said? To become, briefly, the beach and its rocks, accepting the forces of crashing waves from a place of equilibrium. The destructive forces are not calmed, but there is a chaotic balance.
This illness, this "sickness of the heart" is a little like a cruely imposed and imprisoning secret society. One that claims its members without prior agreement, unlike Faust, but requires an alleigance and exchange no less formidable. Its participants can channel its crippling powers through their dramatic crimes of entertainment through pain; through serial bloodlust; through military sadism or through political autism. Nothing ends this creeping dis-ease. The best its victims can hope for is a controlled bleeding, a steady release of pressure that just might reduce it to a point that lies just inside the boundaries of a bearable, but depleting, agony. The infected are all ways in crisis. Death is an ending of unremitting struggle, a dreamless sleep, a vast and implacable emptiness. To choose immersion in this gives life its only consistency. In blindness, so easily invoked by the closing of eyes, closer, a warm darkness envelops. A slow moving, viscous tar where repose is foetal. Suspended animation with only demons for company. Bad drinking partners. Worse lovers they make! And the source, the source of all this numbing futility is laughingly celebrated as "life".
I haven¹t talked about this before. Except to the little boy, alone again, that dwells in terror, deep within my heart. I never had the inclination. Something paralysed me. Something sacred. Something to revealing about my Self, as well as about Ian Curtis. The unbidden similaritites embeded in our feelings of desparation at that particular intersection of our lives left it hard for me to assess anything separately from his action. I knew it would be years before I was strong enough to tell my truth to my Self, and honour that I felt I saw within his.
But, now, I am compelled, and wish to, speak. I wish to make peace with the Ian Curtis whose secret and unknown pleasures were, I believe, of necessity never revealed to the world outside. Least of all those closer to him. What necessity can that be? Perhaps the necessity to try and find a trick to convince yourself of a plausible ideal for living, and a necessity to avoid acknowledging a final round of destructive paranoid insecurity from within, and emasculating ridicule from without. You see, critical acclaim just does not serve the purpose of a behavioural suture for the likes of us, as we were then. It doesn¹t heal these kinds of personality wounds, or resolve the pressing and omnipresent dilemma ...suicide.
Perhaps it was Jon Savage, or perhaps someone else. But Ian Curtis got hold of my private telephone number and he began to call me. He would call me at odd hours (as the newspapers might say). To talk. To talk about Throbbing Gristle, to talk about my anarchic ideas on popular music; ideas not a little laced with disdain and sarcasm for what I felt were the obvious rock and roll celebrity aspirations of ³punk². He was a great talker on the phone., and smart. He turned out to have been an afficianado of Throbbing Gristle from as early as 1977.
Apart from a mutual drive to subvert and inflame "popular" music, we would also talk about militaria; transgressive acts; nazis; sociopathic tendencies, and needless to say, about depression and isolation.
In 1978 Throbbing Gristle released "D.O.A. - The Third And Final Report Of
Throbbing Gristle" on our own Industrial Records label. "Industrial Music" being a term first coined by Monte Cazazza and myself during a conversation a couple of years earlier. Ian Curtis loved ³D.O.A.². In particular he liked the track "WEEPING". As chance would have it ³Weeping² was my own first official solo track within the confines of Throbbing Gristle. This song plays with several interlacing interpretations and resonances of the word "weeping". It addresses the idea of weeping as tears and crying and the other weeping of raw third degree burns and wounds. This conjunction of physical injuries from burning and emotional wounding from being burned is the morbid centre of the lyric. Morbidity itself is seen as metaphor and reality. The extreme result of betrayal, hopelessness, flesh scalded and blistered leaving no protection, only an absolute vulnerability to infection and unbearable agony.
In fact this song was recorded as an actual suicide note by me. I had already chosen to commit suicide onstage at "The Crypt" gig by Throbbing Gristle, in London. To this end I drank a bottle of whisky laced with sleeping pills and valium. In the crypt of a desanctified church no less. It didn¹t quite work. So on my delerious return home after that disconcert I had swallowed more than 50 valium and mogadon and flushed them all down with mugs of whisky! To this day I consider that the last true Throbbing Gristle gig.
I was disillusioned with everything. I felt no respect for the other members of Throbbing Gristle. I hated the sudden shift into critical acceptance. The dilution of integrity. Even the "cult" acclaim. I was convinced that I had become merely the spectacle. Suiting the voyeuristic purposes of public and band alike by risking sanity, life, physical freedom and emotional disintegration in order to speak more clearly of vulnerability and alienation. I was trying, in my crippled way, to be as mediumistic as intoxication and celebratory indulgence; as pure sonics and streams of improvised consciousness could take me; in the hope for an epiphany. A final moment of vision captured in the headlights of this madness and mayhem. I felt I was the pet freak, a necessary evil to the others. A controlled implosion of notoriety that added a cudos they might never achieve otherwise. I believed they despised me and betrayed me behind my back. That they despised me, and were similtaneously intimidated by my intensity, and that they were phoney in their expression of exploring extremes and taboos, in public at least. Fair or not. True or not. Megalomaniac or not. Paranoid or not. This was how I was feeling. Exploited, unappreciated, and disgusted. Without any redeeming sensations. Which made me assume that this was all my fault. That I was a failure and completely and utterly worthless and devoid of genuine love.
All these thoughts and screams of pain were poured into this tremendously personal song. I recorded it, and the layers of my violin sedated with more alcohol and downers. These days I stil find it hard to listen to. But because of the stupidity. How could I have accidentally found myself caring about anything to do with music or such people so much? How could I have let them hypnotise me into believing I was all of the problem? With hindsight it seems clear that a lot of this might well have been amplified "adolescent" angst. But I had nobody around me to share this with. Except Monte Cazazza in letters, and Ian Curtis over the phone. Ian understood. There seemed to be no separation between us. We even wished we were in each others groups. Or rather, we wished we were somewhere else with a group of our own, a new group.
"Weeping" remained Ian Curtis' favourite song by me. Sometimes he scared even me with his devotion to it. He¹s play it to me over the phone and sing the words along with my vocal. Joy Division released "An Ideal For Living" in June of that same year and he gave me a signed copy. Years later I would sell it so that I could go to see Brion Gysin in Paris.
... During the night of 17th May 1980 an abject Ian phoned me for the last time. He was singing, intoning "Weeping". I was scared for him. I could feel what was in his mind. I had tried to kill myself to a backdrop of "Weeping" too. Lou Lou Picasso who painted the cover of "We Hate You (Little Girls)" for Sordide Sentimental¹s Throbbing Gristle single had also tried to commit suicide listening to "Weeping". It was all too horrible and inevitable. He was distraught, anguished, angry, fristrated, confused and severely depressed. He felt that somehow he¹d let matters slip out of his grasp and control; that nobody around him cared what he wanted, what he needed, and more importantly at that moment, how much he did not want to tour or be in "Joy Division" right now.
He had a sense of invisible, relentless, steamrollering behind the scenes and this was compounded by feeling he had ended up exactly where he didn¹t want to be. Feeling obliged to take part in a truly dreaded American tour. He spoke of a sense of betrayal, of being used, of claustrophobic relationships, of being eaten alive by everyone and destroyed. He was trapped and weakened at the worst possible time.
He believed that somehow his own failings and courage had combined to create this situation where he was seeming to voluntarily compromise his own self-esteem by allowing commercial blackmail and misplaced loyalties to discredit his principles and dishonour his original intentions within "Joy Division". Matters had somehow been shabbily manipulated in such a way that despite his "cries for help" he was scheduled to fly to America on Monday the 19th. He was was alternately bewildered and angry. Sick of it all. Sick of not being heard when it was inconvenient for others. With his own personal contradictions and problems on top I knew that there was not much time.
I phoned someone in Manchester and told them that I thought Ian was really going to try and kill himself and that they should get to him immediately at home or even call the local police or it might be too late. When I was challenged and asked how I knew, I said I just knew. It was a scary but overwhelming certainty that I was feeling. They basically ridiculed me telling me that Ian was always depressed and suicidal and miserable, that that¹s just how he is. I felt helpless. They promised they¹d do something anyway, even though they thought he¹d just been winding me up. A sense of inevitability still overwhelmed me. I cried into the night until the valium kicked in. Weeping..the kind that wracks your body with sobs and screams so deep that they resemble terminal spiritual convulsions.
I am not sure how long after we spoke he actually hung himself in such a very working class Manchester manner. I suspected that nobody would manage to do anything practical. Nobody would make it to go and see him and babysit him through that night. Suicide is often an intense form of temporary insanity. The specific momeant passes, and fire cleanses. Somehow the person I spoke with succeeded in putting me into an almost hypnotic holding pattern, persuading me that everything was going to be fine; it was just a prima-donna tantrum and that I should not interfere directly and call anyone else or the police. That it was not any of my business and that I was just panicking and being dramatic. Just like Ian liked to be. I was assured that if anything really serious was going on the Joy Division inner circle would take care of it in their own way. They were used to this kind of thing.
All this left me very unsure of my orginal intuition and of how much I could appropriately intrude when I really didn¹t know everything about what was going on. I only knew Ian¹s version in late night phone calls. I didn¹t know all the domestic crises, or medical details that were amplifying his moods. So, reluctantly, in my delirium and derangement I didn¹t do anymore. I didn¹t call 999 myself. The last thing I wanted was for Ian to be suddenly invaded by emergency services and perhaps carted off for more medical and even psychiatric evaluations. Perhaps this was just an extreme version of his usual motive for ringing me up. He was just desparate for company and support, to be heard and given respect for his psychological cravings by a person he believed felt the same things just as intensely. I intended to travel up to see him that week if he managed to cancel the American tour.
I.C. WATER
And I see much more clearly everyday
And I sense I can see you play
And there¹s always some truth
And there¹s always something I should say
There¹s always something there to give me water everyday
WATER
Water I hear you say
WATER
Water I plead that you might stay
And every day, in every way
I can see you die
And I could never go away
And I could never tell you a lie
And I can see you scream and I can see you cry
For all the stories and all the hate that always comes to you
Like WATER
Water I hear you say
And I know and I feel
What you say is far too real
And every thing
And everywhere
And everything you say you care for
WATER
I need some water
WATER
I need some water
I am the devil¹s daughter
I am a Lamb to the slaughter
WATER
Water everyday (water pouring down)
WATER
Water I hear you say (water on the ground)
You tell me things and they¹re things I should have known
Where your tears are NOW they¹re not quite your own
And at night you lie in dreams you haven¹t flown
As we spin in circles that look so blown
Just water
Water in the ground
And your tears are tears and fears more like me
And the S.M.I.L.E. that I S.M.I.L.E. is not what I see
WATER
Water everywhere
Water, water I know you care
And the tears stream down from the sky
Each tastes bitter
The salt of asking why?
And your words come down and fall over me
Each one is a friend
Each one is the rain
And each is the sea
Our worlds are so close they¹re inside my heart
Falling, falling, falling
Ripping me apart
Like water
Water everyday,
Water, water I hear you say
Water, water everyday
Water, water I hear you say
WATER
Water on the ground
WATER
What a strange sound
Water
What a strange sound,
Water
What a strange, strange sound
Lyric copyright GENESIS P-ORRIDGE 1989.
Ian Curtis Remembered by Genesis P-Orridge
It has become an overworked phrase in our commodified and superficial times, but this is an "heartfelt" song. It waited 10 years to come through me and even then, staring at a wall as gray as the cover of "Still" as the words poured out, it was painful and distressing. I heard it as if I was hearing someone else sing. Like all the best songs, it wrote itself directly onto tape. The following excerpt of writing is taken from a chapter of my autohagiography "GENESIS - THE LAST BOOK OF CREATION" scheduled to be published by Creation Books U.K. January 1st 2000.
My feeling, looking back at my brief but precious friendship with Ian Curtis, is that he and I were intensely anomalous. We were born in the same post-industrial manufacturing slave vortex of Manchester, England. We both had an obsessive and sadly disturbed attachment to melancholic poetic lyricism and we both tended to view experience in a minute to minute way, as a metaphor and a fatalistic destiny. When the pseudo-political, and apolitical posturing of ³punk² was the norm we both felt stylistically sickly and socially stunted. There was a cynical disregard for society that could often express itself in self-hatred, for failing to make people understand, failing to make them really SEE the hypocrisies and the
betrayals, the ludicrousness of inherited ideas of relationships and reasons for living. Yet, coupled with that commitment to the point of death to try and make people share our feelings of ennui, was an equally deep distrust of empty, sycophantic acceptance. An isolation that knew no bounds. It is so hard at a certain point in one¹s material existence to make other people realize how real one¹s angst and frustration can be.
The only way that I can describe how that connection between us really felt, beyond the obvious fact of mutual recognition of kindred, spectral, lost souls; of the "little boy lost in a world of demons" syndrome is to concede what has since become a cliche. We had an almost genetic Mancunian grimness of vision. If you saw Salford in the fifties and early sixties, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady would vindicate all interpretations of the proposal of "cultural inevitability".
The brutal mundanity of the post-Blitz environment itself spawned a neo-romantic detachment and kindled a fire of massive messianic motivation that became almost entirely about compounding and validating undistilled pointlessness for its own sake, taking as its medium an highly individualized perversion of excellence, covertly clothed in the trappings of popular culture. Of that most despised of contemporary art forms, rock music. Joy Division was Ian¹s fantasy of the implications for himself
Velvet Underground catalyzed against the mainstream of fashion. Throbbing Gristle was, quite consciously, exactly the same fantasy for myself. Rather than be crippled by having none of the usual skills, or ingredients normally eschewed for such a mission, both of us chose to let the available resources mature and fester in equal amounts, believing as we did, that the form would inarguably appear and succeed by virtue of our determination. This was an act of faith, a leap of faith, into the unknown pleasures of an metaphysical, and emotional highwire performance that required, for its illumination, the refusal of any manner of safety net.
This is how it was. Can you feel that almost erotic sense of purpose and that exquisitely tormenting sensation of irrevocability that devoured us? It is an expression of an idealism for living, of a rarefied fanaticism that truly conceives of all creativity as an holy act, a sacred task that leads to immolation or salvation and the acceptance of that risk is what permeates this path with potency and a contemporary shamanism that sets its practitioners apart.
To build something, in this case an aesthetic "jihad", that was not already publicly desired, that nobody in their right mind could possibly want, and then to relentlessly prove that they did want it after all, indeed, leave them feeling that it always existed, and was always so, that was the meaning, the necessary agenda to extricate ourselves from the horror. In the end, they would crave our tortured visions despite themselves, even despising themselves. That was, at the beginning, as far as we could see. It was enough. How we imagined the Velvet Underground¹s nihilism to be, especially on that first album, was a crucial trigger to this beginning. Later we would discover that a knowing musicology and ambition flavored our personalized, and self-justifying interpretations. Later we would substitute Jim Morrison¹s spiritual and emotional psychic- implosion as closer to the process we had volunteered our "selves" for.
