Tag: John Shirley

Glenn Branca and Elliott Sharp: “We are the Reality of this Cyberpunk Fantasy” 1991

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IN CONVERSATION WITH MARK DERY

From Issue #5 of MONDO 2000 1991

Glenn Branca and Elliott Sharp philosophize with a hammer. And an anvil. And a stirrup. The two New York composers take Friedrich Nietzche, who subtitled an essay “How One Philosophizes With a Hammer,” a step further. They make music that jangles the bones of the inner ear and bruises the brain.

Branca, 42, is a Promethean presence in new music. Emerging from Manhattan’s no wave scene in the late seventies, he smashed the world to flinders with a single, craggy, monolithic chord-a cluster of E notes, to be exact, the thunderclap that opens 1979’s “The Spectacular Commodity” (The Ascension, 99 Records). Then, he made it new. Scored for massed electric guitars amplified past the threshold of aural pain, “Symphony No. 1: Tonal Plexus” (ROIR) welded the harmonics and heterodyning effects of minimalism’s “acoustic phenomena” school to Beethoven’s stormy bluster, Steve Reich’s static harmonies, and the careening, locomotive fury of heavy metal.

“Symphony No. 3: Gloria-Music For the First 127 Intervals of the Harmonic Series” (Neutral) called for non-tempered tunings based on the harmonic series, the naturally-occurring, endlessly-ascending row of pitches which are multiples of a fundamental frequency. “Within this internal mechanism exists a body of music,” Branca observed in his program notes, “music which has not been written, but which is inherently indicated, in much the same way that DNA contains information.” In “Symphony No. 5: Describing Planes of an Expanding Hypersphere” and subsequent works, Branca used the harmonic series to conjure otherworldly effects-an ethereal, crystalline whistling reminiscent of glass harmonica, sonic Spirograph patterns traced in the air by spiraling melody lines.

In his seventh and most recent symphony, Branca embraces equal temperament and conventional orchestral instrumentation. Polymetric, polymorphous, and perverse- there are no melodic themes to speak of, only ascending harmonies “Symphony No. 7“ suggests Reich’s “Desert Music” in its chattering mallet instruments and attacca movement, Anton Bruckner in its almost palpable air of mystery, of awe in the presence of something that withers words like dry husks.

Although he is not the Brucknerian mystic Branca is, Elliott Sharp shares his fellow composer’s obsession with raw power. In music of unutterable strangeness and mutant beauty, the 40-year-old composer/multi-instrumentalist summons visions of thermonuclear fireballs and self-squared dragons, black holes and information whiteout. On Sili/contemp/tation (Ear-Rational), Monster Curve (SST), and other Sharp releases, one hears echoes of innumerable influences-gutbucket blues, Inuit throat-singing, Jimi Hendrix, Krzysztof Penderecki, the harmonic chanting of Tibetan monks, chaos theory, and fractal geometry-scrunched into a single skull and subjected to explosive decompression.

All of which might suggest that Sharp’s art is a cross between the neural spin art of a theoretical physicist at mid-orgasm and the climax of the movie Altered States, where the protagonist devolves into Silly Putty. Nothing could be further from the truth. Sharp, like Branca, is a hyperintellectual who frequently makes use of mathematical equations in his work. He has explored the farflung reaches of the harmonic series and has written works in just intonation, the microtonal tuning system favored by Harry Partch. Moreover, his compositional architecture, tuning systems, and rhythms are often generated using the Fibonacci series, mathematical ratios derived by summing a number and its precedent- 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so forth.

“The music,” informs Sharp in his liner notes to Larynx (SST), “dances upon the ever-changing boundary between a geometry derived from the Fibonacci series and a fractal geometry of turbulence, chaos and disorder.”

