The Black Paintings, Big Day Out, Gold Coast, 22/1/12

Having taken it this far, I could hardly say no, so I palmed off commitments and hopped a last minute red eye east for the BDO. We overcame heat and ditzy navigation to locate the venue, where we multiplied passes like Jesus did fishes. Once again, the Hare Krishnas rescued us from the alimentary (if not spiritual) poverty of this declining festival. War-painted and alert, I paired milk crate with smoke machine and tucked myself behind the string section for the last march of the Adler Junior 12.

Its key seriality barred fist mash poetry and demanded that thinking be sequenced and lucid. Nooked together, we accumulated black holes of egoism and nihilism, consumption and extinction, of eyes and gullets and guts. I tied a bracelet of apologies to the page, proceeded with an apophatic calligramme. Watching from behind a canvas being painted prompted a meditation on art as nonknowledge. Forget reciprocal visibility—here now there is only a shadow painter conjuring viewers’ abjection.

The show was brief and furious, a finale awash with triumphant relief. Dual drummers modulated dangerous tempos. Impromptu set changes syncopated energies. Diminishing worlds were enlarged by operatic heroics. Cosmic static amplified temperaments as hordes without and within clamoured for brain time. We wet machines responded as we could. The last spectral setlist included “The Truancy Collector”, “Riotmantic (The Suburban Adventures of the Bristol Zoo Lion)”, “Opera Man vs Bedlam” and “Capitalingus.”

Glad of the opportunity for conclusion, I farewelled the typewriter, its owner and his kind, and an idle superhero chauffeured me to the border in easy quietude.

The Black Paintings, The Bakery, Perth, 19/1/12

I spent this serendipitous home town gig winding down with my oldest friend and brief bandmate over a few pints under the vigilant and sexually aggressive eye of security. We talked music and old times and therapy fodder, about getting back into instruments and the lot of vocally deficient lyricists. By now having characters, themes and an ergodic format, I spent what I thought was my final show documenting images and auras when I wasn’t simply enjoying immersion. The band shredded through oppressive heat and Trash in drag sang through injured ribs. There was interactive audience foldback drumming and a “Hong Kong” pause you could smoke a cigarette in. Eventually rain rescued the hiply sweltering mob, and we were wistfully ejected from the venue and taxied home to pike like old men.

The Black Paintings, Tuggeranong Alliance, Canberra, 12/1/12

I arrived in the capital at a commandeered church for the opening song and its scornful apology. The keen all-ages audience slamdanced in the front row pews. There were readings from the Gospels according to Cave and Molko, and a fiery sermon preached on the pocketwatch pericope from the Book of Alice. We interpreted the signs of the times and invoked the Holy Ghost. Comfortable now with my objectives for each gig, I penned notes in tranquil sobriety: on perceptual isolation and the Ganzfeld effect, on a virtuosic practice of spontaneous cheironomy, on the noise of life since the end of history. After an energy drink communion, the moon led me home, and when I got there, a cracker down the oval was setting off fireworks.

The Black Paintings, Factory Theatre, Sydney, 11/1/12

Pre-show, I party-listened to the album, The Revolution is Never Coming. Under wind-dragged leaves and airliners with no sense of occasion, the participants (among them an OGTRP cog-sci professor) listened and painted and broke into spontaneous grins. Long in the making and finally forthcoming, this is a genuine work, of life and art, about change and stasis, refusal and creation, invoking technological mythologies and delirious experiences. It had me thinking about redemption; their uncostumed soundcheck layered that messianic aesthetics with a vulgar burlesque flourish, before the ideas that remained were Shanghaied by a maniacal mashup.

The show hit hard with blows to the ear and eyeball. I defended with reflex writing. Lone instruments braved silence before the relief of accompaniment. Unhelped by smokeless lasers, a barrage of notes and colours fought for spacing between primal deprivation and sensory overload. Ticking clock picking synchronised motion and horizons of perception. The reverb speakers received radio transmission. Crystal structures formed and thought walked synapse tightropes. I dreamt of cosmonautical adventures as canvases danced and aliens “versed” ninjas. All the while I struggled to make out the muffled screaming of a protagonist drowning under tides of perspective and editorial paraphernalia. Yes I had been drinking, and on an empty stomach. Fossils and meat were painted. The phantom set took in:

