Bulletin Board
#005: mailer_daemon: Spectral Peaks
In the halcyon days of the early internet, bulletin board systems, or BBS's, provided a range of fora for the posting of all manner of digital content with varying degrees of public accessibility. UseNet in particular became a haven for hackers, digital artists, and tech-literate introverts and outcasts to congregate in secret. From this strange social amalgam emerged mailer_daemon, an anonymous digital recluse of the highest order. Based on his Usenet history, mailer_daemon appears to have spent the 1980's as an under-recognized composer and poet in New York City. As the decade progressed, he experienced the complete dissolution of both his career and his only significant adult relationship. By the mid-1990's, he began posting a series of dense, cryptic codices of hypertext containing a manic swirl of references including (but not limited to) hair metal, Christian apocrypha, Greek Mythology, toy and video game lore, neurology, and quantum theory. Throughout his first hypertext codex, a thirty-entry collection entitled Spectral Peaks, mailer_daemon displays dissociation from physical reality and an obsession with tracing the so-called "hidden world". Adorned with dynamic ASCII art and riddled with nested footnotes, Spectral Peaks was only accessible via a cryptographic post on UseNet, the solution to which was a string of 23 23's. The codex's final eponymous entry closes with the following passage:
When the Minotaur finally fell I felt no sadness, wanting something to touch that could somehow still touch back.
Like the first time I felt flesh, held it there. And all that was inside it. Right after then, when it vanished, and all I knew to do was to want it back again,
as if after forgetting.
#004: Konami Dream: HAL
In 1956, a deaf seven-year-old with perfect pitch named Joybubbles discovered he could access Ma Bell's proprietary long distance phone lines by whistling a tone at 2600 Hz. It was in this serendipitous moment that the practice of phone hacking, or phreaking, was born. Loosely connected by its core principles of curiosity, freedom, and anti-corporatism, the phreaking community used plastic Cap’n Crunch cereal box whistles and other rudimentary tools to penetrate deep into the buttressed technical infrastructure of both Ma Bell and IBM. By the late 1980's, the phreaking community expanded to include computer hackers, who, at the time, were little more than a rogue group of basement-dwelling autodidacts with a shared penchant for daring infiltrations, Bulletin board system diatribes, and ASCII-based cyberpunk imagery. As the so-called phracking movement crested in the early 1990's, groups like the Masters of Deception and the Legion of Doom began to expand outward, launching semi-legal initiatives and broader, more coordinated cyber attacks. Artistic creativity also began to emerge from the digital hijinx. Cult of the Dead Cow, a hacking collective formed in a Lubbock, Texas slaughterhouse, began posting musical and visual renderings of member Beto O'Rourke AKA Psychedelic Warlord's grotesque poetry. Konami Dream, an underground hacker/rap collective, embedded its BladeEnc-encoded mp3's on various governmental and corporate websites, a process it referred to as PhrequeLeaking. Konami Dream’s PhrequeLeak apex was a breach of IBM's corporate website - the group posted a strangely monotone rap track entitled [2001|HAL]] on the company page for Deep Blue - the chess playing AI that defeated world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.
#003: Digital Riptide: Cerulean Fog
The founding members of Digital Riptide, the short lived but seminal New York City-based No Wave band, first met Gordon Voidwell immediately prior to their first recording session in the early months of 1982. With a handful of songs under their belt and no one to sing them, they lept at a chance to bring the elusive but supremely talented singer on board for their debut. Gordon offered no resistance, and the group hastily tracked and released its first single, Cerulean Fog. Although Voidwell and his eventual artistic and romantic partner Leira would pen the lyrics to the remainder of the band's catalogue, Cerulean Fog’s (contrived & platitudinous) lyrics were reportedly completed by band members in the studio on the day of recording. Despite its hurried production, the SINGLE was, for the most part, warmly received by both press and audience alike - the Village Voice proclaimed the group “one to watch in 1983”. The single's heartfelt if slightly mawkish B-side ballad Heaven (or Something Like It) became something of a hit in the downtown club scene, leading to a label bidding war for the group's eponymous debut LP. The band's manager, a seasoned former felon, secured the group a large advanced sum which the band immediately used to purchase a $20,000 CMI Fairlight digital sampler, a $5,000 Roland Jupiter-8 synthesizer, a $3,000 LinnDrum LM-2, and, according to band lore, a substantive amount of narcotics.
#002: Black Screen o' Death: UNTITLED
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
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.