Astonishingly, the two composers had never met, a fact that defies the laws of probability given their parallel courses and the close confines of New York’s downtown music scene. Fortuitously, both will have new recordings in the racks. One of Branca’s older works, “Symphony No. 2,” is being released by the Chicago-based indie, Atavistic.  Subtitled “The Peak of the Sacred,” it relies on homebuilt “staircase guitars”-lap steel/hammer dulcimer hybrids arranged in tiers, their open strings played with chop sticks-to produce an eerie, lambent rainbow of sound, the aural equivalent of Northern Lights. The second half of “Symphony No. 2” spotlights Z’ev, a Mad Max Roach of sorts who plays springs, pipes, titanium sheets, and strips of cold-rolled steel.

Sharp’s September offerings consist of Datacide and Twistmap (Enemy/Indie and Ear- Rational, respectively, the latter available from Ear-Relevant, 547 W. 20th Street, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10011). Datacide, which showcases the guitarist’s quartet, Carbon, is forty-nine minutes of neurocore-clotted, convulsive songs that are equal parts dark matter and gray matter. Twistmap features the title track and “Shapeshifters,” two astringent pieces for strings interpreted by the Soldier String Quartet, and “Ferrous,” a rambunctious instrumental performed by Carbon on instruments designed and built by Sharp. Among them are the pantar, an electric string instrument whose angry buzz Sharp describes as “a cross between a tamboura and a dumpster,” and the slab, an unlovely creation fashioned from a hunk of butcher block fitted with bass strings and pickups.  Drummed with metal rods, the slab produces a raspy bumbling suggestive of iron bees with rusty wings.

Branca and Sharp share an abiding interest in science fiction. Branca, an obsessive cyberphile, ran JAA Press, a mail-order distributor of cyberpunk books and related ephemera. Sharp’s song and record titles chronicle a lifelong fixation: “Kipple” and “PKD” allude to Philip K. Dick, “Cenobite” to Clive Barker’s splatterpunk movie, Hellraiser, and Dr. Adder to the Jeter novel of the same name.

Little remained but for MONDO 2000 to introduce the two like-minded composers. A meeting was arranged in upstate New York, where both were summering, far from New York City’s sopping, sweltering canyons of steel. Branca graciously conceded to play host at the 200-year-old cottage on the campus of Bard College, at Annandale-on-Hudson, where the experiment in superconductivity was conducted.
-Mark Dery

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The Annoying Internet Part 1

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by John Shirley

When I’m online looking up hotels to stay at, or airlines, it used to be that you got the hotel itself first, the website with the front desk number and reservations number — reservations made within the hotel. Now you get a raft of intermediary businesses trying to get you discounts and they’re all people who can’t answer your questions. They can book you a room maybe at a slight discount but not always. Bunch of goddamn parasites.

Lots of times their URLs are deceptive — like, it’ll say the name of the hotel, Joe’s Hotel say, and then after that the name of the intermediary parasite company. JoesHotelFrontDesk dot com — the company is deceivingly called Front Desk. Wanting to talk to the hotel directly you’ve got to sift through a dozen of these and look carefully to pick out the real hotel website.

It’s deceptive and it’s inefficient and it’s irritating. I should not see these booking companies first ± I should see the hotel. If I want booking companies I can google hotel discounts or something. (When I was a boy, the damn search engines were simple and good!)

And ….try finding correct song lyrics online. When looking for song lyrics online, most of the time you get bullshit — they don’t provide the real lyrics, they provide a spazzy version with many errors. The lyric sites are often put up by people in Europe and Eastern Europe who really don’t understand the lyrics very well, even if they can hear them, and they write down the wrong stuff. Lyric sites (often with obnoxious ads) copy the badly transcribed lyrics at other lyric sites. The result is lots of new bands doing covers full of errors.

On youtube, the videos that offer “the lyrics,”,if not put up by the band or artist directly, are likely to be at least partly wrong, sometimes very wrong. And these people do not get permission from artists to put this up. Nor do the lyric sites get permission.

Some artists, like David Bowie, put up all their lyrics so people’d get it right. Lou Reed put out a really good big book of his lyrics. If you go to RollingStones dot com put LYRICS in their search bar, and you get videos where the official lyrics are available. Try that with bands and artists first before searching online.

