http://desperationandnoise.com/2009/11/10/the-industrialization-of-pain/



When the alien language is transmitted direct into our brains, will we be prepared to understand it?

Get the edge on your fellow humans. Retrieve that bottle of whiskey that you were saving for an unknown day in the future when things would get really desperate. Don't waste a glass—there are no sad dishes in our future. Take it as direct into your throat as possible. There is room for purity in this world, and it is important that this moment in your life be pure in practice though you simultaneously cause your organs to writhe in deathly pleasure like snakes in the hot sun.

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http://desperationandnoise.com/2009/11/02/second-childishness/



a.k.a. (desperation + noise): SPECIAL VIDEO EDITION. Um.

Necessary context: I have yet to retrieve the music from the failed heart of my external hard drive. Thus, it is difficult for me to write about how the entire Converge discography details The Plague and the ways in which it spreads through the body and blackens the bones, as their discography is currently unavailable to me. This would have been explained in the following video had I not edited it beyond comprehension.

The idea (of my parading in front of a camera and pointing at music that ignites me) originates in the brilliant mind of my friend Erin; my execution may have botched the original brilliance. In lieu of my traditional music library gone on blackout vacation, I talk about a really odd record in my vinyl collection and a really odd record in The Beach Boys catalog. It is not the kind of talk that is necessarily coherent.

I shall not front: There are many foolish moments in this thing. This is okay; I bear my foolishness with enthusiastic pride. I do not bear my desperate need for a haircut with the same.

WATCH THE VIDEO AT DESPERATIONANDNOISE.COM

http://desperationandnoise.com/2009/10/12/twin-hybrid-engines/



Every so often in these dark and long music histories, distant genres collide with and collapse upon each other in breathless fits and they leave behind new and alien caverns that we graft names to. Jazz came screaming from blues and European classical traditions, one subverting the other until their melded skins made attendant eardrums glow like embryos. This is the genuine hope, this is the hope that is not always delivered—that we may find the unknown when we let our separate maps arbitrarily meet and relinquish their lines.

In the late '60s, some evil bastard, who will not be forgiven when called from the book of names, designated this process as "fusion," as though it were cold, sterile chemistry (which, don't get me wrong, in some cases it totally is, but it can also be incidental heat and smoke), and then applied this to the new music of all eddies and no land in sight previously known as "jazz-rock," which was just as bad for invoking the genres as binaries when the actual music was neither and both simultaneously. These exchanges between jazz and rock were illicit, their handshakes uncertain, their voices wet with wah-wah.

Regardless, these interactions now file under "fusion" and punch their cards sneering beside Chick Corea's defanged keys and the devils of smooth jazz who all work beneath terrible smiles; all cheapened by their new designator despite relative quality, as each was pushing something new through the exhausted canal. These new somethings no longer require names, just class designations so they may be collectively set aside if we are left unmoved by their meekest representative. The effects suffocate: it is impossible to inhabit these middle spaces without sharing room with and enduring the long glances of the sterile, there by the grace and virtue by which they gummed their way into the public consciousness. It is impossible to make new music—the gates are guarded by flaming swords and long, endless mouths that constantly invoke "originality" as though it it could ignite the air without requisite particles.

READ MORE AT DESPERATIONANDNOISE.COM

http://desperationandnoise.com/2009/09/28/the-abyss-expands-cancerous/



There are places that grow chaotic with life, plants encircling each other with alternating abandon and care, cradling each other, running each other through—products of an extreme desire for self-preservation that society affords when it swells and spreads like a dark bruise.

There are places where everything is dead and has retreated back into the ground for further defenses, and these further defenses have incidentally abandoned this black rock for soils less irreparably toxic, more expansive and teeming with hot fertile life. They have given up their mothers to these gray visions of mortality, in which they drink several seasons of black water and sit still and calm, waiting for the sun to burn them through. Every so often there is a twitch of fire from these patient years of dry friction. The only light left is destructive light.

Someone stands over them and feels the abyss expand cancerous in the stomach, a feeling particular to moments when the things that you dedicate yourself to refuse to yield, though it is wrong to have expected it of them.

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http://desperationandnoise.com/2009/09/14/fourth-world-war/

THREE FREE-ASSOCIATIVE PROSE POEMS ON JON HASSELL, PUNCTUATED BY HIS MUSIC DRAGGED FROM THE RIVER

(Note: I am not really trying to be a poet. I am totally trying to be a poet. This is half inspired by TJ Mahr's recent piece on "Once in a Lifetime," in which he writes, "The problem for me is that this album is ineffably great and significant; how do I talk about the album in a mere blog post? Liveblog it. Gameplan: Write everything I can during one listen of the album." Jon Hassell's new record, Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street, is so haunting and evocative it deserves such treatment, but maybe just for its 11-minute throbbing center. The first poem: Where I was when this album buried me in snow. The second: Hassell's impossible style. The third: Holistic visions.)

READ MORE AT DESPERATIONANDNOISE.COM