#schismusic

So if you're familiar with the average Mars Volta record (if you're not, here's a little something) you might be feeling a bit confused right now. As usual, I'm not an inside guy, I bring nothing to the table – no scoop or profound insight or private information concerning the making of this album – but I have been listening to this record for more than ten years at this point and I feel quite strongly about it. For starters: TMV fans almost always make a point of underlining just how groundbreaking, daring, eclectic, et cetera et cetera et cetera the band was/is. And I mean, sure, I would be hardpressed not to agree with that, but part of the reason why I'm inclined to give them credit for this is the existence of Octahedron and, yes, Noctourniquet. The other part is the existence of De-Loused in the Comatorium and Frances the Mute, more or less specifically: Amputechture is good and it tries a number of cool bits here and there but it's, you know, a very codified Mars Volta album for the time it came out at, and The Bedlam in Goliath is -- God, okay, let's take a deep breath and get this out of the way.

See, ideally this'd be a whole different post unto itself, a post that has more to do with the nature of music criticism and music fans than it does with Noctourniquet as an album. Look, it's simple: The Bedlam in Goliath is nowhere near as good as Noctourniquet or, fuck it!, even Octahedron, because it is not a good album by just about any metric. The long and short of it is: you know that meme that's like, this is what [insert band here] sounds like to people who hate them? Yeah, that's the entirety of The Bedlam in Goliath to me. It's overlong, overplayed, overcomplicated, its only direction is off the nearest fucking cliff, and I don't give a shit about any stories about ghosts and wiped hard drives and everything: how this is rated higher than Amputechture (or any of the releases after it) simply escapes me. I will say I'm sorry for the personal injuries sustained by the band, because I am a functioning fucking human being, but I'm sorry y'all: this is a bad album that displays no class at all. Except Ilyena, which is an honest-to-God good song, despite Thomas Pridgen's best attempts to deface it with sulphuric acid at every chance he gets to cram a fucking drum fill in.

Man, that's a load off my chest. DMs are open to death threats, by the way. Now back to an actual interesting record.

So the consensus about Noctourniquet seems to be that it's a record that displays the signs of a lack of internal cohesion, different visions for the project colliding and not merging properly, underbaked songs with uneven structures and glaringly lacking songwriting that manages to feel somewhat placeholder. I will go out on a limb and say this: all of this is true, actually, but this is specifically why the record should be cherished. Like, be fucking for real here: are we surprised that the band we all praise for their experimentation actually went out of their way to experiment with their sound? Worse than that: are we mad that they did, because this experimentation includes raising the synths' levels on the final mix? It's not like they completely abandoned guitars, or the occasional classic-Volta number, as per the song I just linked before this paragraph. There's just a whole bunch of stuff going on here (at least until track 8, but I'm getting ahead of myself). And the idea of future punk itself – it's not exactly new at all, one might argue that Noctourniquet is basically just synthpunk with extra steps, but aren't the extra steps kind of the point here? What truly makes Frances the Mute different from Brain Salad Surgery, Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Lateralus, Fear of a Blank Planet or even Script for a Jester's Tear, if not the extra steps?

One funny thing that I figured was worth including, since this entire post is basically turning into a journal entry. A friend of mine a while back posted an Instagram story with the song Nuclear Seasons. Wrong as I might be, I don't exactly expect The Mars Volta and Charli xcx to have much fanbase overlap, so in case you're not familiar it's one of the very earliest singles that Charli released as a signed artist (for obvious reasons, I'm not getting into the early mixtapes here, thank you for your cooperation). It's a whole bunch of Eighties clichés slapping you in the dick, ostensibly, but she does do one thing in the pre-chorus that just fucked me up hearing it for the first time. You'll hear it when you listen, I'm sure: there's at least two separate instances where Cedric Bixler-Zavala wrote vocal lines with that exact same sense of melody over Noctourniquet – the title track, for instance. This is to no one's detriment, but it does display very clearly just how zeitgeist-y the Mars Volta were being with this particular release. Some might potentially argue that it could be a net negative: after all, it's not like any of their other record felt particularly era-appropriate, if you ignore the smashing success of bands like Porcupine Tree, Muse and …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead at the exact same time in the exact same circles, which – after typing it and re-reading it black-on-white – sure sounds like a really hard thing to ignore, now doesn't it? I'd still argue TMV is the superior band (Source Tags and Codes notwithstanding, maybe), if only by virtue of them releasing a record like Noctourniquet at what one could argue was their most broken. Not even a year after this dropped, Bosnian Rainbows looked like they were the next thing, then Antemasque for like thirty seconds flat – before everyone realized that one song sorta sucked – and then relative radio silence for a while. We were, essentially, left wondering. At the Drive-In reunited and made a couple more records, then disbanded again, then The Mars Volta reunited, released the same exact record twice and I didn't like it either time. It was a victory lap that clearly displayed the band has learned nothing of what Noctourniquet truly had to offer.

Deantoni Parks has an absolutely inorganic approach to groove and drumming that completely altered the way Volta songs were written. It made them more alien, harder to quantify and yet at the same time tighter, more clinical, laser-focused. The Mars Volta can write a radio song, they've proven it time and time again, which is why they just did not really do it for this one. Even The Malkin Jewel – lead fucking single for this thing, mind you – starts out sounding like it's coming for your carotid with a bread knife, wearing clown shoes. It's this impossible song that makes no fucking sense and sounds outright goofy on multiple occasions, and then it coalesces and has that big ass ending that we should all love so much in an ideal world. What went wrong here? Absolutely fucking nothing. It sounds like that intentionally, and it's that intentionality that I cannot help but respect. On Imago, the band starts off with this delicate emo-ass acoustic guitar arpeggio and then proceeds to absolutely mangle the bridge with shimmering synth arps, and the percussion gets smothered in slapback delay that turns it almost annoying and the track might be one of my highlights, specifically because of this. Even when the band goes medieval on the listener and tries a couple of the old tricks, the results sounds ice-cold and mechanical, and god do I love this fucking record. See next exhibit.

