Mission Statement of The Emetics

We are a part of no movement, and you will not find this work shelved in a music store. Sometimes it is compared to noise, in particular the Japanese variety, or the ghetto tech revolution poised to steal the DJ’s tables. But our mission is totally dissimilar to such artists. In texture and intent it is closer to Xenakis’ Threnody for Hiroshima. Our music is experimental in the scientific sense, a methodological exploration of the discipline of chaos and complexity through controlled experimental procedures in which we take ourselves as subjects (follow this link for a detailed sample report). Everyone who enters the feedback cycles of our music, whether as a listener, or as a contributor of samples or dumper of audio junk, become a participant in the experiment. We intend each Discordian “song” to be a fleeting instant during which a lifetime of omnicultural experiences passes before your ears. It is all uncannily familiar, yet it sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard, and nothing we’ve ever played, before. Or rather, it sounds like everything everywhere being spoken or played at once, heard simultaneously, a transtemporal cacophony spontaneously rendered, mechanically deboned, electrocuted. The reactions to these productions are broadly dichotomized. Some people cannot get enough of it. They enter into this experimental feedback and state induced perceptive regeneration with us. This mu-(sic)k is addictive, and if you listen to it as you go about your daily activities, noises that would normally intrude on your listening pleasure will mix seamlessly with it–loud obnoxious sounds, like a concrete drill or your boss yelling at you, will become a virtuosi’s solo–like an inverse Cageian experience, had Cage written Attali’s Noise instead of his own Silence! Other people are sickened by it immediately (hence our name) and repudiate our goals. “That was horrible” retched our previous drummer after playing for our second album, “Horrible Bling Bling”. This does not dissuade us in the slightest: As Marshall McLuhan (1967) noted, “any new demand on human perception, any new pressure to restructure the habits of perception, is the occasion for outraged response” (p. 282). Moreover, it may not be in good taste, but it is effective, and it works.
Our technique is innovative and pioneering for its time, but a great amount of what we produce is the accumulated result of two decades of collaboration. Without a long history of live shows and artistic experimentation it is doubtful whether this project would be possible. It has required our total commitment and openness, because we never know how it will proceed. We rummage through audio detritus and turn it into a fecund environment, a garden of genetic and sonic mutation. But it also has a transformational effect on our lives, it changes who we are. So just as we never know from one album to the next what this mu-(sic)k will be, we never know from one session to the next who we will be. In fact, after a while, there is very little distinction between the music and the lives of those engrossed in it. This reveals something of the true nature of experiment, or rather, the nature of true experiment. Our designs, methods, participants and results/findings/albums are subsumed into one and the same regenerative feedback loop.
Informational waste is soon to become one of the most pernicious dilemmas of the new millennium. We have only begun to see the outcome of industrial and technological waste–Siberian uranium dumps, oceanic putrescence and Arctic oil spills, global warming and weirding of weather-the brown house gases melting polar ice caps, ozone depleted amphibian extinctions, water scarcity in one spot, postdiluvian flooding in others, Teshima, the garbage island of the Japanese archipelago, cyanide spills into the African rivers Asuman, Danube, and Tisza, the endless litany of auto-destructive global scuttling by cannibal corporatism–but most people in capital-endowed industrialized nations benefiting from the superfluity of disposable, consumer goods, see little of the effluent bads. Now this is changing and Gaia is wreaking her natural revenge, but we are still at the warming and warning stage. It is evident that the worst is yet to come, and that environmental issues will necessarily take a sudden upswing in the priority when daily life can no longer go on as usual. Yet all this is only one part of the story, the portfolio of physical environment is in the no worse disarray than that of the cultural–and therefore social–environments. But we have yet to see competent measures of the devastating effects from toxins spilling out of the information pipeline, the socio-spiritual pollution and the putrefaction of humanus. Just outside the range of human hearing we have dumped the vibratory refuse of hundreds of millions of simultaneous cellphone conversations, broadcasts on TV, radio, shortwave, microwave, gamma wave or slow carrier wave shocking carbon-based cellular transmissions into remission. The delicate neural environment is under constant inaudible and invisible miasmic attack. Add to this the pollution audible and visible spectra, the endless advertising of the uber-consumer orientation, the automated voices, spam email: and yet, when individuals react and challenge this poisonous enterprise, expression is criminalized. Advertising is allowed to steal every new popular mode of expression for their own ends, but if we take something with a corporate label, it is theft, the sampler and the plagiarist are considered pariahs. For this reason, when we recycle we mutilate our source materials beyond recognition. We endeavor to keep thorough audio journals, all the sounds of the work-a-day world become our instruments, our resources. The real world and the musical realms are not divided as they are in almost all other kinds of musical expression. For us, there is only a plethora of vigorous sound waiting to be rejoined in giant composite waves of crashing noise on the beach of your conscious mind, a subconsious beast lurking just below the surface of all media sending a tsunami of public noise to wash away the electric fences that keep you from sunning yourself in the natural splendor of the sonic world. Sometimes we steal your voice, you do not know, and you never will, unless you listen very carefully.