This interview was conducted by snail mail and email. Apparently four of the five main Cheer-Ax guys (Thymme Jones, Dylan Posa, Jeff Liebersher, Phil Bonnet, and Scott Rutledge) responded, but since they did not label their replies, I have no idea who said what; hence, the assignation of each mystery entity as a numbered Voice of Cheer-Accident (VOCA1, etc.). Some follow-up Q & A took place afterwards with Phil Bonnet; his replies are noted as PB. My apologies if I left something out in the frenzied transcription process....
DEAD ANGEL DISMANTLES THE WALTZ WITH CHEER-ACCIDENT:
VOCA1: CHEER-ACCIDENT is a concept with a core -- a board of directors, in economic terms. There will never be an adequate dairy substitute.
DA: So, then... what exactly IS Cheer-Accident? A band? A duo with lots of help? A fat-free non-dairy substitute? A way of LIFE?
VOCA2:
DA: How did this band with the incredibly huge, revolving cast of complex characters come about?
VOCA1: There are people who are concerned about issues and decide to speak about them through music. Most of the time they fall into the trap of acceptance -- be it wanting to be accepted or actually receiving something (like a thinly-veiled bribe). Most of the people we wortk with have no idea what we're going to do with them.
DA: How you manage to keep such a wildly disparate bunch organized enough to actually get something down on tape? :)
VOCA3: Since we started with a waltz. (At midnight. On January 1, 1981.) And since these first three questions relate to one another. And since we're all still f riends. And since we've decided that it is a way of life, and not a career. A way of living. A way of working. But not in order to achieve anything specific. And since we've met more friends along the way. And since there are enough talented people i n the Chicago area who see enough of the point to agree to participate in our little world for little to no money (thank you, by the way).
VOCA1: Maybe now is a good time to point out that Dylan Posa is neither a god, nor playing much guitar on ENDURING.
DA: Well, when i said that i was thinking in more of a global sense -- remarking not on just his playing on ENDURING, but on NOT A FOOD and the Bri se-Glace album. Additionally, my concept of a "guitar god" has less to do with the accepted notion of heroic masturbatory guitar immolation than it does with taste, tone, and sense of restraint. By my definition, John Fahey is a guitar god and Edward Van Halen merely an exceptional example of technical proficiency. There is a difference....
PB: Kudos on the Guitar god definition. Mr. Posas' sense of asthetic economy and general mental illness have added greatly to the Cheer-Ax collective.And though he was at the mixdown session of NOT A FOOD, he did not play a lick on the lp. [tmu: Ah, once again i am revealed to be clueless.] His spray will be all over our next 4 to 5 releases.
DA: W U P S. Boy do i feel stupid now. [scratches head] So where the hell did i get the idea he was playing on the album, anyway? Incidentally, i've since read the liner notes to ENDURING a bit more closely and i see that Dylan is actually credited with "vacuum cleaner." Not that this negates anything i said earlier about him, though.
DA: The unexpected yet ultimately inevitable segue has become a trademark of sorts for Cheer-Accident (and almost the only constant). How do you plot such manuevers in the first place?
VOCA3: I think that his answer is perfect.
VOCA1: One has to accept the random neural firing as a catalyst.
VOCA2:
DA: Given the extraordinary density of sound in ENDURING THE AMERICAN DREAM, i would imagine that mixdown can be a bit of a headache....
VOCA1: I'll tell you a story. We stood in the back of Solid Sound for a while miking the sound of us smashing bottles against a wall (and putting into jeopardy P hil's mikes and job). We then took several takes of that and mixed it down to DAT. We then put the mixdown from the DAT back on to the master. Then, in final mixdown, we kept the fader real low so you'd only hear it after, like, 50 listens. Certainly not a headache for us.
VOCA3: The "Vacuum/Law of Attraction/Shallow Stream" segment took many (many) hours; "A Hate Which Grows" took many (many) hours; the deterio rated vocals into distorted cymbals part of "Desert Song" took over fifteen hours to mix. I don't recall any headaches -- definitely fatigue, though.
DA: I notice the band's interest in noise (both as a background sound and as a primary instrument in its own right) has been in place for at least the last three albums... does it actually predate the entire current obsession with noise?
VOCA1: I, personally, have always been interested in irritating people so the problem lies not with the obsession being current, but being localized.
VOCA3: How long has there been this "current obsession with noise?" We've been interested in "noise" (and its link with what people generally call "music") since our inception (January 1, 1981). I don't necessarily associate "noise" with irritating (I don't think the other guy's answer is perfect). There are a number of different musical languages or histories. Some pe ople set up hierarchies (or at least categories) and say "this is music" and "this is noise." There are an infinite number of ways to organize sound. We're interested in exploring that which can readily be identified as "musi c" and that which would be labelled as "noise." And maybe along the way it will be revealed that there is not a dichotomy but a continuum.