Lyrics for Blue Oyster Cult and Iggy Pop online are often partly wrong. Sometimes they leave out passages too. I checked and some of my own lyrics for Blue Oyster Cult are misreported. Many lyric sites not only have super-annoying advertising they’re trying to put malware on your computer.

Google Music (not just the google search engine, but Google Music) seems to make an effort for accurate lyrics.  Artists should sue these other bastards for this misrepresentation.

ONLINE AD FUNGUS SPREADS TO YOUR BRAIN opinion by john shirley

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by John Shirley

I have said that the internet is a wilderness, where predators roam. Sure, sex predators, spammers and scammers, but there are sites that are mostly quite reputable — and yet they host con artists. This kind of thing is “very internet.” There is a hothouse atmosphere of haste and desperation, that sizzles around finding ways to monetize websites. CNN dot com, even MSNBC online, BBC news — they’ll monetize by putting up sponsored “stories” and flatout ads, without checking the companies (or “companies”) out. In fact, cable channels do the same thing — ads for fly by night, often outright fraudulent products they should know perfectly well are bullshit…but the online links, if you accidentally click on them or are seduced to do so, are worse, because they’ve more fully drawn you into the world of their bogus ad. The initial “headline” makes it seem like an actual news or “scientific discovery” link… they’re often with a group of other links and I have three times clicked on one when trying to click on a legit link, just a slip of the finger. In one case I found myself in a website that seems to advertise something and then turned out to be a delivery system for actual ransomware/malware. I was able to defeat said ransomware, but it made me furious that it was caused by a link these ransomware scumbags had paid for at a reputable site. But that’s rarer, I think. Mostly what you end up at is fraudulent product sales, often taking advantage of the dotty elderly or poorly educated people.

 

Fake Ad

 

This happens because CNN or CBS, whomever, has a separate sub sub sub dept that sells ads, and gets to put them up wherever, to make the website profitable, without any oversight. No one seems to vet the ads and it’s crazy irresponsible. I just ran into one that sent me to an ad for a fake substance (a fake herb, which does not appear in any legit place if you google it, I checked when I reported it to the FTC) for losing bellyfat and there was an “endorsement” by Oprah Winfrey — only, she never endorsed it. It’s really common for these online con men to have a made-up, utterly fallacious endorsement — one was for a brain enhancement pill “endorsed by Stephen Hawking”! Oh yeah, Hawking “takes it every day!” they told us. The celebs being used this way — Neil Degrasse Tyson was another — should work to take these guys down.

There is no address given for the “company” selling these goods. Just an online ordering system. By allowing scumbags to sell via their site, CNN and others — even the Raw Story — are in effect lending credibility to these con artists…One common “story” repeated with variations is about how “veterans don’t know about special twenty thousand dollar payment due them” — if you follow it, as I did once to confirm my suspicion, it’s a come-on for a company that says it’ll help you get the money, if you pay a fee. But they don’t actually exist, except as an entity taking your fee. So they’re screwing over veterans. And CNN and pals are blindly, stupidly, helping them do that. The internet’s hothouse of monetization desperation has grown some strange fungi. It has allowed in predators, or, if you like, invasive species of scammers who could be easily weeded out. But somehow the whole “anything goes on the internet” myth allows otherwise decent websites to shrug off responsibility..

Early Chan Culture, The Raids Of Hal Turner And Their Personal And Societal Implications

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By Julian Shirley

Lately my nostalgia for 4chan /b/ during the years of 2007 through 2009 4chan has been sneaking up on me pretty hard, as I realize that almost nobody I speak to, with the exception of one or two online friends, experienced this culture. It really was something else during those years, it was a special time and place to be on the internet, nothing like the eventual form it would take, and hard to describe or put into a contemporary cultural context. The culture that exists on the 4chan’s now is vastly different. In fact, the original chan culture is notably antonymic to contemporary chan culture. I am going to try to explain why 4chan culture was so special to me at the time, why it feels so unrepeatable now and why I temporarily invested so much of my identity into a large group of people, a behavior which is generally speaking, personally atypical. To give context and attempt to portray the feeling of the cultural at the time, I will detail my participation in and observations of the Hal Turner raids of 2008.

