Dionysian Industrial Complex

The rational world dissolves into a chaotic soup of fakeness and disinformation. Surveillance is freedom. Conspiracy is knowledege. And politics is the plaything of “hyperleaders” : anarchic outsiders, who paradoxically leverage social media blitzkrieg into authoritarian power.

Artists turn to dystopian science fiction for, maybe solace, maybe a vocabulary to express their horror and bewilderment at the present-shock we hurtle through.

A new arrival to the Dionysian Industrial Complex is djalgoritmo, a live-coder working exclusively in Tidal Cycles, the state of the art music programming language hybrid of Haskell and SuperCollider. His beats are a glitched texture of hissing, deep throated gurgles, fluttering clatter and spectral choirs, punctuated by stabs of synth bass and 808s.

On this epic EP he tells a dark story in collaboration with established Dionysian Industrial artists Biophillick and euFräktus, The trio explore a nightmare world bricolaged from the exploded fragments of dark science fiction movies.

Biophillick, the “real” Biophillick, is a techno-shaman channelling the cosmic forces of nature. But what is a shaman to do when trapped in the bowels of Metropolis? In the torture chambers beneath Airstrip One, in the aftermath of yet another World War Terminus? This Biophillick, the Biophillick of }bio{borgs, wanders through an underworld of electric sheep, where Furbies and Pokemon must substitute for true animal familiars and Anchimayen. Indeed, we struggle to determine whether this “Biophillick”, his lyrics a free-associated thoughtstream of unravelling techno-babble, might not himself be a failing replicant.

Meanwhile, euFräktus, picks up a sitar, like a reanimated George Harrison, and is transmogrified and transubstantiated. He ascendeds to become cosmic drone, a black Om-sound, drenching the ruins with background radiation.

djalgoritmo’s beats become distorted, birdlike whoops and drums pulverized by reverb. Biophillick stops to converse with an atomic beetle, in all its Kafkaesque helplessness. A conversational sound-world of rasps and clicks and thunder and bursts of static. Overdubbed with Bio’s fat laments.

But is Bio engaging with nature? Or wantonly pulling the wings off another artificial lifeform?

A Nexus 6, tripping on melange, in the pursuit of “more life”, finds himself in a spice trance. Now the sitar becomes more driving. A riffing protagonist. Locking with djalgoritmo’s accelerating, half-dancing, half-military, beats, into a travelling groove. A cosmic escalator or space elevator lifting Bio on a last journey. Escape velocity from this flattened Earth to a wider universe, accompanied by Furby’s warbling and trilling song.

Away, beyond the Heaviside Layer. To Arrakis. To join djalgoritmo and euFräktus’s nomad war-machine in clairvoyant jihad against the drug-lords and trolls of social media. Bio becomes messiah. One day, he will return.

A new phase of releases on Dionysian Industrial.

We welcome Phillip Häxan who produces murky darkwave pop : slick indigo, coral and deep crimson digital arrangements, slathered in lo-fi gloom and topped with Häxan’s own disturbingly wobbly and processed baritone vocals. A Pete Murphy minotaur, wailing sorrowfully, as he shuffles through the endless dark corridors of his labyrinth beneath the sea.

This one-off single starts with a burst of bright digital harp, briefly illuminating the shadows. Before being engulfed again by rolling waves of arpeggiation. We hear dusty footsteps of percussion. And the distant echoes of the minotaur’s bellows and roars of pain, multiplied through the tunnels.

The minotaur’s heart is broken. His confidence shot. He struggles as to whether to allow himself brief flares of hope. As shoals of indefinite but polychromatic lead-synth swim by, momentarily re-illuminating the hard repetitive musical geometry of his twisted world.

River of Electrons returns to Dionysian Industrial Complex with an exercise in personal archive resurrection.

Chiptunes and retrocomputing references are now an established part of the electronic music scene. But Rapunzel is slightly different. As RoE explains:

These short sketches and exercises were composed on a BBC Micro using the MuProc (Quicksilva Music Processor) when I was a teenager back in the 1980s. Somehow I managed to still have a copy of the disks from that time. And, on finding an emulator for the BBC Micro that ran in my browser, it was actually possible to run the software and play back and rescue these tunes.