Granted, the record does lose a bit of steam in the second half. In Absentia, yet another banger, unfortunately just sort of inexplicably ends there, just like that, almost as if it was willingly cut by the band around the seven-minute mark so as to not turn it into "your usual Mars Volta thing"; and the record itself ends on Zed and Two Naughts (pretty good track, taken in itself), which basically just cuts the whole thing off with no particular qualms or time for reflection. I will say the track sequencing could be improved a bit, with some cuts here and there: Trinkets Pale of Moon, for instance, could have made a fun B-side, but as a whole ass track on the finished record? Eh. But then, just as you're looking the other way, the band hits you between the eyes with Vedamalady. I really don't know what to say about this anymore.

Does this not prove my point? Why is there so much beauty in what is, ostensibly, considered a "minor release" by just about anyone I've ever talked to, apart from this one stranger on Tumblr? And why is the beauty so apparent in spite (or perhaps because) of the unfinished, brutalist, stark naked nature of a record that actively got Cedric and Omar to argue, so much so that they had to call it quits for a while? No surprises that there was potential here, seeing as Omar immediately recruited a keyboard guy (Nicci Kasper) and this exact same drummer to make a new band, Bosnian Rainbows, that feels like a direct evolution/iteration on his exact sound. It is also a band that I love to death, and we sorta deserved a second album honestly, but that's a story for a different time. Point being: Noctourniquet sounds like a band falling apart, it is ostensibly unfinished, has way too many ideas and it never quite focuses on one or the other, its identity crisis is clear from the first FM bell arp all the way to the sudden full band stop at the end. And yet it holds so much potential to make it burst at the seams, and this potential feels so untapped, raw – alive, ultimately.

There is another Nine Inch Nails record hitting a special anniversary this year. It perennially exists in the shadow of the other two "classic" NIN records, mostly due to its perceived length, width of scope, breadth of intent, intensity. I'm not a Nine Inch Nails historian, despite the profound interest the band has always sparked within me. I will not pretend to have any special insight to offer within the recording process, the songwriting, the psychology behind any NIN release at all – and especially not a release as personal, as layered, as complicated, and ultimately as definitive as this one. Anyone with ears will however have to agree with this: sure, it might not have singles as iconic, it might not be as concise, it might not capture the zeitgeist as well as its predecessors, but The Fragile hit its twenty-fifth anniversary with what we can only assume to have been the same grace as works like Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Homer's Odyssey, Nintendo R&D1's Super Metroid. It's not even a contest. Pretty Hate Machine, barring a couple of incredible songs that would be absolute standouts in any other discography, is mostly just cute and quite unfocused in a number of crucial ways that make it breathe stilted compared to what's to come. Broken and The Downward Spiral still hit like a truck with very little rough spots – they remain lean, efficient pieces of slaughter machinery – but, as acutely noted by recurring blog guest Francesco Farabegoli, their reliance on heavy guitars seems to be more a byproduct of historical coincidence than that of genuine affection, on Reznor's part, to that specific brand of aggression. As such, it's easier to see them retrospectively as double-bound to phenomena like the Seattle sound's overnight success, or the surprisingly big following garnered by genres like death metal and projects like Ministry. None of this applies to The Fragile. Every single sound design decision in The Fragile stands as well alone as it does within the context of the whole NIN discography up to that point – including the Quake soundtrack, which (if not for its inherent ties to an external vision, not directly pertaining to anyone in the band) might actually be its closest peer in a number of ways.

Following up on the more abstract moments of Quake, for starters, The Fragile by and large foregoes the grid-like structure that even The Downward Spiral still abode to. As a result, most of the album's songs retain a surprising "live" feel to them; however, it has to be noted that the sounds themselves are imprecise, artisanal, acoustically coherent to their own reality, believable within the context of a hypothetical recording space: somewhat damaged, in most scenarios. The irony of saying this about a record whose singles include, among other things, humongous-sounding digitally distorted walls of electric guitars and actual breakbeats does not escape me, of course; but tracks like The Great Below (one of the album's thematic centerpieces) are ultimately so enhanced by the unnaturally warbled synth strings, the alien-sounding acoustic guitars or whatever that fucking pluck even is, the single-tracked lead vocals that it's actually impossible to unhear it, once you've heard it. In other words, The Fragile's ultimate superiority lies within its decision to sound – plain and simple – like it is dying.

What most popular rock and rock-adjacent acts of the 1990s made finally clear is the inextricable connection between grief and anger, mourning and fury. On average, the more personal the record, the clearer the connection between the two. In Utero, Dirt, the more politically charged branches of emo, the bands that most openly associated themselves with the nu metal image all end up converging onto an angst-filled paradox of vehement depression, or abulic bloodlust, if you'd rather. This is also the case with The Downward Spiral – a record that conveniently expresses its sad moments in the form of exactly that: sad moments (A Warm Place and Hurt, to name names). I am also conveniently leaving aside the more overtly sexual side of all the records and movements mentioned – but ultimately, bloodlust and appetite are not just metaphors of destruction, if you catch my drift. All of this somehow ends up actually coalescing into virtually any given second of The Fragile's hour-and-a-half runtime. The irony is that this exact coincidence of sounds and feelings looks a lot like your average sixty-year-old who takes up the habit of looking at obituaries posted on the streets and put in local newspaper – an exquisitely Abruzzese habit, from which I am not exempt.

