nettime: Dead By Dawn

[Jed@pHreak.intermedia.co.uk (Jed) (by way of Pit Schultz <pit@contrib.de>)]

DEAD BY DAWN
Explorations Inside the Night by TechNET

Track * : Resisting the Present
For no apparent reason  circulating  mists of noise and body music rise up.
This is a space-between, a squatted building  re-used as a site of becoming.
Neither here nor there but re-appearing at angles like groove notations in
the run-off of a record. This is an interspace impervious to categories and
explanations, not telecommunicatively cleansed with messages and signposts.
Here, as track mixes into track miles away from the rave cathedrals , the
building becomes an urban socialisation zone where dancers form collages of
variable states of mind that connect into collective arrangements. Where
there were limits and the gridlock of time and money, now rootless packs
accelerate into suspension as mouths move into silence. Sensation ripens into
experience and experience engenders intensity. An all night party. Shrouded
accounts. Inconclusive evidence. A  group-enunciation that refuses to speak
for others and claim the last words when what is sensed can't be explained.
It's like trying to re-contruct a snowstorm

Track^  Each Party is the End of an Era     
An all-night party developed and over-inflated: these parties were never
intended to be a stepping stone to a commercial venue, they were motivated by
a desire to waste, to squander energy for its own sake alone. A collectively
activated desiring-machine that was intent on inspiring itself. It was never
about seeking abstract and disconnected audiences, instead Dead by Dawn acted
as one more event-horizon drawing together malcontents....Making it happen -
but just to the side. In the bar area an Electronic Disturbance Zone was
installed, an anti-ambient zone that re-sequenced and cross-phased with the
dancefloor below. In any one session this zone could contain the abrupt
mixing of different sound installations; drum and bass concoctions with
sub-noise experimentation, future sounds with early techno progenitors. A
Fucked Meshing. A party that always began with an assembly of the invisible
college: an haphazard grouping that formed connections and traversed a
movement across the dogmatic and the non-logical,  that resisted fixed
conceptions and the big freeze of zombie culture. Meetings that ranged from
'smashing the literary establishment' to 'tactics,psychosis and techno
contaminants', from 'ruling class conspiracies' to 'autonomous print
creations'...Each party is the end of an era - something to take and use.

Track </l> :  Wall of Surf
Like sleepwalkers more attuned to energies than to comprehensions, dancers
collide in semi-darkness. The music heard escapes itself, its melodies are
subsumed by rhythmic urgency. A wall of sound. A  space-between, a vibrating
expanse of shade removed from the fixed points of capture and private
certitudes where shifting de-tuning cadence produces a group effusion, a
relationality of sounds that dissolves ego-ice. Like a foreigner at home lost
in the complexity of what goes without saying, dancers become others, become
open to detail and ride the digitised relays as these weave into several
amplified break-points, to peak and replenish the overlaps and machinic
permutations. An all-night party. An immaterial event. Loosing it and eluding
it. Surfing the mental geography of  voluminous sound ...suspended between
tracks and entrances like dancers engineering journeys through
micro-perception.

Track  # : Interview with a Borderline Personality
"I don't know who I am right now, it's like there can be no 'I', that's just
a fucked way of conforming to some outmoded construct, like declaring
ourselves mono-dimensional, potential members of the monologue of power that
can't see the connections, that can't go on a schizo-stroll. You know, the
schizo-stroll is the most political of things, you see connections where
there aren't supposed to be any, you see how meaning hinges on the sensuous
desire to inhabit whatever it is you're trying to give meaning to. You can't
sit still, you can't be pinned down...so you can't give answers, there can
never be answers and that's why those clean, over-produced records are just
conforming consoles, fixated, and finished and polished...You've got to get
out , get strolling, get connecting, come up with more projects than you can
possibly begin to think of...never finished, never started, keep moving,
become others, stay ahead, or what's more to the point, stay just to the
side."

