Mo*Te ‘Anti Is Anti Is Anti’ C-30 (New Forces)

Fumiyuki Nagura’s time as Mo*Te in the 1990s seems larger in retrospect; constituted by a handful of self-released cassettes and some choice extensions into the small label underground of the time, boosted by selective and highly treasured split releases: in both audio content and packaging those efforts are some of my favourite relics of that time. The work resonates the best features of that era: incessant harsh noise electronics with movement and innate understanding, utterly heavy in delivery and tinged with dark social unease.

Mo*Te’s surprising return in the 2010s has been sporadic but so far without misstep, shifting away from the cathartic insistence of the 1990s work and tentacling into new ideas without abandoning the project’s roots. A recent CD boxset reissue by Industrial Recollections and Audio Dissection collects Mo*Te’s early output on his own Uncut label, and is the perfect realisation/diffusion of the project at its best, also setting a backdrop for new work ‘Anti Is Anti Is Anti’ which casts a long shadow.

A side “Be Lacks Human Feelings” unleashes a brief storm of crisp fury before settling into rather placid waves of electronics, stabilising as a stereo split of two streams of live-to-tape noise which pool around a thudding heartbeat pulse which fades in and out throughout the piece. The focus is on mid-range saturated distortion textures, but flighty filter plumes also flock to the track, glaring from the sluggish grind of “Be Lacks Human Feelings” as its linear textures start to move, weave, and multiply; a few higher waves of fury peak during the piece but they’re quick, falling back into the unthreatening current of the piece. Those peaks of harshness betray the overall timidity of “Be Lacks Human Feelings”, missing the encompassing fervour of Fumiyuki’s 1990s output which the piece seems to want to tribute, but also wants to distance.

The second side is a recording of a May 2019 live collaboration with Freaks Idol, the rugged recording returning caustic flavour to the work but also charcoaling the piece quite severely –  meaning large stretches are reduced to near impenetrable cinder. Heavy flange, shredded feedback and vocals, and singed chunks of the duo’s noise barrage make it out of the tar pit to give the piece strong hints of what I’m sure was a fervent live set, but as with “Be Lacks Human Feelings” – although for different reasons – the collaborative piece misses, more than it attains, Mo*Te’s golden age sweet spot.

If ‘Anti Is Anti Is Anti’ is Mo*Te’s attempt to return to those halcyon early years, in looking back it probably misses why Fumiyuki’s drift into adjacent genre expression was needed. As a hit of regression ‘Anti Is Anti Is Anti’ marks what it set out to do, but doesn’t master the same wide-eyed solvent inhalation-fuelled insatiability which struck ‘Life In A Peaceful New World’ or ‘Taste Die Mad’. Maturation can be a bitch, but pretending it didn’t happen is rarely an option. ‘Anti Is Anti Is Anti’ is not a bad cassette, but it’s not a legacy note for Mo*Te, and not what the project now best has to focus on.

GX Jupitter-Larsen 'Characterized'

Psychiatrist Ewen Cameron ended up being a compensatory and reputational nightmare for the Canadian government, after the behaviourally and psychologically devastating impact of his psychiatric experiments – in part delivered as contractor services to a subproject within the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program – were revealed in later decades (a fate not limited to Cameron, and not the only part of Cameron’s life or practice deserving of criticism). A feature of Cameron’s work was the use of repetitive spoken words, delivered in isolation and as part of an arsenal of techniques intended to psychologically deteriorate a patient – in the undelivered hope that a new construct could then be inserted.

Alvin Lucier’s seminal minimalist work ‘I Am Sitting In A Room’ also realises degradation through repetition, a piece of narration repeated through recording and tape playback, degradation, room atmospherics and frequency emphasis emerging from the process to realise something new from the repetitive process. It may be no coincidence that a classic image of Lucier in performance – used recently on the excellent ‘Illuminated By The Moon’ boxset – makes Lucier up to resemble an involuntary subject.

Both serve as experiential reference points for ‘Characterized’, a piece for radio authored by GX Jupitter-Larsen and which aired on Australia’s Radio National in May 2015 after an earlier airing in the United Kingdom. The piece subverts GX’s entropic intentions to bore away at psychiatric wholeness by the use of its own unstable repetitions of a few central spoken phrases, taken from Chelsea Manning’s testimony as part of the judicial process which led to her conviction and imprisonment for Espionage Act violations. Cameron’s work is part of the MK-ULTRA legacy which continues to inform interrogation ‘techniques’ carried out by America agencies.

After those initial few words provide the unstable point of our trepanered opening, silence, Manning’s text expands from a selection of opening single word repetition to short passages sampled from her testimony and underpinned by extended exhalations of hollow feedback, the content deformed by edited stutter and cacophonous layering, and with doubt clinging to the words as glitch and decomposition take root by operation of GX’s own clandestine techniques. Ultimately the words are unstoppable, their initial probing and hesitancy coaxed on by the smaller repetitions into greater segments, layers and disclosures, ‘Characterization’ ending with a denser selection and longer phrases than the small fragments which opened it.

While the promotional blurb says that ‘Characterization’ was created with the intention of capturing a dream state, its sound creation carries an abuse focused on isolation and degradation through repetition (Anthony Adeane’s book ‘Out Of Thin Air’ explores the intersection of dream states and interrogation techniques and is a fascinating bisection of crime confessions) which is initially more dismal than that description suggests – ultimately triumphed, however, by Manning’s testimony revealing itself in spite of the sonic attacks on her voice which reflect the social, judicial and political attacks on Manning’s name, character and conduct.

The skill of repetition is to locate purpose, something Lucier and Cameron share even if their worlds never collided. GX Jupitter-Larsen does so with ‘Characterization’, the work far more immersive than what its somewhat simple creation would ordinarily carry. My single point of concern is that some background knowledge/context is unfortunately important for appreciation – a listener coming in with no information may only hear repetition and glitch, without the techniques or content carrying the power that GX’s choice of character imbues in the piece. A power of radio is the excitement of discovering the unknown, turning the switch to hear something new and undeniable. While ‘Characterization’ sensibly disseminates by public media it also arguably suffers from that too, the potential impact of discovery lessened by what I consider to be the necessary immersion in the story which the piece portrays.

An archive of the Radio National broadcast of 'Characterized' is available here:
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/soundproof/characterized/6445292