Pointedly enough, a couple of tracks on the record openly tie into the then-recent demise of Trent Reznor's grandmother Clara, the woman who encouraged him to actually pursue a serious career in music. It gets particularly grim when you realize the instrumental I've just linked above this paragraph – candidly titled I'm Looking Forward to Joining You, Finally – has one single thing written under its title in the CD's booklet: the chilling epigraph "for Clara". I spent a lot of time in a cemetery on November 2nd, 2024, as my family and I waited for the Day of the Dead mass to start. Everyone in town had reunited in the graveyard, with the hilarious result that the place in question was more populated – and noisier, regrettably – than the actual town itself. A literal necropolis, then: a city of the dead, as in quite literally built with them: the little family mausoleums and the big structures comprising multiple assorted burial recesses, if you squint, look like condominiums, late nineteenth-century roofed avenues, suburban villas. Then, those who populate these areas, of course very much alive, speak of things pertaining mostly to people who are alive – and boil with the self-destructive rage pertaining to people who are still alive (self-destuctive, that is, only insofar as other people they know no longer are alive).

I was born on July 11th, 1999; as such, I am about two months older than The Fragile. The fact that this particular record would turn twenty-five the same year as me imposed a redde rationem of some kind: finally face this behemoth, advertised to be more depressing, more horrifying, dirtier and more suffocating than any other NIN record was. And so I did. Mere days after the record's anniversary, my girlfriend would tell me she wasn't feeling the spark anymore. As usual, she'd called it right – neither was I, as hard to admit as it was. Grandpa stays buried, much to everyone's chagrin, and I am nowhere closer to making my own Russian Ark than I was when I posted my last piece on here. I fumbled a cute-looking girl a week ago and while on the one hand I knew this was gonna happen and I was going to take it in stride, on the other hand this very much did not happen, which led me to finally listen to Justin Broadrick's Jesu (more on this in another post: it's probably gonna be a fun time, unlike this one). A couple of other things happened – a British girl hit on me after my band played a local underground music club, and then forgot to actually follow suit with her actual plans, luckily for me seeing as she looked to be quite drunk already – but the point still stands: I am the one looking at obituaries, blindly reading on, recognizing last names with a grimace, refusing to engage with my own fallibility.

So twenty-five years on, we have to face the music. Reznor has, so far, never made anything as intense and personal and calculated and brutal and perfect in the etymological sense of the word as The Fragile. Doing so would, in all likelihood, kill him. With Teeth is a record that admits a form of defeat: I'll take a quiet life, I'll take a rock quartet with synths, I don't fucking care about perfection any longer. Hesitation Marks deals in different forms of anxiety, more befitting for a man (at the time) nearing fifty, with a wife and children and an Academy Award or two sitting on his shelf somewhere. Both are mostly cute – I will go so far as to admit I have an actual soft spot for Hesitation Marks, making it the only NIN record outside of the classics that I willingly go out of my way to listen to in full – and ultimately inconsequential. I guess I can certainly aspire to be as inconsequential and cute as these records are, knowing there will forever be a record like The Fragile somewhere behind my back, hiding in the shadows.

Pyrrhon - Exhaust

Nothing to do with the zeitgeist, nothing to do with good manners and common sense; it's death metal but played with as much boiling rage as any given band on AmRep in the '90s, entirely written and recorded live – which helps the single songs stay solid, consistent, eyes-on-the-prize, no-nonsense.

Tracks that hit like a jackhammer:

Out of Gas

Concrete Charlie

Not Going to Mars

Ulver - Liminal Animals

Third pop record (if we're only counting full lengths, which we shouldn't, since Sic Transit Gloria Mundi back in '17 was as much a certified banger as Assassination) by the Wolves of the North. This one benefits from a slightly less postmodern outlook and approach than the last two (or three), which makes it especially better than Flowers of Evil, and feels animated by a genuine sense of terror.

Tracks that spent a lot of time in my queue for a bunch of reasons:

The Red Light

Nocturne #1

Ghost Entry (honorable mention for the simple-yet-stunning Autechre remix)

Rude Cinno - Bassa qualità

This is, partially, shameless self-promotion, considering Rude Cinno have been more active as publicity agent for my own band than we ourselves were. This being said, the record is actually very good, sporting a very clear Sleaford Mods influence but playing the interesting card of Emilian folk music and dialect interspersed throughout the record. The result is a cute retrofuturist approach that makes it sound like William Gibson grew up in Castel Maggiore.

Tracks that made me laugh a bit, cry a lot, think very hard:

Curati

Titolo mancante

Miglior tempolinea

Sunrise Patriot Motion - My Father Took Me Hunting in the Snow

This record was already discussed in my worried music post, so that's a more in-depth treatment of it. For the purposes of this post, suffice it to say that this up-and-coming Noughties revival has, if anything, one good thing: the revelation that nu-metal in the right hands can be more of a toolbox than a music genre or a set of conventions. This and the sheer quality of the recorded performances (Andy Chugg on vocals especially shines with his anguished, horrified, eldritch yelling) simply tramples all criticisms.

Hard to pick any standout tracks, since this is a very short EP with two dungeon synth interludes out of four tracks. Works better in tandem with Sunrise Patriot Motion's first LP.

Resfeber - domani il sole

Deeper shade of shameless self-promotion here, in that Rebecca, singer for Resfeber, is also the singer for NUMBERS and the Operators, but the tracks featured here are more than competently written, arranged and played. Smooth jazz-funk that feels natural and lived in, elegant and direct. Short and sweet. (v)incenso, as a title, made me laugh quite a bit, and fortunately I do quite enjoy the track.

Shellac - To All Trains

Let's be real: this would have made this list even if it sucked royally. It does not suck royally, to no one's surprise. It sounds like a Shellac record (that is, it sounds great), it's played with consummate savoir-faire if not straight up somewhat bothered, it's got that ironic thing that Shellac as a band have been masters of since the very first seven-inch records. I don't think it would be warranted of anyone to ask anything more than this.