Early chan /b/ front pages usually contained at least one thread which could be labeled as a “Raid”. A “Chan Raid” or an internet Raid in general, is when a large group of people from one forum, chat, website or other social network agree to converge on a digital target, such as another forum, chat, website or other social network at the same time, usually with intent on trolling, hacking, or otherwise attacking the specified target. Some of my fondest 4chan and 7chan memories were raiding, the most fond of them being our ongoing raids of the white supremacist “Hal Turner” and his internet and radio talk show. We launched a campaign against him consisting of a creative meshing of psychological warfare and ridiculous meme spouting. About fifty percent of the calls into his show were from us and fifty percent were legitimate calls from his racist fan base, a ratio which was very much intentional and enforced with care so as to increase his paranoia. Inevitably he became hyper paranoid which is when we eased off a little so that we could muse at his inevitable incorrectly assumed accusations of his loyal followers in which he insisted they were “4chan spies” and “were not fooling him for a second”.

Looking back it was rather masturbatory, juvenile and arguably even vaguely sadistic on our part but we were a group of mostly angst and anger filled teenagers and young adults that were also brilliant, talented and marginalized by society, so that was to be expected to some degree as we slowly realized we were not as powerless as we had been told.

We raided Turner as an exercise and test of our various skills and artistry, as a social experiment and because he stood for something we despised. We were not rebelling against his racism as you might guess, although most of us found it very distasteful, but the illogical and authoritarian platform all of his ideals and rhetoric was born from. We targeted him not because we were social justice warriors but because he was an idiot who was profoundly devoid of logic. His lower more base emotions presented themselves so transparently that it frankly disgusted us. His attitude, demeanor and pompous style was eerily similar to that of contemporary Donald Trump. Consistently exuding the shallow embarrassing insecurities and projectionist egotism you might expect from a spoiled middle class 6 year old child feeling threatened or entitled to something they felt they were missing.

The aggressive rhetoric President Trump uses when condemning an enemy as well as his over simplistic proposals for defeating his enemies are strikingly reminiscent of Turner to me, to the point where I sometimes confuse Trump for Turner in my mind briefly. The way Trump speaks aggressively before taking any real action or announcing any plans when asked about defeating formidable enemies such as MS-13 or North Korea is fairly close to verbatim the methods and rhetoric we heard from Turner at the time when he was dealing with anything he felt was threatening him. We were not an exception. When we first started he frequently boasted that he would “destroy us” and made claims we would end up paying the server bills that were financially destroying him as a result of our consistent denial of service attacks on his servers. Once we had doxed him thoroughly we discovered his history of abuse of animals and all sorts of awful things. He was truly was a deplorable, pathetic and hateful human that I had, and still have, very little sympathy or empathy for. In the end we returned his name and career to total irrelevance and obscurity. He was just done.

Towards the end of the raids some hackers managed to compromised his mail servers and some other sources and uncovered emails from and to Turner and his FBI handler, confirming that Turner was indeed an FBI informant, a position which is needless to say, frowned upon heavily to put it mildly by Turner’s Neo-Nazi community and the releasing of these emails undoubtedly led to Turner being shunned by the only community that supported him. Many people believe and assert that Turner was used by the FBI to stir up racial controversy and was effectively an FBI controlled pawn but I am skeptical of this. He was however, an active FBI CI.