DA: Which brings up an interesting question: a DEAD ANGEL sympathizer and i have been discussing the future direction of noise and i claim that it's ultimately headed in a more rhythmic direction. Given that "vacuum" and parts of "a hate which grows" sound remarkably like what i had in mind, what do you think?
VOCA1: I went to a seminar once about music and its neurological therapy possibilities. Anyway, I talked to one of the speakers about perceiving rhythm music ver sus time (a Bach prelude versus a Philip Glass piece) and he said, "There's rhythm even in noise." Do you mean, then, "noises" used as rhythmic accents or the building of "noisescapes" over a period of time? In this this age of Merzbow CD singles and Chemical Brothers remixes, I think "noise" is becoming a more subjective term. It's the context that bothers people.
VOCA1: Surrealism is a hard term to nail down -- we just want to get at some of the things people keep locked up inside.
VOCA2:
DA: The entire band seems to have a definite surreal bent, most obviously manifest on THE WHY ALBUM. Or is that album more of an exception?
DA: So what was the "meaning" (if any) behind the three separate same-but- different mixes of "Transposition" from THE WHY ALBUM, anyw ay? Just more surrealism at work or... something deeper?
VOCA3: We believe that the average listener wants (needs?) to hear that song three times in a row.
VOCA1: Our bid for '96 -- the year of the remix. Too literal? Shit. Um, when I play this at work I always put the three mixes on repeat. That seems to clear it u p.
VOCA1: Yes.
DA: The lyrical sentiments on the new disc are not only startlingly articulate, but fairly grim. Would i be correct in assuming that you guys are less than impressed with the supposed "progress" of western civilization?
VOCA2:
VOCA4: See the notes to ENDURING THE AMERICAN DREAM.
DA: Am i right in thinking that the whole "key" to the new album lies in the lines (from "Dismantling the Berlin Waltz") "the biggest ma ll in the world is / being built across the street from / what was the biggest mall in the world"?
VOCA1: A good place to start (next to Bataille).
VOCA4: "Dismantling the Berlin Waltz" is not the "key" to the album, for that would imply that it gives us access to a meaning which is hidde n. There is no meaning hidden within this album, there are meanings which are expressed through the album.
The importance of the mall as a site of exchange is that it is a place in which the economic relations of a consumer society are materialized, are made real, concrete, fashionable. The mall is where the simulacra becomes the reality. The simulacra grows at the rate of the market, and that is why the mall is getting bigger, for it is the materialization of the economy, it is a capitalist theme park where experience is representational, where sensatio ns and desires are articulated for the mass culture.
But as we can see in "The Adoration of the Mall," there is an ecclesiastical machinery operating underneath, making the establishment of mass culture possible in the first place. This is not so much a critique of the mall (where everything is made obvious) but a critique of the sacred, of the establishment of truth which is based on the mystification of reality. There is a long history of the secret which brings us to the mall, and we shou ld be glad that the mall has made all this mysticism into obvious trash, that we can more easily give up believing in anything.
The danger is that this lack of belief could turn to cynicism, and I do not believe that it has to, for I would argue that not believing, that a lack of faith, is beneficial in that it helps to demystify the realities which are manufactured by the market. The mall makes a critique possible, for it materializes a set of cultural and economic forces which are embarrassingly obvious.
We are a stupid people, though we are not limited to this stupidity.
DA: Then there's the provocative lyrics, in their entirety, of "A Hate Which Grows": "I scandalize history / I rape the statue of liberty / I beat her about the head and face." Would you care to elbaorate on the thinking behind this?
VOCA1: Yes.
VOCA4: Though these words are carefully chosen to offend, this is nonetheless a positive statement, an expression of liberty. This is a brutal ethics which does not take a position with accepted discourse. The language includes more than what could be thought of as a philosophical stance, for to speak of the rape of The Statue of Liberty as an expression of one's aspiration for liberty is blasphemous, and ye t, this act would also be the fullest expression of liberty: to take liberties with liberty. What could be more liberating?
The language is made even more disturbing in that it depicts this violence in a very physical sense, even borrowing a phrase from the news media, "beat her about the head and face," which is co mmonly used to describe incidents of domestic violence. This use of language does not allow the listener to think of this as an abstract critique. This is liberty without idealism.
DA: What kind of reaction do you get when you play these fractured and impossible-to-pigeonhole songs before live audiences?
VOCA1: The Cubby Bear never asked us back.
People get what they want out of whatever. We want to give nothing so there is nothing to take. Rather, we would like to be as non-accepted as possible so there is enjoyment with fear. Goebbels will be h ere shortly for his haircut.
VOCA3: Approaching each performance as a unique event allows the audience member to experience something in the moment, and precludes any excessing leanin g-on-of-the-expectations.