Tracks that made me realize these guys had still got it:

Scrappers

Chick New Wave

I Don't Fear Hell (RIP)

HONORABLE MENTION: Charli xcx - Brat

The entire media/publicity operation around this record has been played so much and for so long that it's impossible to cut it any slack at all by now (admittedly, not entirely through Charli or her own PR entourage's own faults). The remade record with the guests is impossibly bad and useless. The record's merch utilises the meme so much that it becomes absolutely tedious if not actively enraging if not shameful, plain and simple. The music takes the liberty to utilize a sound palette that's been pioneered by trans and nonbinary creatives – in Charli xcx's own music as well, sure – and then takes that sound palette to write a ballad about marrying a man and having children. The true miracle amidst all of this mess is that if you absolutely ignore all the noise around it and go back to the record, and by that I mean the actual recorded music, all of this ceases to be a problem when the record works as intended (usually during the noisiest, messiest bits of it all). RIP SOPHIE <3

AOTY: Ben Frost - Scope Neglect

Sometimes you need Transmission or Shadowplay for the sunny days — impassioned jolts, sparks flying everywhere. Sometimes The Perfect Kiss hits harder on a cloudy afternoon, coming back home and in need of that extra push to not fall asleep in the train. It's surprising to realize the versatility displayed by both bands, or the same band in two different iterations according to whomever you ask. Peter Hook says, as late as 1993, that the laziest member of New Order is Ian Curtis. Or again this other person, in the comments under the Atmosphere official video on YouTube, who went to see New Order (Hooky-less New Order, which might be a relevant distinction) at the O2 Arena a couple of years ago and they gave an encore, says "Those of us who stayed got the privilege of watching Joy Division perform three of their songs". Interesting outlook on the matter. I personally saw Peter Hook and the Light play both Joy Division records and, I'm pretty sure, an encore comprised of just Love Will Tear Us Apart at the Arti Vive Festival in Soliera, back when it was still free to attend some of the events. I remember being pretty mad that Hooky had stopped to take pics with basically everyone and then left exactly as I was approaching. In retrospect I don't exactly blame the man, it was like midnight anyway. I remember nothing of the back trip home.

My first contact with Joy Division happened when I was thirteen and very much in my prog era. I was in Rome staying at an aunt of mine's place for my fourteenth birthday and she told me I could get a CD, since I had gotten some money saved up over time. Some Facebook page dedicated to Pink Floyd I'd liked (yeah, Facebook at age thirteen — I literally just wanted to play a fucking Flash game, back when Facebook allowed them, and I ended up getting to be terminally online. Crazy how things turn out) used to share a lot of memes and fanart relating to the Unknown Pleasures album cover, and me being a massive Pink Floyd head at the time I thought "I mean, if these guys are pushing this band so hard, that's gotta mean something". The album cover was pretty striking, admittedly: a far cry from the paisley ass paintings that I had grown to accept as the gold standard for the music I liked, but its simplicity struck a chord closer to The Dark Side of the Moon, or perhaps The Wall. Those were records I liked a lot, probably called them "the best records ever made" to more than one person, not like they aren't but that's a very bold statement to make when your listening experience consists exactly of

Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor when I was six;

Daft Punk's complete discography (minus Random Access Memories, which wasn't out yet) when I was twelve;

Pink Floyd's complete discography, courtesy of a CD collection coming out with some Italian newspaper, that same year;

a couple random classic rock records recommended to me by older friends and relatives usually well into their fifties or sixties at the time, random people on Internet forums — which, for clarification, I did not actively attend, preferring to just lurk from time to time — and the OndaRock "milestones" page.

So browsing through the surprisingly expansive CDs section of this electronics shop in Rome, and being mesmerized by a vinyl rack in the days when Music on Vinyl was the final frontier of pretending you could re-analogue the digital ("you mean to tell me these are like CDs, but bigger? Whoever designed these truly lived in the future"), I came across that very same album art that had stricken me so hard. I had listened to the first seconds of the album on YouTube, but that weird drum sound — so echoey, so distant, ultimately not particularly powerful, meaning it didn't really sound like Bonzo: it sounded more like my own band, which at the time didn't even exist yet — I didn't really know what to make of. This store I was in had one of those preview listening machines that would scan the barcode on the CDs and give you a small snippet of the song. I pull the CD up to the scanner, the scanner lights up green, I put on the headphones and the solo from this comes up:

Clearly they had to be kidding me. I had come to know, sneaking into infinitely many rehearsals with the band from my mother's town, what it sounded like when someone tried to play lead without something else filling up the arrangement (even though I didn't really know all that, or at least lacked the vocabulary to properly express it) and, for Christ's sake, didn't these guys notice rehearsing? It sounded empty, weirdly so, and it wasn't my thing, I thought. I put that CD away and picked up a band I knew I'd like — Genesis, specifically. So Nursery Cryme became the first CD I've ever paid with my own money, the very day I turned fourteen. Not a bad pickup. I remember being very impressed with the fast blurring lead guitar on The Musical Box and digging the sweet pastoral atmospheres of For Absent Friends and Harlequin. I still think of that record more often than one would probably assume looking at this blog, or my most played on Spotify. At the time, that was the best move I could take, really: why beat my head against a record that, as your average prog nerd ballbreaker, simply wasn't speaking to me?

Then all of a sudden in August of the same year my friend's dad hands me a 16 gigabyte USB drive, full of random music from all eras of rock. A lot of it remains inscrutable to me for a really long time, most notably Tom Waits (see related post), but I spent the whole month reading random folder names, seeing if something catches my eyes, and at one point I come across the Mars Volta. Open the folder up, read the names of their first three records, and my first thought is "Christ, these guys look incomprehensible. I'm about to have some fun". Long story short: I end up having a lot of fun, the Mars Volta turns into my favourite band at the time and finding out that they had previously been called At the Drive-In makes me gain some measure of respect for punk rockers: if they tried hard enough, I must've thought, they could prog as hard as anyone. In the meantime the ghost of Joy Division remains at the back of my head. I feel like I'm missing something, for the first time in my life: it's not them, it's me. Too bad that same realization didn't occur to me when it came to the people in my life until much, much later, but that's being fourteen for you I suppose. Early King Crimson and the Mars Volta were the pinnacle of violence to me, and not even the very few Metallica songs I'd downloaded just to see what would happen scratched that itch. It felt a bit too cauterized for some reason (I would later find out I had been looking in the wrong direction the whole time: the Black Album "sucked", according to my favourite metalhead of the time, who somehow catalyzed my interest from the very second I saw him in the school's courtyard. Hard to imagine why I would imprint on people like puppies do, but what the fuck, not like I've ever outgrown that anyway, I've just gotten better at managing it). But I felt there was more than violence to this, or different forms of violence. When Christmas came around and my relatives tried to get me presents, my mother asked if there was anything specific I was interested in, and I basically told her "look, if they can get me some CDs off of this list, I'm golden". It had some bangers on it, namely Noctourniquet by the Mars Volta — it's one of their best and I will die on this hill, be warned — and The Downward Spiral, which might as well warrant its own post in an ideal world. But the best of them all I think came from a random purchase, once again with the little money I had lying around at the time.

