The Convulsion Factory (21 page)

Just in case you need an excessively high level of visual stimulation and tire of watching Jaeger go through his breakdown and reconstruction, all of this is played out before a backdrop screen on which they project a constant barrage of imagery: Nazi propaganda reels, combat footage from Vietnam and Desert Storm, news video, films of grisly medical procedures, once-classified documentation of weapons testing, films of primitive tribal body modification, pornography out-takes and bloopers, a collection of political assassinations captured live as they happened … there’s no telling quite what’ll show up at any given glance.

Jaeger smiles cryptically. “Think of it as a party tape of all the stuff that fascinates us.”

Jasmine Snow freely agrees. “We admit it. We’re total pervs.”

*

We used the next day to take in the Museum of Science and Industry. When in Chicago, do as the tourists do. Kevin got an especially enthusiastic charge out of the jarred display of fetuses in various stages of growth. I could see his mind at work, running through an idle exercise, figuring out how to steal them.

“I could shoot a picture with me in the middle of them all,” he said, “and send out still-birth announcements.”

Anthony picked up on this. “‘However, the proud father regrets to announce that he doesn’t know who the mothers are.’”

“They’re better off here,” I told him. “You’d just end up abusing them.”

I still had them on my mind when we got back to the hotel that evening, these tiny orphans, neither alive nor truly dead. They did have lives of their own, of a sort, floating placidly, their embryonic and fetal oceans their entire worlds as the older ones seemed to reach toward ours with delicate waxy fingers. I didn’t even know if they were real or not — probably they weren’t, just lifelike rubber dolls — but I found that didn’t matter. I felt sorry for them and I loved them, and most of all I was jealous of the potential they represented.

Fetal tissue is so adaptive, it can become anything. That’s why doctors find it so easy to work with in restoring the bodies of those who made it past the womb, but left room for improvement.

It can adapt to anything.

Even the cool, hard, metal skin of technology?

I’d have to see what Josef thought of that. I doubted this small revelation could have spared him all his pain, but to me it was intriguing to ponder. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Josef had claimed that the body becomes malleable when the mind reaches a certain level of cellular and spiritual awareness, but I’d half-suspected that he’d just gotten carried away with the special effects from our earlier tours.

Oh, me of little faith.

*

From
Alternative Press
, August issue, eighteen months ago:

There’s something about success that breeds its own menagerie of demons. It’s never enough for some people, regardless of how hard they appear to have worked for it. There’s always something more just beyond reach, a continual reenactment of the predicament of a certain mythical Greek named Tantalus.

“It depends on how you’re measuring success, doesn’t it?” Jaeger mutters, and he seems so distraught I hardly have the heart to press the matter. When I suggest we continue the interview tomorrow, he impatiently turns a thumbs-down on the idea. “Things won’t be any better tomorrow.”

He’s an unlikely candidate for such existential angst. Ticket sales have been brisk for The Giger Sanction’s upcoming tour, and their third and latest release,
Cudgel
, is making a surprisingly strong showing on the charts, currently within 100,000 units of going gold. No mean feat for a band whose sound is abrasive even by most FM college radio standards, and whose image is decidedly unfriendly to the likes of MTV. Ironic, since their own in-concert video productions are passionate, technically precise excursions of extremity into what the medium was originally designed for: the transmission of information. Indeed, this is a band that seems successful in spite of itself.

Lest you think Jaeger’s attitude is that of one more crybaby artiste bemoaning his being misunderstood by the mainstream, you couldn’t be more wrong. He truly does not care. In fact,
Cudgel
seems produced with the intent of alienating even more listeners, rather than embracing newcomers with a watered-down version of the attractions that got them noticed in the first place.

Cudgel
takes the Sanction’s penchant for grinding intensity, then marries it to a renewed emphasis on percussion. The disc teems with a rhythmic tribal pounding as they make use of not only traditional drums, but such found objects as sheet titanium, high-impact plastic hazardous-material disposal containers, and 55-gallon oil drums. The effect is both hypnotic and ominous, and in evoking primitive echoes resonating from the refuse of the modern urban wasteland, it’s brilliant.

But is it enough for Josef Jaeger? He seems the least satisfied of anyone.

“It’s nothing new,” he explains while slumped over the table, heedless of the cigarette that’s about to burn too close to his fingers. “People treat it like it is, but that’s only because they have no sense of the past. And when they treat us like we’re coming up with something new, all that does is make me feel like a fraud. All these elements, they come from somewhere else. Look at some of the earliest industrial acts, from the mid-seventies on, and you’ll find them. Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Z’ev, Einstürzende Neubauten … they were the real innovators. They were the pioneers. The only advantage I have over them is being born later, so that I’m working in an age when I’ve got a marketing machine behind me that turns whatever I do into an automatic commodity.”

I suggest that he’s seeking a sort of legitimacy for himself, an area that is uniquely his. Something that — dare I voice such an empty cliché? — no one has ever done before?

