Distort Tokyo
Distort Archive: A 20K word poem / spoken word in Tokyo with Iceage, writing on Deathside, David Bowie, Down&Out, Milk Music/Mystic100's
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This is an extract from a book compiling all the better parts from Distort mag. You can read more from the series below.
Foundation subscribers to the Reverse Evolution substack get a lifetime sub to the Distort PDF Archive, or you can purchase that separately here.
DISTORT #53 (2018) a collection of writing from 2017-18, published in in other underground music magazines and books, liner notes for records, or hate mail to distant nemeses, including an introduction for B. C. Trogdon’s photo book RNR FOREVER, writing on Bowie, Sleep live in Melbourne, Nick Tosches, Death Side playing live in Melbourne, Milk Music’s Mystic 100’s.
Distort #53 is dedicated to Iceage and Haruka / Big Love Records who invited me to do a reading in Tokyo that the writing for this issue was based on.
Cover ikebana / photo / text by Haruka Hirata.
Cover design / Rixe poster / drawings James Vinciguerra.
You can get a PDF of this and all Distort issues here.
From the intro text:
“You are at home alone trying to read
or you are at work attempting to perform complex surgery to extract a tumour from a child’s throat
or you are at a drain rave
or in a room full of people on meth watching a hardcore band
or buzzing at an art opening in your best outfit observing bubbles of urine float around the room
or in a lecture at school learning of the Russian response to Rihanna
or you are a grim pervert in a claustrophic public transport tube
or a lone savage walking your pet pig along the backstreets of your town
you are writing an important report for your employer
or in an elevator between floors
or you are standing at traffic lights waiting for the little green man
or you are at dinner with the love of your life waiting for a proposal
or on the toilet or in the shower or in the kitchen
or giving birth to triplets in a well scented bathing pool
or you are drunk in a new model land rover speeding down the highway and
oppressed by the tedium
and you are anxious because it’s 2018
and you are nervous because it’s 2018
so you pull out your phone:
There is a photo of a skinhead with an ACAB: ALL CATS ARE BEAUTIFUL shirt in a queue at some kind of fan convention to get Harry Potter books signed. The caption the skinhead writes is a single emoji: HEART BREAK.
There’s a photo of a poached egg with green dust all over it and a piece of thin meat that looks like a crayon next to it, and underneath @killthepigs has written can’t wait to eat this poach eg lol
There’s a meme featuring a photo of Sakevi and Kim Kardashian, a reference to a TV show you’re not familiar with.”
In 2018, I did a couple of spoken word performances in Japan and they were utterly disastrous. My friends from Iceage were going to Japan to play a couple of shows, and they were asking their friends to support them. They asked an artist to prepare some art, they asked a cook to make a couple of sandwiches to feed the crowd, and they asked me to do some spoken word and to read poetry.
My first instinct whenever I'm asked to do anything involving spoken word or anything performative like this is to run. This makes me very nervous. But the week that they asked me, my mum got arrested. I was diagnosed with skin cancer from a piece of cancer on the side of my head about the size of a 50 cent piece. I returned home to find my girlfriend at the time had taken all my possessions and thrown them out in front of the house in the rain.
So nothing intimidated me or frightened me or made me feel nervous after that. It was very easy to see myself standing on a stage in front of people reading a poem. At the time, I was working on a long piece of poetry and I was really happy with this idea. It was something that was quite fruitful and I really enjoyed working on it. It was based on some reading that I'd done into neuroscience and the effects of social media on people’s brains.
I just wanted to understand what was going on. This was about the time that I was experiencing a great deal of disconnection from the people around me, and constant dramas were breaking out in my own friendship groups and basically everywhere I looked, that were based on social media. It was having the most dreadful effect on the capacity of people to retain their sanity.
I was just seeing it escalating. I wanted to understand why. I did a little research into the effects of absorbing that torrent of images—what that effect had on people's mental health. It turns out, as you could probably guess... that it is really stressful for the brain to view in rapid succession a series of images that have no relation to each other.
Before Instagram, Facebook, etc., you'd have to go to a museum and physically walk through a space, or you'd have to pick up a book and physically flip through it, or run down a street looking at billboards and ads. But the point being, you were still oriented in some kind of physical space and your body could make sense of it, and your brain didn’t get so overwhelemed. But with the advent of screens and television and cinema, and then the acceleration of the iPhone, it made it even more surreal and absurd.
To illustrate this and kind of contrast it with the effects of having a phone: if you're going through your phone and you see an image of a woman standing and then a woman lying in bed, you might make the narrative that the woman got tired and went to bed. Then you see a woman standing, you see a glass of milk, and then a woman in bed. You might think that that woman got tired, she had a glass of milk, and then she went to bed. Then you can reverse it, and the woman was in bed, she had a glass of milk and woke up.
