The Convulsion Factory

The Meat In The Machine

There is no such thing as repugnance. Everything is a simple matter of context, and how much you’re willing to accept. How far you’re willing to go for your own aesthetic of beauty is only a factor of commitment, and the only one that matters.

Kevin and Anthony and I arrived in Chicago two days before the first show of the new tour — Josef would follow — to settle in and make sure there were no problems with the stage design, and give our road crew plenty of time with the initial set-up. The theater management was cooperative. Smaller venues usually are. A 5000-seater, it was probably the top end as far as what we could ever expect to sell out. We would never fill anything much larger. This is the price of shunning the commercial, and cultivating your disciples from among the underground. It’s their fervor that sustains you when you start to think no one else is listening, and no one ever will.

“Has he checked in yet today?” It was the first thing Kevin asked me when he came knocking after we got back to the hotel that night. For some reason it was my room that got designated as the communal area. I think I understood: Kevin and Anthony lived like pigs but wouldn’t generally inflict it on me. Concessions to the alleged fairer sex after all? They would deny it to their graves.

“There was a message,” I told him. “He said he’ll be coming in tomorrow night for sure.”

“Call him later?”

I avoided that one and moved about the room. Here and there lay fetishistic objects I seemed unable to leave behind whenever we toured, my favorite being a shrunken head impaled on a long, crude nail of the type used in Roman crucifixions. I had cut the stitching across the head’s lips and pried open the tiny mouth. Dark and wrinkled as a prune, blind and wizened, it seemed to sing.

“Wonder if he’s still in much pain,” said Kevin. “At least he’s bound to get some good scars out of it.”

He shucked his leather cyclist’s jacket and lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Sweat glistened, jewel-like, in the cropped black stubble of his hair. We’d been lovers once, in terms of the act itself, if not the emotion. It’s always easier to detach when you go at it like machines. You just disengage.

This was before Josef, after whom nothing could ever be the same. Some of us seem naturally to addict ourselves to obsessive types. It reduces the world to a certain attractive simplicity.

“I wonder what he sounds like now,” was all I could say.

On the bed, Kevin started to say something, found it wasn’t there after all. He shrugged and was the first to look away, and I then knew: Something had finally pierced his shells of leather and grime and dogged survivalist ethic, and left him cowed.

It meant I was stronger … and that was information in which I could revel.

MANIFESTO: In the late twentieth century, the territorial war has become an anachronistic holdover, on the wane as an effective tool of control. The battleground for control in post-industrial society is informational. Information has become the new international currency, the new holy grail. Covert wars in private as well as public sectors are fought over information, with murders, assassinations, and saturation propaganda all viable means to desired ends.

This we understood. Know thy enemy.

And of information, on ourselves, we have plenty…

*

From B-Side Magazine, February/March issue, 3 years ago:

“Your confusion’s understandable,” says Josef Jaeger.

That’s a relief.

“Not a whole lot of people pick up on the significance of our name. It used to bother me, but now I just take it for granted.”

So says the vocalist/lyricist/psychodramatist behind hardcore industrial quartet The Giger Sanction, whose first two releases have solidly established them as worthy contemporaries of such bands as Skinny Puppy, Ministry, and Nine Inch Nails, while also bringing to mind middle-period Swans.

Now, about that unusual moniker?

Explains Jaeger, and one gets the feeling he’s run through this a few times: “Most obviously, it’s a reference to Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger, and that entire biomechanical world his paintings depict. He did the original creature and some of the set designs for the movie Alien, but that’s just a tiny fraction of his work. Is it flesh, is it metal? His work’s always creeped me out in the best way possible. But our name’s also a play on words from the title of the Trevanian novel The Eiger Sanction. I read that when I was in junior high, and it had a big impact on me. The main character was a professional assassin named Jonathan Hemlock. He was so ruthless when he had to be, he could just completely dehumanize others. I think what I was responding to, what I found the scariest, was that when you read it, you root for him.”

Apparently more than a few people wonder what connection this has to the dense, eardrum-rupturing sound of The Giger Sanction and its apocalyptic lyrical content, not to mention the frequently gruesome stage spectacles. Not to worry. One gets the feeling Jaeger has often explained this too.

