Door 7 / Show 8In America today, anyone can engage in spiritual
surrender. Performing the rite is simple: one first gathers with their
community in a room of mirrors (in peripheral vision these mirrors
appear as windows). Next, the agendas, hopes, and grievances of each
individual are written down and cast along pulsed radio frequencies to
data centers. From here they are automatically sifted through a neural
network of graphics processing units, and contributed to an artificial
intelligence engine. The principal aim of the ritual is to preserve
the cosmic movement of collective perception. Secondary aims include
catharsis, prosperity, and (occasionally) procreation. Because of the
persistence of social stresses and mounting political dread, the
ritual’s cyclic performance is necessary (twice daily, once at dusk
and once at dawn).
Paradoxically, even those who question the efficacy of this tradition
must do so from within the same framework, in the form of status
updates, tweets, or blog posts. In the early part of 2017 Noah wrote:
_ _“This is our voice. The Aether. An invisible platform. A maze of
wires and boxes safely containing our proclamations… While white men
with pens close their doors, stuff their ears with cotton, and break
the world... we piss in the ocean… we drown in white noise.”
(Once upon a time, Noah Gundersen poetically sang that the storms
which make us tremble also “fill our organs up with
air,”...allowing us to sing “honest songs”. What of our songs
now? Are they just piss in the ocean? White Noise?)
A longtime fan responded via Facebook, referring to the entry as “a
goddamn dumpster fire of a post”.
“Your early records are masterpieces,” he commented, “...but
this scramble to be anything but what your parents are is killing your
authenticity.”
Authenticity can be a fickle mistress it seems. Noah has been peddling
sincerity and introspection in musical form for almost a decade; songs
that give listeners a taste of the emotional nectar in the pit of
another human’s gut. He’s been dredging up viscous fistfulls of
his own being and shaping them into little waxen votives, candles
meant to illuminate the territory between shameless confession and
hopeless redemption, for all of the other twenty-somethings who’ve
been groping around in that long existential shadow.
At some point this whole process must have lost its charm. It was two
years ago that Noah, like some artistic ouroboros, began to sing the
words _“__Am I earning the right to live by looking in a mirror?
There__’__s nothing more sincere than selfish art?__”_ The cyclic
ritual of self-induced nausea, staring in the mirror mouth agape,
waiting to wretch new words and sounds, was catching up with him. Not
long after, in the early part of 2016, he sat down for a show and felt
like he was dying.
“Instead of my life up to that point flashing before my eyes, it was
my future. A future playing songs I didn’t believe in... pouring my
soul out into a vehicle I no longer recognized or loved.”
Noah turned to a fellow songwriter, who shared this mote of
reassurance from dancer and choreographer Martha Graham:
“No artist is pleased... There is only a queer divine
dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us
more alive than the others.”
This crisis was an opportunity for the serpent to relinquish hold of
its own tail, for forward motion. To turn his gaze away from
reflection, and maybe instead at the mirror itself, alternate voices
and distorted perceptions that throw their weight onto the human
psyche in powerful ways, but evade expression in introspective
storytelling.
So, that’s _White Noise, _I think_:_ the fluorescent glow of queer
divine dissatisfaction. The distorted buzz manufactured by dumb metal
phalluses thrust into a vacuum of waves and signals. It doesn’t
dwell on (and in fact seems uninterested in) introspection. Not a
guiding light. Not the reasoned problem-solving of the ego, but the
muddled demands of the id. It’s a myriad of interpolated signals,
symbols, and voices, like a tube-TV greedily flipping through channels
on auto-program.
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10/11/2017 Last update