Europa, Phase I

2014–12–03

TOC

• Input
• Dark Dreams of Europa

Input:

Boys in the Distorted Wave by The Nexus Rasp :: Deep noise with some interesting subtlety of textures and challenging choices of direction. Not your mom’s Merzbow ripoff.

Headphone Commute - Sound Mind Mix :: Headphone Commute is always a fantastic collection of ambient and/or noise and/or glitch, but this mix in particular has a wonderful breadth to it that I greatly enjoy.

Dark Dreams of Europa:

I’ve just been to Europe for the very first time. Thanks largely to the kindness of my dear friend Audrey, with whom I have been trying to see Einstürzende Neubauten play for years now, I finally have gotten out of this American Bubble and seen some of the cracks from the outside.

Of course this means that I have a mass of mad ideas running around my head all looking for things to connect to and quite frankly I haven’t eaten nearly enough today to make sense of any of them. Also the jetlag of having the longest Tuesday I have ever experienced is starting to catch up to me and I need to go to work soon. So this won’t be coherent, but since the last time I was scheduled to release this newsletter I was standing on the 10th floor of a brutalist apartment block looking out over Slovenia I felt I had to muster something for you, my loyal readers.

(Just pretend you’re loyal. It’ll be easier for everyone.)

The trip was structured around seeing two performances of Neubauten’s new piece, Lament, which is an investigation of the World War One (or, perhaps more accurately, The Beginning Of The Ongoing World War). It was conceived as a theatrical piece, the album being intended as a record of the live event. I would recommend seeing it, but at the Italy show Blixa fell from the stage and injured himself, so unfortunately the rest of the tour was cancelled (a comment on the band’s facebook: “Blixa is the first WWI casualty in nearly a century.”). I feel very lucky to have seen it at all, much less twice. As most of my knowledge of Europe comes from research surrounding the War, this was the perfect punctuation for my first trip there.

We started the trip in Vienna, where we have friends, and I immediately fell in love with the place. There’s a gently oppressive atmosphere that I feel right at home in, and everyone I met there was weird in very nice ways. In Vienna I got the sense that history was a substrate of reality, a thing that was part of the landscape, so solid as to be static, but still being used as the basis of a very dynamic life. There was a cathedral, ancient and alien, hovering above the landscape in the manner of Warren Ellis’s Trees, completely uncaring about the humans that are so small as to be unnoticeable. And yet there was an abstract light composition projected onto it, and that somehow took this thing back from bleak history and made it a functional part of the landscape, something humans could interact with.

We ended the trip in Rome, and by way of contrast, I’ll just quote a letter I wrote to a friend earlier today:

“A musician friend of mine once complained about musicians who keep talking about the record they released 10 years ago that got them famous, and acting as though that somehow justifies their lack of production since then. This is Rome to me, only the record was released 3000 years ago and they’ve been playing it so long that the grooves on the record have worn down to nothing but pops and crackle. ”

I hated Rome, and it hated us. It felt like the seat of power of Order that it always has been, from the Caesars to the Catholics to the Fascists. Somewhere between the third restaurant that couldn’t actually tell us if they were open or not, and the cleaning lady who threatened us, and the armed guards sauntering around our street for no reason, Audrey made the astute observation that Rome’s immune system seemed to be trying to drive us out. That place is the territory of the Archons, and if you go, go well stocked with enough memetic ammunition to stay fluid.

(Also as a side note, there are no Cannoli in Rome. They are made up, as it turns out. I found one place that had them listed, and after engaging the owner in a spirited multilingual debate over what the hell I was trying to say (“Cannoli?” “…no meat?”) I took him outside and pointed at the word “CANNOLI” on his sign, and he just shook his head sadly and said “oh… no. No.” and walked away.)

In between, however, we went to Slovenia. Where we saw Laibach play (because how could we not), and found the local hackerspace completely by accident, and the local underground tech-art scene by following the stickers on light poles, and “underground” is literal because when you go to a venue to see a performance of sound wave folding audio sculpture in a blackout room and it’s called “the Bunker”, they really mean that. Slovenia was part of the Eastern Bloc, and had their last revolution sometime in the early 90s, and they do not fuck around when it comes to understanding things like this.

In other words, Slovenia is terrible and you should never go there, because I want it all to myself.

So yes. I now have the briefest glimpse of Europa, and it turns out that there is in fact color there, and this, among other startling discoveries, are slowly percolating through my mind. Maybe now my novel that takes place in Europe will have some semblance of something better than a cheap plastic knockoff Europe. And on that, time to try to get some writing done on that before I have to go to work.

Send coffee, and prayers that the insect gods haven’t stowed away in my luggage to infest us all with dark dreams.