From: Jed@pHreak.intermedia.co.uk (Jed)
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-construct 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