(desperation + noise)

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.

When you have achieved the optimum oil levels (note: this is when you are so unconscious to pain that you feel it arbitrarily and allow it to take you over), I would like you to remember that all of the knives in your house are dull from that boredom-inspired knife-throwing venture you engaged in two months before, evidenced by the long, telling marks on the kitchen cabinets (troubles with the landlord didn’t concern you because fuck the landlord). What I mean to say is that all possibilities for escape will be ineffective at the edges.

So here we are. The whiskey bottle is starting to grow teeth, but they are a pleasant sort of teeth that smile and make laughing movements at you or the room or nothing. You start shaking hands with familiar ghosts, asking them where they’ve been lately though you don’t really care, and their answers make suddenly aware of a dark presence in all things. You put on a record called Love & Noise by C.C.C.C.

Japan’s Cosmic Coincidence Control Center, or Community Center Cyber Crash, or Chaotic Custom Cock Commandos were born out of awful pain and sentenced to live in its palm in 1989. According to that impossibly solid bedrock of knowledge, Wikipedia, “The core line up of this band consisted of Hiroshi Hasegawa (also of the bands Astro & Mortal Vision) and former bondage-porn star Mayuko Hino. Hino would occasionally during live shows reprise this element of her past into her performances by engaging in such acts as onstage stripteases. Other members were occasionally and variably brought in for work on singular albums, but had no permanent membership in the band,” i.e. there was a long season in which Incapacitants member Fumio Kosakai brought his untenable visions to fruition in the group and they once harbored a bassist named Ryuichi Nagakubo who I assume grounded the project when they traveled too close to the giant living brain in space.

Nagakubo, Hino and Hasegawa perform on Love & Noise, but Love & Noise is not a story of performers; it is a story of insects and their environments. You know this because you have relinquished some rooms to the colonizing whine of the infinitely tiny and reactionary. This is a recording of the pink fire expelled by ant synapses when they connect, but it also draws attention to how they connect within the larger ant body, brushing harsh against its similar brothers, feeling certain that it is the essential expression of ant life and screaming this certainty to no one in particular, while remaining in lockstep with the pack. Like an initial drawing communicating through layers of paint. Like the toy raygun sounds in Loud Sounds Dopa: sudden, distinguished and triumphant until their context changes shape and they are compelled to succumb. Like you: A lone oscillation emerging occasionally from its overwhelming backdrop, but even in emergence you are defined and limited by your surroundings.

C.C.C.C.: “LOUD SOUNDS DOPA” (PART 1)

I know you are all worried that there is judgment going on here but I am not that guy. I am the guy who invited you to the whiskey and these bitter, new realizations, and believe me, I am drinking with you and the ghosts, and I know they’ve started to look at you as though you belong with them but this is a side effect of a permanent disembodied existence, this desire for new members. I also know that at least half of you is lost in a C.C.C.C.-created k-hole and soon your whole field of vision will be sucked up and away as if with a dropper. This is natural. Pain will replace it.

See, the emotional philosophy behind C.C.C.C.’s brand of harsh noise is all over the internet and is invoked in any and all talk of them, but it shouldn’t be ignored for its omnipresence: Cold Spring Records says, “Mayuko feels strongly about noise being an emotional outlet rather than an intellectual outlet. She has also pointed out that those artists who approach noise in this way end up with a very distinctive sound—a listener should be able to learn about the artist’s personality from hearing their noise.” Which you can get down with because your intellectual ability right now amounts to soft gestures of static in your head and the rest of you is a raw, red center of emotional dissonance.

The great American myth is that expressing buried trauma negates its chewing from within. When we don’t tell, when we attempt to preserve past damage in amber, what we see beyond the hardened exterior transmits pain to places deep in our essential stuff. When we do tell, however, in releasing the trauma from our insides, we allow it to reenact itself, to destroy us all over again for an indefinite amount of time. Neither is an escape. Neither is a release. There is no such thing as moving on. Think of sudden historical emptinesses: the Holocaust (too often invoked in a noise context, but relevant here, I think), others; think of the things that people told us not to forget when we already knew that we wouldn’t, knowing that these skeletons lost to the fire would puppet ours eternally.

This is where C.C.C.C. exists. They dig hollows in our eternally raw wounds. They set up shop there and amplify the wound until it colonizes the whole body and starts self-perpetuating by establishing factories and workers in its service—it expands and industrializes pain.

But I do not mean to suggest that C.C.C.C. only serves to remind us of our damage and our limits and little more, because not only is there an immediate, entrancing, meditative quality to this thrumming gash, but also, as clichés go, my favorite is that even in the darkness that breaks your legs and arms, there is light because you still have teeth by which to crawl out. So too there is light in C.C.C.C.’s Love & Noise because while it acknowledges the impossibility of recovery, it also recognizes, in its very composition, new, alien forms in which we might be finally saved or obliterated or both, or maybe there’s no real difference between the two.

My justification for this is whiskey and Mark Sinker, who in his piece like a long, caustic drink about noise, elaborates on what probably is not the main thesis of Jacques Attali’s Noise: The Political Enemy of Music, or perhaps not a point even made there at all, but we’ve already resigned ourselves to the dark whatever so let it ride: “Consider now the borderline where music turns to noise, noise to music, says Attali: this is the line where the power that shapes the world can be glimpsed. Within, music is soothing sweetness and codified harmony, everything in its place, changeless and eternal: anything arriving in from outside the ordered stockade, from the rest of unmusical sound, is an obnoxious, unwanted intrusion, a disturbance, a hint of violence, or more. At the line itself, the point where the codes that determine music’s identity congeal, where the excluded seems suddenly fascinating, there we glimpse possibilities, of other ways to listen or to be. ‘Music makes mutations audible’: music, considered in terms of the noise it is currently domesticating, is prophecy.”

Which suggests that we must be ready for this prophecy when it arrives! So find that other bottle for the well-known beyond desperate times and get yourself into a position in which you may act as an eternal receiver: for pain, yes, but also for the promise of a new, horrifying, painless body.