“Modern society is breeding sociopaths at a rate higher than it’s ever been. We definitely believe that. And dehumanization is everywhere you look. Sure, you have obvious examples — mass murder, the military/industrial complex — but it’s in the ads for your breakfast cereal too. Those commercials don’t care that you’re a human being, they take for granted that you’re some kind of meat machine and then try to push the right buttons. People are getting torn in two inside, because they’re expected to function in a world where everything’s progressively more mechanized, but they’re still human beings. We don’t try to make sense of all that, we just look at it really hard.”

“At its heart, what our music is,” says Jaeger’s bandmate and paramour Jasmine Snow, “is a wake-up scream. Wake up and smell the corrosion.”

Which makes them prophets of gloom, doom, and apocalypse?

“Definitely. Hell yes,” says Anthony Newman, but with a wicked grin that suggests he gets a thrill out of the world just as it is. “I mean, when you look like us, and there’s still lots of streets we’re afraid to walk, you know there’s a big problem.”

The Giger Sanction must surely win some minor award for their physical transformation between debut and sophomore releases. The liner photo in their first album, Virtual Neurality, doesn’t do much to distinguish them from any of several anonymous techno bands, decked out in colorful rave-wear. One look at the photo in their new CD, Acetylene Torch Songs — not to mention the band in the flesh — suggests that in a year’s time, they’ve undergone an evil metamorphosis.

Leather cycle and bomber jackets abound, on top of commando pants, unwashed T-shirts, and combat and Doc Marten boots. Jaeger sports a head of crusty white-boy dreadlocks. Jasmine Snow, the Sanction’s primary keyboardist, has sidewalled her own scalp, the remainder braided into sharp-looking, whiplike rat-tails. Both guitarist Kevin Lanier and Anthony Newman, who handles electronics and percussion when the Sanction isn’t propelled by a drum machine hammering hard enough to shift continental plates, bare menacing skulls shaved within a millimeter of skin. This crew looks as if they stepped out of the post-holocaust wasteland of a Mad Max film, and frequently come across as grim as if all they have to look forward to are lives spent sweating over the foundry in a steel mill.

“Oh, that,” says Jaeger, uncomfortable with the comparison to a Mel Gibson character. “It wasn’t really anything calculated.”

“If anything,” Lanier adds, “we’re more comfortable now in whatever we project. We quit caring. That makes everything so much easier.”

Says Jasmine Snow: “It just seemed a mutant outgrowth of the direction our music started taking.”

One listen to their two releases supplies all the evidence needed to back that up. Virtual Neurality is sonically the smoother album, heavily reliant on synthesizers, sequencers, and a few samples of caustic unnatural sounds. All of which are present on Acetylene Torch Songs, but this time deeper in the mix, combined with the frenzy of Lanier’s grinding guitar and Newman’s sledgehammer drumming. It all blends into a devastating wall of beautifully ugly noise. Live on stage, it’s as dense as a wrecking ball slamming you in the chest.

This time around Jaeger promises a visual presentation worthy of the music. “Our first tour, we opened for Ministry. Which was great, but when you’re the opener, you’re limited as to what you can do. This time we’re headlining in clubs and small theaters, so we figure, why not make it memorable, in a visceral, propagandized way. I wear a headset, so I’m not chained to a mike stand, and I spend the first two-thirds of the show wandering around the stage, doing an autopsy on myself. The special effects makeup’s pretty intense. I tear out the pieces that we perceive modern society to be minimizing in importance — say, my heart, for instance — and I put them on various altars. Then for the final third, I go gathering different pieces from the junkyard onstage and putting them in me, as replacements for everything that’s missing. Gears, wiring, tools of control. Like, one of them is this oil-dripping videotape.” He pauses, looking a bit sheepish. “Well, we kind of stole that one from the movie Videodrome, but it works so well with the overall concept, we like to think Cronenberg wouldn’t mind.”

