by Brian Hodge
Since I can take for granted that he’s ruling out such leaps as a cure for AIDS, or voice-activated steering for emission-free autos, I have to wonder what leap he feels qualified to make.
“Oh, I never claimed to be qualified for anything. But … are we fantasizing here?”
Sure. Why not.
He stares thoughtfully at the ceiling. “What we’ve always been most interested in, in nearly all its permutations, is human potential. Just because we focus artistically on the most heinous potentials that have been realized doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to build some sort of linkage that would be positive, constructive.”
A linkage?
“Creating something in the spirit of a hybrid realization between technology and the primal humanity that’s our essence. Humans have to come to comfortable terms with technology, because right now it’s allowed to be the enemy, but a benign one. Machines can outlast us at every turn, and we’re killing ourselves trying to keep up. Everybody’s sleep-deprived and we’re paying for it in reduced efficiency and horrible decisions. Disasters like the Challenger explosion, and the Chernobyl nuclear accident, and the Union Carbide gassing in Bhopal, India, and more train wrecks and plane crashes than I could name … you know what they all have in common? Somebody, somewhere, without any sleep, trying to maintain a machine’s pace rather than human biorhythms.
“It’s a war of attrition, and all I’m saying is there’s a middle ground somewhere that nobody’s really occupying. What I’d like to do is harness the Cartesian philosophical construct of ‘the ghost in the machine’ and give it a new meaning in the struggle between meat and metal.”
Any ideas?, I ask him.
He doesn’t answer. He just sits still and lifts his hand and watches me watch the cigarette burn toward his finger. It’s an excruciating moment when I realize he’s not going to snuff it out, not even when the skin reddens and blisters.
“I used to not be able to do that,” he says. “It proves I can change.”
*
My name is Jasmine and I’m an addict … one who wants never to change. When Josef arrived at my door, weary from his flight from Switzerland, I let my addiction take control once more. I never realized the full depth of the pain of our separations until the moment we were reunited and I realized what was so incomplete about myself.
Beneath a week’s beard and the dark blond serpentine locks of his hair, Josef’s face was beatific, enraptured.
“It works,” he said.
“Tell me this was worth it.” I clutched him by the arms. “I have to know.”
He dragged me to the bed, and as we kissed with the fever of a month of our lives lost, we stripped away each other’s clothing. We stretched out upon the wide hotel bed, pale and naked, our hair like whips as we consumed one another.
I drew back up to my knees and ran my hands along the thin, suffering rack of his body. Still red and fresh-looking, the scars were symmetrical, up and down each limb, and in twin rows along his torso and back. They weren’t much larger than the welts writ upon one another by Africans practicing scarification as a rite of passage. I put my mouth on one. It tasted hot and raw, and I imagined that against my tongue I could feel it pulse.
“You look beautiful,” I whispered, hoarse and weak.
There’s something puny about an unadorned body. Such a body is, without clothes, more naked still. It’s why we needed our piercings, our tattoos … to lay claim to the last thing we owned that the world could never take from us or tax.
“Get your practice amp,” said Josef.
I lugged it over from the corner where it sat with one of my smaller synths that I would bring into hotel rooms. I yanked the patch cord from the synth’s output and handed the plug to Josef.
When he was ready, I turned it on.
Our arousal was, I think, born out of a delicious fear more than anything. Like the first time we made love after Josef had gotten his ampallang piercing, a steel post through the head of his cock. Or after the time I’d gotten a ring through my clitoral hood. This was no different. We had no idea what to expect, we only knew it would be momentous.
I caressed him, lovingly, gently, and from the practice amp rolled soft waves of sound. Thunder from a kiss upon his thigh, earthquake from a grip upon his arm. I straddled his outstretched leg and dragged my cunt along it from ankle to hip, and the air itself swelled with sound … each distinct but overlapping, an evolving glissando of a world’s end.
Josef’s hands on me, urging me on, I stretched out atop him as I might my own grave. It was like swimming across his flesh as it buoyed me. There could never be too many points of contact, for each had its own voice, and when I impaled myself upon him and we strained with flailing limbs and wet mouths, I heard the throats of an infernal choir drowning out my own cries, and all I could think of was what if we were onstage, with fifty thousand watts of power at the other end of our union.
*
From Spin, December issue, two months ago:
For a lot of disgruntled urban and suburban youth, industrial music picked up where punk left off, after it burned itself out or softened into New Wave. The appeal was basically the same: atonal noise, pounding rhythms, inhuman energy, frequently indecipherable lyrics expounding a bleak world view, often sung in a garishly distorted voice.
But a funny thing happened to the industrial revolution: it got mainstreamed. Which is the way of all deviant pursuits, and that it’s happened should surprise no one who’s ever tuned in to MTV and seen Johnny Rotten acting as guest VJ. Sounds and rhythms that smack of industrialism have shown up on recent releases by such unlikely converts as U2 and Suzanne Vega, and even Nine Inch Nails copped a Grammy, albeit under the Heavy Metal category.