DA: Are you even able to play them without substantial alteration, given how complex they are on the albums?
VOCA1: We don't even try.
VOCA3: A lot of our recorded output has been played live; a lot of it has (at times) been played very similarly to the album versions. So we can -- but why? A li ve (real time) situation is a completely different context than a recorded artifact, so we approach it as such. Lately we've strayed very far (and this is a trend we really set in motion back when Dylan first joined in '94) from wanted to re-create ( especially if that's all we're doing) our studio material.
VOCA1: Yes.
DA: Aaaaah, forget these album-related questions for a minute, let's talk about... shopping malls. I hate 'em too. They typify everything that's wrong with America today. What do they symbolize for you, then?
VOCA2:
VOCA4: Sure, I hate malls, but they have also been useful to me in my own work, and my own thought. For the mall is like a replica of the market, a complete worl d closed onto itself. In this sense, we can see the mall as an experiment. A place in which market economics can be studied.
The mall reveals a general shift in systems of control, for instead of controlling through the word, and through belief systems, there is now a control which is based on interaction, on the construction of environments through which we move.
The church has been replaced with a mall. There are no rituals which we have to follow. There are no scriptural passages which we have to memorize. But, although the mall (the market) does not demand any discipline from us, it at the same time does not allow us to express ourselves on our own terms. That is, even though the mall, or the market, is not an authoratative system of power, with a father ready to mete out punishment and make sure that we have learned our lessons, there are nontheless very restrictive methods of control through which the market maintains the present balance of power.
The mall is privately owned, and it serves private interest. Malls place restrictions on free speech, and you are not able to hand out pamphlets or engage in a public forum. These restrictions are not id eological, the mall just doesn't want politics, or for that matter, any event which does not serve private interest, to take attention away from the merchandise. You can put on a fashion show, but you cannot have a meeting on local property taxes.
What is true of the mall is true of the market as a whole, and this is a very disturbing thought, for one quickly realizes that almost all of the space through which one moves, through which one engages in their lives, is privately owned.
DA: Do you get the sense, too, that people in this country are becoming less aware of (and less concerned with) their own history?
VOCA1: This country has no real history. We've taken the history of others and appropriated the bare necessities. Our history reads like a badly- translated roma nce novel. And those aren't printed on the best of paper.
DA: Actually, this raises an interesting point (in a tortured way; bear with me here). While ENDURING has, in my mind at least, raised some interesting qu estions about the nature of history, my own experience in records management (my current "vocation," such as it is) and constant exposure to the internet has made me recently realize that technology is helping inadvertently rewrite history, and not necessarily in a good way. Look at the internet, where documents are thrown up on the web and modified constantly. It has occurred to me that if we move toward a paperless society, it will become that much easier for the unscrupulous (the go vernment, marketers, whoever) to erase and reconfigure what passes for history. Consider this: until the advent of inexpensive digital processing, we used to take photographs (and to a lesser degree films) at face value: if you see it in the picture, then it must exist. If you see a US military officer shooting a captured Vietnamese spy, then it must have happened. But now this is no longer true: you turn on the TV and see the long-dead stars John Wayne and Fred Astaire marketing beer and vacuum cleaners from beyond the grave. Pictures are no longer trustworthy.
By the same token, information -- even that of a historical nature -- is no longer as reliable as it once was, particularly on the internet. Previously, in order to alter records, you had to actually phy sically change the records themselves (an almost impossible proposition where books are concerned) or make them disappear. But now it is possible to easily take information from the internet and replace it with spurious documents, or (with the help o f sophisticated PC graphics programs) copy and modify a document to produce a lie that is totally indistinguishable from the original product.
If this is true, then what happens when the government finally wises up and starts storing everything electronically, where it can be easily altered in a moment of panic or simply hidden through encrypti on? What happens to the recording of history then?
But i could just be paranoid.
PB:Rewrite history -- It's fun! Don't you think that ultimately internet = television? Ring out the old, ring in the old, is what we say in Cheerland.
DA: Oh, yes. very much so. What puzzles me is why some people seem to be obsessed with the idea of watching television while they toil away on the net. Truly tel evision has enslaved the masses to the point where the average American can't be without it for more than a few hours. (I'm not a huge fan of television myself.)
PB: It's all a series of lateral moves actually. So what was manipulative propaganda by the government in the pre-internet days, has become an equal opportunity tweaking tool for us civilians. It just seems that there are a lot more shades of gray to contend with.
DA: This is true. Disinformation is being spread from all directions on the net. There was an interesting article in one of the music magazines recently about fu ndamentalists opposed to Marilyn Manson who have been using the internet to spread disinformation about that band and their performances from city to city in an effort to block their ability to play. Their measures have been surprisingly successful. I don't particularly care whether Marilyn Manson gets to play the Bowl-O-Sheep Dome in Wazoo, North Carolina or not, but i find the grassroots use of internet technology by the fanatical to be kind of interesting.