Closer appears to be, right away, a bit more concrete, and if there's something inexperienced music fans like is a pretty packaging that conjures a strong emotional response before they've even played the record. Compare a color-inverted graph of pulsar emissions to a literal funerary monument. Opening up the booklet I was shocked to see that Genesis was used as a negative point of comparison (bad omen, I thought) by people close to the band, and I came across much more detailed information about Ian Curtis's untimely demise — at that time, something far too removed from my experience to be faced with the delicacy and attention it deserves. Atrocity Exhibition hits like a ten-ton truck, a reference which at the time I wouldn't have been able to make for obvious reasons, and Isolation exposes all the nerve tissue under the skin. Passover comes in and strips everything even barer, and then A Means to an End turns… danceable, for some reason? Big emotional moment with The Eternal and Decades, which I thought actually took them closer to my usual tastes. And yet at the same time I kept looking at Colony, Heart and Soul and Twenty Four Hours as the most compelling cuts. Geometric assault sounding like sheet metal if it were music; rhythmically driven emptiness that serves as a minimal backdrop for depressed poetry, and finally a rocking ebb-and-flow that would probably inform a lot of my interest in GY!BE-like post-rock in the coming years. Very interesting to think that the same guys who'd done Unknown Pleasures could think of this. To this day, when asked, I still do think that Closer is the best Joy Division record, but what does it even mean when the records are exactly two, compilations notwithstanding?

It was around this time that it came to my attention that both Joy Division and another band called New Order had a record called Substance out, both published by the same recording company, both coming out within a year of each other. Looking it up, it turns out it's fully intentional, because New Order is simply Joy Division minus Ian Curtis. It would turn out to be a tad bit more complex than that. Anyway, I look New Order up and kind of have to do a double-take. Synthpop? In my Joy Division? More likely than you'd think, considering Isolation exists. But yeah, that sort of seals it — I wouldn't care about this New Order for a million years. Until all of a sudden a couple of years later David Sylvian bursts like a comet in my face, which of course leads me straight to Japan, the same year as I'd come across Berlin-era Bowie, and you can probably guess where this is going, right?

Well, you'd be wrong. I still don't check out New Order. There's a whole new world open to me — vaporwave and therefore R Plus Seven come to my attention, which leads me to dissect that record like an alien tool of unclear purposes. This of course leads me onto an ambient tangent, taking me back to my Tim Hecker listens of that same year, which has the effect of renewing my interest in "pure" electronic music and the then-rising post-dubstep movement. The sheer experience of sound, the dazzling modernity and innovation, is what's in at the time. I have no time for nostalgia-pandering dimwits: the future awaits. Then all that jazz from the first Godflesh post hits, then God pulls the funniest gag in the history of viral infections to my memory, and I have some time to actually look back, a bit less prejudiced. As it turns out, synthpop is not the devil, as some of you might have surmised by now, and as I relisten to Blue Monday I realized I have never listened to either of the Substance record. I do know some, most perhaps?, of the tracks on the Joy Division one, and I do think the New Order one has the more striking cover art — not to mention I knew, by this time, that this was the one to give Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance its name, and that Your Silent Face soundtracked one of the most memorable moments in Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson. As the ultimate Hideo Kojima stan, I couldn't let this slide, so I pop the record on and get hit with this:

Way to go, guys. Holy shit. I knew that Ceremony was a Joy Division cut before they could record it, but what the hell — Bernard got it, too. It wasn't a matter of singing ability with songs like these, it's just getting it, finding the right energy. They had that right energy. And then it hit me just as many times these dudes have made Blue Monday over and over again before actually getting it right, and everytime I look into it it's funnier and funnier to realize just how many different attempts it took them to finally be Kraftwerk, but augmented — with the stellar results we all know. Everything's Gone Green, 5 8 6, Temptation potentially, all lead up to this one moment in the history of dance music where somehow three dudes and a girl hailing from Manchester managed to out-gay the Pet Shop Boys (by their own admission, apparently), to shake the whole world's collective booty, to do whatever it is they were supposed to do in this last comparison that would ideally make the previous one a bit less obnoxious but whatever, it's 3am as usual, you know how it goes by now don't you? But then after Blue Monday the record keeps going, and thank god it does, because it's banger after banger. How do these guys keep doing it?

So I spend some time with that record, then it fades down, then it comes back up last month, when the weather calls for it and its parent company. Which is when I find myself watching the Control movie for the first time, surprisingly enough seeing as I already enjoyed the work of Anton Corbijn as a photographer. Looking at all that, it is revealed to me that Joy Division never really having died is not a bug, it's a feature. Everyone is gasping, I get it, but please pick your jaws up and check this out: the band has never learned how to play their respective instruments. One might go so far as to argue they play their own stuff their own way, and that's basically it. Nothing could be further from the truth. These guys jammed, a lot; that's how Joy Division wrote songs, that's how New Order wrote songs, even going as far as having Bernard Sumner fucked up on acid so he could find the chorus to Temptation or the whole band bombed out of their minds on X in Ibiza clubs to write, basically, the entirety of Technique — and even then, not really, there's a couple jangly tracks that the X would most likely render unlistenable but what do I really know? Point being: it might now have been sparked by a music teacher or instructor, it might not have been the product of a process comparable to that within Television, which led them to organically seek out better, more "by the book" musicianship, but New Order were incredibly familiar with their instruments, had formed an element of comfort and understanding that counterbalanced the alien-ness to music terminology.