All the while we were converting the outside world to our inner aesthetic Ian and I were depressingly aware that really, in the end, the audience and critics understood nothing, respected nothing, and protected nothing of our vulnerability on parade, our genuine pain. They saw nothing of the bottomless dead souls that fueled it all, nor the charade of charisma that disguised the obvious detachment from actually feeling truly alive that
underpinned the paradox of seeming to discuss a seclusion of perception whilst actually describing a state of absolute discomfort laid bare.
Not even the other band members of our respective groups really understood this, or really saw it. What was so fatally affecting us, the exposed morbidity of our onstage, on record personas, was dismissed all to conveniently as affectation. They were so close to the open wounds, they couldn¹t even address them. At times they chose not to believe they were real, or to sympathize. This compounded our cardinal angst, possessing us with a terrible foreboding of the emptiness dwelling symbiotically alongside the pivotal vacuity of humanity, friends and lovers alike.
We explained so much we appeared silent. We moved so many we appeared still.
This paradox of the "cry - for - help" misdiagnosed as superficial pop anthem has claimed others greater and lesser than Ian Curtis. Spirits that scream for acknowledgement. Hindsight maketh fools of us all.
I am forced to believe that Ian recognized a great part of himself in the role I was compelled to act out in Throbbing Gristle. An identical, careening, searingly adrift and isolated experience, desperately trapped in
the guise of radical self-destructive performer . Often bitter, suicidal and callously nihilistic.
We were never whole, nor never wholly connected, not even to the other members of the bands we were part of. We had secrets. Secrets kept from before those bands existed. Secrets that might have revealed why, for us, they were a necessity, not a contrivance. We had our own cathartic and therapeutic agendas. We suffered from an afflicted fanaticism of visionmbordering at times upon an individuated form of megalomania. No matter how the world chose to validate Joy Division or Throbbing Gristle, at the most private level of conception there remained a repulsing apprehension that it was all, in the sweet end, an enterprise of pearls before swine. A thing without substance.
The later lionization of both bands, by those self-same critics and arbiters of popular cultural taste who had ignorantly adored or hated us, became just more bitter-sweet evidence of the tawdriness of life in general and the music "business" in particular as it dilutes, absorbs, mythologizes and consumes into cultural impotence and obsolescence that which is actually a sincere crusade. Regardless of the very real mortal risks involved, we were engaged in a tenacious and careening search of the ultimate, yet detached, possibilities of daring to dream of the immortal. Of course, in retrospect this seems a flawed, naive way of looking at simply making music to some. Opening up the heart and soul in public. Learning in public, and experiencing pain as entertainment and entertainment as pain can consume even the recklessly strong. Nobody who is mediumistic can survive it without scars, without wounds, without weeping.
As far as I was concerned, in terms of the emotional turmoil eating away inside me, there was much I never bothered to tell the rest of Throbbing Gristle. Ian Curtis held back from Joy Division in this same way. Not onstage, but in his heart. Certain deeply uncomfortable considerations as to the hopelessness of life, certain connections between lyrics and secreted feelings and evenhidden references to the aesthetics and structures of personal ikons.
But I would share these secrets, these strategies and unspoken manipulations that were required by my insecurity to render the slightest touch of extracted absolution to my existentialism, in order to cosmetically lessen the burden of worthlessness. I shared these convoluted fears, and this underlying shame of even seeming to believe that I was, in private, that others imagined I appeared to be in public with Monte Cazazza and with Ian Curtis. I had no choice. The searing pain of seeing is so relentless and unforgiving. The contradictions are so crushing that someone has to be told. Otherwise the blackness opens up, we are sucked in, and it is the sensual annihilation our efforts have been so convolutedly designed to deflect us from that claims us. We begin by knowing intimately, and neo-sexually this seductive nothingness. Our flight leads us to posture and defy our fates in a grandiose copulation that, to maintain and protect our hardwon sense of being for a shimmering moment physically present and in time and place, requires, absolutely, an audience.
The audience is our anchor. They hold us here when the sirens and demons try to distract us. We hold on by our fingernails, unable to confess our terror, lest the mere movement of our jaw dislodge us and our sanity, slipping us effortlessly out into the abyss to the howling glee of the banshees. This sense of terror is very real. The puzzle is how it drives us towards that which we know wishes to consume us, committing us to purgatory. The edge of loss is within us, cutting its shape. The outline is blurred by the tumultuos mass. In solitude, it is clear. The white line around the lost body. Staying inside is so hard. Being outside is surrender. The audience is temporary camouflage.
Monte Cazazza understood, still understands ( Hello Monte!) . Ian Curtis
understood. I didn¹t HAVE TO EXPLAIN! Do you have any idea what a blessed relief it is to not have to explain anything? Not pretend anything? Not hide anything? Not have to remember what must not be said? To become, briefly, the beach and its rocks, accepting the forces of crashing waves from a place of equilibrium. The destructive forces are not calmed, but there is a chaotic balance.
This illness, this "sickness of the heart" is a little like a cruely imposed and imprisoning secret society. One that claims its members without prior agreement, unlike Faust, but requires an alleigance and exchange no less formidable. Its participants can channel its crippling powers through their dramatic crimes of entertainment through pain; through serial bloodlust; through military sadism or through political autism. Nothing ends this creeping dis-ease. The best its victims can hope for is a controlled bleeding, a steady release of pressure that just might reduce it to a point that lies just inside the boundaries of a bearable, but depleting, agony. The infected are all ways in crisis. Death is an ending of unremitting struggle, a dreamless sleep, a vast and implacable emptiness. To choose immersion in this gives life its only consistency. In blindness, so easily invoked by the closing of eyes, closer, a warm darkness envelops. A slow moving, viscous tar where repose is foetal. Suspended animation with only demons for company. Bad drinking partners. Worse lovers they make! And the source, the source of all this numbing futility is laughingly celebrated as "life".
I haven¹t talked about this before. Except to the little boy, alone again, that dwells in terror, deep within my heart. I never had the inclination. Something paralysed me. Something sacred. Something to revealing about my Self, as well as about Ian Curtis. The unbidden similaritites embeded in our feelings of desparation at that particular intersection of our lives left it hard for me to assess anything separately from his action. I knew it would be years before I was strong enough to tell my truth to my Self, and honour that I felt I saw within his.
But, now, I am compelled, and wish to, speak. I wish to make peace with the Ian Curtis whose secret and unknown pleasures were, I believe, of necessity never revealed to the world outside. Least of all those closer to him. What necessity can that be? Perhaps the necessity to try and find a trick to convince yourself of a plausible ideal for living, and a necessity to avoid acknowledging a final round of destructive paranoid insecurity from within, and emasculating ridicule from without. You see, critical acclaim just does not serve the purpose of a behavioural suture for the likes of us, as we were then. It doesn¹t heal these kinds of personality wounds, or resolve the pressing and omnipresent dilemma ...suicide.
Perhaps it was Jon Savage, or perhaps someone else. But Ian Curtis got hold of my private telephone number and he began to call me. He would call me at odd hours (as the newspapers might say). To talk. To talk about Throbbing Gristle, to talk about my anarchic ideas on popular music; ideas not a little laced with disdain and sarcasm for what I felt were the obvious rock and roll celebrity aspirations of ³punk². He was a great talker on the phone., and smart. He turned out to have been an afficianado of Throbbing Gristle from as early as 1977.
Apart from a mutual drive to subvert and inflame "popular" music, we would also talk about militaria; transgressive acts; nazis; sociopathic tendencies, and needless to say, about depression and isolation.
In 1978 Throbbing Gristle released "D.O.A. - The Third And Final Report Of
Throbbing Gristle" on our own Industrial Records label. "Industrial Music" being a term first coined by Monte Cazazza and myself during a conversation a couple of years earlier. Ian Curtis loved ³D.O.A.². In particular he liked the track "WEEPING". As chance would have it ³Weeping² was my own first official solo track within the confines of Throbbing Gristle. This song plays with several interlacing interpretations and resonances of the word "weeping". It addresses the idea of weeping as tears and crying and the other weeping of raw third degree burns and wounds. This conjunction of physical injuries from burning and emotional wounding from being burned is the morbid centre of the lyric. Morbidity itself is seen as metaphor and reality. The extreme result of betrayal, hopelessness, flesh scalded and blistered leaving no protection, only an absolute vulnerability to infection and unbearable agony.
In fact this song was recorded as an actual suicide note by me. I had already chosen to commit suicide onstage at "The Crypt" gig by Throbbing Gristle, in London. To this end I drank a bottle of whisky laced with sleeping pills and valium. In the crypt of a desanctified church no less. It didn¹t quite work. So on my delerious return home after that disconcert I had swallowed more than 50 valium and mogadon and flushed them all down with mugs of whisky! To this day I consider that the last true Throbbing Gristle gig.
I was disillusioned with everything. I felt no respect for the other members of Throbbing Gristle. I hated the sudden shift into critical acceptance. The dilution of integrity. Even the "cult" acclaim. I was convinced that I had become merely the spectacle. Suiting the voyeuristic purposes of public and band alike by risking sanity, life, physical freedom and emotional disintegration in order to speak more clearly of vulnerability and alienation. I was trying, in my crippled way, to be as mediumistic as intoxication and celebratory indulgence; as pure sonics and streams of improvised consciousness could take me; in the hope for an epiphany. A final moment of vision captured in the headlights of this madness and mayhem. I felt I was the pet freak, a necessary evil to the others. A controlled implosion of notoriety that added a cudos they might never achieve otherwise. I believed they despised me and betrayed me behind my back. That they despised me, and were similtaneously intimidated by my intensity, and that they were phoney in their expression of exploring extremes and taboos, in public at least. Fair or not. True or not. Megalomaniac or not. Paranoid or not. This was how I was feeling. Exploited, unappreciated, and disgusted. Without any redeeming sensations. Which made me assume that this was all my fault. That I was a failure and completely and utterly worthless and devoid of genuine love.
All these thoughts and screams of pain were poured into this tremendously personal song. I recorded it, and the layers of my violin sedated with more alcohol and downers. These days I stil find it hard to listen to. But because of the stupidity. How could I have accidentally found myself caring about anything to do with music or such people so much? How could I have let them hypnotise me into believing I was all of the problem? With hindsight it seems clear that a lot of this might well have been amplified "adolescent" angst. But I had nobody around me to share this with. Except Monte Cazazza in letters, and Ian Curtis over the phone. Ian understood. There seemed to be no separation between us. We even wished we were in each others groups. Or rather, we wished we were somewhere else with a group of our own, a new group.
"Weeping" remained Ian Curtis' favourite song by me. Sometimes he scared even me with his devotion to it. He¹s play it to me over the phone and sing the words along with my vocal. Joy Division released "An Ideal For Living" in June of that same year and he gave me a signed copy. Years later I would sell it so that I could go to see Brion Gysin in Paris.
... During the night of 17th May 1980 an abject Ian phoned me for the last time. He was singing, intoning "Weeping". I was scared for him. I could feel what was in his mind. I had tried to kill myself to a backdrop of "Weeping" too. Lou Lou Picasso who painted the cover of "We Hate You (Little Girls)" for Sordide Sentimental¹s Throbbing Gristle single had also tried to commit suicide listening to "Weeping". It was all too horrible and inevitable. He was distraught, anguished, angry, fristrated, confused and severely depressed. He felt that somehow he¹d let matters slip out of his grasp and control; that nobody around him cared what he wanted, what he needed, and more importantly at that moment, how much he did not want to tour or be in "Joy Division" right now.
He had a sense of invisible, relentless, steamrollering behind the scenes and this was compounded by feeling he had ended up exactly where he didn¹t want to be. Feeling obliged to take part in a truly dreaded American tour. He spoke of a sense of betrayal, of being used, of claustrophobic relationships, of being eaten alive by everyone and destroyed. He was trapped and weakened at the worst possible time.
He believed that somehow his own failings and courage had combined to create this situation where he was seeming to voluntarily compromise his own self-esteem by allowing commercial blackmail and misplaced loyalties to discredit his principles and dishonour his original intentions within "Joy Division". Matters had somehow been shabbily manipulated in such a way that despite his "cries for help" he was scheduled to fly to America on Monday the 19th. He was was alternately bewildered and angry. Sick of it all. Sick of not being heard when it was inconvenient for others. With his own personal contradictions and problems on top I knew that there was not much time.
I phoned someone in Manchester and told them that I thought Ian was really going to try and kill himself and that they should get to him immediately at home or even call the local police or it might be too late. When I was challenged and asked how I knew, I said I just knew. It was a scary but overwhelming certainty that I was feeling. They basically ridiculed me telling me that Ian was always depressed and suicidal and miserable, that that¹s just how he is. I felt helpless. They promised they¹d do something anyway, even though they thought he¹d just been winding me up. A sense of inevitability still overwhelmed me. I cried into the night until the valium kicked in. Weeping..the kind that wracks your body with sobs and screams so deep that they resemble terminal spiritual convulsions.
I am not sure how long after we spoke he actually hung himself in such a very working class Manchester manner. I suspected that nobody would manage to do anything practical. Nobody would make it to go and see him and babysit him through that night. Suicide is often an intense form of temporary insanity. The specific momeant passes, and fire cleanses. Somehow the person I spoke with succeeded in putting me into an almost hypnotic holding pattern, persuading me that everything was going to be fine; it was just a prima-donna tantrum and that I should not interfere directly and call anyone else or the police. That it was not any of my business and that I was just panicking and being dramatic. Just like Ian liked to be. I was assured that if anything really serious was going on the Joy Division inner circle would take care of it in their own way. They were used to this kind of thing.
All this left me very unsure of my orginal intuition and of how much I could appropriately intrude when I really didn¹t know everything about what was going on. I only knew Ian¹s version in late night phone calls. I didn¹t know all the domestic crises, or medical details that were amplifying his moods. So, reluctantly, in my delirium and derangement I didn¹t do anymore. I didn¹t call 999 myself. The last thing I wanted was for Ian to be suddenly invaded by emergency services and perhaps carted off for more medical and even psychiatric evaluations. Perhaps this was just an extreme version of his usual motive for ringing me up. He was just desparate for company and support, to be heard and given respect for his psychological cravings by a person he believed felt the same things just as intensely. I intended to travel up to see him that week if he managed to cancel the American tour.