Poke around the web and you'll find an interesting thing: outside of major corporations, the most professional-looking, well-funded, and/or profitable sites are those run by fundamentalists, right-wing e xtremists, or pornographers. (The Jack T. Chick Christian tract site is a most obvious example.) These "underground" (in the sense that they are largely shunned for one reason or another by traditional media) factions have been among the fi rst to realize the real propoganda potential of the net.
VOCA4: I am not sure that we were ever that concerned with our history. What I believe has changed is our sense of collective identity. We do not think of oursel ves as a people, and thus we are not concerned with our history as a people. Our realm of knowledge has been reduced to the immediate concerns of our lives. Our identification is not individual/ social, it is personal/ professional.
We move through localized circuits of exchange which are more or less personal, but which are not social. The market replaces both the society (as a collective space of interaction) and history (as the c ollective progress of a people). This is why, ultimately, the critique has to be directed against capital, and against market economics, for these are the mechanisms of power which determine the course of history, a history which has been turned agai nst its own progress.
DA: Are we right to be worried about these things, or are we just worrying?
VOCA3: I don't think worrying accomplishes anything other than (perhaps) chronic paralysis. Sometimes worrying just ends up being an excuse to not do anything. B eing critical, however, of your surroundings and yourself is necessary if you are to remain conscious.
VOCA2:
VOCA1: It depends on whether you'd like to be around fifty years down the road.
DA: Now that i'm horribly hooked, you guys aren't planning on going anywhere, are you? :)
VOCA1: Metaphorically, yes. Literally, maybe. Careerwise, nope.
VOCA3: I'll be right back.
DA: Are you going to continue to torment me by thinking up tremendously suave titles (like "Modestly Clothed, Did She Trouble You?") that i wish i'd th ought of first?
VOCA3: No. Our next few titles are: "Love On The Line," "Love Me Today," "Love Me Right Now," "Love on the Rocks," " Lovin' and Drinkin'," "Drinkin' and Drivin'," "Drinkin' Your Love In," and "Drive Me to Love."
VOCA1: Yes.
VOCA2:
DA: In closing, i'd like to note that "The Law of Attraction" really should have been part of the CRASH soundtrack. Do you agree, perhaps?
VOCA1: A friend of mine, in trying to describe the movie, called it "auto- eroticism" without a trace of irony. Cronenberg could have done something wi th this idea (and I must admit I haven't read the novel so I have no idea whose fault it really is), but instead he chose to make an exploitation flick that merely tittilates rather than examines or questions. It's the easy buck and it hurts to even think of it.
DA: The book does go into this idea more. In fact, in a lot of ways the book is far more perverse than the movie. Incidentally, you know the scene in the movie w here they are watching what appears to be a Swedish crash video? The Swedish narrator is actually talking about the safety of Volvos while the characters are discussing the best way to crash cars. An oblique bit of Cronenberg irony that is totally lo st on the audience unless you happen to know Swedish (or know someone who does who's seen the movie).
VOCA3: One of the things I liked about that movie was the fact that it had little, if any (correct me if I'm remembering it wrong) music in it.
DA:It actually has quite a number of orchestrated pieces in it, but they are generally mixed so far down in the background that you have to be listening for them , really. I happened to get extremely interested in the music while watching it because Howard Shore's approach to the guitars in those pieces (making them sound like other things, mostly) produced a sound that is similar to some of the pieces my own band has done, which i thought was interesting. The score was orchestrated for six electric guitars, three orchestral harps, three woodwinds, and two percussionists, then mixed in such a manner that it's hard to tell who's doing what. Most of the pi eces, though, sound very much alike, which may have only increased their subliminal effect throughout the movie.
I thought the movie was interesting just for the concept of the sexuality of psychopathology. And that they largely appeared to be oddly "normal" while pursuing some seriously perverted desires .
PB: Gotta admit that the Arquette/Hunter,Spader/Performance Artist Guys sex scenes had as much emotional impact as anyone of those Ron Jeremy spectaculars.
DA: Well, i have to admit that i liked the movie just because i have a fondness for both the writer/director axis and perverse sex. I didn't think the movie was anywhere near as pornographic as it had been described to me before seeing it, but i can see how a lot of people think it is (and think that Cronenberg missed the point).
PB: At least in DEAD RINGERS there was an interest in finding out the why, as opposed to presenting us with just the shells.I don't know. Maybe I hang out with too many compulsive people.
DA: I think DEAD RINGERS is a better movie than CRASH. There's a lot more dramatic interest in the slow spiral from sanity to madness than there is in CRASH's more static position that all of its characters are fairly perverse from start to finish. I actually like the latter movie's flat, unemotional tone: It's like watching the actions of a borderline sociopath who doesn't even realize that he's abnormal and deviate.