Peter Hook recently uploaded a Yamaha-sponsored video to his Instagram, which I am pretty sure has a say in running, where he jams on a Yamaha bass and, you know, it sounds like Hooky alright, but it's never a discernible bassline until he kicks into the A major strumming that opens Love Will Tear Us Apart. Before that, he just strolls around the neck, leisurely strumming away at power chords imbued with that thick chorus and reverb combo he became renowned for. I would never, in my wildest dreams, have imagined I'd find myself thinking "okay, awesome, stop talking — I want to hear you jam a bit more" referring to one of the musicians who were part of possibly two of the craziest storiest in the history of contemporary rock'n'roll, also notorious for playing the rockstar whilst carrying the minimum possible baggage of technical knowledge he could. Once again, this is nowhere near a knock to the man — quite the opposite. Ian Curtis asked "persistence, well, what does it matter?", and Hooky (and, of course, the other members of New Order) found a way to constructively answer that question. Moments before Coil, but a bit later than Israel Regardie, they said "persistence is all" and built a brand on finding a way to consistently sound like splendid, eternal, golden children: "like crystal", impassionate, tightly-knit performers with the purity of a child's heart. Ian Curtis had, in certain ways (at least artistically), the purity of a child in his heart, which some might even argue was a distinguishing feature of most of his literary idols — if you think about it, William Burroughs could be your dirty-minded classmate who walked in on his parents sharing an intimate moment in the bedroom (had his parents been gay men, the metaphor would probably fly better, but that most definitely wasn't the case). So the heart of Joy Division remains untouched, if a bit more naked. Heroes of post-punk, sons of the silent age, you can sleep soundly tonight.

It's some dude (gender neutral) with a mask who climbs on top of some gigantic robot, goes on top of its head and has it detach, taking flight to avoid some kind of massive storm approaching. It's like a cross between Dormin's darkness and space debris as seen on the rings of Saturn/an asteroid belt. The head and its occupant are however quickly taken away by the storm itself and that's where the trailer ends. Some have speculated that this might already be a gameplay loop on its own, but – given the sheer amount of setpieces displayed by The Last Guardian – I'm inclined to think the exact opposite. My hopes are as follows: not only is this not representative of the final gameplay loop, but this is literally just the game's intro, or something.

Check this out: what if it's like Shadow of the Colossus, wherein perhaps there's a repeating gameplay loop of sorts that focuses heavily on exploration (of some deeper, fuller world than that of SotC – or maybe something even emptier, better conveyed through more powerful technology), but with the added narrative thing from The Last Guardian thrown in for good measure. Sort of à la Death Stranding when it actually starts gaining steam, in a way, but with the added Ueda thing where everything is melancholy and faraway and stunningly silent and meditative. Which is actually why I called this series a set of meditations, of all things – these are games that invite a level of thought that doesn't necessarily take the usual steps that Aristotle-based logic – for lack of a better word that isn't "Western", which one could see as sort of a cop-out in this scenario – would deem indispensable.

Such an approach, for starters, would explain the use of English in the spoken bits of the game. I've been playing Outer Wilds lately (thank you @alexswordsman for insisting that I give it a shot – you were right all along) and see, now that's a game that sounds like a solid peer to what I hope this one big ass robot game turns out to be. The idea is that the so-called plot of the game may be lived entirely in retrospect, but keeping the usual cryptic approach that Ueda and the team seem to favor in their storytelling. So there's this dude (gender neutral) who has to repair their robot, or somehow traverse a landscape, and in the meantime they come to learn… something, I guess, about who was here before? Or maybe just who was hit the hardest by that debris storm from the trailer, mere hours ago? Who knows, not me, I'm just speculating because I have way too much free time on my hands. Would love to hear you guys' thoughts on the matter. Gender neutral, of course.

I realize I'm still trying to think of Ueda as a creative, after all of these years, in one of two ways:

he's doing his usual thing, and he's thinking within his own box.

he's looking out to other developers in attempts to make a mishmash of random cool titles that might have interesting elements.

The problem with both of these lines of thought is that it makes no sense to close off one or the other. I can't shake the feeling that there will be, simultaneously, more and less than what I've discussed above. Again, this entire post is nothing more than a bunch of speculation and opinions piled together into a trenchcoat, but I'm still feeling way too up in the air about this. The one thing I'm sure of is, I am really excited about this. My best hope for this is not that it finds its market niche, or its "target audience", or any of that BMA crap. I just hope it's a good Ueda game, one that strikes emotional chords with the same grace and poise and elegance as the others do.

Now for another robot song, and it's the last one, I swear.

The beauty of Ico lies in the fact it seems to disregard the conventions of an average videogame, if you're not looking too hard. The first thing I did after completing ICO again was to put on some Kraftwerk – Computer Love, to be exact – because that same exact comment could be made with regards to their post-Autobahn production almost as a whole. Trans Europe Express and Radio-Activity, at least to an extent, tinker with that divide between their profoundly poppish writing style and that weird, destructured, post-1968 thing where even a pop song's structure can be broken down into something more than just function and role. All the same, ICO (Kraftwerk's music) is tightly designed, with recognizable hooks and welcoming moments that allow the player (listener) to immediately understand what they have to do. Here's a bubbly cursed boy. Here's a girl who's spent her whole life in a cage. They're trapped in a castle and evil shadows want to kidnap the girl. Have you done the math yet?