Or you might throw an image of Kanye West in the middle, and at a stretch you could say the woman was asleep, she dreamt of Kanye West, drank a glass of milk, and woke up. Or flip it around: the woman was awake, had a glass of milk, thought about Kanye West, and went to bed.
But throw in a pug with a Santa Claus hat on it. Or a sandwich. Suddenly the narrative link between things becomes really obscure. If the same woman doesn't reappear in bed, your brain is continually looking for some kind of way to make sense of it. Like some kind of symbol. And this can cause quite a bit of a cortisol boost.
The most media literate people today are able to handle that stress, and the least media literate people experience a great deal of stress and anxiety when they're overcome with the flood of imagery.
I wrote a poem about this and was basically just describing images that you might see if you were a young person somewhat affiliated with the music scene in a major city in 2018. Our aptitude in hunting comes from our capacity to recognize signs and symbols in the environment and create narrative out of them. It has made us into apex predators, but it's also made us into psychopaths when it comes to a torrent of images that have no relation. So I was attempting to create a poem based on this, and the idea was basically a torrent of description of images—not the images themselves, just descriptions.
Images you would see if you're on your phone as a cosmopolitan inner-city dweller. The idea I had was going to Japan, at the shows that I was performing. I doubted that anyone was going to be able to understand most of what I was saying. I'd been in Japan. There's not a lot of English being spoken there. It's pretty practical English. So I assumed people were just going to pull their phone out their pocket while I was talking.
I was writing a poem to disrupt the flow of those images going into their heads. Even if they didn’t quite understand everything I was saying, certain shapes or colours and sounds might make sense and disturb the flow of that narrative ingestion.
I got to Tokyo and I talked through the plans with Iceage, the idea was that I’d get on stage and start the poem: “You’re standing in a concert hall waiting for Iceage to start. There’s a handsome man holding a microphone and he starts to read a poem to you. So, you pull out your phone and...” At that point, I escalate in tone and delivery until it is just a psychotic barrage of images.
After 15 minutes, Iceage were to come on stage and the end of the poem was something along the lines of: “and then you see a live video of Iceage at a show in Tokyo, they are walking onto stage, they plug in their guitars,” at which point the noise disrupts the flow of the poem, much like an iPhone dying or someone pulling your phone forcibly out of your hands to prevent you from brain rot.
I went out on stage and I spoke. I had written and rewritten and read and re-read and edited this 20,000 word poem for so long, I knew it so intimately that it was easy to slip into it and just recite it like a chant. I felt like I was in a dream. I had no conception of time passing because I didn’t take my phone on stage and I didn't wear a watch. I didn't want anything to interrupt me and my flow except for Iceage getting on stage.
But every time I looked over at them, they just smiled at me and raised their thumbs. And at some point, the people in the crowd started yelling at me in Japanese. I couldn’t understand it, and I assumed that they were telling me that my poem was fantastic and that I should keep reading it. But it turned out that they were telling me to get off stage and to stop because my poem was so good that they couldn’t bear to hear anything more.
And finally, Iceage walked out on stage and they were drunk and they were laughing at me. And I asked them why they were laughing at me. And one of them said, “You just spoke for 45 minutes.”
45 minutes.
45 minutes.
One of the most embarrassing moments of my life. I remember just experiencing the most... terrible chill of mortification run up my spine. When I walked out later on, everyone in the crowd kind of averted their eyes from me and I felt like a non-person. It was so humiliating. It definitely ended any illusions I had that I would be good at spoken word.
I was later asked to do a spoken word performance at the MCA, which I had to cancel because I got extremely sick on the day before. You can listen to this episode of the Reverse Evolution podcast for what happened there.
