Transitory Magnetism
 Bill Hutson

 
Just in case you don't read the I Heart Noise board: Slogun played at the No Fun Festival in Brooklyn last weekend, and some people are pissed. Apparently, Slogun's set involved kicking, spitting on and shouting abusive rhetoric at the noise fans in the front row. Having only watched a brief clip of this performance on YouTube, I am in no position to judge the quality of the act. I did, however, sit and read pages and pages of internet posts about the performance, the basic gist of which was: either people hated it because screaming through a delay over prerecorded Power Electronics tracks while unsuccessfully trying to incite violence is "stupid," or people loved it because Slogun showed all the noise "pussies" that they're really just frightened ineffectual little dweebs who can't stand up for themselves. Whether or not Slogun intended this or could have predicted the resulting discussions that followed his set is irrelevant. What is interesting is how this differs from the post-No Fun arguments from last year. Last year, Macronympha played at the No Fun Festival in Brooklyn, and some people were pissed. My memory of the discussion is a bit hazy, again because I hadn't been in attendance at the festival and only ever saw brief internet clips of the performance in question. Similar lines were drawn, though that time they were between the so-called "art/fag" noise fans and the so-called "jock/frat boy" noise fans. That division seemed incredibly silly to me. It can come only from a relatively recent position of privilege in noise where there actually are enough fans in existence to classify them into sub-groups. The Slogun set, though, reminded everyone about a much older division-a political one. I'm not going to get too into this, because it's not the purpose of this column, but conflicts have always been present in our little subculture between (roughly) right and left-wing politics: Power Electronics and Noise. Leaving that aside, honestly because I have nothing new or compelling to say about it, that problem of politics in our music reminded me of another political issue I noticed a while back. Every time we are told by the news media that another terrorist cell has been discovered and foiled, among the evidence listed as proof of their diabolical intent, is the possession of Islamic sermons on cassette tape. Now I'm sure most people in the world hear this and think: "Cassette tapes? What backwards-ass luddites still have cassette tapes?" But I always feel a momentary twinge of sympathetic understanding. Not about blowing up buildings or killing people, or about the content of their insane religious speeches, but because I, too, think cassettes are cool. Then it goes away. But I am left to dwell on a bizarre kind of kinship shared between noise musicians and terrorists, purely on the level of physical communicative media. As far as I can tell, we're pretty much the last people on Earth who are still take tapes seriously. I want to make it very clear that I have never heard an Islamic tape sermon, nor have I ever sought to hear one. I love my country, do not believe in God, and am terrified of my government. I had this idea for a really cool noise release, but rather than actually doing it, I am going to write about it in the abstract, for fear of being dragged off to some secret prison, never to be heard from again. A split tape between a noise artist and an Islamic cleric- one side brutal power electronics, one side radical Jihadist sermon. My feeling is: PE dudes love to think that their music/audio/art/whatever is, in some way, incendiary. They're performance is a microcosm of the world and the violence they incite is akin to all-out war, etc. Cassette sermons are, in actuality, incendiary. The New York Times famously called them "Bin Laden's low-tech weapon." PE dudes should stop using the word "tape" and only call them "low-tech weapons." What more desirable term could they use? It's fucking perfect. Gangster rappers have figured out that Islamic terrorists, as imagery, are the baddest shit out there, and that to remain frightening to white America they should align themselves with terrorists, at least abstractly ("Dip-set Taliban," anyone?). How far behind can Power Electronics be? Cassette tapes really lend themselves to this aesthetic. There's something dangerous and mysterious about them. Their content is not open and available the way digital media is. No two tapes can have identical information in the way that two CDs can. Their secrets are wrapped up and hidden inside a little enclosure, their content impossible to decode by sight. They are small and sneaky, often the MacGuffin in James Bond-type spy thrillers. Xeroxed artwork is murky, difficult to decipher, as if to disguise itself. It makes sense that noise artists use them-they are so frightening that their mere discovery in the possession of a Islamic person instantaneously condemns that person as the worst kind of monster. The medium itself is terrifying. If the discussion surrounding Slogun's set is any indication, many Power Electronics artists and fans are less concerned with actual audio produced than with the situation it creates. Nobody defending Slogun on the bulletin board ever said anything about the set sounding good. (Imagine snooty voice: "The tonal complexities of the low-quality mp3 playing on Slogun's iPod reacted deliciously with the timbral subtleties of his screaming into a Boss Digital Delay.") So if the situation and the reaction it creates is the art, then PE dudes need to step their fucking game up. Where are the roadside bombs and suitcase nukes? I wanna see Grey Wolves in Arabian face veils. Or not. I don't know. ...Perhaps I've gone a little overboard. I'll suggest another possibility for this split release: One side sermon, one side harsh noise that centers it's frequency around 1.57542 MHz (unfortunately far out of human's range of hearing, and certainly out of the rage reproducible on magnetic tape) so that terrorists who listen to the sermon can flip the tape, and point their speakers at the sky to jam the signal from any Global Positioning Satellites that might be looking for them. And if I mysteriously disappear after this stupid column gets posted, address all cassettes for review to: Bill Hutson c/o Scary Secret Military Prison, USA.