Turner represented what we hated about the system that oppressed us, to most of us, who felt we could never easily assimilate to a system so transparently flawed. This sentiment and many of the more radical ideas that we had thought or felt quietly, had been quite militantly and systematically discouraged in our society, especially in the educational system most of us felt captive to. To hear other people say these things we had thought alone but which were never encouraged or validated and to unite behind them to destroy a man who represented and reflected not only our oppression but the majority held beliefs that seemed illogic to us felt very good. More importantly it helped nurture in me, and I can only assume many others, a self confidence which had been taken away by the relentless indoctrination and intellectual suppression of the educational system and our society in general.

Although we shared emphatic distaste for authority and rule, we were not anarchists nor were we nihilistic. Our culture’s core values were not written out neatly in the form of document or dogma but still were, to me, very clearly defined. They consisted of, at their core, a militant adoration and reverence for both logic and humor. We exalted these two values above all other morals in a way that scared the shit out of normies and had them all figuring us for nihilists and shock jockies. Which is unfortunately mainly what the culture eventually digressed into before the SJWism and hacktivism that popularized 4chan in the mainstream media, seeped in, causing our precious short lived cultural bubble to burst and leaking our culture, values and memetics into the ocean of mainstream internet cultures where they were thoroughly bastardized and diluted to impotence.

To be clear I am not bitter about these events. The fact that something so pure, self sustaining and artistically and philosophically inspirational existed for as long as this, did is amazing to me. It was a hive mind of people drawn together by a love of logic, intellectualism, humor, art, hacking and technology in general as well as a shared distaste, or even hate, for protocol, dogma, rules, and social constructs. I identified with these people in a very real way because I saw that they recognized our societies consistent and fallacious tendency to normalize and systematize the arbitrary social, political and emotional constructs that we knew in our hearts were just that, constructs.

Julian Shirley, also known as the songwriter/producer Juji, lives in Alameda, California, where he works in computer science and the arts. He is the son of author John Shirley

This article was originally posted on PasteBin

Read also 

(Excerpt) Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right

 

The Cyberpunk Issue — Pull Quotes from MONDO 2000 Issue #1 (1989)

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A cyberspace experience might be a simulation of an entirely imaginary world as long as the space is physically lawful and self-consistent. Autodesk

 

Bush doesn’t want us to know whether he’s telling the truth of lying, but he wants us to be sure he’s not stoned while doing it. Robert Anton Wilson

 

McLuhan seemed to be giving permission for youth culture, rock & roll, and post-print libidinal tactility to finally, mercifully dismantle linear stuffed-shirt Western Civilization. Terence McKenna

 

Gibson has produced nothing less than the underlying myth, the core legend, of the next stage of human evolution. Timothy Leary

His females are shaman ladies, sophisticated wizards, playful, humorous, hip diviners. Timothy Leary

 

Burroughs found 50’s science fiction and used it like a rusty can opener on society’s jugular. William Gibson

McLuhan’s revenge. Media monsters . . . the worst street gang you ever ran into were, at the same time, intense conceptual artists William Gibson Read more “The Cyberpunk Issue — Pull Quotes from MONDO 2000 Issue #1 (1989)”

Operation Mindfuck Was Too Successful

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“Sartre said hell is other people. Now, hell is other people’s tweets or posts.They just irritate the crap out of all of us. The feeling is mutual.”

R.U. Sirius & Douglas Rushkoff in converation

I’m inspired by comments here from Grant Morrison and from John Shirley to share this again. It was previously posted on Medium on May 21

“Sartre said hell is other people. Now, hell is other people’s tweets or posts.They just irritate the crap out of all of us. The feeling is mutual.”

On April 5, I was on Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human radio show. We agreed to get the interview transcribed for possible publication somewhere.

I’ve decided that rather than trying to edit a truncated version to pitch to more popular websites, I’m just going to keep it conversational and run it here. Maybe less people will see it, but that’s ok. I get to say what I want.

I’ve added to my own spew as I edited. We hope you enjoy.

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: I came in contact with your work for the first time at a psychedelics conference in Los Angeles. Albert Hoffman and Laura Huxley [Aldous Huxley’s wife] were there. Timothy was there, and I think Ram Das and Ralph Metzner. It was the original psychedelics crowd.

