Restraint

Decompression

February 27, 2003 – 3:52 am

The last two days have been madness.

Leslie and I just finished the third two-day Dark Carnival festival, and while it was a resounding success, it has left us feeling quite drained. There were a lot of technical problems that we had to overcome, in addition to the more mundane stresses of putting on fourteen hours of event time in two days. There were seven different musical acts (not including Leslie and myself), and at least a dozen artists involved this time around, and co-ordination took a lot of time and effort.

Plus, we have another event in a week or so that we need to start polishing up, and perhaps another two in the month following that… and another half-dozen in the works, with plans stretching as far as October.

We’ve been doing pretty well with the finances for the events, which means that we haven’t lost more than a thousand dollars on any given show in the past half-year. Being able to support ourselves full-time with promotion work would be nice, but I think at this point we’d kill to break even two shows in a row.

…

Leslie’s birthday was yesterday, but with everything going on, there wasn’t much celebration time. I feel pretty bad about this, she made sure that on my last birthday, I had my every desire fulfilled, and not being able to do the same for her doesn’t sit well with me.

I think we’ll take a day off sometime soon-ish and do a belated birthday celebration, but it would have been nice to be able to give her the birthday proper that she deserves.

…

Work continues to progress on our not-so-secret Cafe project, and while things are slowly coming together for it, my inability to attend work over the last month has really hit us financially. Almost all of that lost income was earmarked for use by the Cafe, and my insurance company has yet to rule on my application for short-term disability.

While the disability would be retroactive to the day of the injury, the possibility of my application being rejected is very real, and very upsetting. The temptation to try to attend work regularly, even at the cost of permanent damage to my knee, is overwhelming.

I’m really not sure what to do about this, except for work full-steam on our business plan and funding applications, and hope for the best.

…

I need to spend more time doing nothing, sometime soon.

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-28c and sucking.

February 10, 2003 – 9:59 pm

I’ve been inside my house for three weeks straight now, having made it outside only three times. My knee shows no signs of spontaneous recovery, although I hold out hope.

…

I’ve began working on a remix of an Iszoloscope track for an album to be released in the near future, but I’m not very happy with my work. I took a heavy noise/gabber track, sped it up, and tried to turn it into what is essentially hard techno. Instead, I think all I’ve done is make 7 minutes of dull, uninspired trance.

To be fair, I’ve only been working on the track for two days, I’ve only been working with these music-creation tools for two days, and this is the first time I’ve tried to make music in any serious capacity since I was sixteen (when I was quite prolific within the tracker scene), but I find it incredibly discouraging nonetheless.

I have three weeks until the remixes need to be submitted to Ant-Zen, and I may or may not continue work to try to have something by that time.

…

Most of my hair is in a garbage bag in the washroom. I’ve shaved a good portion of it, leaving a wide strip of blue hair along the top of my head.

Rarely have I been so immediately happy with a change in hair style/cut/colour, but I’m really pleased with the way it looks. With that said, I have not discounted the possibility that being indoors for a month has caused me to lose all sense of style.

I hope to have added a piercing or two before I go outside again, and perspective returns.

…

In other news, I’m very happy with Restraint’s recent facelift, even if most of the non-journal material isn’t currently available. Having a new look does wonders to motivate me to keep writing.

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83

January 4, 2003 – 10:36 am

An excerpt from an article regarding the relevance of the deaths of Dee Dee Ramone and and Ratt guitarist Robbin Crosby, who died within 24 hours of each other.

“The reason Crosby’s June 6 death was mostly ignored is that his band seemed corporate and fake and pedestrian; the reason Ramone’s June 5 death will be remembered is that his band was seen as representative of a counterculture that lacked a voice. But the contradiction is that countercultures get endless media attention: the only American perspectives thought to have any meaningful impact are those that come from the fringes. The voice of the counterculture is, in fact, inexplicably deafening. Meanwhile, mainstream culture (i.e., the millions and millions of people who bought Ratt albums merely because that music happened to be the soundtrack for their lives) is usually portrayed as an army of mindless automatons who provide that counterculture with something to rail against. The things that matter to normal people are not supposed to matter to smart people.”

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Because sometimes we forget what it means…

December 23, 2002 – 1:35 pm

One more quote, from Peter Christopherson, Co-founder of Throbbing Gristle, Coil, and Industrial Records.

“The original idea of Industrial Records was to reject what the growing industry was telling you at the time what music was supposed to be.”