Just in case you need an excessively high level of visual stimulation and tire of watching Jaeger go through his breakdown and reconstruction, all of this is played out before a backdrop screen on which they project a constant barrage of imagery: Nazi propaganda reels, combat footage from Vietnam and Desert Storm, news video, films of grisly medical procedures, once-classified documentation of weapons testing, films of primitive tribal body modification, pornography out-takes and bloopers, a collection of political assassinations captured live as they happened … there’s no telling quite what’ll show up at any given glance.

Jaeger smiles cryptically. “Think of it as a party tape of all the stuff that fascinates us.”

Jasmine Snow freely agrees. “We admit it. We’re total pervs.”

*

We used the next day to take in the Museum of Science and Industry. When in Chicago, do as the tourists do. Kevin got an especially enthusiastic charge out of the jarred display of fetuses in various stages of growth. I could see his mind at work, running through an idle exercise, figuring out how to steal them.

“I could shoot a picture with me in the middle of them all,” he said, “and send out still-birth announcements.”

Anthony picked up on this. “‘However, the proud father regrets to announce that he doesn’t know who the mothers are.’”

“They’re better off here,” I told him. “You’d just end up abusing them.”

I still had them on my mind when we got back to the hotel that evening, these tiny orphans, neither alive nor truly dead. They did have lives of their own, of a sort, floating placidly, their embryonic and fetal oceans their entire worlds as the older ones seemed to reach toward ours with delicate waxy fingers. I didn’t even know if they were real or not — probably they weren’t, just lifelike rubber dolls — but I found that didn’t matter. I felt sorry for them and I loved them, and most of all I was jealous of the potential they represented.

Fetal tissue is so adaptive, it can become anything. That’s why doctors find it so easy to work with in restoring the bodies of those who made it past the womb, but left room for improvement.

It can adapt to anything.

Even the cool, hard, metal skin of technology?

I’d have to see what Josef thought of that. I doubted this small revelation could have spared him all his pain, but to me it was intriguing to ponder. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Josef had claimed that the body becomes malleable when the mind reaches a certain level of cellular and spiritual awareness, but I’d half-suspected that he’d just gotten carried away with the special effects from our earlier tours.

Oh, me of little faith.

*

From Alternative Press, August issue, eighteen months ago:

There’s something about success that breeds its own menagerie of demons. It’s never enough for some people, regardless of how hard they appear to have worked for it. There’s always something more just beyond reach, a continual reenactment of the predicament of a certain mythical Greek named Tantalus.

“It depends on how you’re measuring success, doesn’t it?” Jaeger mutters, and he seems so distraught I hardly have the heart to press the matter. When I suggest we continue the interview tomorrow, he impatiently turns a thumbs-down on the idea. “Things won’t be any better tomorrow.”

He’s an unlikely candidate for such existential angst. Ticket sales have been brisk for The Giger Sanction’s upcoming tour, and their third and latest release, Cudgel, is making a surprisingly strong showing on the charts, currently within 100,000 units of going gold. No mean feat for a band whose sound is abrasive even by most FM college radio standards, and whose image is decidedly unfriendly to the likes of MTV. Ironic, since their own in-concert video productions are passionate, technically precise excursions of extremity into what the medium was originally designed for: the transmission of information. Indeed, this is a band that seems successful in spite of itself.

Lest you think Jaeger’s attitude is that of one more crybaby artiste bemoaning his being misunderstood by the mainstream, you couldn’t be more wrong. He truly does not care. In fact, Cudgel seems produced with the intent of alienating even more listeners, rather than embracing newcomers with a watered-down version of the attractions that got them noticed in the first place.

Cudgel takes the Sanction’s penchant for grinding intensity, then marries it to a renewed emphasis on percussion. The disc teems with a rhythmic tribal pounding as they make use of not only traditional drums, but such found objects as sheet titanium, high-impact plastic hazardous-material disposal containers, and 55-gallon oil drums. The effect is both hypnotic and ominous, and in evoking primitive echoes resonating from the refuse of the modern urban wasteland, it’s brilliant.

But is it enough for Josef Jaeger? He seems the least satisfied of anyone.

