Anarcho-Tyranny
Γιώργος Σώτος
Vampire Salad
Carnivalesque Phantasmagoria
HAZY EROTICISM & URBAN CHTHONIC
Earthbound yet mehr als Leben
Seraglio of Odalisques + Devil’s Iconography
Les femmes fatales des enfants terribles
Cult of Narcissus + Cult of Kristeva
Splendid Faith of Latter-day Saints
Open Total Canon of Continuous Process
(王の力) شاهزور | The Power of the King (IMPERIVM REGIS)
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.
In another ten or fifteen years, the people that understand and appreciate Gummo or my work will be in positions of power.
I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Mans
I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create
The feminists are ridiculous; the anti-feminists are vulgar.
The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to the orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them; and if they are to live at all, they have to live like other living creatures. Foul waters and foul meats they’ll take, if they can get no better, but not poison.
He is only a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of the Conservative.
The disciple of Nietzsche, indeed, embraces immorality like an austere and difficult faith. He urges himself to lust and cruelty with the same tremulous enthusiasm with which a Christian urges himself to purity and patience; he struggles as a monk struggles with bestial visions and temptations with the ancient necessities of honour and justice and compassion.
The name Neurofunk suggests a soft, ambient genre, but it’s still very much alive and kicking. Techstep’s popular “destroy-‘em-all”-attitude formed a powerful mainstream sound in the world of Jungle. This stream evolved into something new; something more clinical and less melodic with ambient drone sounds and blips of noise, but still aggressive and Ravelike. “Neuro” – as it is called – sounds like the natural soundtrack of the brain: neurological chemicals flowing and rushing, creating both deeply obscure and delicate emotions.
As the name suggests, Neurofunk borrowed some influence from Funk (and Jazz) to make this happen, but in a barely noticeable manner. The difference between Techstep and Neurofunk can be challenging. Important is that Neurofunk incorporates acid sounds (it might even be called “Acidstep”) and features few or moderate builds and breakdowns. Neurofunk is a continuous stream of washes and waves emitting a strong atmosphere that sparks the imagination. Neurofunk aka Futurestep likes to reel you in a science-fiction or anime fantasy world with its hyper-clean production, yet remains as hard and dark as Drum ‘n’ Bass can be. A spookier, grittier version called Darkneuro, also exists and even more subgenres though that would be really splitting hairs.
The persuasive sense of slippin' into a new Dark Age, of an insidious breakdown of the social contract, generates anxieties that are repressed but resurface in unlikely ways and places. Resistance doesn't necessarily take the 'logical' form of collective activism (unions, left-wing politics); it can be so distorted and imaginatively impoverished by the conditions of capitalism itself, that it expresses itself as, say, the proto-facist, anti-corporate nostalgia of America's right-wing militia, or as a sort of hyper-individualistic survivalism.
In jungle, the response is a 'realism' that accepts a socially constructed reality as 'natural'. To get 'real' is to confront a state-of-nature where dog eats dog, where you're neither a winner or a loser, and where most will be losers. There's a cold rage seething in jungle, but it's expressed within the terms of an anti-capitalist yet non-socialist politics, and expressed defensively: as a determination that the underground will not be co-opted by the mainstream. 'Underground' can be understood sociologically as a metaphor for the underclass, or psychologically, as a metaphor for a fortress psyche: the survivalist self, primed and ready for combat.
Jungle's sound-world constitutes a sort of abstract social realism; when I listen to techstep, the beats sound like collapsing (new) buildings and the bass feels like the social fabric shredding. Jungle's treacherous rhythms offer its audience an education in anxiety (and anxiety, according to Freud, is an essential defence mechanism, without which you'd be vulnerable to trauma). 'It is defeat that you must learn to prepare for', runs the martial arts movie sample in Source Direct's 'the Cult', a track that pioneered the post-techstep style I call 'neurofunk' (clinical and obsessively nuanced production, foreboding ambient drones, blips 'n' blurts of electronic noise, and chugging, curiously inhibited two-step beats that don't even sound like breakbeats any more). Neurofunk is the fun-free culmination of jungle's strategy of 'cultural resistance': the eroticization of anxiety. Immerse yourself in the phobic, and you make dread your element.
While outwardly claiming to adhere to disparate religions, the Islamic terrorists follow a heretical version of the faith, ultimately rooted, like their counterparts in the West, in the same occult doctrine, the worship of Lucifer, and the belief in the use of religion as a disguise to deceive the masses.