Right before I went back to the game myself, I happened to catch a friend of mine – @alexswordsman – as they streamed part of their first playthrough on Discord. I was struck by the realization that I had absolutely no recollection of a lot of moments from the game; but what truly surprised me is just how much of the game I did keep in my memory, and not just story bits (that would be easy, considering the campaign's length) but also entire rooms' worth of environmental puzzles, fights against the shadow children, the genuine sense of dread when leaving Yorda alone or when hanging from some iron pole, a good hundred meters above any solid ground. As I spent some time thinking about this, and a good couple of weeks after actually going through the game again in something like two and a half sittings, I realized that it really did take me a loooooong time to realize just for how long ICO was a game about the story, for me. The answer was of course quite a fucking lot – a whole year after my first playthrough or something, specifically. I remember telling some girl in my class about it, back in 2019, because I was an insufferable bastard who felt really alone but could not relate to other human beings on any fundamental level. Poor girl, I think she actually did feel some modicum of attraction towards me, but unfortunately I was very much not prepared to return it. The point being: for the longest time, apart from when I replayed it back in 2020, I genuinely thought of ICO as a story to be told, something to be read off of a Wikipedia page a billion years ago. As the previous piece (and, if you've read them, my other pieces about Team Ico, the Italian ones) might have clarified, of course, coming back to the games with a slightly more informed outlook has worked wonders for me.

Where Wander's core moveset would focus preeminently on violence and hostile action, Ico's was softer, less specialized, harder to describe. R1, which you have to hold down, allows you to hold Yorda's hand (or call to her, if she's away from you – much like Agro and Trico after her, buttons used notwithstanding); Square swings whatever blunt – or edged, or spiked – object you've got in your hand, but Ico is canonically like nine, so it's safe to assume he's not a fighter, or a climber, or a horserider. The one thing he can convincingly is seek out human contact: the one thing he is denied, as a horned kid. Yorda, on the other hand, has no such preconceptions: she may actually have no preconceptions, period, apart from her knowledge of a certain power and a certain purpose assigned to her. At the same time, Yorda starts out basically clueless but learns very very quickly: you explode the pillar holding the bridge up, then next room over you have to blow up some wood planks blocking the way forward and – assuming you've seen the bombs and the open flame right near the entrance – Yorda runs up to them and points at them, which is very clever foreshadowing of the second act's climactic moment. If Yorda is seen by her captors as a machine, built entirely as a means to an end – becoming the Queen's new body – then it has to be a fully functional one, shoutouts to Lieutenant Commander Data, but this has the side effect that she can learn trust. She can learn affection.

No surprise then that R1 would be the key to hold Yorda's hand and call out to her. R1 is where the important stuff is in Team Ico's games. You hold R1 to core-mechanic your character into winning, i.e. into exerting emotional stimuli over the player, and it's no surprise that as such every time you're doing the R1 stuff the games tend to give you incredibly strong and constant sensory feedback. The controller vibrates, almost mimicking a heartbeat, as you're holding Yorda's hand. Alessio called it a "sensory nightmare" and deactivated the feature: not that I blame him, it can get annoying, but I actually sorta love it myself. It's the closest thing they can do to allow the player to perceive warmth, touch, life on their very skin. If Shadow of the Colossus is "a game about letting go", then ICO is a game about holding on. As such, it is necessarily much shorter than SotC: something you can quite literally burn through, like a friend you mad on that one week by the seaside when you were nine and had no mobile phone so you have no idea where that friend is now, what they're up to, what they're doing. You can only replay it, understanding its actions and words a bit better everytime but forever retrospectively, forever crystallized.

It's a short and immensely sweet experience that ends on a bittersweet note to say the least (Fumito Ueda himself refers to the post-credits scene as a dream that Ico has going back to civilization, which means Yorda did not of course escape the crumbling castle) and yet manages to conjure deep feelings of beauty and warmth. It doesn't make any fucking sense to discuss the plot of this game, because honestly as narrative-driven as this game is, it already takes the shape of an experience that prefers player stories as the driving principle for the player to go on with the game, more so than its own narrative. I mean, Shadow of the Colossus is probably better at this – considering the even more bare-boned nature of its plot and the open ended lore that the player is left to to toy with – but something has to be born once already, in order for it to be reborn.

I was knocked the fuck out on painkillers, two of my wisdom teeth freshly removed, not even remotely worried about the exam that I had coming up in like two days from then. So I was barely moving away from my swivel chair and sleeping on a whole ass armored pillow to prevent from tossing and turning and shit felt so surreal to me. It was like the eating chair from the last Cronenberg movie. So I delved into Æon Flux essentially blind and bingewatched the shit out of it. Twice. Ended up downloading the whole thing from some sketchy ass 1080p remastered torrent, rewatched it again, and spread it around personally in a more cauterized Google Drive folder (so if you guys got a nasty ass virtual STD from it, my bad I guess), not even a month after watching the series. Shit was fucked, in short, and every rewatch just fueled this obsession even further.

(image taken from Episode 1, Season 1)

One thing about me: when I obsess over stuff I want to draw something at the very least inspired by it. Happens to me a lot with Autechre, who are actually one of maybe three bands I would not hesitate to call my favourite based on an absolutely objective principle which is absolutely not up for discussion and which might be the object of a future post at this point. But the point is fucking Æon Flux is essentially impossible to replicate because Peter Chung's character designs are so recognizable that you start seeing them in literally every other movie that came out in the late '90s/early 2000s - and for reference, Æon Flux was brought to an end in 1995. Consequently, all attempts at drawing Æon Flux-inspired stuff end up either feeling very derivative or looking like fucking trash. Artistry is a weird thing because sometimes it inspires other people, other times it just inspires man-slaughtering rage.