I.C. WATER
And I see much more clearly everyday
And I sense I can see you play
And there¹s always some truth
And there¹s always something I should say
There¹s always something there to give me water everyday
WATER
Water I hear you say
WATER
Water I plead that you might stay
And every day, in every way
I can see you die
And I could never go away
And I could never tell you a lie
And I can see you scream and I can see you cry
For all the stories and all the hate that always comes to you
Like WATER
Water I hear you say
And I know and I feel
What you say is far too real
And every thing
And everywhere
And everything you say you care for
WATER
I need some water
WATER
I need some water
I am the devil¹s daughter
I am a Lamb to the slaughter
WATER
Water everyday (water pouring down)
WATER
Water I hear you say (water on the ground)
You tell me things and they¹re things I should have known
Where your tears are NOW they¹re not quite your own
And at night you lie in dreams you haven¹t flown
As we spin in circles that look so blown
Just water
Water in the ground
And your tears are tears and fears more like me
And the S.M.I.L.E. that I S.M.I.L.E. is not what I see
WATER
Water everywhere
Water, water I know you care
And the tears stream down from the sky
Each tastes bitter
The salt of asking why?
And your words come down and fall over me
Each one is a friend
Each one is the rain
And each is the sea
Our worlds are so close they¹re inside my heart
Falling, falling, falling
Ripping me apart
Like water
Water everyday,
Water, water I hear you say
Water, water everyday
Water, water I hear you say
WATER
Water on the ground
WATER
What a strange sound
Water
What a strange sound,
Water
What a strange, strange sound
Lyric copyright GENESIS P-ORRIDGE 1989.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Liner notes from the Thee majesty and Cotton Ferox Wordship album
COVER SIGIL" WORD OVMOUTH" BY GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE 2003inside cover
Thee majesty + Cotton Ferox = wordship
Special delivery: Ventadour castle is the, now ruined, place where the medevial romantic poet, recorded as being the very first TROUBADOR, was writer in residence. His name was Guilhem de Peitieu. One of the poems began "I am sick in a strange way and all I know is hearsay". Our visit was illuminated in many subtle ways by the generosity of Luc De Goustine, who was persuaded to reveal the castle mysteries by Eric And Marc Hurtado of Etants Donnes.This cd is dedicated by my SELF to all these beings and the entities they conjure outside the circles of T.I.M.E.
My deepest respect and gratitude for allowing these voices to speak herein go to my friends and compatriots in magick,Carl Abrahammson and Thomas Tibert; and to Benedikte and Sofia for their tolerance and kindness during thee period when these recordings took place. Also, allow me to mention in these dispatches, my ever-loving otherness Lady Jaye, who encouraged me to give equal prescence to all those who could choose to speak through me by word ov mouth.
GENSIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE,NEW YORK, 2004
BACK COVER
WORDSHIP
(AND ALL E KNOW IS HEARSAY)
AS RECORDED BY
THEE MAJESTY+COTTON FEROX
"Let I.T be known,sweet souls who might crave more knowledge of this remarkable text that, during thee authors travels, and travails, S'HE was led mysteriously by those beatnik brujos Eric and Marc Hurtado ov Etants Donnes to one Ventadour Castle in la belle France. This majestic spot, craggy home of hawks and brooding spirits is now but a ruin where the medevial romantic poet, recorded as being thee very first TROUBADOUR, was a writer in residence. His name was Guilhem de Peitieu. One ov his most wonderous poems began, "I am sick in a strange way and all I know is hearsay". Our visist was illuminated in mnay subtle ways by generosity ove thee learned sage Luc De Goustine, who was persuaded to reveal thee castle's innermost secrets. I.T is this same shattered fortress that doth grace thee cover to form a Templar cross.Be aware that therefore that this song cycle is dedicated by thee author's SELF to all nameless beings and hallowed entities fluttering in shadows and conjured momentarily outside thee circles of T.I.M.E. De-code En-code A-code
Fabian Llyod,Paris 1923
Thee majesty + Cotton Ferox = wordship
Special delivery: Ventadour castle is the, now ruined, place where the medevial romantic poet, recorded as being the very first TROUBADOR, was writer in residence. His name was Guilhem de Peitieu. One of the poems began "I am sick in a strange way and all I know is hearsay". Our visit was illuminated in many subtle ways by the generosity of Luc De Goustine, who was persuaded to reveal the castle mysteries by Eric And Marc Hurtado of Etants Donnes.This cd is dedicated by my SELF to all these beings and the entities they conjure outside the circles of T.I.M.E.
My deepest respect and gratitude for allowing these voices to speak herein go to my friends and compatriots in magick,Carl Abrahammson and Thomas Tibert; and to Benedikte and Sofia for their tolerance and kindness during thee period when these recordings took place. Also, allow me to mention in these dispatches, my ever-loving otherness Lady Jaye, who encouraged me to give equal prescence to all those who could choose to speak through me by word ov mouth.
GENSIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE,NEW YORK, 2004
BACK COVER
WORDSHIP
(AND ALL E KNOW IS HEARSAY)
AS RECORDED BY
THEE MAJESTY+COTTON FEROX
"Let I.T be known,sweet souls who might crave more knowledge of this remarkable text that, during thee authors travels, and travails, S'HE was led mysteriously by those beatnik brujos Eric and Marc Hurtado ov Etants Donnes to one Ventadour Castle in la belle France. This majestic spot, craggy home of hawks and brooding spirits is now but a ruin where the medevial romantic poet, recorded as being thee very first TROUBADOUR, was a writer in residence. His name was Guilhem de Peitieu. One ov his most wonderous poems began, "I am sick in a strange way and all I know is hearsay". Our visist was illuminated in mnay subtle ways by generosity ove thee learned sage Luc De Goustine, who was persuaded to reveal thee castle's innermost secrets. I.T is this same shattered fortress that doth grace thee cover to form a Templar cross.Be aware that therefore that this song cycle is dedicated by thee author's SELF to all nameless beings and hallowed entities fluttering in shadows and conjured momentarily outside thee circles of T.I.M.E. De-code En-code A-code
Fabian Llyod,Paris 1923
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Various sections and T.o.p.y Chapter from Douglas Rushkoff's 1994 book CYBERIA
UPDATE: what follows is a few pages of "Cyberia" that mainly deal with Genesis and T.O.P.Y...Author Douglas Rushkoff has made the entire work of "Cyberia" availiable to read on online or download here http://www.rushkoff.com/downloadables/cyberiabook/
Material from cyberia "life in the trenches of hyperspace " by Douglas Rushkoff
pgs 117-118 the origins of "Acid house" and Gen's first experience with it.
Let's leave Toon Town for a moment to get a look at thehistory of this thing called house.'' Most Americans say it began in Chicago, where DJs at smaller, private parties and membership-only clubs (particularly one called The Warehouse)began aggressively mixing records, adding their own electronic percussion and sampling tracks, making music that--like the home-made vinaigrette at an Italian restaurant--was called"house.'' The fast disco and hip-hop---influenced recordings would sample pieces of music that were called bites'' so (others spell it "bytes,'' to indicate that these are digital samples that can be measured in terms of RAM size). Especially evocative bites were called acid bites.'' Thus, music of the house, made up of these acid bites, became known as "acid house.''
When this sound got to England, it was reinterpreted, along with its name. Folklore has it that industrial (hard, fast,high-tech, and psychedelic) music superstar Genesis P. Orridge was in a record store when he saw a bin of disks labeled "acid,'' which he figured was psychedelic music--tunes to play while on LSD. He and his cohorts added their own hallucinogenic flavor to the beats and samples, and British acid house was born.
CHAPTER 12 Gardeners Ov Thee Abyss
The strength of any magic in Cyberia is directly proportional to that magic's ability to permeate the network.Like cultural viruses, the techniques of magic are thought to gain strength as they gain acceptance by larger groups of people.Computer technology fits in to cyberian spirituality in two ways: as a way to spread magic, and as a magic itself.
Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth is a nett-work for the dissemination of majick (their spellings) through the culture for the purpose of human emancipation. TOPY (rhymes with soapy) began as a fan club and ideological forum for Genesis P. Orridge,founder of industrial band Throbbing Gristle and its house spin-off Psychic TV, but soon developed into a massive cultish web of majick practitioners and datasphere enthusiasts. They are the most severe example of technopaganism, consciously stretching backward through medievalism to ancient pagan spirituality and up through computer technology to the creation of a global,informational being. They predate and maybe even spawned House culture, but have remained pretty separate from the lovey-dovey,soft and squishy Ecstasy crowd.
All male initiates to TOPY take the name Coyote, and all women Kali. The name is followed by a number so that members can identify one another. Kali is the name of a female sex goddess known as the destroyer''; the coyote is found in many mythologies, usually symbolizing wisdom and an adventurous nature.
The nett-work consists of access points, or stations, which are post office boxes, fax machines, computer modems, or 800 phone numbers. Each access point gathers information from places off the web, then distributes it throughout the network, and in turn takes information from the web and makes it available to local members. As one initiate explains: The main memory can be accessed from the stations, then downloaded via correspondents through Xeroxes.'' Or, in English, someone reads his mail or plays his message machine, then types it up and gives copies to his friends. "The main memory'' refers to the TOPY idea that all its members compose a single, informational being.
The information passed about consists of majickal techniques'' from drugs and incantations to computer hardware and engineering tricks, as well as general TOPY philosophy. In someways, the entire TOPY network is really just an elaborate metaphor for the postmodern Gaian brain. The information they pass around is much less important than the way in which it is passed. TOPY documents are immediately recognizable because they spell words in obsolete or newly made-up ways. This is seen as away of retaking control of language, which has been used and abused for so long by the illegitimate power mongers of Western culture, which are directing the planet toward certain doom.
However well TOPY has permeated the net, its members rarely peep up out of the underground into the light of day and consensus reality. For all their 800-number accessibility, very few cyberians regularly socialize with flesh-and-blood TOPYmembers. It's almost as if their presence as human beings is less important than their presence as a cultural virus or informational entity.
All on the Same Side
Today, Diana is on Haight Street, distributing fliers forthe next Toon Town. Unlike most promoters, who target likely''clubgoers--kids with house-style clothes, computer-hippies,college cliques--Diana is dedicated to spreading the house phenomenon to the uninitiated. A freespirited club girl with a slight Mother Theresa complex, Diana is the female, emotional,caring counter to Toon Town's otherwise heady patriarchy,especially now that Earth Girl works at Big Heart City. Each human to whom she hands a flier is a potential link to dozens more. The more people brought in to the scene, she reasons, the more it grows, the more they grow, the further enlightened and loving the world is. This is the philosophy that got Diana to leave protective campus life at Berkeley and move into the city to promote Toon Town full-time.
When Diana approaches an unlikely cluster of young men cladin leather and army fatigues and smoking a joint in front of a record store, she unwittingly hits the networking jackpot. Her Toon Town promotional bill is grabbed up by the trio, who exchange it for a leaflet of their own, The Wheel of Torture,''a poem by Coyote 107:
EYE WAS ON THEE WHEEL OV TORTUREON THAT TABLE, I WAS SPUN LIKE AZ A VORTICE. IN AN ACT OV ATTRACTING VIOLENCE TO MY BEING. THEE VIOLENCE WAS EXPRESSED THROUGH TORTURE, WHICH BECAME AN ACT OVALCHEMICAL PROCESS. MY SENSES WERE BEING PULVERIZED. THROWN INTOSHOCK. PULVERIZATION WAS BEING SHOVED DOWN MY THROAT. EVERY OUNCE OV MY EMOTION WAS NULLIFIED. STEPPED ON AND SPIT ON. TOTALAPPLICATION OV NEGATION. TOTAL ACT OV NON SERVITUDE. REJECTING MY OWN PERSONALITY. NOT LETTING MY EGO TAKE KONTROL. VIOLATING MY OWN EGO IZ AN ACT OV KONTROL OVER IT. A REBELLION AND A REJECTION. HOPING FOR COMPLETE REVOLUTION WITHIN MYSELF AND NOTWAITING FOR THEE GENERATIONZ TO CATCH UP. (FUCK THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS! WHEN THINGS NEED TO CHANGE THEY WILL; THROUGH WILL.) THIS TYPE OV NULLIFICATION IZ THEE PROCESS OV PURIFICATION THROUGH PULVERIZATION. AN INITIATION INTO THE SELF. THE TRUESELF. NOT THEE ILLUZION OUR EGO FEEDZ US. LOSS OV EGO IZ PART OV THEE AWAKENING PROCCESS. THEE LIBERATION PROCESS. TO LIBERATEYOURSELF IZ TO NEGATE AND NULLIFY THAT WHICH RESTRICTS YOU. WHAT RESTRICTS YOU FROM EXPRESSION AND EXPLORATION. EXPLORE YOURSELF AND BE READY. BE ABLE AND CAPABLE. TRANZFORM AND COMMUNICATE. TRUE COMMUNICATION ONLY HAPPENZ BETWEEN EQUALS. YOU MUST MUTATE TO COMMUNICATE. YOU MUST SHARE VIBRATIONAL FREQUENCY, WHICH IZWHAT YOU ARE. ALL LIFE IZ VIBRATION AND MOVEMENT. NOTHING IZ IN A FIXED POSITION. FIXED POSITIONS ARE ONLY TEMPORARY. TRUE STATESARE TEMPORAL BECAUSE CHANGE IZ INEVITABLE. CHANGE MAKES BALANCE. CHANGE IZ MOVEMENT. MOVEMENT IZ UNIVERSAL YET DEPENDENT AND DEFINABLE. MOVEMENT HAS VELOCITY AND DIRECTION. MOVEMENT IZ MAJICK. MAJICK IS SETTING FORTH THEE WILL INTO MOTION TOWARDS A GOAL. ALLEGORY IZ THEE VEHICAL. LEARN TO KONTROL THEE VEHICAL. GET BEHIND THE WHEEL. STEER YOUR LIFE IN THEE DIRECTION YOUCHOOSE. YOU DON'T HAVE TO MAKE PIT-STOPS FOR YOUR EGO.PULVERIZE & PURITY.
The majick, kontrol, and steering happen in two ways. First, the techniques and ideas spread throughout the United States and England empower individual pagans to develop their own personal strategies for moving through life. Second, and more important,the dissemination of the information itself creates a sub- oreven countercultural infrastructure. In a meta'' way, the new lines of communication create the global, informational being, inthis case based on majick and pagan technology. Unlike GreenFire, though, whose gentle androgyny is quite Disney in its softness, TOPY members are medieval-styled skinheads. Pierced lips and noses, tattoos, army clothes, spikes, leather, bizarre beards, crew cuts, shaved heads and mohawks for the men; the women dress either in sixties naturale or psychedelic partyclothes beneath heavy army coats and leather jackets.
Magick. Cool. We're into that, too,'' Diana says, looking up from the small document. Unlike most with whom the TOPYs come in contact, Diana knows that they're not punk rockers. "We have a Nutrient Cafe, a virtual reality booth, brain machines. Plus alot of good information about all those things.'' Diana's attempt at cross-culturalization opens a Pandora's box.
