Bulletin-board

Bulletin Board

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#002: Black Screen o' Death: UNTITLED

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When power electronics emerged as an underground subsect of industrial music in the late 1970's, its hallmarks were profane, often indecipherable lyrics, unrelenting noise, and waves of arrhythmic digital chaos. The genre's first lodestone came from the British assemblage known as Whitehouse, whose 1980 album Total Sex contained multiple tracks of pure feedback overlayed with intermittent screaming. Stateside, the genre's main purveyors included the New York City-based Black Screen o' Death - a duo that specialized in "direct injection overload", or DIO, a practice in which a semi-functional Oberheim SEM was plugged directly into a soundboard with its faders pushed past the redline,essentially capturing the sound of melting board circuitry. In fact, smoke would frequently emit from the house mixers during the group’s performances. As a result, the band was eventually banned from most NYC venues aside from White Columns, a semi-derelict non-profit artist loft that regularly featured the group on its monthly "Night of the Living Noise" shows. To accompany its ear-splitting sound, the duo often projected looped visuals from notorious art films, including the eyeball-slicing scene in Luis Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou and various excerpts from Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon. A grainy xeroxed film still of Deren's mirror-faced personification of Death was later used as the cover for the group's untitled 1982 self-released EP.

#001: PARCO Collexion

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Throughout the mid-1980's, Japanese department store PARCO experimented with increasingly abstract and, some say, visionary ad campaigns. Led by outlandish fashion photographer Kazumi Kuragami, PARCO released a series of increasingly bizarre television commercials - the most notorious of which featured the famed cinema diva Faye Dunaway eating an entire boiled egg in silence. As was au courant at the time, PARCO often commissioned ambient in-store music to accompany its campaigns. This practice paralleled the emergence of Japanese Streetwear - a style of clothing featuring boxy silhouettes and bold colors popularized by designers like Rei Kawakubo, also known as Comme des Garçons. Ever the trendsetter, Kuragami decided to commission the obscure and somewhat heavy-handed German/Japanese jazz improv duo ßynthündßäx to produce a series of looping audio installations to accompany a new line of women's clothing by the heretofore unknown designer REDACTED. His efforts were ultimately proven to be almost too successful. Shoppers overcome by emotion could be seen lying down and weeping in the store. The resulting bedlam was heavily covered in the Japanese press - but the fervor did not result in many sales, largely due to the impracticality of REDACTED's designs, which featured pounds of itchy, unwieldy fabric, working electric lights, and a series of cumbersome and dangerously heavy metal hats.