Track * :  Art of Users
Powerloop:  Perceiving the multi-effect of people coming together in groups
where there is a greater chance for creativity and disturbance,
interconnecting networks of power and counter-power are detected moving
within and through us: possibilities arise for disarranging and dissolving
the fixity of binary signals and one way commands...The users operating
within these networks develop minute tactics and ingenious mechanisms to
sample and re-process these power loops: an art of manipulation, invisible
games unknown to the pre-programmed and overproduced. "Zombiegroove":  If the
end of a party marks a point of return to the daylight world of the living
dead it is the psycho-social inspiration of the parties which resists zombie
culture...whilst the Re-animators of Inherited Identity continue erecting
landmarks to loneliness these parties discard the romance of marginality,
creating counteractives to enforced isolation by being for themselves in any
moment whatsoever...users disappearing inside crowded  nights.

Track <;>  : Subterranean Gatherings
Peeling paint, dodgy electricity, a flooding toilet and holes in the floor
boards created by rats...You change all the time...there are sounds that cut
across the inter-space between drifting conversations and barely apprehended
thoughts, the space between excessive drug use and secret passwords to gain
re-entry...You perceive something...maybe a basement dancefloor with silver
walls reflecting speed-emotion, or a crowded entrance where people relay
anecdotes, improvising and  responding to a three-storied building resonating
with the soundtracks of endless mixing...You recall something...a stumbling 
into radiance with no consideration for the limits or the inevitable fall to
ground, maybe moments of intoxication when thoughts flow unblocked through a
skull with a thousand mirrors inside. Nobody knows where you're at, not even
you...it's like trying to guess how many cigarette butts decorate the bottom
of plastic bin-bags after each party, or following the alignments of empty
beer bottles scattered like random co-ordinates over exhausted
furniture...You sense what you can't explain. Walls imprinted with memories.
Patterns left in a lost zone...

Track ~ : Retina De-Programme
A regular feature of Dead by Dawn is the visual stimulus supplied by the
Nomex Realist Film Unit. Monitors are placed around the building and
specially mixed videos play in loops and cycles. Rather than act as a
soporific calmer these rapid-fire digitally scratched images pulse to the
beat and oscillate like strobes at  rates resulting from studies into
frequency weapons and mind machines. Stealthily re-patching 'live' footage
and disparate documentary sources these videos reverse the effects of
subliminal seduction creating fractures for psychic drift as multi-layering,
masking and filtering induce associative links and subconscious probings.
This image-mix and pixel-spite acts as a  depth-charge and like sound waves
the images are in movement, always dissolving and always in the process of
being formed.  Colours flicker across the retina. A visual analogue for
sounds never seen. 

Track HvK : 1810 - The Power of Music
It was a sound something like that of leopards and wolves howling at the sky
in icy winter. I assure you, the pillars of the house trembled, and the
windows, smitten by the visible breath of their lungs, rattled and seemed
about to disintegrate, as if handfuls of heavy sand were being hurled against
the panes. At this appalling spectacle we scattered in panic, our hair
standing on end; leaving our cloaks and hats behind, we dispersed in all
directions through the surrounding streets, which in no time were filled by
more than a hundred people startled out of their sleep; the crowd forced its
way through the door and downstairs, seeking the source of this ghastly and
hideous ululation which rose as if from the lips of sinners damned eternally
in the uttermost depths of burning hell...I looked out the window at walls of
moonlit cloud rising beside us as though we were at the bottom of some gray
and ivory canyon, hung above the moon-smashed sea..I suppose that the reason
that I want to close on a consideration of these words is that the moon-solid
progress through high, drifting cumulus is - read them again - at the very
opposite of what we perceive on a liquid's tilting and untilting top...Or
perhaps I merely want to fix it before it vanishes like water, like light,
like the play between them we only suggest, but never master, with the word
motion. Track S.R.D. : The Motion of Light in Water, '60-'65



All tracks recorded by TechNET April 1996 for Dead By Dawn, the 23rd party...
contact: jed@phreak.intermedia.co.uk




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