“It’s nothing new,” he explains while slumped over the table, heedless of the cigarette that’s about to burn too close to his fingers. “People treat it like it is, but that’s only because they have no sense of the past. And when they treat us like we’re coming up with something new, all that does is make me feel like a fraud. All these elements, they come from somewhere else. Look at some of the earliest industrial acts, from the mid-seventies on, and you’ll find them. Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Z’ev, Einstürzende Neubauten … they were the real innovators. They were the pioneers. The only advantage I have over them is being born later, so that I’m working in an age when I’ve got a marketing machine behind me that turns whatever I do into an automatic commodity.”

I suggest that he’s seeking a sort of legitimacy for himself, an area that is uniquely his. Something that — dare I voice such an empty cliché? — no one has ever done before?

He brightens faintly and finally does something with that cigarette. Only now he’s waving his hands around and I fear he’ll set one of his dreadlocks burning, like a fuse. “Who doesn’t harbor the desire to push the envelope? Everybody in this world who’s really forged ahead with something nobody’s ever seen, you could probably fit them all into one house. What makes it so difficult anymore is the hyperaccelerated evolutionary speed that affects everything. Now everything advances in increments, day by day, or week by week. You hardly ever see that huge leap anymore that leaves everybody’s jaw dragging the ground, and they’re screaming, ‘Shit, where’d that come from?’”

Since I can take for granted that he’s ruling out such leaps as a cure for AIDS, or voice-activated steering for emission-free autos, I have to wonder what leap he feels qualified to make.

“Oh, I never claimed to be qualified for anything. But … are we fantasizing here?”

Sure. Why not.

He stares thoughtfully at the ceiling. “What we’ve always been most interested in, in nearly all its permutations, is human potential. Just because we focus artistically on the most heinous potentials that have been realized doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to build some sort of linkage that would be positive, constructive.”

A linkage?

“Creating something in the spirit of a hybrid realization between technology and the primal humanity that’s our essence. Humans have to come to comfortable terms with technology, because right now it’s allowed to be the enemy, but a benign one. Machines can outlast us at every turn, and we’re killing ourselves trying to keep up. Everybody’s sleep-deprived and we’re paying for it in reduced efficiency and horrible decisions. Disasters like the Challenger explosion, and the Chernobyl nuclear accident, and the Union Carbide gassing in Bhopal, India, and more train wrecks and plane crashes than I could name … you know what they all have in common? Somebody, somewhere, without any sleep, trying to maintain a machine’s pace rather than human biorhythms.

“It’s a war of attrition, and all I’m saying is there’s a middle ground somewhere that nobody’s really occupying. What I’d like to do is harness the Cartesian philosophical construct of ‘the ghost in the machine’ and give it a new meaning in the struggle between meat and metal.”

Any ideas?, I ask him.

He doesn’t answer. He just sits still and lifts his hand and watches me watch the cigarette burn toward his finger. It’s an excruciating moment when I realize he’s not going to snuff it out, not even when the skin reddens and blisters.

“I used to not be able to do that,” he says. “It proves I can change.”

*

My name is Jasmine and I’m an addict … one who wants never to change. When Josef arrived at my door, weary from his flight from Switzerland, I let my addiction take control once more. I never realized the full depth of the pain of our separations until the moment we were reunited and I realized what was so incomplete about myself.

Beneath a week’s beard and the dark blond serpentine locks of his hair, Josef’s face was beatific, enraptured.

“It works,” he said.

“Tell me this was worth it.” I clutched him by the arms. “I have to know.”

He dragged me to the bed, and as we kissed with the fever of a month of our lives lost, we stripped away each other’s clothing. We stretched out upon the wide hotel bed, pale and naked, our hair like whips as we consumed one another.

I drew back up to my knees and ran my hands along the thin, suffering rack of his body. Still red and fresh-looking, the scars were symmetrical, up and down each limb, and in twin rows along his torso and back. They weren’t much larger than the welts writ upon one another by Africans practicing scarification as a rite of passage. I put my mouth on one. It tasted hot and raw, and I imagined that against my tongue I could feel it pulse.