We're trying to achieve total control over information.''Kurt, the leader of the group, speaks with a forced eloquence,ironically counterpointing his belligerent styling. "That allows us to decontrol the imprints that are implanted within the information itself. Everyone has the right to exchange information. What flows through TOPY is occult-lit,computer-tech, shamanistic information and majick--majick as actually a technology, as a tool, or a sort of correlative technology based on intuitive will. It's an intuitive correlative technology that is used by the individual who's realized that heor she has his or her own will which they have the freedom toexercise the way they want. That's kind of how I see majick.''
To TOPYs, magic is just the realization and redirection ofthe will toward conscious ends. To do this, people must disconnect from all sources of information that attempt to program them into unconscious submission, and replace them withi nformation that opens them to their own magical and technological abilities.
While Kurt is more in your face'' and confrontational abouthis majickal designs on culture than is Green Fire or Earth Girl,Diana is confident that they all share in the basic belief that magic and spirituality are technologies that must be utilized to prepare and develop the planet for the coming age.
Well, we're all on the same side.'' She's hip to their codified lifestyle and too determined to get them to her club to let their critical tone or angry-looking fashion choices get in the way. At Berkeley there were kids plenty more strung out than these guys. Besides, if she can turn one TOPY into a Toon Towner,thousands could follow. Kurt has the same intention. Toon Town would be an excellent venue to distribute TOPY literature.
Everyone's trying to turn everyone else on to basically the same thing. Diana takes their names down for the ever-expanding guest list (Preston won't be happy about that) and moves on.
The Protocol of Empathy
Back at Kurt's apartment later that day, the group preparesto go to Toon Town for the evening. They'll check out the club,it's decided, and give out some of their latest propaganda. A new member of the group--a runaway teenager who was found at a concert last weekend--wonders why everyone is so preoccupied withspreading the word. Kurt is quick to answer him.
That's what TOPY's always existed for: to help people realize that this society is in a crisis point. People have towake up instead of sleeping in front of the TV, which is a window on information which you don't even realize is subliminal `cause the intentions aren't even known to all the people.''
Kurt's tiny black-and-white television set has the word virus scrawled across its screen in indelible marker, a constant reminder to all viewers that the media is carrying potentially infectious subliminal ideas.
It's the programming that's dangerous. The television networks create programs which program the reality of the viewer.Each viewer is defined by nothing more than his programming.''
So, TOPY members replace regular, power-depleting television programming with information of their own: magick.
Majick is a map of the external reality. Pagans who've understood that throughout history have stayed away from the church, and used the occult as a type of underground communication. Symbols which were agreed upon.''
The revelation of the subcultural lattice work vanishes as Kurt's girlfriend suddenly enters.
I got an electric shock,'' she announces, with a certainamount of wonderment in relating the incident. "And it made my finger go numb. I was plugging in my hair dryer to the socket,and my finger's numb. I don't know what to do! It hurts like hell. I mean, it doesn't hurt at all, but ... I got shocked and it affected me.''
Do you have any cigarettes, Kim?'' Kurt asks her in an eventone.
Yeah,'' she answers. "Do you want one? Want some pot?''
She goes out, still staring at her thumb, to search for tobacco and/or cannabis. Although these kids are far out on a technopagan limb, their familial interactions look as traditionally patriarchal as the Bunkers. In one sense they seem to have taken cyber paganism the farthest. Their model of the human being is really that of the computer with will. But in another way, they appear to have adopted a more sexist and radically traditional value system than their parents could have had. The Coyotes have all become pack animals, roaming thestreets for adventure, while the Kalis stay at home, shop for clothes, or mix potions.
When Kurt does get to the topic of socializing, he speaks about it in a language more suited to computer modem protocol than human interaction:
When computers talk, there's a basic hand shake that happens between two terminals. The computer is analogous to the human biosystem, or a neural linguistic coalitive technological system.'' Kim sits up on Kurt's knee as he continues. She lights Kurt's cigarette for him and puts it into his mouth.
Empathy is caused by frequencies being shared by people, and when they interlock their frequencies, they cause a certain level of syncopation. The closer that that level of syncopationis together, the closer that those frequencies are locked in the higher level of communication that you're experiencing. Interlocking can happen in what we now call protocol: the terms that are agreed by the two users.''
The highest level of protocol between two users is, of course, sexual intercourse, an act of creativity that TOPYmembers are trying to demystify. Since they see sex as the connective energy in all interactions, the word of has been replaced in TOPY-spell by the word ov, representative of ovum,''the sexual energy, which needs to be liberated from society's restrictions and reintegrated with the will. In a practical sense, this means using the sexual energy for the practice of majick.
Your dick is majick wand if you know how to use it,'' one roommate loves to say. As another of the many leaflets around the house insists in block type:
We are thee gardeners ov thee abyss. Working to reclaim a strangled paradise choked with unwilled weeds, subconscious manifestations ov fear and self-hate. We embrace this fear and our shadow to assimilate all that we think we are not. Realigning ourselves on thee lattice ov power. Change is our strength. We turn the soil to expose thee roots ov ourconditioned behavioral responses. Identifying and dissimilatingthe thought structures that blind us ov our beauty and imprison us from our power. We thrash these weeds beyond recognition, beyond meaning, beyond existence to the consistency of nothingness. Returning them to their origin,thee abyss. Thee fertile void revealed is pure creative inspiration. in coum-union, we impregnate thee abyss; thee omninada; thee all nothingness, with thee seed ov creation.Cultivating, through will and self-love, thee infinite beauty and love that is Creation.
The creative energy in TOPY is always linked with the darkness. It is through recognition of the shadow (what Radzikconsiders the anima liberated by Ecstasy) that new life may see the light. The fertile void revealed is pure creative inspiration,'' because an acknowledgment of the unconscious programming and darkness within us opens the possibility fortheir obliteration. Leaving them in the unconscious or repressingthem turns them into monsters, which will sooner or later have to be dealt with in the form of Charlie Mansons, Chernobyl disasters, or worse. Still, to most of Cyberia, the TOPY view is unnecessarily dark and its treatment of the human organism too mechanistic.They have an almost puritanical obeisance to the forces they believe are controlling the universe. Ecstasy produces many experiences, but fear and paranoia are very rare.
Jody Radzik, for example, believes he once encountered the spirit of Kali directly. To him, there was nothing dark about it,he tells me as he makes a graffiti picture of the goddess onto a billboard at a construction site in downtown Oakland:
I can positively describe that experience as making love with God. I know that's what it was. Nobody can tell me different. I will argue until the day I die that that's what my experience was. It was a wonderful experience and it's led me to greater opening. Every now and then I do Ecstasy again because it brings me back to that incredible experience that I can't even begin to describe. It's there. It's there that I learned how to make love with God. It's how I offered myself as a sex slave to God, through MDMA, and it's brought me to really a wonderful experience of life.''
Several TOPYs who are walking by stop to watch Radzik paint. Whoah!'' exclaims one girl. They stare in astonishment.
Better be careful, man!'' warns the largest of the guys,whose nose has at least three rings in it. "Kali is dangerous.She'll get you really hard. She's the Destroyer.''
The TOPYs shake their heads and walk on in horror anddisdain. Radzik looks up from his work and shouts after them with a wide smile: Kali has her fist up my ass up to her elbow andshe loves every minute of it!''
As he puts the finishing touches on his masterpiece: Fucking art critics!''
SECTION OF CHAPTER 13
Coyote 1
The TOPYs, of course, took the idea of a collision-based nett-work even further. "Industrial'' pioneer and TOPY founderGenesis P. Orridge also bases his music on Muzak, attempting to create an even more violently anti brainwashing style of song writing than Eno's. His original group, Throbbing Gristle,was the first major industrial band, and even his current industrial/house band, Psychic TV, incorporates industrial sound sto deprogram what he sees as a Muzak-hypnotized youth culture. In his treatise on fighting Muzak, P. Orridge testified:
We openly declared we were inventing an anti-muzak that,instead of cushioning the sounds of a factory environment, made use of those very sounds to create rhythmic patterns andstructures that incorporated the liberating effects of music by unexpected means. This approach is diametrically opposed to the position of official muzak, as supplied by the Muzak Corporation of America. Their intention is to disguise stress, to control and direct human activity in order to generate maximum productivity and minimum discontent.''
Throbbing Gristle's mission was a social reengineering effort to decode brainwashing stimuli from the oppressive status quo. This motivated them to create what they called "metabolic'' music, for which cut-and-paste computer techniques werenecessary. They took irritating machine noises, factory sounds,and other annoying postmodern samples and overlaid them using thecomputer to create a new kind of acoustic assault. They knew the new sound was unpleasant--so much so that they considered it a"nonentertainment-motivated music.'' Orridge was more interested in affecting the body directly through the textures of his soundsthan he was in making any aesthetic statement throughentertaining songs or ear-pleasing harmonic structures.
The bare-bones quality of his music was thought to go right past the analytic mind, de-composing the listener's expectations about music. Making use of Muzak's painstaking research into theeffects of various frequencies and pulses on the physiology and psychology of listeners, Orridge picked his sounds on the basis of their ability to decondition social restraints on thought andthe body.'' Orridge claims certain passages of his songs can even induce orgasms. In industrial music, it was not important thatlisteners understood what was happening to them any more than it was in Muzak technology. The music needed only to deprogram theaudience in any way available.
For his current, more house-oriented Psychic TV project, Orridge has made a more self-conscious effort to expose Muzak andthe societal values it supports. The music still contains deconditioning elements, but is a more transparent parody of Muzak techniques. Listeners can feel the way the music works andenjoy it. It is less angry and abrasive because it no longer seeks to provoke fear and anxiety as its weapon against passivity-inducing Muzak. Instead, this lighter music invites thought and even humor by creating new and greater pleasures.Orridge is not merely fighting against Muzak; he is trying to do it better than they are. He not only deprograms his audience but reprograms as well, and makes listeners fully aware of the conditioning techniques of modern society in the process. This creates what Orridge calls a distorted mirror reflecting Muzak back on itself.'' He believes he can show his listeners and followers--through self-consciously cut-and-paste house music--that the technologies in place around them can be successfully analyzed and reversed. They contain, in code, "the seeds of their own destruction and hopefully the structure thatnurtures it.''
Cut and paste technology, applied to music, becomes a political statement. While beginning as a confrontational assaul ton programming, it developed into a race to beat Muzak at its own game. Muzak teaches that the world is smooth and safe. There is no such thing as a discontinuity. If a shopper in the grocery store experiences a discontinuity, he may take a moment to reevaluate his purchases: Did I buy that because I wanted it, or was I still influenced by the commercial I saw yesterday?'' If a voter experiences a discontinuity, the incumbency is challenged.Muzak's continuous soundtrack promotes the notion that we are in a world that behaves in an orderly, linear fashion. Cut-and-paste music like Psychic TV is an exercise in discontinuity. But rather than angrily shattering people's illusions about a continuous reality, it brings its listeners into a heightened state of pleasure. The teaching technique is bliss induction directly through the sound technology:
We've been saying that pleasure has become a weapon now.You know, confrontation just doesn't work. They know all about that game, the authorities, the conglomerates, and even the supermarkets, they know all those scams. So straight-on confrontation isn't necessarily the most effective tactic at the moment. Ironically, what used to be the most conservative thing,which was dance music, is now the most radical. And that's where the most radical ideas are being put across, and the most jarring combinations of sounds and sources as well.''
Material from cyberia "life in the trenches of hyperspace " by Douglas Rushkoff
pgs 117-118 the origins of "Acid house" and Gen's first experience with it.
Let's leave Toon Town for a moment to get a look at thehistory of this thing called house.'' Most Americans say it began in Chicago, where DJs at smaller, private parties and membership-only clubs (particularly one called The Warehouse)began aggressively mixing records, adding their own electronic percussion and sampling tracks, making music that--like the home-made vinaigrette at an Italian restaurant--was called"house.'' The fast disco and hip-hop---influenced recordings would sample pieces of music that were called bites'' so (others spell it "bytes,'' to indicate that these are digital samples that can be measured in terms of RAM size). Especially evocative bites were called acid bites.'' Thus, music of the house, made up of these acid bites, became known as "acid house.''
When this sound got to England, it was reinterpreted, along with its name. Folklore has it that industrial (hard, fast,high-tech, and psychedelic) music superstar Genesis P. Orridge was in a record store when he saw a bin of disks labeled "acid,'' which he figured was psychedelic music--tunes to play while on LSD. He and his cohorts added their own hallucinogenic flavor to the beats and samples, and British acid house was born.
CHAPTER 12 Gardeners Ov Thee Abyss
The strength of any magic in Cyberia is directly proportional to that magic's ability to permeate the network.Like cultural viruses, the techniques of magic are thought to gain strength as they gain acceptance by larger groups of people.Computer technology fits in to cyberian spirituality in two ways: as a way to spread magic, and as a magic itself.
Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth is a nett-work for the dissemination of majick (their spellings) through the culture for the purpose of human emancipation. TOPY (rhymes with soapy) began as a fan club and ideological forum for Genesis P. Orridge,founder of industrial band Throbbing Gristle and its house spin-off Psychic TV, but soon developed into a massive cultish web of majick practitioners and datasphere enthusiasts. They are the most severe example of technopaganism, consciously stretching backward through medievalism to ancient pagan spirituality and up through computer technology to the creation of a global,informational being. They predate and maybe even spawned House culture, but have remained pretty separate from the lovey-dovey,soft and squishy Ecstasy crowd.
All male initiates to TOPY take the name Coyote, and all women Kali. The name is followed by a number so that members can identify one another. Kali is the name of a female sex goddess known as the destroyer''; the coyote is found in many mythologies, usually symbolizing wisdom and an adventurous nature.
The nett-work consists of access points, or stations, which are post office boxes, fax machines, computer modems, or 800 phone numbers. Each access point gathers information from places off the web, then distributes it throughout the network, and in turn takes information from the web and makes it available to local members. As one initiate explains: The main memory can be accessed from the stations, then downloaded via correspondents through Xeroxes.'' Or, in English, someone reads his mail or plays his message machine, then types it up and gives copies to his friends. "The main memory'' refers to the TOPY idea that all its members compose a single, informational being.
The information passed about consists of majickal techniques'' from drugs and incantations to computer hardware and engineering tricks, as well as general TOPY philosophy. In someways, the entire TOPY network is really just an elaborate metaphor for the postmodern Gaian brain. The information they pass around is much less important than the way in which it is passed. TOPY documents are immediately recognizable because they spell words in obsolete or newly made-up ways. This is seen as away of retaking control of language, which has been used and abused for so long by the illegitimate power mongers of Western culture, which are directing the planet toward certain doom.