And there were a bunch of issues of your first magazine, High Frontiers. And to me it was like a calling card from the future.

I was in my early 20’s, and your magazine was an amalgamation of everything that I had been interested in yet had never seen connected before: cultural, scientific, biological, cosmic, spiritual, and pharmacological advances, all in one place. How did physics and math and drugs and music and culture and transgender and cultural alchemy all end up considered part of the same strand of cultural information? How did you come up with that?

R.U. SIRIUS: In a way, it just came together in my head. I assumed that there were other people out there like me. Sort of like what Paul Krassner said about starting The Realist at the start of the ’60s. He put it out to meet the other aliens…

So this was a new generation of aliens.

And to me, the generational aspect of it was important. And the cultural aspect of it was important. Because even though I was from a generation that had a lot of hippies and deadheads and so on, we were also the people who created the cultures of punk and new wave. I was in my mid-twenties when all that came along and it was a refreshing blast to my pot-soaked mind.

So I was adapted for a very speedy, hyper, futuristic mentality by that, as well as by scientific ideas and psychedelic ideas and so forth.

And by the time we were doing High Frontiers in the mid-80s, one could clearly see the so-called digital revolution coming on, and one could be fairly optimistic about it… actually, radically over-optimistic. (laughter) So all these things just felt like the makings of a truly contemporary magazine.

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: High Frontiers really ran the full gamut of hallucinatory experiences. It was a flag in the sand. Leary had said, “Find the others.” And this was saying to a new generation, “Yes, there are others. These are our experiences.”

But then, you turned it into Reality Hackers and eventually Mondo 2000. It became the voice of this 21st century post-television, designer-reality society.

R.U. SIRIUS: Yeah, the Jetsons on DMT, as Mark Dery snarkily labeled it. Read more “Operation Mindfuck Was Too Successful”

OH THE HORROR! WE MAY ACTUALLY NEED FORBIDDEN MODIFICATION OF THE WEB!

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In any wilderness is beauty and fruitfulness and vicious predators and wandering madmen and disease and flooding and fires and regeneration…

by John Shirley

First, let’s quickly review the scale of the thing: In excess of a billion people are active on Facebook. Every month a hundred million use Instagram. There are three hundred twenty eight million plus monthly users of Twitter. More than half the world’s population is online in some way. Eighty percent of Americans go online. For years now, public school classes have given homework requiring online activity to complete it (indifferent to the fact that some of the poor don’t have steady access to a browser.)

There are more than a billion websites.

That’s not a system, it’s a series of  randomly interlocked systems; it’s not a grand network of self expression. Envisioned in cyberspace, it may look like an endless stochastic city, like a megalopolis of data. But it’s really a kind of wilderness.  In any wilderness is beauty and fruitfulness and vicious predators and wandering madmen and disease and flooding and fires and regeneration… Chaos is beautiful, chaos is necessary, chaos also destroys if it’s not modulated. Read more “OH THE HORROR! WE MAY ACTUALLY NEED FORBIDDEN MODIFICATION OF THE WEB!”

The Next Fifty Years: Why I’m Optimistic Because Everything Will Be Terrible…

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by John Shirley

 

The following is the complete text of the speech the author had originally planned to give at TEDx in Brussels (November 2011). The speech he gave used high points from this off-the-cuff essay, but, of necessity, only half as long. He prefers this version.

 

It’s a contradiction in terms—two singularities. But there are two, there’s the fanciful technological singularity of the imagination and the singularity that’s likely to come about. The false singularity, supposed to come between 2035 and 2045, is almost a “supernatural event” in the minds of many people. With its dream of technologically achieved eternal life, it has the reek of religious mythology about it, the unconscious fear of mortality; the second singularity is the real singularity—it is more modest but impressive enough… Read more “The Next Fifty Years: Why I’m Optimistic Because Everything Will Be Terrible…”