“You look beautiful,” I whispered, hoarse and weak.

There’s something puny about an unadorned body. Such a body is, without clothes, more naked still. It’s why we needed our piercings, our tattoos … to lay claim to the last thing we owned that the world could never take from us or tax.

“Get your practice amp,” said Josef.

I lugged it over from the corner where it sat with one of my smaller synths that I would bring into hotel rooms. I yanked the patch cord from the synth’s output and handed the plug to Josef.

When he was ready, I turned it on.

Our arousal was, I think, born out of a delicious fear more than anything. Like the first time we made love after Josef had gotten his ampallang piercing, a steel post through the head of his cock. Or after the time I’d gotten a ring through my clitoral hood. This was no different. We had no idea what to expect, we only knew it would be momentous.

I caressed him, lovingly, gently, and from the practice amp rolled soft waves of sound. Thunder from a kiss upon his thigh, earthquake from a grip upon his arm. I straddled his outstretched leg and dragged my cunt along it from ankle to hip, and the air itself swelled with sound … each distinct but overlapping, an evolving glissando of a world’s end.

Josef’s hands on me, urging me on, I stretched out atop him as I might my own grave. It was like swimming across his flesh as it buoyed me. There could never be too many points of contact, for each had its own voice, and when I impaled myself upon him and we strained with flailing limbs and wet mouths, I heard the throats of an infernal choir drowning out my own cries, and all I could think of was what if we were onstage, with fifty thousand watts of power at the other end of our union.

*

From Spin, December issue, two months ago:

For a lot of disgruntled urban and suburban youth, industrial music picked up where punk left off, after it burned itself out or softened into New Wave. The appeal was basically the same: atonal noise, pounding rhythms, inhuman energy, frequently indecipherable lyrics expounding a bleak world view, often sung in a garishly distorted voice.

But a funny thing happened to the industrial revolution: it got mainstreamed. Which is the way of all deviant pursuits, and that it’s happened should surprise no one who’s ever tuned in to MTV and seen Johnny Rotten acting as guest VJ. Sounds and rhythms that smack of industrialism have shown up on recent releases by such unlikely converts as U2 and Suzanne Vega, and even Nine Inch Nails copped a Grammy, albeit under the Heavy Metal category.

On the eve of The Giger Sanction’s fourth release, which goes by the unwieldy title of Liturgical Music For Nihilists, it seemed a fruitful idea to check in with Josef Jaeger, their enigmatic and troubled front-man and theoretician, for his views on the state of the art and how the Sanction is coping with industrial’s being co-opted by seemingly anyone with a yen to cut a dance track. One listen to an advance tape of their new release caught my ear as a departure from their in-your-face sound. While no less unsettling, it would seem that the band has decided the most subversive route they can now take is — can it be? — subtlety.

SPIN: Why the sudden vector away from the path you’ve established?

JAEGER: I don’t see it that way. I see the new CD as a synthesis of all our prior experiments, with new elements incorporated… just like we’ve always done. On the surface, it’s got a quieter approach, I won’t argue that, but deep in the mix it’s all there. There’s a lot of grinding and clanking going on in the background, but more subliminally, less overt. We went into our sessions to record this with a motif written on the studio wall: “Ritual hymns from decaying cathedrals of rust.”

S: When you put it that way, it does sound like you’re coming from inside a hellish church of some sort.

J: What we wanted to map out with the sound is the collision between, say, the human spirit and harsher mechanical realities. Plus, it’s a veiled reference to the human body as a temple, and its decay.

S: Which is a topic you’ve become notorious for exploring onstage, in some of the most graphic ways possible.

J: Considering what’s coming on the next tour, you haven’t seen anything yet.

S: Can you give us a hint?

J: Not really, it’s still in the planning stages, but it works in theory. I’ve found a … well, let’s say technician, in Switzerland, who’s not afraid of taking some of my more outré ideas and trying to actually implement them. It’s not so much of a visual effect as a way to interface with the audience. Totally. While at the same time creating a new sound source.

S: Considering your usual candor, this is sounding very secretive.