However well TOPY has permeated the net, its members rarely peep up out of the underground into the light of day and consensus reality. For all their 800-number accessibility, very few cyberians regularly socialize with flesh-and-blood TOPYmembers. It's almost as if their presence as human beings is less important than their presence as a cultural virus or informational entity.
All on the Same Side
Today, Diana is on Haight Street, distributing fliers forthe next Toon Town. Unlike most promoters, who target likely''clubgoers--kids with house-style clothes, computer-hippies,college cliques--Diana is dedicated to spreading the house phenomenon to the uninitiated. A freespirited club girl with a slight Mother Theresa complex, Diana is the female, emotional,caring counter to Toon Town's otherwise heady patriarchy,especially now that Earth Girl works at Big Heart City. Each human to whom she hands a flier is a potential link to dozens more. The more people brought in to the scene, she reasons, the more it grows, the more they grow, the further enlightened and loving the world is. This is the philosophy that got Diana to leave protective campus life at Berkeley and move into the city to promote Toon Town full-time.
When Diana approaches an unlikely cluster of young men cladin leather and army fatigues and smoking a joint in front of a record store, she unwittingly hits the networking jackpot. Her Toon Town promotional bill is grabbed up by the trio, who exchange it for a leaflet of their own, The Wheel of Torture,''a poem by Coyote 107:
EYE WAS ON THEE WHEEL OV TORTUREON THAT TABLE, I WAS SPUN LIKE AZ A VORTICE. IN AN ACT OV ATTRACTING VIOLENCE TO MY BEING. THEE VIOLENCE WAS EXPRESSED THROUGH TORTURE, WHICH BECAME AN ACT OVALCHEMICAL PROCESS. MY SENSES WERE BEING PULVERIZED. THROWN INTOSHOCK. PULVERIZATION WAS BEING SHOVED DOWN MY THROAT. EVERY OUNCE OV MY EMOTION WAS NULLIFIED. STEPPED ON AND SPIT ON. TOTALAPPLICATION OV NEGATION. TOTAL ACT OV NON SERVITUDE. REJECTING MY OWN PERSONALITY. NOT LETTING MY EGO TAKE KONTROL. VIOLATING MY OWN EGO IZ AN ACT OV KONTROL OVER IT. A REBELLION AND A REJECTION. HOPING FOR COMPLETE REVOLUTION WITHIN MYSELF AND NOTWAITING FOR THEE GENERATIONZ TO CATCH UP. (FUCK THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS! WHEN THINGS NEED TO CHANGE THEY WILL; THROUGH WILL.) THIS TYPE OV NULLIFICATION IZ THEE PROCESS OV PURIFICATION THROUGH PULVERIZATION. AN INITIATION INTO THE SELF. THE TRUESELF. NOT THEE ILLUZION OUR EGO FEEDZ US. LOSS OV EGO IZ PART OV THEE AWAKENING PROCCESS. THEE LIBERATION PROCESS. TO LIBERATEYOURSELF IZ TO NEGATE AND NULLIFY THAT WHICH RESTRICTS YOU. WHAT RESTRICTS YOU FROM EXPRESSION AND EXPLORATION. EXPLORE YOURSELF AND BE READY. BE ABLE AND CAPABLE. TRANZFORM AND COMMUNICATE. TRUE COMMUNICATION ONLY HAPPENZ BETWEEN EQUALS. YOU MUST MUTATE TO COMMUNICATE. YOU MUST SHARE VIBRATIONAL FREQUENCY, WHICH IZWHAT YOU ARE. ALL LIFE IZ VIBRATION AND MOVEMENT. NOTHING IZ IN A FIXED POSITION. FIXED POSITIONS ARE ONLY TEMPORARY. TRUE STATESARE TEMPORAL BECAUSE CHANGE IZ INEVITABLE. CHANGE MAKES BALANCE. CHANGE IZ MOVEMENT. MOVEMENT IZ UNIVERSAL YET DEPENDENT AND DEFINABLE. MOVEMENT HAS VELOCITY AND DIRECTION. MOVEMENT IZ MAJICK. MAJICK IS SETTING FORTH THEE WILL INTO MOTION TOWARDS A GOAL. ALLEGORY IZ THEE VEHICAL. LEARN TO KONTROL THEE VEHICAL. GET BEHIND THE WHEEL. STEER YOUR LIFE IN THEE DIRECTION YOUCHOOSE. YOU DON'T HAVE TO MAKE PIT-STOPS FOR YOUR EGO.PULVERIZE & PURITY.
The majick, kontrol, and steering happen in two ways. First, the techniques and ideas spread throughout the United States and England empower individual pagans to develop their own personal strategies for moving through life. Second, and more important,the dissemination of the information itself creates a sub- oreven countercultural infrastructure. In a meta'' way, the new lines of communication create the global, informational being, inthis case based on majick and pagan technology. Unlike GreenFire, though, whose gentle androgyny is quite Disney in its softness, TOPY members are medieval-styled skinheads. Pierced lips and noses, tattoos, army clothes, spikes, leather, bizarre beards, crew cuts, shaved heads and mohawks for the men; the women dress either in sixties naturale or psychedelic partyclothes beneath heavy army coats and leather jackets.
Magick. Cool. We're into that, too,'' Diana says, looking up from the small document. Unlike most with whom the TOPYs come in contact, Diana knows that they're not punk rockers. "We have a Nutrient Cafe, a virtual reality booth, brain machines. Plus alot of good information about all those things.'' Diana's attempt at cross-culturalization opens a Pandora's box.
We're trying to achieve total control over information.''Kurt, the leader of the group, speaks with a forced eloquence,ironically counterpointing his belligerent styling. "That allows us to decontrol the imprints that are implanted within the information itself. Everyone has the right to exchange information. What flows through TOPY is occult-lit,computer-tech, shamanistic information and majick--majick as actually a technology, as a tool, or a sort of correlative technology based on intuitive will. It's an intuitive correlative technology that is used by the individual who's realized that heor she has his or her own will which they have the freedom toexercise the way they want. That's kind of how I see majick.''
To TOPYs, magic is just the realization and redirection ofthe will toward conscious ends. To do this, people must disconnect from all sources of information that attempt to program them into unconscious submission, and replace them withi nformation that opens them to their own magical and technological abilities.
While Kurt is more in your face'' and confrontational abouthis majickal designs on culture than is Green Fire or Earth Girl,Diana is confident that they all share in the basic belief that magic and spirituality are technologies that must be utilized to prepare and develop the planet for the coming age.
Well, we're all on the same side.'' She's hip to their codified lifestyle and too determined to get them to her club to let their critical tone or angry-looking fashion choices get in the way. At Berkeley there were kids plenty more strung out than these guys. Besides, if she can turn one TOPY into a Toon Towner,thousands could follow. Kurt has the same intention. Toon Town would be an excellent venue to distribute TOPY literature.
Everyone's trying to turn everyone else on to basically the same thing. Diana takes their names down for the ever-expanding guest list (Preston won't be happy about that) and moves on.
The Protocol of Empathy
Back at Kurt's apartment later that day, the group preparesto go to Toon Town for the evening. They'll check out the club,it's decided, and give out some of their latest propaganda. A new member of the group--a runaway teenager who was found at a concert last weekend--wonders why everyone is so preoccupied withspreading the word. Kurt is quick to answer him.
That's what TOPY's always existed for: to help people realize that this society is in a crisis point. People have towake up instead of sleeping in front of the TV, which is a window on information which you don't even realize is subliminal `cause the intentions aren't even known to all the people.''
Kurt's tiny black-and-white television set has the word virus scrawled across its screen in indelible marker, a constant reminder to all viewers that the media is carrying potentially infectious subliminal ideas.
It's the programming that's dangerous. The television networks create programs which program the reality of the viewer.Each viewer is defined by nothing more than his programming.''
So, TOPY members replace regular, power-depleting television programming with information of their own: magick.
Majick is a map of the external reality. Pagans who've understood that throughout history have stayed away from the church, and used the occult as a type of underground communication. Symbols which were agreed upon.''
The revelation of the subcultural lattice work vanishes as Kurt's girlfriend suddenly enters.
I got an electric shock,'' she announces, with a certainamount of wonderment in relating the incident. "And it made my finger go numb. I was plugging in my hair dryer to the socket,and my finger's numb. I don't know what to do! It hurts like hell. I mean, it doesn't hurt at all, but ... I got shocked and it affected me.''
Do you have any cigarettes, Kim?'' Kurt asks her in an eventone.
Yeah,'' she answers. "Do you want one? Want some pot?''
She goes out, still staring at her thumb, to search for tobacco and/or cannabis. Although these kids are far out on a technopagan limb, their familial interactions look as traditionally patriarchal as the Bunkers. In one sense they seem to have taken cyber paganism the farthest. Their model of the human being is really that of the computer with will. But in another way, they appear to have adopted a more sexist and radically traditional value system than their parents could have had. The Coyotes have all become pack animals, roaming thestreets for adventure, while the Kalis stay at home, shop for clothes, or mix potions.
When Kurt does get to the topic of socializing, he speaks about it in a language more suited to computer modem protocol than human interaction:
When computers talk, there's a basic hand shake that happens between two terminals. The computer is analogous to the human biosystem, or a neural linguistic coalitive technological system.'' Kim sits up on Kurt's knee as he continues. She lights Kurt's cigarette for him and puts it into his mouth.
Empathy is caused by frequencies being shared by people, and when they interlock their frequencies, they cause a certain level of syncopation. The closer that that level of syncopationis together, the closer that those frequencies are locked in the higher level of communication that you're experiencing. Interlocking can happen in what we now call protocol: the terms that are agreed by the two users.''
The highest level of protocol between two users is, of course, sexual intercourse, an act of creativity that TOPYmembers are trying to demystify. Since they see sex as the connective energy in all interactions, the word of has been replaced in TOPY-spell by the word ov, representative of ovum,''the sexual energy, which needs to be liberated from society's restrictions and reintegrated with the will. In a practical sense, this means using the sexual energy for the practice of majick.
Your dick is majick wand if you know how to use it,'' one roommate loves to say. As another of the many leaflets around the house insists in block type:
We are thee gardeners ov thee abyss. Working to reclaim a strangled paradise choked with unwilled weeds, subconscious manifestations ov fear and self-hate. We embrace this fear and our shadow to assimilate all that we think we are not. Realigning ourselves on thee lattice ov power. Change is our strength. We turn the soil to expose thee roots ov ourconditioned behavioral responses. Identifying and dissimilatingthe thought structures that blind us ov our beauty and imprison us from our power. We thrash these weeds beyond recognition, beyond meaning, beyond existence to the consistency of nothingness. Returning them to their origin,thee abyss. Thee fertile void revealed is pure creative inspiration. in coum-union, we impregnate thee abyss; thee omninada; thee all nothingness, with thee seed ov creation.Cultivating, through will and self-love, thee infinite beauty and love that is Creation.
The creative energy in TOPY is always linked with the darkness. It is through recognition of the shadow (what Radzikconsiders the anima liberated by Ecstasy) that new life may see the light. The fertile void revealed is pure creative inspiration,'' because an acknowledgment of the unconscious programming and darkness within us opens the possibility fortheir obliteration. Leaving them in the unconscious or repressingthem turns them into monsters, which will sooner or later have to be dealt with in the form of Charlie Mansons, Chernobyl disasters, or worse. Still, to most of Cyberia, the TOPY view is unnecessarily dark and its treatment of the human organism too mechanistic.They have an almost puritanical obeisance to the forces they believe are controlling the universe. Ecstasy produces many experiences, but fear and paranoia are very rare.
Jody Radzik, for example, believes he once encountered the spirit of Kali directly. To him, there was nothing dark about it,he tells me as he makes a graffiti picture of the goddess onto a billboard at a construction site in downtown Oakland:
I can positively describe that experience as making love with God. I know that's what it was. Nobody can tell me different. I will argue until the day I die that that's what my experience was. It was a wonderful experience and it's led me to greater opening. Every now and then I do Ecstasy again because it brings me back to that incredible experience that I can't even begin to describe. It's there. It's there that I learned how to make love with God. It's how I offered myself as a sex slave to God, through MDMA, and it's brought me to really a wonderful experience of life.''
Several TOPYs who are walking by stop to watch Radzik paint. Whoah!'' exclaims one girl. They stare in astonishment.
Better be careful, man!'' warns the largest of the guys,whose nose has at least three rings in it. "Kali is dangerous.She'll get you really hard. She's the Destroyer.''
The TOPYs shake their heads and walk on in horror anddisdain. Radzik looks up from his work and shouts after them with a wide smile: Kali has her fist up my ass up to her elbow andshe loves every minute of it!''
As he puts the finishing touches on his masterpiece: Fucking art critics!''
SECTION OF CHAPTER 13
Coyote 1
The TOPYs, of course, took the idea of a collision-based nett-work even further. "Industrial'' pioneer and TOPY founderGenesis P. Orridge also bases his music on Muzak, attempting to create an even more violently anti brainwashing style of song writing than Eno's. His original group, Throbbing Gristle,was the first major industrial band, and even his current industrial/house band, Psychic TV, incorporates industrial sound sto deprogram what he sees as a Muzak-hypnotized youth culture. In his treatise on fighting Muzak, P. Orridge testified:
We openly declared we were inventing an anti-muzak that,instead of cushioning the sounds of a factory environment, made use of those very sounds to create rhythmic patterns andstructures that incorporated the liberating effects of music by unexpected means. This approach is diametrically opposed to the position of official muzak, as supplied by the Muzak Corporation of America. Their intention is to disguise stress, to control and direct human activity in order to generate maximum productivity and minimum discontent.''
Throbbing Gristle's mission was a social reengineering effort to decode brainwashing stimuli from the oppressive status quo. This motivated them to create what they called "metabolic'' music, for which cut-and-paste computer techniques werenecessary. They took irritating machine noises, factory sounds,and other annoying postmodern samples and overlaid them using thecomputer to create a new kind of acoustic assault. They knew the new sound was unpleasant--so much so that they considered it a"nonentertainment-motivated music.'' Orridge was more interested in affecting the body directly through the textures of his soundsthan he was in making any aesthetic statement throughentertaining songs or ear-pleasing harmonic structures.
The bare-bones quality of his music was thought to go right past the analytic mind, de-composing the listener's expectations about music. Making use of Muzak's painstaking research into theeffects of various frequencies and pulses on the physiology and psychology of listeners, Orridge picked his sounds on the basis of their ability to decondition social restraints on thought andthe body.'' Orridge claims certain passages of his songs can even induce orgasms. In industrial music, it was not important thatlisteners understood what was happening to them any more than it was in Muzak technology. The music needed only to deprogram theaudience in any way available.