On the eve of The Giger Sanction’s fourth release, which goes by the unwieldy title of Liturgical Music For Nihilists, it seemed a fruitful idea to check in with Josef Jaeger, their enigmatic and troubled front-man and theoretician, for his views on the state of the art and how the Sanction is coping with industrial’s being co-opted by seemingly anyone with a yen to cut a dance track. One listen to an advance tape of their new release caught my ear as a departure from their in-your-face sound. While no less unsettling, it would seem that the band has decided the most subversive route they can now take is — can it be? — subtlety.
SPIN: Why the sudden vector away from the path you’ve established?
JAEGER: I don’t see it that way. I see the new CD as a synthesis of all our prior experiments, with new elements incorporated… just like we’ve always done. On the surface, it’s got a quieter approach, I won’t argue that, but deep in the mix it’s all there. There’s a lot of grinding and clanking going on in the background, but more subliminally, less overt. We went into our sessions to record this with a motif written on the studio wall: “Ritual hymns from decaying cathedrals of rust.”
S: When you put it that way, it does sound like you’re coming from inside a hellish church of some sort.
J: What we wanted to map out with the sound is the collision between, say, the human spirit and harsher mechanical realities. Plus, it’s a veiled reference to the human body as a temple, and its decay.
S: Which is a topic you’ve become notorious for exploring onstage, in some of the most graphic ways possible.
J: Considering what’s coming on the next tour, you haven’t seen anything yet.
S: Can you give us a hint?
J: Not really, it’s still in the planning stages, but it works in theory. I’ve found a … well, let’s say technician, in Switzerland, who’s not afraid of taking some of my more outré ideas and trying to actually implement them. It’s not so much of a visual effect as a way to interface with the audience. Totally. While at the same time creating a new sound source.
S: Considering your usual candor, this is sounding very secretive.
J: You’ll understand why when we unveil it in Chicago. I’m so excited about it I’m pissing down my leg right now.
S: And that’s all you can say about it at this point?
J: (after sigh and long pause) If it means that much to you, I’m calling it the “Human Resonance Chamber.” But don’t print that.
*
For the first night of the tour, all four of us went to the theater to watch our support band from the wings, then withdrew to the dressing room to nervously await our turn. We remained oddly quiet, as if realizing that tonight marked a turning point. We — Josef above all — would be viewed either as messiahs or lepers.
I’ve never claimed to wholly understand the way his mind works, or what compels him. Or what drove him to Switzerland to meet with a renegade surgeon whose obsessive fascination with the human body and its sonic potential equaled his own. My only claim is that, bathed in the glow of it all, I sometimes feel very humbled.
Such faith Josef had, that his flesh would not reject the implants studded over his body. But why would it? Millions must be walking around at this moment, skeletons held together with metal pins, or plates sealing broken skulls. The body adapts. Metal is coated with blood and tissue, and incorporated. Insulated wiring integrates along muscle like a new kind of artery.
The body embraces.
And bone conducts sound with eerie ease.
Twenty minutes to showtime, I took him in my mouth, tasting steel and his sex, and thought I could hear the humming of his blood.
And when we took the stage, our places were ordained by our function in the machine that the four of us became. The curtains parted and angry red lights burned and five thousand throats rose in one mighty cry of welcome. And we were a collective god … the god out of the machine.
They saw us integrated within a setpiece of ruin, amid rusted mutant pews that would never again hear prayers from pious lips. Meat rotted atop a blasted pulpit, and our projection screen hung between corroded cathedral arches that housed shattered stained glass, while across the screen itself, herds of central Europeans from a half-century past marched to the gas chambers in grainy black and white.
The drum machine and Anthony’s kick bass slammed in sync with a dirgelike pounding that shuddered the stage. A latched loop from one of my keyboards chugged away with a sound of distant oil pumps, while I called up a wailing wall of pipe organs in anguish. Kevin’s guitar spat caustic chords. Spliced through it all were audio cut-ups of savage modern prophets exhorting their countrymen to jihad.
And from the wreckage at center stage, he rose. A hydraulic hinge lifted Josef up, up into view, lashed to a twisted cruciform fashioned from old discarded television aerial towers. Skin along the backs of his arms and elsewhere had been pinched and fed into tiny breaks sawn in the metal rods, so that in several places he looked skewered in place.
With distorted voice, he chanted the faithful to Mass:
“Fathers feed on daughters
mothers feed on sons
and you will feed on emptied wombs
incubate in scraped-out tombs
with maggots thy kingdom come.”
We never broke between compositions — we segued. We never spoke informally from the stage. The medium was the message, and there was nothing we wished to impart that wouldn’t translate better from the speakers and the screen.
We were into an extension of the third piece of our set when the hydraulics ground into motion and lifted Josef, then swung him forward and down, an offering to the crowd. Red and blue spots tracked him, descending into a sea of reaching arms.
I watched, I played on, as Josef tore free his arms, then broke loose a number of foot-long sticks affixed to his platform. Most he dropped to the crowd around him. He kept two.
And, in tribal rhythms he began to play his own body.
It was totally improvised. I don’t even believe he yet knew which place sounded like what. But into the density of the mix he fed … the sound of meat, and machines.
Just within reach, the clamoring horde took their cue, now understanding, then took up their bludgeons. I’ve always found it amazing how strangers will naturally fall into sync after several beats, no matter how complex the polyrhythm. Entrainment, it’s called, and it gives me faith that despite our alienation, we are connected after all.
Cudgels flailed, and Josef’s sweat cascaded. He opened his mouth and out roared a feedback wall of unearthly voices.
The horde surged around him, and where there were not enough bludgeons, hands sufficed. He rolled his head back to face me, and across the burning mists of the stage our eyes met. He’d never looked happier.
And I knew, even if they tore him limb from limb, each piece would continue to sing its own song, from deep within its throat of bone.
Extract
Just like last time, you awaken in the middle of the night with the taste of blood on your mouth. It’s thick and gummy, has been drying awhile. The moon drapes a bright trapezoid of silvery light over the top of your bed, crosshatched like the panes of your window and slashed with the bare branches of trees.
When you raise your head, no more than you have to, you spot the dark, coin-sized stains on your pillow. They hadn’t been there when you went to bed.
You sink down in the covers to become invisible beneath them, in hopes that it won’t see you if it’s still in the room. You try to lie motionless, refusing to surrender to that urge to tremble, because if it’s still there, it might hear even the tiniest chattering of your teeth.
It knows teeth. Intimately.
You listen for the soft sigh of its breath; through slitted eyes dissect the shadows for its shape, maybe the glint of an eye or two. You remain razor-alert for the creak of a board, for the metallic click of the tools it carries.
And somewhere on the far side of forever, you realize it has the inhuman patience to outwait you all night.
Demons, you suppose, must enjoy the waiting.
If you weren’t so convinced it was still there, you’d run to the bathroom for the aspirin. The throbbing in your jaw is starting to grow more pronounced, pain taking form out of the numb void.
But the only movement you’ll risk so far is something it can never see … although you wonder if its ears might not be so sharp that it can hear the sliding inside your mouth. The way you can’t help but press the tip of your tongue into that fresh hole in your jaw, exploring the hot moist socket newly emptied of tooth. It feels huge, another gaping wound gouged in gum and bone, big as a bucket and still brimming with blood.
Then, slowly, the recollections start to piece themselves together again:
Awakening to the prick of the needle.
The immense pressure of that hard round knee — or whatever it was belonging to the thief’s anatomy — bearing down on your chest, to hold you in place.
The taste of metal in your mouth, its firm insistent grip.
Then, after the ordeal of twisting, of tugging, of cracking, the sigh of something’s satisfaction — definitely not your own.
Reliving all this, you shudder in the moonlight, knowing if it’s still in the room, it can’t help but notice you now. With this much lost, your invisibility betrayed, you let curiosity get the better of you, and slide your small cold hand back, beneath your pillow…
Where it closes on another crisp dollar bill.
No such thing as a tooth demon, your best friend told you at school, after the first time; not that she’d ever heard of. For a while this reassured you, because if anyone would know about these things, she would.
She’s got the kind of parents you wish you had, at least when it comes to the movies and comics and magazines they let her see. How you love going to her house, because the family room becomes a magic theater where you get to watch all the films forbidden under your own roof, and walking into her bedroom is like a trip to a museum where you can learn about all the terrible and fantastic creatures that make their homes behind the dark of night…
But aren’t really supposed to creep uninvited into your room while you’re asleep.
So this tooth demon must exis
t, obviously. Just look how hard it’s breaking the rules.
Ever more educated about such things, your friend once showed you a comic book that told about the one rule that all demons, no matter how mighty, must obey: If called by name, their true name, they must submit to your control.
A board creaks. A shadow disengages from the deeper darkness along the far wall, while moonlight glints off the pliers clicking in its eager hand.
One name is all you need, strong enough to contain all your hopes and prayers that your friend is worth such trust. One name.
“Daddy?” you try, and this works. It stops.
But only for a moment.
As soon as you can talk again, you’ll try another name.
Liturgical Music For Nihilists
Jamey had been missing for nearly a week before anyone much realized, then another few days after that before we learned why. It wasn’t the first time, Jamey off again on another exorcism of the latest future he saw ahead of himself, rather than the one he wanted. Don’t feel like assistant managing a Kinko’s for the next forty years? A few days of going AWOL will bury that particular nightmare.
When the phone rang I stirred first, then Rachel turned over in bed, splaying her warm soft hand over the knobs of my spine.
“Don’t answer it,” she said, and batted hair from her eyes as if hacking at ferns in a jungle. “It’s four in the morning…”
Briefly I considered it might be someone calling about a job and this was their way of deciding who was truly hungry for it, but Rachel thought it more likely a gauge of how much shit you’d swallow, and about had me talked into ignoring it, but the caller was persistent, and the answering machine was still pulped from my throwing it across the room last Easter after listening to some condescending message my mother had left, so I answered, and it was no one hiring, just Andre.
It’s hard to take Andre seriously when he cries because it gives him the hiccups, and he could be pouring his heart out to you for all you know, but you just can’t get past that inverted yelp every time his diaphragm convulses, so instead of empathizing you mostly end up trying not to laugh. When we were in gradeschool other kids, out of boredom, used to pummel on him for no other reason than to get him started.