J: You’ll understand why when we unveil it in Chicago. I’m so excited about it I’m pissing down my leg right now.

S: And that’s all you can say about it at this point?

J: (after sigh and long pause) If it means that much to you, I’m calling it the “Human Resonance Chamber.” But don’t print that.

*

For the first night of the tour, all four of us went to the theater to watch our support band from the wings, then withdrew to the dressing room to nervously await our turn. We remained oddly quiet, as if realizing that tonight marked a turning point. We — Josef above all — would be viewed either as messiahs or lepers.

I’ve never claimed to wholly understand the way his mind works, or what compels him. Or what drove him to Switzerland to meet with a renegade surgeon whose obsessive fascination with the human body and its sonic potential equaled his own. My only claim is that, bathed in the glow of it all, I sometimes feel very humbled.

Such faith Josef had, that his flesh would not reject the implants studded over his body. But why would it? Millions must be walking around at this moment, skeletons held together with metal pins, or plates sealing broken skulls. The body adapts. Metal is coated with blood and tissue, and incorporated. Insulated wiring integrates along muscle like a new kind of artery.

The body embraces.

And bone conducts sound with eerie ease.

Twenty minutes to showtime, I took him in my mouth, tasting steel and his sex, and thought I could hear the humming of his blood.

And when we took the stage, our places were ordained by our function in the machine that the four of us became. The curtains parted and angry red lights burned and five thousand throats rose in one mighty cry of welcome. And we were a collective god … the god out of the machine.

They saw us integrated within a setpiece of ruin, amid rusted mutant pews that would never again hear prayers from pious lips. Meat rotted atop a blasted pulpit, and our projection screen hung between corroded cathedral arches that housed shattered stained glass, while across the screen itself, herds of central Europeans from a half-century past marched to the gas chambers in grainy black and white.

The drum machine and Anthony’s kick bass slammed in sync with a dirgelike pounding that shuddered the stage. A latched loop from one of my keyboards chugged away with a sound of distant oil pumps, while I called up a wailing wall of pipe organs in anguish. Kevin’s guitar spat caustic chords. Spliced through it all were audio cut-ups of savage modern prophets exhorting their countrymen to jihad.

And from the wreckage at center stage, he rose. A hydraulic hinge lifted Josef up, up into view, lashed to a twisted cruciform fashioned from old discarded television aerial towers. Skin along the backs of his arms and elsewhere had been pinched and fed into tiny breaks sawn in the metal rods, so that in several places he looked skewered in place.

With distorted voice, he chanted the faithful to Mass:

“Fathers feed on daughters

mothers feed on sons

and you will feed on emptied wombs

incubate in scraped-out tombs

with maggots thy kingdom come.”

We never broke between compositions — we segued. We never spoke informally from the stage. The medium was the message, and there was nothing we wished to impart that wouldn’t translate better from the speakers and the screen.

We were into an extension of the third piece of our set when the hydraulics ground into motion and lifted Josef, then swung him forward and down, an offering to the crowd. Red and blue spots tracked him, descending into a sea of reaching arms.

I watched, I played on, as Josef tore free his arms, then broke loose a number of foot-long sticks affixed to his platform. Most he dropped to the crowd around him. He kept two.

And, in tribal rhythms he began to play his own body.

It was totally improvised. I don’t even believe he yet knew which place sounded like what. But into the density of the mix he fed … the sound of meat, and machines.

Just within reach, the clamoring horde took their cue, now understanding, then took up their bludgeons. I’ve always found it amazing how strangers will naturally fall into sync after several beats, no matter how complex the polyrhythm. Entrainment, it’s called, and it gives me faith that despite our alienation, we are connected after all.

Cudgels flailed, and Josef’s sweat cascaded. He opened his mouth and out roared a feedback wall of unearthly voices.

The horde surged around him, and where there were not enough bludgeons, hands sufficed. He rolled his head back to face me, and across the burning mists of the stage our eyes met. He’d never looked happier.

And I knew, even if they tore him limb from limb, each piece would continue to sing its own song, from deep within its throat of bone.