For his current, more house-oriented Psychic TV project, Orridge has made a more self-conscious effort to expose Muzak andthe societal values it supports. The music still contains deconditioning elements, but is a more transparent parody of Muzak techniques. Listeners can feel the way the music works andenjoy it. It is less angry and abrasive because it no longer seeks to provoke fear and anxiety as its weapon against passivity-inducing Muzak. Instead, this lighter music invites thought and even humor by creating new and greater pleasures.Orridge is not merely fighting against Muzak; he is trying to do it better than they are. He not only deprograms his audience but reprograms as well, and makes listeners fully aware of the conditioning techniques of modern society in the process. This creates what Orridge calls a distorted mirror reflecting Muzak back on itself.'' He believes he can show his listeners and followers--through self-consciously cut-and-paste house music--that the technologies in place around them can be successfully analyzed and reversed. They contain, in code, "the seeds of their own destruction and hopefully the structure thatnurtures it.''
Cut and paste technology, applied to music, becomes a political statement. While beginning as a confrontational assaul ton programming, it developed into a race to beat Muzak at its own game. Muzak teaches that the world is smooth and safe. There is no such thing as a discontinuity. If a shopper in the grocery store experiences a discontinuity, he may take a moment to reevaluate his purchases: Did I buy that because I wanted it, or was I still influenced by the commercial I saw yesterday?'' If a voter experiences a discontinuity, the incumbency is challenged.Muzak's continuous soundtrack promotes the notion that we are in a world that behaves in an orderly, linear fashion. Cut-and-paste music like Psychic TV is an exercise in discontinuity. But rather than angrily shattering people's illusions about a continuous reality, it brings its listeners into a heightened state of pleasure. The teaching technique is bliss induction directly through the sound technology:
We've been saying that pleasure has become a weapon now.You know, confrontation just doesn't work. They know all about that game, the authorities, the conglomerates, and even the supermarkets, they know all those scams. So straight-on confrontation isn't necessarily the most effective tactic at the moment. Ironically, what used to be the most conservative thing,which was dance music, is now the most radical. And that's where the most radical ideas are being put across, and the most jarring combinations of sounds and sources as well.''
Related: Brion Gysin and Timothy Leary Import vinyl in stock via Cold spring records...
Taken from the Cold spring Newsflash email update- 17th November 2009
We've some truly CULT items in stock now!Act fast as all of these items are RARE and in limited quantities!
BRION GYSIN - 'Poems Of Poems' LP (Alga Marghen) - £45 / £47 / £49
Recorded in 1958 at the Beat Hotel, rue Git le Coeur, Paris, on a UHER 4400 reel-to-reel recording machine, this record documents Brion Gysin's important experiments in cut-up and recording technique. "I made it to show Burroughs how, possibly, to use it. William did not yet have a tape recorder. Very soon after that, Burroughs was busy punching to death a series of cheap Japanese plastic tape recorders, to which he applied himself with such force that he could punch one of them to death inside a matter of weeks, days even." Limited Edition of 630 copies (original 1998 pressing!). Italian import. • All Brion Gysin Titles•
TIMOTHY LEARY - 'You Can Be Anyone This Time Around' LP (Get Back) - £14 / £16 / £18
For a long time a hard to find collectable record, this historical spoken word album by LSD prophet Timothy Leary has now finally been reissued. Leary’s raps and monologues, structured on an intersections of famous tunes of the time (the album was originally released in 1970 on Douglas) might sound outdated today and too linked to a specific weltanschauung that was the basis of Leary’s modern age philosophy. But this is probably the reason why "You Can Be Anyone This Time Around" retains its interest in current times: it’s the original, uncut, uncensored vision of a sharp thinker who has been often easily scorned for his extreme takes on drug use. Musically speaking, side B “Live and Let Live,” offers an unforgettable jam session in the background with Stephen Stills, John Sebastian, Buddy Miles and Jimi Hendrix on bass! Pressed on heavyweight 180g vinyl. • All Timothy Leary Titles•
We've some truly CULT items in stock now!Act fast as all of these items are RARE and in limited quantities!
BRION GYSIN - 'Poems Of Poems' LP (Alga Marghen) - £45 / £47 / £49
Recorded in 1958 at the Beat Hotel, rue Git le Coeur, Paris, on a UHER 4400 reel-to-reel recording machine, this record documents Brion Gysin's important experiments in cut-up and recording technique. "I made it to show Burroughs how, possibly, to use it. William did not yet have a tape recorder. Very soon after that, Burroughs was busy punching to death a series of cheap Japanese plastic tape recorders, to which he applied himself with such force that he could punch one of them to death inside a matter of weeks, days even." Limited Edition of 630 copies (original 1998 pressing!). Italian import. • All Brion Gysin Titles•
also...
TIMOTHY LEARY - 'You Can Be Anyone This Time Around' LP (Get Back) - £14 / £16 / £18
For a long time a hard to find collectable record, this historical spoken word album by LSD prophet Timothy Leary has now finally been reissued. Leary’s raps and monologues, structured on an intersections of famous tunes of the time (the album was originally released in 1970 on Douglas) might sound outdated today and too linked to a specific weltanschauung that was the basis of Leary’s modern age philosophy. But this is probably the reason why "You Can Be Anyone This Time Around" retains its interest in current times: it’s the original, uncut, uncensored vision of a sharp thinker who has been often easily scorned for his extreme takes on drug use. Musically speaking, side B “Live and Let Live,” offers an unforgettable jam session in the background with Stephen Stills, John Sebastian, Buddy Miles and Jimi Hendrix on bass! Pressed on heavyweight 180g vinyl. • All Timothy Leary Titles•
Monday, November 16, 2009
Larry thrasher 1995 bio
from the official fanzine/publication of GenesisP-Orridge and Psychic(k) TV PTV4UNE in 1995
PSYCHIC TV U.S.A. 1995
LARRY THRASHER (Real name: Larry Thrasher) TABLA/SAMPLES/GUITARS and...
LARRY THRASHER grew up in Kentucky, U.S.A. where he studied piano for 2 years before initially being taught Beatles tuneson guitar at age 8. He taught himself Pink Floyd/Hendrix/Zappa/Mahavishnu Orchestra tunes on acoustic guitar. Mid-70's studied formally baroque guitar specializing in Bach. By 1979was playing guitar in punk and Australian ska band "HEROES"in South Carolina. Switched to Bass Guitar, replacing RAY FITZPATRICK famed bassist for IKE & TINA TURNER and TAJ MAHAL's bands previously.
Larry moved to San Francisco in 1984. In 1985 he co-founded the ambient noise band "THESSALONIANS" with KIM CASCONE(founder of SILENT RECORDS) and DAVID JAMES (currently with"SPEARHEAD"). "THESSALONIANS" broke up in 1986 after releasing "THE BLACK FIELD" (SILENT). Worked with San Francisco based psychedelic lightshow WARM LIGHT. Became bassist and front-man with the San Francisco band "THE BUBBLES" and later "WHACK AND DANGLE" (whose lineups alsoincluded DAVID JAMES)
.Started studying INDIAN TABLA drums with the renowned master SWAPAN CHAUDHURI in 1986. Began traveling to India collecting rare instruments and studying folk styles of music inMaharashta.
THESSALONIANS regrouped in 1991 (with new lineup) andreleased the CD "SOULCRAFT" (SILENT) which featured a broadrange of his Indian percussive styles. Formed JHOPDI STUDIOS in 1991 and did digital editing for various SILENT RECORDS artists.
Met PSYCHIC TV's GENESIS P-ORRIDGE in 1993 while mastering and editing the G.P-O/PTV definitive tonal musics andsoundtracks 6 CD box set "SPLINTER TEST" (CAROLINE UK). He started performing live with PTV in January 1994 playing samples and TABLA. Since then he has become an indispensable part of PTV live; in the studio and co-writing new material.
In 1994 Larry and GEN released "A HOLLOW COST" (INVISIBLE-US,VISIONARY-UK); "CATHEDRAL ENGINE" (DOSSIER); "BREATHE"(DOSSIER); "ELECTRIC NEWSPAPER Issue.ONE" and "Issue.TWO"(DOSSIER and INVISIBLE); as well as tracks specifically recorded for compilation anthologies "TRANCE ATLANTIC"(VOLUME) and "SPACE DAZE" (CLEOPATRA). As PSYCHIC TV theyhave just finished a new studio album of co-written"hyperdelic and hallucinogenic" songs called "TRIP RESET"(CLEOPATRA). As a re-mix duo they have 3 mixes on the newPENAL COLONY CD "5 MAN JOB" (CLEOPATRA).
Larry records and performs with the Los Angeles based Hard/Acid/Jazz band "OM BOYZ" as well as his own punk-Qawwali band"THRASHER QAWWAL". He and GEN are currently plotting andplanning a number of projects, preparatory to touring the1995 PSYCHIC TV band and extravaganza, refining a BRUTAL PSYCHEDELIC TRANCE EXPERIENCE using traditional rhythms andinstruments coupled with technology working in a song-basedformat. They continue to explore ambient noise fields, tonalsymphonics in conjunction with spoken word in both recordingsand live performance.
PSYCHIC TV U.S.A. 1995
LARRY THRASHER (Real name: Larry Thrasher) TABLA/SAMPLES/GUITARS and...
LARRY THRASHER grew up in Kentucky, U.S.A. where he studied piano for 2 years before initially being taught Beatles tuneson guitar at age 8. He taught himself Pink Floyd/Hendrix/Zappa/Mahavishnu Orchestra tunes on acoustic guitar. Mid-70's studied formally baroque guitar specializing in Bach. By 1979was playing guitar in punk and Australian ska band "HEROES"in South Carolina. Switched to Bass Guitar, replacing RAY FITZPATRICK famed bassist for IKE & TINA TURNER and TAJ MAHAL's bands previously.
Larry moved to San Francisco in 1984. In 1985 he co-founded the ambient noise band "THESSALONIANS" with KIM CASCONE(founder of SILENT RECORDS) and DAVID JAMES (currently with"SPEARHEAD"). "THESSALONIANS" broke up in 1986 after releasing "THE BLACK FIELD" (SILENT). Worked with San Francisco based psychedelic lightshow WARM LIGHT. Became bassist and front-man with the San Francisco band "THE BUBBLES" and later "WHACK AND DANGLE" (whose lineups alsoincluded DAVID JAMES)
.Started studying INDIAN TABLA drums with the renowned master SWAPAN CHAUDHURI in 1986. Began traveling to India collecting rare instruments and studying folk styles of music inMaharashta.
THESSALONIANS regrouped in 1991 (with new lineup) andreleased the CD "SOULCRAFT" (SILENT) which featured a broadrange of his Indian percussive styles. Formed JHOPDI STUDIOS in 1991 and did digital editing for various SILENT RECORDS artists.
Met PSYCHIC TV's GENESIS P-ORRIDGE in 1993 while mastering and editing the G.P-O/PTV definitive tonal musics andsoundtracks 6 CD box set "SPLINTER TEST" (CAROLINE UK). He started performing live with PTV in January 1994 playing samples and TABLA. Since then he has become an indispensable part of PTV live; in the studio and co-writing new material.
In 1994 Larry and GEN released "A HOLLOW COST" (INVISIBLE-US,VISIONARY-UK); "CATHEDRAL ENGINE" (DOSSIER); "BREATHE"(DOSSIER); "ELECTRIC NEWSPAPER Issue.ONE" and "Issue.TWO"(DOSSIER and INVISIBLE); as well as tracks specifically recorded for compilation anthologies "TRANCE ATLANTIC"(VOLUME) and "SPACE DAZE" (CLEOPATRA). As PSYCHIC TV theyhave just finished a new studio album of co-written"hyperdelic and hallucinogenic" songs called "TRIP RESET"(CLEOPATRA). As a re-mix duo they have 3 mixes on the newPENAL COLONY CD "5 MAN JOB" (CLEOPATRA).
Larry records and performs with the Los Angeles based Hard/Acid/Jazz band "OM BOYZ" as well as his own punk-Qawwali band"THRASHER QAWWAL". He and GEN are currently plotting andplanning a number of projects, preparatory to touring the1995 PSYCHIC TV band and extravaganza, refining a BRUTAL PSYCHEDELIC TRANCE EXPERIENCE using traditional rhythms andinstruments coupled with technology working in a song-basedformat. They continue to explore ambient noise fields, tonalsymphonics in conjunction with spoken word in both recordingsand live performance.
Gen's 1994 cease and desist to the Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia
To: Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia
Katharos Foundation
P.O. Box 837
5000 av Tilburg Holland
9th September 1994
From: GENESIS P-ORRIDGE
P.O. Box 1034
OCCIDENTAL
CA. 95465-1034
WITHOUT PREJUDICE:
Dear Sirs,
I am writing to inform you that I intend to pursue with duelegal vigor the matter of your group's inarguable and illegal infringement of my personal Registered Trademark.
I have produced, to facilitate a speedy and satisfactory conclusion to this matter, evidence of the certificates registering the "PSYCHICK CROSS" in my name. KK Records,also, released a CD/Album by only myself and Andrew McKenzie.He chose to be called "The Hafler Trio" and I chose to becalled "Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth" for this project. It is catalogue number KK 015 and titled "DREAMACHINE".
I certainly know from my archive of correspondence that youare all aware that I designed and founded the "T.O.P.Y."project, and further that you are ALL aware that it is my own personal idiosyncratic styles of spelling "OV"; "Thee";"Coum" etc that add to the exploitation of my intellectual property by yourselves. I hope you will end your fruitless denials and begin to suggest forms of settlement and apology in these matters.
I do not consider your brief and arrogant NOTE a suitablereply to this serious matter. You have had ample time to assemble and send me documented PROOF and evidence of yourlegal right to use my personal Trademark. The legal onus is,and must be, upon you to provide authentic and incontrovertible documentary evidence that you receive ddirect consent from myself to pirate and exploit my private Trademark properties.
I must inform you that I have appointed legal representatives in the UK to administer my Trademark, and the Trademarks and Patents office's correspondence with me. You must cease and desist immediately from your flagrant and illegal infringements of my personal Trademark. There is no excuse at all. You have absolutely no legal rights to exploit it, nor did you ever have such rights.
I expect an IMMEDIATE response to this letter, Return of Post, producing written and clear proposals as to how you intend to rectify this intrusion into my life, my work and mypersonal career, and through that the damage and loss offuture income you have caused me, as well as personal distress and the jeopardising of my future business deals,which inevitably include my continued use of my own Trademark.
Yours Sincerely,
Genesis P-Orridge
LETTER 2
To: Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia
Katharos Foundation
P.O. Box 837
5000 av Tilburg Holland
9th September 1994
From: GENESIS P-ORRIDGE
P.O. Box 1034
OCCIDENTAL
CA. 95465-1034
Dear Sirs,
I have registered a Trade Mark in the following details:-
1. Trade Mark registered in part A of the Register under no:1334546 as of the date 06.02.1988 in Class 16 Schedule 4 inthe name of Genesis P-Orridge. Sealed on 8th December 1989.