***
This is an extract from a book compiling all the better parts from Distort mag. You can read more from the series below. Foundation subscribers to the Reverse Evolution substack get a lifetime sub to the Distort PDF Archive, or you can purchase that separately here:
Distort Archives: #7 2005 - Integrity, Abraxas Annihilation, Anton Szandor Lavey
Distort Archives: #8 2005 - h100's, Top Ten Unreleased HC records
Distort Archives: #9 Chris Colohan re: Left For Dead / Japanese hardcore rumourmill
Distort Archives: #10-12 10: Interview with Luke Dolan re: Arms Reach / writing on Schism Fanzine and racial politics and hardcore. 11: Masstrauma / Regulations / Thought Criminals / writing on 60's punk, Warning Fanzine, Peter Laughner, Hassan-I-Sabbah 12: Annihilation Time / Formaldehyde Junkies / World Burns To Death / Pisschrist tour photo diary
Distort Archives: #13-14 13: Extortion / The Mormons / Bill Bondsmen / Voices Wake Us / Cardiac Arrest / Out Cold 14: Cold Sweat / Subversion / The State / Distroy / bullshit on Black Flag
Distort Archives: #15-16 #15: Sex/Vid, Voorhees, Smash N Grab, Disclose / GISM collector scum guide by Spider. #16: Fucked Up / Writing on Clockcleaner, Draft Dodger, Poison Idea lyrics
Distort Archives: #17 Gag Reflex, Homostupids, Puncture Wound, Darvocets... and a couple lost notes on Darby Crash
Distort Archives: #18 (Straightjacket Nation US Tour Diary / Interviews with Condominium, Brain Handle
Distort Archives (#19, 21): #19 - Interviews with Lebenden Toten, Blank Stare, Homosexual Tourists, Napalm Hearts / a Hardcore 2008 rundown / RIP Ron Asheton and Lux Interior *** #21 (2009) - Interviews with Sex/Vid, Shock Values (Split with RATCHARGE fanzine)
Distort Archives: #22 (2009), #23 (2010) #22: Writing on the Christian hardcore of Dry Rot / loads of reviews #23: Interviews with Waste Management, Watery Love, Wasted Time / writing on Straightjacket Nation tour of SE Asia (Indo, Malaysia, Singapore)
Distort Archives #24 (2010) – KVLT SKRAPYARD - Ephemera related to AMDI PETERSENS ARME / ROKY ERICKSON/ LIPCREAM / VINNIE STIGMA / STOP AND THINK / NEGATIVE APPROACH / LARISSA STRICKLAND / THE STALIN / CRAIG SETARI / CHEETAH CHROME MOTHERFUCKERS / DISCHARGE / FLESH EATERS / SEX/VID
Distort Archives #26 (2010) Rikk Agnew
Distort Archives #28 (2010), #31 (2011) - #28: Royal Headache, Lou Barlow, Born Bad, Scarcity Of Tanks, Criminal Damage, Video Disease, No Tolerance, Rival Mob, Home Blitz #31: interview with Iron Curtain, Poikkeus / writing on Flesh World, Inmates, FU's, Black Flag, Condominium, Crazy Spirit, Nightprowler, Waste Management, Sweet Tooth, Royal Headache, William S Burroughs, Dennis Hopper, Siltbreeze, Pisschrist
Distort Archives: #32 (2010) & #33 (2010) h100's / Integrity / Left For Dead / Formaldehyde Junkies / Mormons / Lebenden Toten / Sex Vid / Fucked Up
Distort Archives: #36 (2011) Naked On The Vague / Crazy Spirit / Negative Guest List / Puffy Areolas / Rival Mob / Mike Rep / Billy Bao / Boston Strangler, etc.
Distort Archives: #37 (2013) - Interviews with: Eddy Current Suppression Ring / Brainwashed Youth / Lakes / Bloodclot Faggots / the Inmates / Stab / Negative Guest List Writing on: The Stains / the Kinks / Folded Shirt / Iron Age / Degreaser / Kriegshog / Artificial Peace
Distort Archives: #38 (2013) - Writing on Mugger / Ilegal / CCR / Rule of Thirds / Peste / Absurdo / Holy Terror (Gehenna / Catharsis / Inside Front) / Ausmuteants / Discipline Mag / Low Life / Peacebreakers
Distort Archives: #41 (2013) - Featuring interviews with The Hunches, Night Prowler and Aaron Aspinwall. Writing on Harry Crews, Repairs, Lost Domain, Waste Management, Factorymen, Jackman, Harald Grosskopf, Whores, Inservibles, Vile Gash, Schizophasia, Bits of Shit, Salvation, No Balls.
DISTORT Archives #42 (2013) - Features interviews with Omegas, The Throb, Beastianity, Red Red Krovvy, Drew Gates and NS Mayhem. Writing on E.M. Cioran, Justin Fuller, Oily Boys, Wet Cloth, Soma Coma, Hyperspace Vision, Croation Amor, LR, X-TG / Throbbing Gristle, Lakes, The Clean, Constant Mongrel, U202, Destruction Unit.
Distort Archives #43 (2014) - Dribble / Gutter Gods, Lakes, Puce Mary, Oily Boys, Low Life, Vanessa Amara, Lucy Cliche, Prolife and author S.T. Lore.
Distort Archives #44 (2014) - Dribble / Gutter Gods, Jon Roffe, HTRK, Constant Mongrel, Loke Rahbek, Ray Brassier and Jock Club.
Distort Archives #46 (2014) - Crisis
Distort Archives #47 (2014) - Brando's Island, Justin K Fuller, Moon Rituals, Jess Johnson, YDI, Glue, Blotter, Puce Mary, Culo, Martyr Privates, Goosebumps
Distort Archives #48 (2015) “A tribute to Al Montfort, Snake, who has spent the last decade playing in some of Melbourne's most active underground bands - Straightjacket Nation, The UV Race, Total Control, Dick Diver, East Link and Lower Plenty.”
Distort Archives #51, 52 (2017) Melbourne (Jim McCullough/Civic), Sydney (Orion, Royal Headache, Crime Spree, Nasho, Fatalitas, Bb & The Blips) Queensland (Comrad Xero, Pious Faults, Sex Drive)