Praxis: Nothing Essential Happens In The Absence of Noise
From Alien Underground 0.0, London 1994
by Praxis
Nothing Essential Happens in the Absence of Noise
Techno is the culture that was born from the sores of an unintelligible urban territory. Cultural production, corporate or independent, only could produce extreme boredom, apathy when the post war years got recycled in ever shorter cycles, art imploded and personal computers got widely available. The industry then got the fear, Horror Vacui, because the principle of its organisation > the top-to-bottom one way transmission > got short circuited, & there was no transmitter or receiver, only a mixer & rooms full of people + noise.
Urban zones got contaminated, the syntax of control scrambled, the virus spread. Primitive rhythms followed the logic of sex rather than reason, the logistics of guerrilla warfare rather than commerce.
Culture got deconstructed and left a zone populated by savages seeking forbidden pleasures in a wasteland that became nowhere and everywhere at the same time, uncontrollable and incomprehensible for teachers, cops, parents, the industry & media. Only the tabloid press was favorable, as it saw the apocalyptic dimensions of it all. But soon the savages were to be colonised, explained, made transparent + understood – or killed.
Formula were created & marked research employed, documentaries were made, and laws drafted. It all needed to be brought back into the world of the spectacle, made safe for mass consumption; faces appeared, and like in a demonstration of power, talentless dj’s were made superstars.
Ethnologists scoured the wastelands with their dat recorders + cameras, brought back what was deemed necessary to take the raw sounds, strip them of their subversive potential & spit them out again as nazi trance & audio-valium™, streamlined for mass-brainwashing & pacification.
But techno is always mutating, not the cops, not even the media, those executioners of the authentic, are able to terminate that, always moving into different directions, & the time is now that transformations are under way that will lead to new places, eruptions . excess… in a situation where most of the supposedly underground parties are playing the same shit as everywhere else, where sponsorship deals + big money have moved in, a new resistance is emerging slowly >>>
praxis nov.1994
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