2. Trade Mark registered in Part A of the register under no:1334545 as of the date 06.02.1988 in Class 09 Schedule 4 inthe name of Genesis P-Orridge. Sealed on 20th October 1989.
3. Trade Mark registered in Part A of the register under no:1379316 as of the date 23.03.1989 in Class 14 in the name ofGenesis P-Orridge. Sealed on 14th December 1990.
The classes are as follows in terms of "products" covered:-
Class 16:- Printed Matter; Newspapers and Periodicals; Books;Journals; Photographs; Posters; Postcards; and all includedin Class 16.
Class 09:- Records; Tapes; Compact Discs; Videos; allincluded in Class 09.
Class 14:- Goods in precious metals or coated therewith(except cutlery, forks and spoons); jewellery; goods inprecious stones; all included in Class 14.
I have been travelling in the Far East for some time, but have now settled in the U.S.A. I believe that my attorneys,SIMONS & STEIN, have already contacted "Restless" in the USA. I am sure you are aware of the reason for my contacting you.It is really very simple. I want you to agree immediately to cease and desist from exploiting my Registered Trademark. It is registered in Europe, a process that was expensive andtime consuming, and there is reciprocity with the U.S.A.
The use of my internationally recognised personal Trade Mark,combined with the adoption of my own personal literaryidiosyncracies in your text seems designed to mislead thepublic into assuming at the very least, that I am involved inyour project, and at worst that it is a project of my ownthinly disguised. This effect has been confirmed directly tome over and over again by shop proprietors, and music buyers.
As I am SURE you are aware. I continue to use my Trade Markon my products and projects. Your unsanctioned co-option ofmy Trade Mark damages my past, present, and future works. I intend to continue using my Trade Mark and it is intolerableand unacceptable for anyone else to capitalise on, profitfrom, and deceive the public and the market place. I considerthis a very serious, and fraudulent, manipulation of my reputation and body of work.
I must once more insist that you immediately cease and desistfrom all and any further use and/or exploitation of my TradeMark. I further demand to receive in writing, within 30 daysof the date of this letter, a proposal from yourselves, andK.K. Records, and Restless Records for a substantial andappropriate amount of financial compensation both for theblatant infringement of my Trade Mark rights, and for thecontinuous damage to my own commercial projects. I furtherrequest that all and any stock that remains with my TradeMark on it be withdrawn immediately and destroyed.
I demand full figures on the numbers of products soldexploiting my protected Trade Mark by yourselves and any andall record labels that release your work(s). I expect financial compensation for each and every infringement.
I intend to pursue this matter legally if a mutually agreedsettlement is not reached between us in as short a period oftime as is possible practically.
I do believe, personally, that your exploitation of my TradeMark, was deliberately intended to enable you to confuse the public, and to exploit the possibility that I was involved in your project. I therefore also demand a Press Release that states clearly, and without malice in its content, that I, Genesis P-Orridge was not, and never was, in anyway connected with your releases, and that you used my legally protectedTrade Mark without my prior knowledge or consent, and that you apologise for any financial and/or creative distress it has caused both Genesis P-Orridge and his public.
I reserve each and all my legal rights, and avenues of action re: this matter.
Yours Sincerely,
Mr. G. P-Orridge
cc. KK Records/Restless Records/
Simons & Stein.
LETTER 3
To: David Gerber
Business Affairs
Restless Records
1616 Vista Del Mar Avenue
Hollywood CA 90028
20 December 1994
From: GENESIS P-ORRIDGE
Dear David,
I have to say that I am deeply disappointed in your letter. I waited a long time for a written reply. I felt I was open,clear and honest with you in our phone conversations. It is sad to see a corporate hat take over, apparently based upon acombination of bluff; financial superiority and self-interest.
Before E go Any further, and you imply thee lack ov my coummittmeant to my own idiosyncratic linguistics, please beaware ov thee clear differentiation E have ov separating legal/business letters, from more personal and/or literarytasks. In other words, as even my Attorneys will attest, Enormally write in what E my SELF dubbed "T.O.P.Y. speak",though E began developing my idiosyncratic style in thee 1960's and have ample archive evidence ov that claim should Eneed to press thee matter.
I hope that point is cleared up. My normal spelling is purelyan exception to demonstrate politeness.
I enclose, for your files, copies of the actual certificates, showing clearly my Registration of my personal Trademark inEurope. I have consulted with TWO USA Attorneys specialising in Intellectual Property and Copyright. One of these, Mr.Michael D. Rostoker, is considered something of an Internationally renowned authority in these matters and has even published books and videos detailing many intricaciespertaining to my situation through the LSI Logic Corporation.The other is based in New York. Both of them confirm that there IS reciprocity regarding Trademark and Intellectual Property rights between Europe and the United States byvirtue of an Internationally recognised lineage of precedent.
Both further point out that there is no doubt whatsoever, by virtue of the possession, by myself of incontrovertible evidence via legal documents and certificates (copies of someenclosed) declaring my ownership of my Trademark after it was duly, and correctly advertised in the appropriate journals.
There is no "allegation" here. There is fact. Uncomfortable though it might be for yourselves and your arrogant clients/licensees. The onus is therefore, not upon me toprove the already proven, but upon yourself, and KK and PWOGto prove THEIR allegations that they can PROVE they ever hada clear legal and documented right to exploit and trade upon my Trademark.
I can produce, from my voluminous, and thorough archive,documentary evidence to verify each and every claim. The freealbum with Psychic(k) TV's first L.P. on Warner BrothersRecords called "Force The Hand Of Chance" was called "THEMES1" and the name of the band on that free album was spelled"PSYCKICK TV". In interviews, reviews, and texts followingthat we stated in documented forms that the "K" was primarilyto indicate to the record buying public that the recordedworks released by my band were more "ambient" or "ritual" or"abstract" musics, and less in the pop culture arena. It wasseen as a service. We also stated that, as was traditional,the "K" stood in Thelemic terms for "sexual/magick" themes.To this day we continue to reserve our rights to bothversions of spelling and see no justification for you or yourassociates to instruct us as to when we may or may not spelleither version of our band name. You will also find that our video releases also often use the "K" version of our bandname, as video is seen as a more occultural and transmedia application of our theories and ideas.
As to your kindly informing me that PWOG have released trademark infringing products for longer than I was previously aware of. I thank you for this additional information. Believe it or not, to use a parallel, if an employee of a bank is embezzling money for 6 years, and is only discovered to be stealing this year. The mere fact they"got away with it" undetected for several years does not exonerate them, prove their innocence, or make the charges brought against them when they are caught invalid. In fact it is usually seen as increased evidence of their deviousness;disloyalty; and serious criminality. Quite frankly I am shocked at the pathetic nature of this excuse. Ignorance is not seen as a defence for a crime, nor is it seen as proof of a victims secretly wanting to be violated.
As to the claim by KK "that the registration of the cross is impossible", well I suggest they stop kicking up clouds of phoney dust and begin facing FACTS. You are all culpable, invarying ways, and degrees, for exploitation and infringement of my Trademark. This is indisputable. It will not go away. Nor will I.
I can produce witnessed letters from retailers in the USA;from journalists in the USA; from DJ's in the USA; and from members of the public in the USA, as well as elsewhere in the world, that they were misled, and duped by the packaging in these products from PWOG. Namely their use of my Trademark,and my writing style.
I can further produce numerous witnesses to my writing style being developed individually, by myself in the style which was then exploited later, without my knowledge or consent, ONA COMMERCIAL PRODUCT used for COMMERCIAL GAIN by PWOG in whatis clearly a deliberately deceptive manner.
I have hundreds of publications; books; texts; newsletters;posters; flyers and other publicity and documentary materialsthat confirm that the manner of spelling: most significantlythe use of "THEE" and "OV" is globally recognised and notedas specifically mine, and/or related to projects of mine.
I can show clearly that I first used and developed both thephrase "TEMPLE OV PSYCHICK YOUTH" and that it was a connectedaspect of my art/music/cultural manifestations. That it was stated to be an equal part of my artistic expressions with PTV.
I can produce ample evidence of my use of both spellings of PSYCHIC(K) in all territories.
I understand that you might be ignorant of my entire body of work. I also understand that it suits your purposes and hopes to pretend to believe KK and PWOG, whose allegations are completely undocumented, rather than put in writing the plain truth which is that I have an absolutely clear case.
I also understand that you are will assume delay is in your favour. That you probably assume that your finance give you acertain initial superiority over myself. I feel honor bound to inform you that the tone and the insulting content of your letter have increased my resolve in this matter. I expect tohave a corporate executive situation; and a team of associated attorneys and advisers managing ALL my affairs within a few weeks. ONE of the conditions I have put on thisfuture work situation overseeing my multiple creative affairs is the pursuance of this matter to my final satisfaction. I have to thank you for renewing my determination in this. As you will understand, the protection of my Trademark, and allother recognisable "signatures" connected with every aspectof my life and work are the very product ultimately being invested in whenever I sign any kind of deal.
I am very glad that despite the blustering invective and profesionally self-protecting body of text in your letter, you do not by stating that you will NOT release any further records utilizing my Trademark. (I think we've established itis NOT alleged).
I intend to continue to be forceful in this matter. I might add that I did indeed write to the people calling themselves"T.O.P.Y." in the USA in Sep 93 when I became aware of their activities in relation to myself and my properties. They have not yet satisfied me with their response and I continue to pursue this matter with them also.
Naturally, I will copy this letter, and the certificates proving my Trademark Registration to both KK and PWOG, though I have to inform you that I am fully convinced that they knew all along, and, if they did not, I still cannot imagine how they could ever justify in their own minds (assuming they have ANY morality) the exploitation of what I know they wer eaware was my personal symbol. The only possible explanationis the sickest, and the saddest, that is, monetary.
In terms of Restless, being an honest man, and even if it weakens my case in terms of semantics and law. I am prepared,without prejudice to my complaints, to accept that both you,and your Company, were ignorant of this particular probleminitially.
Yours Sincerely,Genesis P-Orridge
pp PSYCHIC TV.
PSYCHICK TV.
BOYCOTT LETTER
"Never be shy. Confront the bastards."
--Old Topi Proverb
At 12:01 AM, April 23 1995, a campaign was launched.
THE TARGETS: Thee Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia and KK Records.
THE ACTION: A call for the complete financial boycott of all PWOG and KK products (past/present/future).
THE REASON: Copyright infingement and theft of intellectual property.
If you have ever purchased an album by the Psychic Warriors Ov Gaia then this campaign is directed towards you especially.
There is a lot of misconception out there that this outfit is sanctioned by Genesis P-Orridge and Psychic TV. Somepeople may even be under the impression that PWOG is aproject of Genesis'. THIS IS NOT THE CASE.
When one sees the Psychick Cross, most often what comes tomind is Genesis and his affiliates. PWOG are unfairlycapitalizing on this association and have ignored repeated requests to cease this illegal action.
We of PTV4UNE hereby declare an International boycott of all KK Records and Psychick (sic) Warriors Ov (sic) Gaia product.We have taken the lead in this effort by destroying all PWOGproduct we own (yes, we were duped too) and returning them to KK Records.
We shall make every effort to alert everyone concerned in thePsychosphere aware of this campaign. You can help by contacting local record stores and enlightening them.Threatening to take your business elsewhere is always a great technique.
Please write to both KK Records and the Psychick (sic)Warriors Ov (sic) Gaia and inform them of your support for this campaign. Addresses are as follows:
Thee (sic) Psychick (sic) Warriors Ov (sic) Gaia
P.O. Box 837
5000 Av Tilburg
The Netherlands
KK Records
Krijgsbaan 240
2070 Zwijndrecht
Belgium
PTV4UNE letter,published in the ptv4une online zine issue 2
To: KK Records Belgium,
Krijgsbaan 240,
2070 Zwijndrecht
Belgium
From: Matt Bailey,
PTV4UNE,
P.O. Box 232,
Nanaimo B.C., Canada,
V9R 5K9
Dear Sirs;
PTV4UNE is the official fanzine/publication of GenesisP-Orridge and Psychic(k) TV. It has recently come to ourattention that you have failed to respond to the demands ofMr. Genesis P-Orridge to cease your use of his registered trademark and to make amends for any financial damage incurred by him. It is for this reason that, unfortunately,we have to write this letter. This communication will be brief.
It will reiterate what has already been demanded of you by Mr. P-Orridge as well as inform you of the measures that will be taken should you continue to ignore them:
1) Immediately cease the use of the "Psychic Cross", the registered trademark of Genesis P-Orridge.
2) Mail or fax, to his address, a written proposal of substantial financial compensation deemed to be acceptable to Mr. P-Orridge.
3) Immediately withdraw and destroy any and all remaining stock bearing the aforementioned trademark.
4) Comply with any other demands previously communicated by Mr. P-Orridge.
Should you ignore these demands we will be forced tocall for a complete boycott of P.W.O.G. and KK products. We have as our main tool the Internet, which has a potential audience of millions. It is here that we will primarily inform record stores and music buyers of the situation andencourage them to stop buying your products. Our publication has only been available for two weeks and we already have readers in Britain, Finland, Germany, Canada and the USA, among others. It is strongly believed that through this type of networking we will be able to seriously damage the pocketbooks of the above organizations.
This campaign will be launched on the 23rd of April,1995 should you fail to respond. We do not wish to take these measures, however, we are up to the challenge.
Sincerely,
Matt Bailey/PTV4UNE
Katharos Foundation
P.O. Box 837
5000 av Tilburg Holland
9th September 1994
From: GENESIS P-ORRIDGE
P.O. Box 1034
OCCIDENTAL
CA. 95465-1034
WITHOUT PREJUDICE:
Dear Sirs,
I am writing to inform you that I intend to pursue with duelegal vigor the matter of your group's inarguable and illegal infringement of my personal Registered Trademark.
I have produced, to facilitate a speedy and satisfactory conclusion to this matter, evidence of the certificates registering the "PSYCHICK CROSS" in my name. KK Records,also, released a CD/Album by only myself and Andrew McKenzie.He chose to be called "The Hafler Trio" and I chose to becalled "Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth" for this project. It is catalogue number KK 015 and titled "DREAMACHINE".
I certainly know from my archive of correspondence that youare all aware that I designed and founded the "T.O.P.Y."project, and further that you are ALL aware that it is my own personal idiosyncratic styles of spelling "OV"; "Thee";"Coum" etc that add to the exploitation of my intellectual property by yourselves. I hope you will end your fruitless denials and begin to suggest forms of settlement and apology in these matters.
