This quasi-musical expression is a transgression of all things corporate about the aesthetic of music. It doesn’t panhandle for opinions, and is irreverent to all marketing strategies that make a buck off artists’ backs, leaving behind a vapid cultural waste because they appropriate artists, control them, and dump them after sucking their vision dry. Going, or being "indie" is not enough. Indies are dirty undies in the bulk bins of the supermarket, with scratch and sniff skid mark logos. Corporate music goons don’t hear music because the cha-ching of cash drowns out everything, so as soon as they have a successful “song,” a hit according to their standards, they think hey, “we can do that too” and then they go on pumping out the same pre-digested formulaic mass produced crap over and over again and forcing it down Joe Q Public’s ear tubes like a mass human dosing experiment carried out by the NeoCon. When someone of Miles Davis’ stature was at the controls, every album was a whole new expression. But when the industrialists took over, all we got was millions of tons of garbage, and anyone who took music seriously had to learn to dig around in it to find something of value. Almost any sound is of value, when it is an act of committed expression. When a young child sings the alphabet with gusto, it has value. When the youth plays her first song on guitar, it has value. When the jug band or metropolitan symphony strike up a chord, there is musical value. But this is a different value than that which the commercial radio, music tv, entertainment guides, magazines, and so on, have been selling to YOU as YOUR music.
But their nicely sewn-up populous of garbage devouring stuffed goats obvious got bored. They wanted music which they valued in ways that aborted the cash aesthetic. The internet has been criminalized for the sake of people sharing what they perceive to be an inherent right, the right to share their sense of culture. The music industry, on the other hand, has claimed ownership of culture, and wants its cut of the share. Dedicated music fans and aficionados resist because these values do not coincide, no matter how much legal hacks twist the law. So in Canada, the industry gets a surcharge off every blank CD sold on the basis that its sold to hold their second hand derivative sputum, to copy their melodious vomitus onto. This is extortion, and ought to cause riots in the streets. Intellectual property and music are fighting a battle that advantages no one except the moolah junkies of capitalism. If I like the work of an artist, group, composer, orchestra, I share this information as something I want another person to know: It is valued as something we share, a part of our greater connection: And the value for the artist is that their expression spreads, takes on greater meaning i.e. the reason to make music is so that people like me and my friends will listen, the more the merrier, and these are values that transcend quarterly returns. Not that we don’t like money. We just think that music is something you do, something that you shape and that shapes you, and that no logo is going to help you to learn how to listen and grow musically. The Emetics make music that is not music, because it does not need to sound like any other kind of music.
The internet helps people understand how many different values we need to wrestle with, and how to find pleasure in the process. Having two people share enthusiasm for a song gives it twice the value. But it doesn’t work exponentially. Just because everyone likes it, doesn’t mean it has any special value at all. Everybody liking something decidedly reduces its value. It means they are corralled, just accepting what’s come their way on the pop culture pooper scooper. That’s what the Emetics music is about, it’s eclectic. If you listen once, you may feel totally disoriented, even with so much that is familiar about the sound. But the more you listen, the better it gets. So you know, if someone else hears it the same way, then you both have journeyed somewhere special, and can share a musical realm that is still unknown, still mysterious and not what everyone else happens to be listening to on the AM radio while flipping bad horse burgers. The Emetics belong on Ipods because you can listen in secret. No need to share it with the masses, just with the chosen. But no one is going to help those who don’t listen to the Emetics yet, except their friends. Without knowing why, music is now alienated from most people. They listen to and consume what they are told. Like fatty foods, their taste in music will make them sick. Soon the pharmaentertainment complex will produce a pill to help supplement the loss of cultural connection the industry has engendered among so many North Americans. We are full of informational toxins. The Emetics are a purgative, take us in your earlobes, cleanse your system with refined noise. Get well soon.
So although Megadeath have lots of heavy metal champions downloading their music, there are thousands of people downloading unusual music that no one in their circle has heard about. These grow topical and interesting to diverse people who form eccentric communities. So people share music as if they were sharing something of themselves, and the industrialists are freaked out, busy suing user-groups for sharing the only naturally free resource that is left, vibrating air. Ever noticed how second hand stores in North America are full of total crap on vinyl, cassette, 8track, CD, that no one wants, the industrial garbage and junks of the entertainment empire. Even when there are collectors of almost every kind of music, there is a overload of empty-hearted pop culture that no one wants, and this stuff circulates around like McDonald’s old Styrofoam containers that never say die. For the Emetic sound, all these junks are woven through these improvised songforms, because we represent the disciplined chaos of post-millennial soundscapes. The Emetics play this chaos like fish swim rapids, glibing and gliding through waves, not pounding out beats. It’s like riding through the ocean of sound on the back of a killer whale. It’s an addictive ride, the more you hear, the more you want, and the faster you go. Nothing ever gets ordinary. Nothing ever turns into the corporate pseudo aesthetic, it is the psycho aesthetic of ninja cuts made with a cosmic machete. Jingles stop, drop, and panic.
What make the Emetics so different from this pseudo-aesthetic of corporate jinglology? The Executive Producers like clean, noiseless sounds, as squeaky clean as cellophane. Everything sounds expensive, while amounting to mass produced cheapness. No eccentricity. No coughs or sputters, sneezes or farts, not a crackling amplifier or accidental room sound to be heard. In fact, nothing at all resembling real sounds except for live albums, but even these are cleaned up, digitally mastered, and fit for a doll house. Everything is a song and should happen quickly and be over and done with in the allotted three minutes between commercial to sell you a lifestyle you can't afford. It should sound like the song before, and the song after, and the song down the hall, in the mall, and on your ring tone. Everything is radio ready. Nothing is made for music, it’s made for market. If there are voices in the music they sing or rap lyrics that are hooks to the gullible fish. They do not say anything important, but use their three minutes to repeat what has been said a million times before. For this reason, clichés make the best hooks. Roland Kirk, blind but blinking from bright moments, would sneak a radio into the Atlantic recording studio, and play it against all the engineers and producer’s wishes. John Cage loved radios too, and composed a music made of every junk sound in the environment, attended to with care. They understood that music was everywhere taken for granted. It needed to be made into something worth sharing. Enter the Emetics. Here is what we ’ve brought with us for show and tell, or in this case, listen and think.
These are compositions that are played live by two people, Kedrick James and Don Klassen. Both of us have backgrounds that are equally weighted in poetry as in music. This is music for poets, poems for musicians. This songs are infused with sound poetry, musique concrete, well-tempered synaesthetic revelations. It is music in every sense, yet it has nothing in common with common music. It is the noise of the universe at the continuous moment of conception, it realizes itself in a self-consuming fire, like a pheonix. It is the result of an on-going artistic experiment in which the electronic world is subjected to its own tendencies, is cut, sliced and diced, ground-up, digested and disgorged. It is like organic drugs, like peyote in which mescalito dances in the smoldering ashes of sonic waste. We are the subjects of our experiment, and it is changing our lives, our perceptions, each meditation on noise bringing us to new states of consciousness. We never know what to expect, what will happen next. We never play the same thing twice. And although it has a recognizable sound and identity, because the same two madmen keep making it, anyone can join in on this experiment, providing more grist for the mill. Send us stuff, enter the cycle of sonic feedback. Its time we recycled and reclaimed music for the better of humanity. Let the visionary impulse resound.
