Bulletin Board
∆ #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.
∆ #006: Konami Dream: Matrix Racer
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.
∆ #007: Konami Dream: Solitaire
Throughout the mid-1990's, the loosely knit hacker-rap collective Konami Dream eschewed conventional commercial releases, choosing instead to distribute work through what it dubbed "Phreaque Leaks" - a kind of digital graffiti. By illegally embedding their audio and video pieces in various public and private digital fora, they created an anti-capitalist alternative distribution system, leading to fringe notoriety and a small cult following (if not financial and critical success). Their Phreque Leak coup de grâce, as it were, was the lifting, modifying, and redistributing of Microsoft Windows' proprietary "Solitaire software - a virtually uninstallable and highly addictive bundled game designed to onboard users into the OS's quote "drag and drop" graphical interface. Posted anonymously as hacked corporate freeware on various BBS UseNet boards, Konami's Solitaire variant was at first blush a dead ringer for the original. However, upon victory, the player was rewarded with an infinitely looping card cascade, replete with coded Easter Egg messaging and a poorly rendered audio loop from "Aikea Guinea" by Scottish dream-pop band Cocteau Twins. A gaelic term for "spiral seashell", "Aikea Guinea", looped and layered with vintage synthesizers, formed the basis for a separately released ambient rap track featuring the introspective musings of Konami's own lyrical wordsmiths, Kevin Venom and the rapper later known as Hades of the Underworld.
∆ #008: Konami Dream: Judgement Day
On November 23rd , 1987 the signal of WTTW, an upstanding PBS Chicago Public Broadcasting Station, was pirated by a figure bearing stark resemblance to Max Headroom, the world's first computer-generated television host. Throughout the 83-second intrusion, the Headroom doppelganger displayed cryptic and erratic behavior, spewing profanities and degrading New Coke in front of semi-swirling corrugated sheet metal. The segment culminated, bizarrely, in Headroom being spanked with a fly swatter by a figure in a french maid costume. Despite the FCC's reward offer of $10,000, the culprits remain, as yet, at large. Thus marked the most prominent instance of broadcast signal jacking, a practice dating back to the "Southern Incident" of 1977 in which a being named Vrillon of the Ashtar Galactic Command interrupted an ITN news bulletin to warn humanity of impending disaster at the close of the second millennium.Following the arrest and subsequent retirement of resident hacker fantom_limb under the absurdly nebulous Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the hacker/rap collective Konami Dream turned to the tradition of signal pirating for its final self-described Phreaque Leak. Targeting the Warner-Apex Satellite Productions, or WASP, -owned NY1, an amateurish 24-hour cable news station based in New York City, Konami staged a bold late night broadcast takeover. Dubbed "Judgement Day", the segment presented a three part audiovisual diatribe against various capitalistic power structures pirated atop a rerun of NY1's "From the Floor", the station's poorly produced on-location Wall Street report.
Disappointed by Judgement Day's lack of impact (NY1 late night viewership reportedly ran in the high double digits), and deflated by [fantom_limb]'s departure, the group pivoted to self-released mixtapes, retaining its starkly anti-commercial bent while extending its referential lexicon further into various modern mythologies:Japanese anime, lore-laden video games, pulp science fiction and other alternate worlds made newly accessible through cyberspace's infinite and, more importantly, lawless expanse.
∆ #009: Konami Dream: Berserk!
The now legendary Japanese manga ’’Kenpū Denki Berserk’’, or ‘’Berserk’’ for short, was begun by artist Kentaro Miura in the late 1980's while still in high school. Named after the berserkers, an ancient sect of trance-induced Scandinavian warriors, the manga's mix of complex emotional themes and gory ultra violence found favor across the ocean in the disillusioned youth of the United States. ‘’Berserk’’'s pages were scanned and shared via UseNet posting boards, with handwritten, and often errant, english translations scrawled in the margins (documents known as "scanlations"). Upon the release of the manga's anime version in 1997, the hacker/rap collective Konami Dream fell under ‘’Berserks’’' mesmerizing spell. The group's new producer, an ambitious pop whiz from suburban Long Island named Kevorkian, obtained an illegal Berserk VHS dub and set to work sampling, or "chopping", loops from the Berserk OST and other related material by its composer, Susumu Hirasawa. Meanwhile, Konami's trio of rappers put finger to keyboard, composing a flurry of lyrics exploring themes like predestination, existentialism and, in colloquial terms, sticking it to the man. Upon completion, the group distributed the mixtape via a process known as "Hotlining" - cryptically uploading the audio and artwork to the recently launched Hotline Connect, a streamlined successor to the Internet Relay Chat, or IRC, community (essentially, the internet's version of Skid Row). Nestled amongst Hotline's bastion of darknet drug sales, pornography, and illegally traded .mp3 files (say the dot lol), Konami's ’’Berserk!’’spread like wildfire. The mixtape's final track, a poignant ode to the series’ protagonist Guts, found legs beyond cyberspace's underworld, receiving local airplay and, reportedly, causing tension within the group.
Kevorkian and the rapper LKA Hades, hoping to secure label funding, departed, setting to work on the macabre, John Carpenter-inspired "Hellraiser", an LP of dense lyrics, bombastic production and - to its own detriment - endless waves of expensive and unclearable samples.
#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.
#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.