• Syllogism Defended
• Cheer Up, Emo Kid’s Mum!
• Birthed Death
• The Aging Process
• Turn the Page
• Come, Ragnarok, Come
• Whorls
• Mad Whorls
• Chinese Century
• Looking Glass Shards in my Eye
• Diluvian Pneumatology
• CO2
• March of the Warmachines
• Covering Make-up with Bruises

The Black Paintings, Blush Nightclub, Gosford, 10/1/12

Tonight, I painted. Ebonised and alien-attired, I emerged during “Dead Adults” to take on an empty black canvas, wary of nearby deadly brushstrokes. Well aware of my limitations, I went for minimalist mixed media collage, keeping to simple symbols and typewritten text. While my (un)read painting was ultimately botched (or, more politely, unfinished) I did manage to draft the first few propositions of the Tractatus Synestheticus. And the experience was singular, an attunement of textual themes to contextual tunes in an intensification of pressure and focus.

On the train home, with my painted face ice breaker, I buffered teenagers performing a visceral reading of the Art Ninja’s painting from a bloke near the end of a three day bender. The acrylic took some scrubbing. After, there was no sleep, just a back porch come down vantage on scrounging possums and circling bats, note taking until the kookaburras laughed in the dawn.

The Black Paintings, The Hi-Fi, Brisbane, 7/1/12

Things were looking up. Brisbane promised to finally deliver a real show, and the awesome zinester Jeremy lent me a typewriter on which to document its aura like a Byron Bay new ager. The drive back up had allowed more ideas to filter, so when the band emerged from behind a curtain (having elsewhere set up in the theatrical depravity of full visibility) there were more trails than I had brains to follow them with. The Adler Junior 12 demanded I focus; aided by the music, I set about transcribing smuggled security footage. Meanwhile, a “Hong Kong” pause broke clocks, and Opera Man cut sicker than pestilence. The ghost band setlist included the crowd favourites “Measuring Yourself for a Casket” and “Dancing through a Maze with No Exits,” as well as the “Judgement Daze” cover. We alternated driving through the night, and by the time we arrived home a work had emerged with a coherent set of questions: What are the black paintings? Who was the black painter? Who were The Black Paintings?

The Black Paintings, Australian Hotel, Ballina, 6/1/12

For those thinking, you don’t need to drive 10 hours to watch a band in order to write a story, well, sure. You can instead then drive just 2 hours and do it. Though it turns out, you don’t need the gig either. On this particular day almost a year out from the floods, after an afternoon’s elaborate set up and encostuming, the skies opened up and drowned the stage. Not even the phantom band picked up pick, bow or stick. This left me plenty of time to question what I am doing in less obsessive circumstances: seeking situational perceptions; broadening and refining technique; exploring the interplay of sensory and artistic modalities. Our night above the pub amid heavy storms and paint leavings was as fruitful as any performance. By the end, I had two scenes, and had fixated on synesthesic transcendentalism and the primordiality of blackness as themes.

The Black Paintings, Elsewhere Bar, Gold Coast, 5/1/12

Paranoia consists in irrational connections. For some, like Dick, it’s organic or chemical, while others, like Dali, cultivated it through self-imposed method. Here, the cluster of circumstances (this being the first go at an admittedly crazy activity; not having reintroduced myself prior to the performance; my location squashed in a couch by the stage, where crew were constantly climbing over me to fix a string of equipment problems; the numerous technical issues plaguing the set, such that it was almost abandoned after three songs) produced a paranoid state—am I getting in the way? do they even want me here?—which my own impulsive attempts to cultivate (sneakily believing this attempt at control would quell them) in fact only intensified—really, the paranoiac-critical method? What sort of wanker are you? This ain’t the thirties any more… What the fuck are you doing? Or maybe it was just the $3 vodkas. In any case, despite not quite achieving a delirium of interpretation, pen on paper amid this systematised confusion produced a number of absurd and irreal images and crystallised the project’s central problematic: how might writing relate to music and visual art? The forged Black Paintings setlist left behind included “Seventh Generation Sinner,” “Coming Second on Sale of the Century,” “Hospital Incinerator” and “When Death Died.”

Our sleep was comforted by the flashing blue and red lit balcony window, as stories below Surfer’s performed its nightly ceremonial dance of cop cars, ambulance and tow trucks around a crashed car and its committed onlookers.

