#nashazphone

I like my political art like I like my life: confusing. I want to wonder what it means, what it wants me to do, why it exists. Porest’s music creates blanks, deletes my categories and fills them in with uncertainty. Maybe it’s wrong to call it political; maybe the way it makes me think about politics and society and culture and communication is a ploy to distract me from how much I’m enjoying music I don’t understand.

Or maybe Porest’s music makes me the kind of deluded conspiracy theorist that it seems at times to parody, at other times to champion. Maybe I’m looking for hidden answers that are right out in the open. All I know is the way Mark Gergis cuts and pastes signifiers of our global predicament into songs that are funny, baffling, catchy, reverent, subversive, absurd, and logical is a knack that has a few parallels (Negativland, Eugene Chadbourne, Gergis’ brethren Sun CIty GIrls) but no real peers. Modern Journal is his first Porest record in a decade, and it has lots to reckon with, yet somehow the Porest POV is so intact it’s blinding – and I’ll be staring at this sun for a while.

– Marc Masters

MARK GERGIS on Modern Journal of Popular Savagery

When they grow tired of shooting themselves in the foot, saboteurs often turn their weapon toward us. Their aim to convert victims from wild boar to mild bore in seconds flat usually succeeds. We might suggest that those who shoot themselves in the foot should aim several feet higher, sparing the rest of us. But, are we even alive?

The word Porest means something that a person can see through. Today, the word is also used to mean an open or honest system or activity.

Originally, the world felt giant and unobtainable – rife with mystery and secrets. We are now meant to believe that there aren’t any mysteries – and if there are, we’ll find them – solve them. Expediting the demystification of the world, and then gleefully classifying it as such seems to be the aspiration. Savagery is never introduced with public consensus or discussion. It is the mother of violation – and likely the father of us all. Savagery has been reintroduced into our contemporary vernacular without it being whispered, spoken or shouted from hilltops. But Al Jazeera cannot verify the veracity of this image, and Al Jazeera cannot verify the authenticity of this information. The information is impossible to verify.