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Martin Atkins interview excerpt regarding Skinny Puppy, circa 1995

December 23, 2002 – 11:33 am

[Dwayne and cEvin] were unable, through jealousy, to allow Ogre to shine. So in Skinny Puppy, the dynamic was to suppress Ogre, and his opinion and just like the worst, worst, _worst_ dysfunctional family, there was also a support system, in which Ogre’s belief in himself and his opinion was constantly invalidated to the point where I think Skinny Puppy is dangerous for Ogre as a human being.

You have a very strong point of view.

You spend a day with those guys and you see it. When you see what I’ve seen…

What about Dwayne and Cevin’s relationship?

It’s sad. I think Dwayne is a very talented individual who, because Cevin taught him some things four years ago, and because Cevin believes Skinny Puppy is _his_ band, Dwayne will never be anything more than Cevin’s assistant.

It’s pretty twisted to see it in action. I feel very lucky to NOT be a part of a situation like that where …you know, the closest I can explain it to you – if you’ve seen Amadeus – the relationship between Mozart and Salieri.

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Excerpt from a Nivek Ogre interview, circa 1996, regarding the death of Dwane Rudolph Goettel.

December 23, 2002 – 10:36 am

But you weren’t at the funeral, were you?

No.

But cEvin was, wasn’t he?

Yeah. cEvin was. I talked to Rave and had a plane ticket booked – I scammed a plane ticket, saying it was a family member – so I had a plane ticket, so then I talked to Rave and said, “Are you going?” and he goes, “Why?” And that kind of answered all of my inside questions.

I was prepared to let a lot of it lie, and I still am letting it lie, but I know in my heart and I know in my head, because of what information I was given by Dwayne’s sister, of certain letters that were about to be sent to certain people, right before he accidentally overdosed. The contents of those letters paints an entirely different picture than I was even aware of. And so be it. I can’t speak for cEvin, and I certainly don’t want to speak out against cEvin, because cEvin’s got a lot of stuff to deal with… but his friendship with Dwayne wasn’t what he makes it out to be and what he’s projected, from the very beginning of this whole fiasco, in a lot of ways.

Just the idea of a person who is dead and who can’t speak for themself, is one of the issues I’ve had to deal with with Dwayne’s sister, because they don’t really want Dwayne’s material coming out on Subconscious. They want all of Dwayne’s data back, and cEvin’s not willing to give it back to them.

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God and Joey are making a punk rock band

December 23, 2002 – 8:09 am

Joe Strummer (from The Clash) died last night.

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E. xtremely B. anal M. uttering

October 18, 2002 – 11:24 am

From an interview with Stromkern:

“I take our music very seriously, I take music in general seriously, maybe too seriously. But that doesn’t mean I can’t poke fun at it when I’m off-camera, so to speak. Maybe we’d be more successful if I’d have some über-spooky website and updated a LiveJournal every day about how I was about to go sacrifice a goat before engaging in a wild sex orgy, but I can’t be bothered, really.”

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Music

September 11, 2002 – 5:51 pm

The Future is Happening Already: Industrial Music, Dystopia and the Aesthetic of the Machine — A PhD thesis final draft from Karen Collins at the Institute of Popular Music.

A few words:

“This thesis represents the first comprehensive overview of a genre of Western popular music known as industrial. It asks the questions, ‘What is industrial music, who creates and listens to it and why: what does it mean to its producers and audience, and what do they believe in? How is the music mediated and disseminated? What does the music communicate, and how does it communicate this meaning?”

In exploring these questions, the thesis uses industrial to develop a methodological investigation into genre in general, asking what might be learned from a detailed interdisciplinary approach to the process of communication within the limits of a genre. Systematic methods involving a variety of approaches were undertaken. These methods included content analysis, hermeneutics, semiotics, an internet questionnaire, interviews, reception tests, a case study with Swedish industrial band Project-X, participation and participant observation in Canada and England from 1999 to 2002.

The results of the study show that, in reception tests, both fans of the music and those unfamiliar with the paramusical elements of the industrial genre have similar connotative responses. Nevertheless, the interpretation of those connotations differed, even to the point of being diametrical. The thesis uses the term ‘supplementary connotations’ for this additional level of meaning, suggesting that familiarity with a genre guides an audience towards a text’s deeper meanings and values. The research shows that industrial has specific signifiers which help to situate the music in a distinctly dystopian setting.

In exploring industrial, therefore, the thesis also introduces musical representations of dystopia and Hell; in particular, the use of mechanical motifs as a critique of rationalisation in the twentieth century. The thesis then suggests industrial music draws on this long tradition of apocalyptic notions to express in particular an alienation from, and critique of, late capitalism.”

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