1) SKANK BLOK BOLOGNA [*1]

Why Bologna and not Berlin? Because it’s a shithole ( with interesting echo and resonance effects, thanks to the widespread arcades ). The sonic psychogeography feeds itself on mediality: the life of an average European city, of an average population, of average size; an average advanced tertiary sector, with average infrastructures; average levels of ethnic integration; and an average forecast of socio-economic development. The sound of a „tiro“ ( electric doorbell opener ) [*2] at 16:35, on May 23rd, 2011, at Santa Viola district, just past Maggiore Hospital, on the right, Drzzz Drzzz! The sound of a remote controlled opening system in Prague, on May 23rd, 1922 „Please take a seat, I understand your repeated requests to talk to an experienced professional, Doctor Kafka has indeed been at the services of the „Insurance Institute Against Work Injuries for the Bohemian Reign“ for at least 15 years, and in fact, after a brief experience at the General Insurance, he joined our company, occupying that small office at the end of the corridor. Doctor Kafka says it’s the only one in the building from which you can’t hear the noises coming from the street“. Why Bologna and not Barcelona? Because the sonic mapping doesn’t need any artistic community elaborating other systems and models of coexistence, the daily course of urban noise refrains from them, just as Franz Kafka the insurer does. The stimulus of daily routine, of banality, of averageness, there’s no need for the hype of New York, Frisco and so on, psychogeography operates just outside of Mazzini street. It doesn’t necessarily seek originality, the specific acoustic resonance of a certain territory is not a sine qua non, and it’s not about recording the echo of the Himalayas during the autumn solstice from 3.000 metres above, nor has it anything to do with art, but just with mapping and documentation. We therefore do not put under our lenses the metropolis, not a sprawl, but an average city, comfortably within our observation slide, and hence the research will maybe come to some conclusions which will then be at the grounds of the beginning of a further research, and so on. Why Bologna and not L.A.? [Read more →]

The precursor to datacide is the magazine titled Alien Underground, which appeared with two issues in 1994/95. In the first issue of Alien Underground, there is a manifesto-like text signed “praxis nov. 1994” titled “Nothing Essential Happens in the Absence of Noise”. It describes “Techno” as a subversive agent that shook up cultural production, whether corporate or independent. “The industry then got the fear (…) 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. (…) a zone populated by savages seeking forbidden pleasures in a wasteland (…) uncontrollable and incomprehensible for teacher, cops, parents, the industry & media.” The backlash was not long to follow: “Formula were created & market 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.” What we saw as raw and subversive was “streamlined for mass-brainwashing & pacification” in the form of “Nazi-Trance and Audio-Valium”. Still there was optimism: “But techno is always mutating, (…) 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>>>”.

This was also the moment when TechNET appeared. [Read more →]

Steve Goodman is author of “Sonic Warfare, sound, affect and the ecology of fear”, a book just published by MIT Press. Tracing the politics of sound in ways that develop some of the arguments made in certain branches of Industrial Music and in the darker waves of Techno and Jungle, Sonic Warfare proposes a vivid and demanding cosmology of sound in the present day, written in a style that mixes reflections on music, philosophy, technology, dance, media, politics in a way that is both speculative and in the thick of it.
Aside from writing Steve produces and DJs under the name Kode9 and runs the Hyperdub label [Read more →]

TechNET was, as the review in the same issue of Alien Underground (self-ironically) stated,
“Some kind of glorified techno flyer passing itself off as a bulletin of the digital underground, argueing for techno as the locus of a new counter culture. Has too much bass gone to their heads? or are these pretentious scribblings encouragement for a tentative optimism, flight lines guiding us to a politics of desire, slippery messages concerning beautiful thought patterns possessed of the art of disappearance, theories of identity that liberate the soul in the dance of all possibilities.” We’re hoping to add other texts some time in the future, here are Elements Toward TechNET Track 3 [Read more →]

from Alien Underground 0.0 (London 1994)

-signals received by Deadly Buda- [Read more →]