The fascination for me today, 30 years later, is to try to relate to and understand the individual who created these. These are obviously juvenalia. Sketches and half-baked experiments with harmony and counterpoint. Unfinished and unpolished. But what intrigues (and sort of terrifies) me today is the ambition. This is music made on software without the Faustian bargain of looping, or even copy-and-paste. And so every note is played by hand. And every bar is different. Motifs are repeated, but either due to ineptitude (playing the wrong notes) or design they continuously evolve and mutate. Time stretches and shrinks, tunes are harmonized against different counter-melodies or riffs.

I can identify the influences from the music I listened to then, perhaps more clearly today than I recognised at the time. A mixture of fragments of my very rudimentary classical music education, the minimalist 80s synthpop I listened to daily, some plangent folk melody, some slightly bluesy cadences. Not actually much “videogame music”. I played games with the music switched off. And at the time there was little sense of game music as a “genre” or something worth paying attention to. The biggest influence of all, though, is Russian ballet music. Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet and Stravinsky’s Firebird are the two examples I was listening to heavily at around this time. And so the odd idea of writing a ballet based on a folk-tale seemed quite natural. As did the short, spiky rhythmic motifs.

Back then, I was oblivious to what is now an obvious absurdity : trying to make orchestral ballet music on a chip that supports three channels of square waves and one noise channel. The sounds are simply harsh, high-pitched bleeps with little variation of timbre. For the current recording I’ve run them through some EQ, echo and reverb to make the sound just a little bit sweeter and softer and less tiring to listen to. And the echo gives everything a slightly twinkly, “Christmassy” feel.

The echo / reverb is probably overdone, but I decided that I’d apply one effect uniformly across the whole album rather try to vary it with the different pieces. This is not meant to be a new remix / remaster or recreation of the original. But a neutral rendering of it. Just made slightly more listenable.

Finally, I should note that about 60% of the music here was explicitly for a ballet called “Rapunzel”. The rest are sketches from around the same time that seem to fit the right mood. I’ve pieced the various fragments together to make what starts to feel like a more coherent whole. So this is, in some ways, a modern reconstruction.

Listening today, in 2018, Rapunzel is an alien music from a distant and disconnected past. Even if only a personal one. This music is uncanny because it is both so very like, and so very unlike, our idea of “game-music”. The chiptune quality of the sound is inescapable. But there are no manic arpeggios hyper-sequenced impossibly fast. This is not the sound of Nanoloop ravers like Droid-On. Nor even the hipster glitch aesthetic of, say, Super Madrigal Brothers.

Instead this is naive and plaintive romanticism. A music of moping and mournful sighs. The theme of a girl (or solar goddess) locked up in a tower by a witch (wicked? or just very protective?) is surely the archetypal teenage boy’s fantasy. A Gothy, angst-ridden saga.

But today we note that it’s also a classic trope of the 80s videogame. What, after all, is Jumpman’s fight with Donkey Kong, or Mario’s quest in the Mushroom Kingdom, but an update on the mediaeval theme of “Attack on the Castle of Love”?

Given that Exu has a sometimes fearsome reputation, Victor Hugo’s invocation of the Orixá is remarkable for its economy and subtlety. Even though the music contains expected elements such as drumming, ritual incantations and bursts of electronic noise, there is little bombast or gratuitous “exoticism”. Rather, this music is an efficient, functional mechanism to open portals to other planets. Terrifying not because of any melodrama; but because it might just be working.

Victor Hugo understands that the drumming is a “carrier wave”. Not a sequence of staccato pulses. Or even a matrix. But a rich, roiling undulation that can be modulated with strange and surprising messages. Frequency modulated, pitch-bent and bitcrushed, flanged and filter-swept. The music is overloaded with a superposition of symbols : a pretty xylophone, a detuning ancient guitar, dented bells, bursts of radio-compressed voice from the bush of ghosts. You can’t quite determine what this alien language means, but you know that, through it, someone is speaking to you.