Somewhat many of my friends are or have at one point tried to be accomplished visual artists. Some have made it to professional/teaching level, some others have an art school diploma or degree - and I'll be using this space to shout out @coto-letta aka V., who has recently rejoined Tumblr after years of absence. We met on here, when her handle was much different, and I mistook her for an ex of mine (whom, surprisingly, we are still on relatively good - if quiet - terms with) so I slid into her DMs as you do, and she was like "yeah actually I have no clue who the fuck you are I just think your blog is neat and dropped a follow" which was quite a fundamental moment in understanding that while my life was written like a dodgy soap-opera, that didn't mean I was the centre of the entire world. Anyway, the reason I'm shouting her out is because sometimes something deeper and older than you remember has a way of finding you again when you least expect it and that's what happened when in January 2023 (after V. had left Tumblr for at that point about two years and we had exchanged Instagram accounts) I somehow ended up on her Insta and found out she had been tagged in a picture taken somewhere that looked suspiciously like my university's conference hall and I could not fucking believe she was in my city. I slid into her DMs again, as you do, and found out that no, that wasn't my uni's aula magna, but yes, she was in fact relocating in my city for her master's. So we met up after maybe seven years of on-and-off Internet friendship. It's a neat story, sure, but how the fuck do we tie it into Æon Flux?

(image taken from Episode 3, Season 2: Leisure)

Not trying to be overly dramatic here, but Æon Flux to me is just about a condensation of everything that "art" can mean. Not just visual flare or style, not just deep meaning or interesting ways of putting across one or more questions and never a definitive answer to any of them (more often than not, it's sets of possible answers - usually two, neither of which ends up covering the whole array of possibilities, both of which actually leave a lot to be desired in a number of different ways), not just this insane fucking music that toys with everything you expect from animation courtesy of Drew Neumann who may just rank as one of the best soundtrack artists ever in virtue of this single work. It's the whole package. You would think it'd work taken in pieces, and it does, no objection to that: but it works even better as a whole package. If the moral questioning (and the philosophical musings of season 3, which is unjustly underrated because "it's too normal" by hipster wannabe critic dilettantes who like to think that they could do better than that. Everybody else on the other hand is generally able to stop pull their head out their own ass and recognize, at the very least, the excellent craftsmanship and talent that went into the ten long episodes) wasn't accompanied by the weird fetishistic sex it'd be somewhat less impactful, almost like a cauterized Tenshi no tamago made into a series for mainstream late-night TV audiences. The twist was that MTV's executives, at the time, "didn't understand [the double entendres], they didn't even notice them. So, we were okay", in producer Japhet Asher's own words in the short documentary Investigation: The History of Æon Flux. The network was, in fact, trying to break into the mainstream - they simply couldn't keep their creatives at bay. No wonder they turned to Jersey Shore as they went along.

(image taken from Episode 5, Season 3: The Demiurge)

Even just the main characters' purported edginess, clearly something "of its time", is never played entirely straight. Both leads are way too complex, and very clearly presented as such, to be just summed up by "Æon Flux is an anarchist/Trevor Goodchild is a dictator". Both of which are true, by the way, they're just one part of a full picture. Even within the context of its necessary linearity - this is still an animated short and as such moves only in one direction, even though a number of episodes (specifically Mirror and Chronophasia) deliberately fuck with the viewer's perception of times on varying degrees of diegesis and extradiegesis - the series could be perceived as, indeed, a sandbox: consequently, the viewer could set sail and explore it. This is further encouraged by the series's active weirdness to whoever would want to try and make sense of the world's story. There is no history, there is just the story at hand: an eternal present which you can't understand ("un eterno presente che capire non sai": Ferretti knew his shit, regardless of how it went after CCCP) and which Æon and Trevor are not interested in even trying to contextualize. Not a surprise then that they'd be into each other: their closeness in body and heart doesn't exist at the mind's level, and the whole thing falls apart miserably every time it looks like they could be finally let their weapons down. But as Æon completely understands, and as Trevor seems to actively try to ignore, the fight is already the whole point: star-cross'd as they may be, the entire act of playfully hunting each other for sport both in the bedroom and on the battlefield is what Trevor Goodchild and Æon Flux thrive on. Trevor wants stability but an Æon who doesn't fight back is simply not Æon; Æon does not want the stability, but she definitely likes Trevor to an extent and finds more in common with him that she would probably be willing to admit (I would like to thank Tumblr user @brw on thons very good analysis of the episode A Last Time for Everything, which heavily inspired this section of the post!). In short: if Trevor seems to embody Pier Paolo Pasolini's idea that "there is nothing more anarchistic than power" ("non c'è nulla di più anarchico del potere") then Æon flips the statement on its head: "there is nothing more powerful than anarchism". That is, of course, until we once again confront my signature ad-hoc elephant in the room that this statement just summoned.

(Image taken from Episode 1, Season 1)

No spoilers intended, but if you so much as google the name of the series you will easily find out that Æon Flux dies a whole lot throughout the series*. Season 1 and all the shorts from season 2 end with her dying ungrateful deaths and a couple of the long episodes leave much to be desired in the way of positive closure, with Ether Drift Theory representing a peak in bleakness for season 3. Most of the shorts where Æon dies imply that either absolutely nothing changes in the world around when she's lost or that Trevor Goodchild literally just succeeds in all of his goals (see Season 1's finale), and one could make a case that even if she did carry her missions through there would be absolutely nothing to show for it: somebody goes up the chain of power, everything is restored, there is one more tyrant to murder. Not to be that one guy who quotes Nietzsche about everything, but the eternal recurrence of the same is the first thing that comes to mind when watching Æon Flux, especially exemplified and even literalized by the episode War, possibly the best of the short ones: it's the same fucking story four times over a five-minute run time and nothing ever gets better for anyone. The body count in the episode is unquantifiably large - every one of the fallen a potential new Æon Flux or Trevor Goodchild. But this, in a way, implies that Æon keeps being reborn, and one could argue that the act of capturing a fly with her venus-fly-trap eye could simply be her coming back to life, as it were; stopping the most evident sign of decay, turning her eyes outward yet again, to face the eternal return of the same again and again and again…

(Image taken from Episode 8, Season 3: Ether Drift Theory)

You can find Æon Flux for free on the Internet Archive.

*as I was discussing the final draft of this post with my friend @oldshittydog we had a pretty interesting discussion which I thought should be added here for an even clearer, fuller picture: