New Musical Express : 9 April 1983
SOUND STALKERS
Maniac cab driver Chris Bohn takes you on a ride to the terminal zone with the New Zealand / Chinese alliance called SPK Pics Peter Anderson
Where to Mister ?
Say don't you know that's a No Go area ? What do I mean No Go ?
Well, Mister, ha ha, you'll hear soon enough. Like as you'll not
hear it before see anything. Listen out for the drumming and
you'll know you're getting close. Not just any ordinary drumming,
mind, more the raw noise of metal beating metal. Then there's
these really odd chants, high pitched Chinese voices and low sub-vocal
moans, and - here's the worst squeals the sort of which
must've been squeezed from electronic gizmos.
The funny thing is it gets to you after a while, against your
better judgement, like. Specially when the sun comes up and then
the noise seems really appropriate to the environment; if you get
my drift.
It keeps drawing me in, though some cabs refuse point blank to go
No Go. The others have taken to call me Stalker, aftre
that Russian picture, ha ha. What does No Go look like ? You'll
know soon enough, it's spreading fast.
Ok, ok, keep cool I wasn't trying to upset you.
Well, No Go goes something like this : it's full of crumbling
buildings, broken down churches, factory ruins, vine seeping out
of window sockets. Kinda eery. Unemployed people still haunt
these places, shuffling between the ruins of their home and
workplace. Just out of habit I guess. Someone forgot to tell them
we've gone post industrial. Ha ha ha. Anyway that's my theory.
Yeah, yeah, all we cabbies got a theory about something, but mine
sticks better than most.
You can tell by the graffiti you'll see, which'll tell you some
of the ghosts are trying to make sense of it all: Einsturzende
Neubauten - that's Goiman for Collapsing New Buildings, what'll
they think of next ? - Test Dept, Throbbing Gristle, Foetus and -
get this one ! - Legendary Pink Dots ! Seems the dispossessed
down this way are dissatisfied.
Just recently I picked up this faded sign I hadn't seen before,
but going by it's age it must've been round some time. SPK,
it read, and right next to it Beating the violent and
primitive heart of a controlled post industrial society !"
Caught my eye, that !
So I felt of honoured when I took a pair back No Go the other
night and they turned out to be this self same SPK. Odd looking
they were, too. He was tall, coated in black and talked with an
Australian accent. "New Zealand," he corrected.
New Zealand ? Say we don't get many of your kind down this way.
What's your name fella ?
"Graeme, and this is Sinan, she's from China."
China ? Red China ? Hey, how'd you meet ? In Sydney, Australia ?
Well, tell me Graeme, what does this SPK stand for ?
Now this is where it gets a litle complicated. Nothing, he
said, but it sure coincides with plenty, like System Planning
Korporation, the US chemical weapons development division. It's
also the signature of a Japanese war poster propaganda artist.
You better close your ears for this one - Surgical Penis
Klinik. Another's Se-Ppuku, Japanese for ritual
suicide. He seemed kinds taken with that one; cheerful ! There's
also Sozialistische Patienten Kollective.
"Our first single was a homage and a parody of them,"
this guy Graeme says. "They were a group of patients in
Heidelberg who made the decision to break out of the situation in
which they found themselves. They chose the terrorist route,
rather than the aesthetic route and they proceeded to organise a
working circle for bomb making for Baader Meinhof; they had these
slogans Bomb for mental health ! Kill for inner peace!
"They were rather hippy, I think, ha ha. Extraordinary. They
were always a bit mixed up really, and they eventually blew
themselves out because they had a short concentration span. We
were just commemorating that attempt to get themselves out of the
shit they found themselves in."
Aren't you guys getting yourselves in a bit heavy, I suggested to
Graeme, concerned - he seemed like a nice guy - all this talking
about taboo stuff, mental health, terrorism ! Turns out, though,
that he's no dilettantish dabbler, as he's talking from
experience - he was a psychiatric nurse in Sydney and formed SPK
back in '78 with a schizophrenic patient who was interested in
punk. Remember that?
"We tried to start up a musical expression of both the
positive and negative sides of our predicaments. That is, he was
a prisoner an I was a jailer and there was no way round it. I had
to stop him running away, give him drugs to dampen the positive
expression of the energy he retained...
"Being in that environment, what with its false sense of
calmness and reasonableness, was like being in a microcosm of
social control.
"I mean, society sees these areas - mental aberration, non-normality
as deviant, and we're to say it's not. Where society tries to
normalise the thing, we try to use the energy back against
society in a positive way..."
Lost ? Well, let me try and explain : whichever society you're
in decides what is normal and what is likely to disrupt the
social order. So in America it's the drunks and in Russia it's
the dissident. In both cases, they'll be locked away and/or dealt
with, lobotomised. The lucky ones will be treated leniently as
eccentrics, made stars out of.
"Star deviants I call them," kids Graeme. "We're
always careful not to sensationalise criminal insane figures like
Manson, Jim Jones or whatever, because that's exactly what the
system does, it produces star deviants, and says, Look at them,
we're right (to lock them away).
"It's an error to fetishise, sensationalise these people.
What is important is that Mr Smith, or whoever, is in a mental
hospital. We're trying to express they're not a deviant
phenomenon. But it's not just people in mental hospitals, it's
all the strange so-called marginal people in this society who are
kept out of creative spheres.
"All the time this media society forces us and our like into
limited areas, the margins, where you can't carry on. Then you
feel depressed and want to give up and that's exactly how it
works with mental patients and groups like us. We can be
destroyed so quickly."
Now, Graeme he went on quite a bit, expounding on a new dark
age, in which light is shut out by an information overload
: that is; we're being bombarded with so much information it's
impossible to make sense of it. At the same time we're being
desensitised by it. The end effect is the same as in a more
rigidly controlled and restricted society; we're being kept in
the dark.
And Graeme, he's smart enough to know anything SPK feeds in only
adds to the information overload.
"Which is why we say our strategy is catastrophic. It
doesn't work to try and overthrow any system. Society will
eventually have to come to terms with all these signs all round
it. We're just trying to speed up the process. That's all you can
do : try and insert yourself and your ideas into society and try
and take it to the limit, try and explode it, and hopefully
something better will come out of it. We claim that our strategy
is both catastrophic and symbolic, insofar as we're not prepared
to go out and commit violence, be a terrorist or whatever. But
you can in some way operate as aesthethic terrorists, use the
violent signs of the system in the symbolic sense, use the
violent signs of the system back against it..."
Well, Mister, that's quite a mouthful for a short taxi ride.
And Grame, being a relatively sober-minded individual, was
concerned that I might've missed the point, so he wrote me a
letter, clarifying things, which said :
"Our music is a new kind of expressionism. It is taking
things at hand - elements and materials from work and leisure -
and converting them into an object for your own use. Drills,
grindeers, motors, bones, burnt out vehicles etc. With them we
express internal and external conflict between a clean, well
ordered society and the brutal reality of the efficiency of its
repression to seduce us and normalise us. We are the expression
of the energy needed to break out of this claustrophobia."
You might consider that outburst to be a touch hysterical,
Mister, but listen to this tape he gave me of a 12" they're
bringing out, called 'Dekompositiones'. Absorbing, exhilirating,
even.
Now you've heard it, you still wanna go No Go ? It ain't no disco
! Great ! Hop in !
*('Dekompositiones' will be available shortly on Side Effects records via Rough Trade, as will the LP 'Leichenschrei; hitherto only available on import. There's also a good live tape 'Last Attempt At Paradise' available from Fresh Sounds, P.O. Box 36, Laurence, Kansas 66044, USA)