Writing experiment: The Black Paintings Tour

The Red Paintings are currently touring their SF and Dada influenced orchestral art rock. Amid the music, their heavily visual shows feature artists painting both regular and human canvases. The themes of this tour—The Black Paintings—are the black holes of the universe, world and self. I am participating as a fiction writer in seven shows, hunting percepts, experimenting with technique, and intensifying compulsion.

“legends of another kind …”

As a tribute to the retiring biblical gigantology blog Remnant of Giants, I offer this passage from pp. 13-14 of Henry Howorth’s The Mammoth and the Flood: … after which he indeed goes on to collect, in his confessedly compilationist manner, the references to giants in Pliny, Plutarch, Philostratus, and other Greeks and Romans, as well as Augustine, and more modern sources such Kircher, Cuvier, and Figuier, by way of introduction to his “survey of the gradually increasing knowledge by which the true character of these remains was eventually determined.” (27)

Annual behavioural assessment

As a result of my naughtiness, I now possess a copy of Howorth’s 1887 disquisition on proboscidean palæontology and diluvial Catastrophism. Try to contain your mammoth jealousy.

Bird’s Robe Records showcase, Annandale Hotel, 22/12/11

Pirate set off a controlled detonation of frenzied jazzy prog, led by groin-lubricating sax and amp-blowing guitar each prone to impersonate the other. Like the soundtrack to an M. John Harrison detective story, where a hieroglyphed body waits under neon and a cloud-covered moon. They make me want to be a barman taking travellers’ confessions in a smoky portside rum den.

Meniscus performed grand acts of cosmic rock; from a sturdy rhythm section launch pad, a frantic mix of effects pedaled into stratospheric live-mixed visuals. Like the soundtrack to a Poul Anderson space opera, where an earnestly soaring astronaut takes in the majesty and mayhem of dying and birthing stars. They make me want to be an alien sentience—an extraterrestrial or scientist—observing the evolution of life and stricken by the astrophysical sublime.

sleepmakeswaves constructed intricate instrumentals of organismic percussion and involuted guitars, with the only vocals private stage screams. Like the soundtrack to a Michael Chabon novel, where a kid’s pop culture obsession helps him negotiate the turmoils of his parents’ breakup, hypersexed college in wartime, and eventually his own students’ transitions to adulthood—as a new species of humanity. They make me want to be a kung fu guru performing high wire knife acts in a late 21^st-century travelling circus as cover for my superheroic crime fighting activities.

“eradicating every animal dimension of the human – in particular by doing research on immortality.”

Weary of the actual world’s abnormal wildness, the disputants turn their attention to possible transhuman futures. “A rather fair way of characterizing the great majority of posthuman trends is to consider that they have definitively taken the side of the machine against the animal in order to conceive the human being.” (Journey to the End of the Species, p. 6) Thusly do Bardini and Lestel contextualise the search for immortality that their decryption of Guide to Singular Metamorphoses demonstrates will have succeeded within forty years. Or, as the post-singularity Nexii state in their “manual for nexial self-configuration”, “The idea of sharing my conapt with little sapiens gives me the shivers… may as well live in a zoo!”

The demonstration continues throughout the 64 prophecies interweaved with philosophic and acerbic commentary. Carried away by an experimental urge, the zoöeschatologists follow GenCorp’s instructions to candidates and, after some meditation, update the commentary on Claude of the Milieu’s 177 AS suggestion that “we can scientifically create new organized species, … [that] have not yet been realized by nature”—the commentary being that “nature is incomplete and we have the means to compensate for that insufficiency. … The Nexus corrects God. … A good expert”—with these words: “And these experts are among the most advanced, erudite and spirited modifiers of human and animal nature one could imagine. A most self-affecting and multihued swarm. And yet the most lonely. May A Thousand Species Blossom! And die.”

Opeth, Enmore Theatre, 16/12/11

As its cover art of a flourishing tree nourished by roots in hell suggests, Heritage is a departure even for the progressive Opeth, a marked maturation from the screamed intensity of death metal into a more melodic sound full of nylon and organs. I took in their new show from the Enmore balcony intrigued by how this transformation would play out. The set opened as does the album, with the swaying broken chords of “The Devil’s Orchard”’s anti-religion and the moody shifts of “I Feel the Dark”’s Romanticism. They played a half-dozen new tracks, including the mellow and jazzy “Nepenthe,” the Dio tribute “Slither” and the game soundtrack chant “The Throat of Winter.” Older selections featured more acoustics and less growls, such as “Face of Melinda” and “Credence.” Åkerfeldt was charmingly chatty throughout, introducing crowd favourite “Porcelain Heart” (which also featured an extended Axenrot drum solo) with an amusing anecdote about its video pageantry. While the gig was inevitably marked by the resentment of certain punters craving old school metal, the frontman confronted it head on, defusing the tension with a good humoured yet robust confidence in the band’s aesthetics and experimental ethos. Yet the music made its own case, drawing the rusted resisters along with its fusions of bluesy metal, heavy folk, occult psychedelia, shifting from calm passages to metal energy, from extended entrancing instrumentals to clean and mystical vocals. “A Fair Judgement” journeyed through ten minutes of despair and hope to a glacial drawdown. They closed with the landmark prog metal of “Hex Omega,” before encoring with the deeply-rooted groove of “Folklore,” which opens by asking “Hey you, will you be true,” and outros with the question: “Will we sustain?” Tradition demands revolution, and this band’s vigorous attitude to its heritage is emphatically fruitful.

“you would have had something here worse than any oil spill in this country, …

“worse than I could even imagine. … it’s a tragedy for the animal world is what it is. But it could have been a bigger tragedy for the human world. … The most magnificent creature in the entire world, the tiger is. … But if you had 18 Bengal tigers and everyone running around these neighborhoods, you folks wouldn’t want to have seen what would have happened.”

Thusly did a suicidal Ohioan amateur zookeeper recently loose his exotic animals on a public media-primed for panic, as if to fulfil the therological dreams of riot observers, and worse, the predictions of overzealous policemen. A tanned man in khaki leapt before the cameras to hyperbolise the threat. An impressive inventory of such beasts as provoke an “Oh my!” became an impressive kill-list and cameos in deputy’s anecdotes. The message is as clear as ever: leave the menageries to the professionals.

The disputants remark how quickly impotent welfare concern becomes shoot-to-kill tyranny when the beasts’ sovereign owner self-sacrifices and wildness is uncaged. Some propose the ironic reading of a passage from Jungle Jack’s autobiography, but the learned gathering declines so as to slow Hediger’s grave-spin. One notes that a viral monkey escaped. They nod and murmur; they have heard that one before.

With swarm

Last weekend I convened a second workshop on the history, philosophy and future of ethology. The first day’s programme weaved anthropology, ecology, ethology, geography, and filmmaking, and culminated with a performance by Undine Sellbach, philosopher and author of the enchanted The Floating Islands, of “A Whirlwind of Insects: Mistress O and the Bees.”

Best anecdote ever

“People who play jokes are also very stupid and on April Fool’s Day—which fortunately only comes once a year—men and women who happen to have the name of an animal—e.g. Miss Bird, Mr Bear, Fish, Lion etc. are asked to ring a certain telephone number, which is the number of the zoo. In the smaller zoos this may mean that the whole day’s work is wasted in the office. Over 100 calls of this nature were received by Zurich Zoo on 1 April 1964. In a previous year I tried to warn everyone with likely names by an announcement in the press; the net result was that the number of these senseless calls was if anything even larger than ever.”

Heini Hediger, Man and Animal in the Zoo

And the waters prevailed

Shit’s been turned up to 11 for a while now.

Wonder what happens at 12.

11/11/11

Another auspicious date. This time it isn’t binary for the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, but something much more important: the temperature of the perfect coffee. There will be the usual weddings and nerd parties. Some will have labour induced or even hail Caesar to improve their child’s numerological (if not natal) fortune. The Great Pyramid will close to avoid esoteric rituals.

Many will take a minute or two for remembrance of the Great War armistice, and wartime casualties in general, or possibly of sacrifices for our ungratefully enjoyed freedom and liberty, depending on the reactionary quotient of one’s memetic cenotaphery. Yet it takes a certain insulation from the aftershocks of trauma to snoot so comfortably at nationalistic hijacking. A while back, the eldest had been playing Call of Duty on his XBOX and asked his grandfather how realistic it was. Watching some of Damien Parer’s documentaries online, they were stunned to discover, left of screen at 3:12 of The Assault on Salamaua:

—their father/great-grandfather at 21 in his upturned slouch hat, of the 2/3 Commandos, engaged in the jungles of New Guinea. A piercing simulacrum.

Hale Halloween

May all your guising be genteelly gothic.