I do not consider your brief and arrogant NOTE a suitablereply to this serious matter. You have had ample time to assemble and send me documented PROOF and evidence of yourlegal right to use my personal Trademark. The legal onus is,and must be, upon you to provide authentic and incontrovertible documentary evidence that you receive ddirect consent from myself to pirate and exploit my private Trademark properties.
I must inform you that I have appointed legal representatives in the UK to administer my Trademark, and the Trademarks and Patents office's correspondence with me. You must cease and desist immediately from your flagrant and illegal infringements of my personal Trademark. There is no excuse at all. You have absolutely no legal rights to exploit it, nor did you ever have such rights.
I expect an IMMEDIATE response to this letter, Return of Post, producing written and clear proposals as to how you intend to rectify this intrusion into my life, my work and mypersonal career, and through that the damage and loss offuture income you have caused me, as well as personal distress and the jeopardising of my future business deals,which inevitably include my continued use of my own Trademark.
Yours Sincerely,
Genesis P-Orridge
LETTER 2
To: Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia
Katharos Foundation
P.O. Box 837
5000 av Tilburg Holland
9th September 1994
From: GENESIS P-ORRIDGE
P.O. Box 1034
OCCIDENTAL
CA. 95465-1034
Dear Sirs,
I have registered a Trade Mark in the following details:-
1. Trade Mark registered in part A of the Register under no:1334546 as of the date 06.02.1988 in Class 16 Schedule 4 inthe name of Genesis P-Orridge. Sealed on 8th December 1989.
2. Trade Mark registered in Part A of the register under no:1334545 as of the date 06.02.1988 in Class 09 Schedule 4 inthe name of Genesis P-Orridge. Sealed on 20th October 1989.
3. Trade Mark registered in Part A of the register under no:1379316 as of the date 23.03.1989 in Class 14 in the name ofGenesis P-Orridge. Sealed on 14th December 1990.
The classes are as follows in terms of "products" covered:-
Class 16:- Printed Matter; Newspapers and Periodicals; Books;Journals; Photographs; Posters; Postcards; and all includedin Class 16.
Class 09:- Records; Tapes; Compact Discs; Videos; allincluded in Class 09.
Class 14:- Goods in precious metals or coated therewith(except cutlery, forks and spoons); jewellery; goods inprecious stones; all included in Class 14.
I have been travelling in the Far East for some time, but have now settled in the U.S.A. I believe that my attorneys,SIMONS & STEIN, have already contacted "Restless" in the USA. I am sure you are aware of the reason for my contacting you.It is really very simple. I want you to agree immediately to cease and desist from exploiting my Registered Trademark. It is registered in Europe, a process that was expensive andtime consuming, and there is reciprocity with the U.S.A.
The use of my internationally recognised personal Trade Mark,combined with the adoption of my own personal literaryidiosyncracies in your text seems designed to mislead thepublic into assuming at the very least, that I am involved inyour project, and at worst that it is a project of my ownthinly disguised. This effect has been confirmed directly tome over and over again by shop proprietors, and music buyers.
As I am SURE you are aware. I continue to use my Trade Markon my products and projects. Your unsanctioned co-option ofmy Trade Mark damages my past, present, and future works. I intend to continue using my Trade Mark and it is intolerableand unacceptable for anyone else to capitalise on, profitfrom, and deceive the public and the market place. I considerthis a very serious, and fraudulent, manipulation of my reputation and body of work.
I must once more insist that you immediately cease and desistfrom all and any further use and/or exploitation of my TradeMark. I further demand to receive in writing, within 30 daysof the date of this letter, a proposal from yourselves, andK.K. Records, and Restless Records for a substantial andappropriate amount of financial compensation both for theblatant infringement of my Trade Mark rights, and for thecontinuous damage to my own commercial projects. I furtherrequest that all and any stock that remains with my TradeMark on it be withdrawn immediately and destroyed.
I demand full figures on the numbers of products soldexploiting my protected Trade Mark by yourselves and any andall record labels that release your work(s). I expect financial compensation for each and every infringement.
I intend to pursue this matter legally if a mutually agreedsettlement is not reached between us in as short a period oftime as is possible practically.
I do believe, personally, that your exploitation of my TradeMark, was deliberately intended to enable you to confuse the public, and to exploit the possibility that I was involved in your project. I therefore also demand a Press Release that states clearly, and without malice in its content, that I, Genesis P-Orridge was not, and never was, in anyway connected with your releases, and that you used my legally protectedTrade Mark without my prior knowledge or consent, and that you apologise for any financial and/or creative distress it has caused both Genesis P-Orridge and his public.
I reserve each and all my legal rights, and avenues of action re: this matter.
Yours Sincerely,
Mr. G. P-Orridge
cc. KK Records/Restless Records/
Simons & Stein.
LETTER 3
To: David Gerber
Business Affairs
Restless Records
1616 Vista Del Mar Avenue
Hollywood CA 90028
20 December 1994
From: GENESIS P-ORRIDGE
Dear David,
I have to say that I am deeply disappointed in your letter. I waited a long time for a written reply. I felt I was open,clear and honest with you in our phone conversations. It is sad to see a corporate hat take over, apparently based upon acombination of bluff; financial superiority and self-interest.
Before E go Any further, and you imply thee lack ov my coummittmeant to my own idiosyncratic linguistics, please beaware ov thee clear differentiation E have ov separating legal/business letters, from more personal and/or literarytasks. In other words, as even my Attorneys will attest, Enormally write in what E my SELF dubbed "T.O.P.Y. speak",though E began developing my idiosyncratic style in thee 1960's and have ample archive evidence ov that claim should Eneed to press thee matter.
I hope that point is cleared up. My normal spelling is purelyan exception to demonstrate politeness.
I enclose, for your files, copies of the actual certificates, showing clearly my Registration of my personal Trademark inEurope. I have consulted with TWO USA Attorneys specialising in Intellectual Property and Copyright. One of these, Mr.Michael D. Rostoker, is considered something of an Internationally renowned authority in these matters and has even published books and videos detailing many intricaciespertaining to my situation through the LSI Logic Corporation.The other is based in New York. Both of them confirm that there IS reciprocity regarding Trademark and Intellectual Property rights between Europe and the United States byvirtue of an Internationally recognised lineage of precedent.
Both further point out that there is no doubt whatsoever, by virtue of the possession, by myself of incontrovertible evidence via legal documents and certificates (copies of someenclosed) declaring my ownership of my Trademark after it was duly, and correctly advertised in the appropriate journals.
There is no "allegation" here. There is fact. Uncomfortable though it might be for yourselves and your arrogant clients/licensees. The onus is therefore, not upon me toprove the already proven, but upon yourself, and KK and PWOGto prove THEIR allegations that they can PROVE they ever hada clear legal and documented right to exploit and trade upon my Trademark.
I can produce, from my voluminous, and thorough archive,documentary evidence to verify each and every claim. The freealbum with Psychic(k) TV's first L.P. on Warner BrothersRecords called "Force The Hand Of Chance" was called "THEMES1" and the name of the band on that free album was spelled"PSYCKICK TV". In interviews, reviews, and texts followingthat we stated in documented forms that the "K" was primarilyto indicate to the record buying public that the recordedworks released by my band were more "ambient" or "ritual" or"abstract" musics, and less in the pop culture arena. It wasseen as a service. We also stated that, as was traditional,the "K" stood in Thelemic terms for "sexual/magick" themes.To this day we continue to reserve our rights to bothversions of spelling and see no justification for you or yourassociates to instruct us as to when we may or may not spelleither version of our band name. You will also find that our video releases also often use the "K" version of our bandname, as video is seen as a more occultural and transmedia application of our theories and ideas.
As to your kindly informing me that PWOG have released trademark infringing products for longer than I was previously aware of. I thank you for this additional information. Believe it or not, to use a parallel, if an employee of a bank is embezzling money for 6 years, and is only discovered to be stealing this year. The mere fact they"got away with it" undetected for several years does not exonerate them, prove their innocence, or make the charges brought against them when they are caught invalid. In fact it is usually seen as increased evidence of their deviousness;disloyalty; and serious criminality. Quite frankly I am shocked at the pathetic nature of this excuse. Ignorance is not seen as a defence for a crime, nor is it seen as proof of a victims secretly wanting to be violated.
As to the claim by KK "that the registration of the cross is impossible", well I suggest they stop kicking up clouds of phoney dust and begin facing FACTS. You are all culpable, invarying ways, and degrees, for exploitation and infringement of my Trademark. This is indisputable. It will not go away. Nor will I.
I can produce witnessed letters from retailers in the USA;from journalists in the USA; from DJ's in the USA; and from members of the public in the USA, as well as elsewhere in the world, that they were misled, and duped by the packaging in these products from PWOG. Namely their use of my Trademark,and my writing style.
I can further produce numerous witnesses to my writing style being developed individually, by myself in the style which was then exploited later, without my knowledge or consent, ONA COMMERCIAL PRODUCT used for COMMERCIAL GAIN by PWOG in whatis clearly a deliberately deceptive manner.
I have hundreds of publications; books; texts; newsletters;posters; flyers and other publicity and documentary materialsthat confirm that the manner of spelling: most significantlythe use of "THEE" and "OV" is globally recognised and notedas specifically mine, and/or related to projects of mine.
I can show clearly that I first used and developed both thephrase "TEMPLE OV PSYCHICK YOUTH" and that it was a connectedaspect of my art/music/cultural manifestations. That it was stated to be an equal part of my artistic expressions with PTV.
I can produce ample evidence of my use of both spellings of PSYCHIC(K) in all territories.
I understand that you might be ignorant of my entire body of work. I also understand that it suits your purposes and hopes to pretend to believe KK and PWOG, whose allegations are completely undocumented, rather than put in writing the plain truth which is that I have an absolutely clear case.
I also understand that you are will assume delay is in your favour. That you probably assume that your finance give you acertain initial superiority over myself. I feel honor bound to inform you that the tone and the insulting content of your letter have increased my resolve in this matter. I expect tohave a corporate executive situation; and a team of associated attorneys and advisers managing ALL my affairs within a few weeks. ONE of the conditions I have put on thisfuture work situation overseeing my multiple creative affairs is the pursuance of this matter to my final satisfaction. I have to thank you for renewing my determination in this. As you will understand, the protection of my Trademark, and allother recognisable "signatures" connected with every aspectof my life and work are the very product ultimately being invested in whenever I sign any kind of deal.
I am very glad that despite the blustering invective and profesionally self-protecting body of text in your letter, you do not by stating that you will NOT release any further records utilizing my Trademark. (I think we've established itis NOT alleged).
I intend to continue to be forceful in this matter. I might add that I did indeed write to the people calling themselves"T.O.P.Y." in the USA in Sep 93 when I became aware of their activities in relation to myself and my properties. They have not yet satisfied me with their response and I continue to pursue this matter with them also.
Naturally, I will copy this letter, and the certificates proving my Trademark Registration to both KK and PWOG, though I have to inform you that I am fully convinced that they knew all along, and, if they did not, I still cannot imagine how they could ever justify in their own minds (assuming they have ANY morality) the exploitation of what I know they wer eaware was my personal symbol. The only possible explanationis the sickest, and the saddest, that is, monetary.
In terms of Restless, being an honest man, and even if it weakens my case in terms of semantics and law. I am prepared,without prejudice to my complaints, to accept that both you,and your Company, were ignorant of this particular probleminitially.
Yours Sincerely,Genesis P-Orridge
pp PSYCHIC TV.
PSYCHICK TV.
BOYCOTT LETTER
"Never be shy. Confront the bastards."
--Old Topi Proverb
At 12:01 AM, April 23 1995, a campaign was launched.
THE TARGETS: Thee Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia and KK Records.
THE ACTION: A call for the complete financial boycott of all PWOG and KK products (past/present/future).
THE REASON: Copyright infingement and theft of intellectual property.
If you have ever purchased an album by the Psychic Warriors Ov Gaia then this campaign is directed towards you especially.
There is a lot of misconception out there that this outfit is sanctioned by Genesis P-Orridge and Psychic TV. Somepeople may even be under the impression that PWOG is aproject of Genesis'. THIS IS NOT THE CASE.
When one sees the Psychick Cross, most often what comes tomind is Genesis and his affiliates. PWOG are unfairlycapitalizing on this association and have ignored repeated requests to cease this illegal action.
We of PTV4UNE hereby declare an International boycott of all KK Records and Psychick (sic) Warriors Ov (sic) Gaia product.We have taken the lead in this effort by destroying all PWOGproduct we own (yes, we were duped too) and returning them to KK Records.
We shall make every effort to alert everyone concerned in thePsychosphere aware of this campaign. You can help by contacting local record stores and enlightening them.Threatening to take your business elsewhere is always a great technique.
Please write to both KK Records and the Psychick (sic)Warriors Ov (sic) Gaia and inform them of your support for this campaign. Addresses are as follows:
Thee (sic) Psychick (sic) Warriors Ov (sic) Gaia
P.O. Box 837
5000 Av Tilburg
The Netherlands
KK Records
Krijgsbaan 240
2070 Zwijndrecht
Belgium
PTV4UNE letter,published in the ptv4une online zine issue 2
To: KK Records Belgium,
Krijgsbaan 240,
2070 Zwijndrecht
Belgium
From: Matt Bailey,
PTV4UNE,
P.O. Box 232,
Nanaimo B.C., Canada,
V9R 5K9
Dear Sirs;
PTV4UNE is the official fanzine/publication of GenesisP-Orridge and Psychic(k) TV. It has recently come to ourattention that you have failed to respond to the demands ofMr. Genesis P-Orridge to cease your use of his registered trademark and to make amends for any financial damage incurred by him. It is for this reason that, unfortunately,we have to write this letter. This communication will be brief.
It will reiterate what has already been demanded of you by Mr. P-Orridge as well as inform you of the measures that will be taken should you continue to ignore them:
1) Immediately cease the use of the "Psychic Cross", the registered trademark of Genesis P-Orridge.
2) Mail or fax, to his address, a written proposal of substantial financial compensation deemed to be acceptable to Mr. P-Orridge.
3) Immediately withdraw and destroy any and all remaining stock bearing the aforementioned trademark.
4) Comply with any other demands previously communicated by Mr. P-Orridge.
Should you ignore these demands we will be forced tocall for a complete boycott of P.W.O.G. and KK products. We have as our main tool the Internet, which has a potential audience of millions. It is here that we will primarily inform record stores and music buyers of the situation andencourage them to stop buying your products. Our publication has only been available for two weeks and we already have readers in Britain, Finland, Germany, Canada and the USA, among others. It is strongly believed that through this type of networking we will be able to seriously damage the pocketbooks of the above organizations.
This campaign will be launched on the 23rd of April,1995 should you fail to respond. We do not wish to take these measures, however, we are up to the challenge.
Sincerely,
Matt Bailey/PTV4UNE
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