He brightens faintly and finally does something with that cigarette. Only now he’s waving his hands around and I fear he’ll set one of his dreadlocks burning, like a fuse. “Who doesn’t harbor the desire to push the envelope? Everybody in this world who’s really forged ahead with something nobody’s ever seen, you could probably fit them all into one house. What makes it so difficult anymore is the hyperaccelerated evolutionary speed that affects everything. Now everything advances in increments, day by day, or week by week. You hardly ever see that huge leap anymore that leaves everybody’s jaw dragging the ground, and they’re screaming, ‘Shit, where’d
that
come from?’”

Since I can take for granted that he’s ruling out such leaps as a cure for AIDS, or voice-activated steering for emission-free autos, I have to wonder what leap he feels qualified to make.

“Oh, I never claimed to be qualified for anything. But … are we fantasizing here?”

Sure. Why not.

He stares thoughtfully at the ceiling. “What we’ve always been most interested in, in nearly all its permutations, is human potential. Just because we focus artistically on the most heinous potentials that have been realized doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to build some sort of linkage that would be positive, constructive.”

A linkage?

“Creating something in the spirit of a hybrid realization between technology and the primal humanity that’s our essence. Humans have to come to comfortable terms with technology, because right now it’s allowed to be the enemy, but a benign one. Machines can outlast us at every turn, and we’re killing ourselves trying to keep up. Everybody’s sleep-deprived and we’re paying for it in reduced efficiency and horrible decisions. Disasters like the Challenger explosion, and the Chernobyl nuclear accident, and the Union Carbide gassing in Bhopal, India, and more train wrecks and plane crashes than I could name … you know what they all have in common? Somebody, somewhere, without any sleep, trying to maintain a machine’s pace rather than human biorhythms.

“It’s a war of attrition, and all I’m saying is there’s a middle ground somewhere that nobody’s really occupying. What I’d like to do is harness the Cartesian philosophical construct of ‘the ghost in the machine’ and give it a new meaning in the struggle between meat and metal.”

Any ideas?, I ask him.

He doesn’t answer. He just sits still and lifts his hand and watches me watch the cigarette burn toward his finger. It’s an excruciating moment when I realize he’s not going to snuff it out, not even when the skin reddens and blisters.

“I used to not be able to do that,” he says. “It proves I can change.”

*

My name is Jasmine and I’m an addict … one who wants never to change. When Josef arrived at my door, weary from his flight from Switzerland, I let my addiction take control once more. I never realized the full depth of the pain of our separations until the moment we were reunited and I realized what was so incomplete about myself.

Beneath a week’s beard and the dark blond serpentine locks of his hair, Josef’s face was beatific, enraptured.

“It works,” he said.

“Tell me this was worth it.” I clutched him by the arms. “I have to know.”

He dragged me to the bed, and as we kissed with the fever of a month of our lives lost, we stripped away each other’s clothing. We stretched out upon the wide hotel bed, pale and naked, our hair like whips as we consumed one another.

I drew back up to my knees and ran my hands along the thin, suffering rack of his body. Still red and fresh-looking, the scars were symmetrical, up and down each limb, and in twin rows along his torso and back. They weren’t much larger than the welts writ upon one another by Africans practicing scarification as a rite of passage. I put my mouth on one. It tasted hot and raw, and I imagined that against my tongue I could feel it pulse.

“You look beautiful,” I whispered, hoarse and weak.

There’s something puny about an unadorned body. Such a body is, without clothes, more naked still. It’s why we needed our piercings, our tattoos … to lay claim to the last thing we owned that the world could never take from us or tax.

“Get your practice amp,” said Josef.

I lugged it over from the corner where it sat with one of my smaller synths that I would bring into hotel rooms. I yanked the patch cord from the synth’s output and handed the plug to Josef.

When he was ready, I turned it on.

Our arousal was, I think, born out of a delicious fear more than anything. Like the first time we made love after Josef had gotten his ampallang piercing, a steel post through the head of his cock. Or after the time I’d gotten a ring through my clitoral hood. This was no different. We had no idea what to expect, we only knew it would be momentous.

I caressed him, lovingly, gently, and from the practice amp rolled soft waves of sound. Thunder from a kiss upon his thigh, earthquake from a grip upon his arm. I straddled his outstretched leg and dragged my cunt along it from ankle to hip, and the air itself swelled with sound … each distinct but overlapping, an evolving glissando of a world’s end.

Josef’s hands on me, urging me on, I stretched out atop him as I might my own grave. It was like swimming across his flesh as it buoyed me. There could never be too many points of contact, for each had its own voice, and when I impaled myself upon him and we strained with flailing limbs and wet mouths, I heard the throats of an infernal choir drowning out my own cries, and all I could think of was what if we were onstage, with fifty thousand watts of power at the other end of our union.

*

From
Spin
, December issue, two months ago:

For a lot of disgruntled urban and suburban youth, industrial music picked up where punk left off, after it burned itself out or softened into New Wave. The appeal was basically the same: atonal noise, pounding rhythms, inhuman energy, frequently indecipherable lyrics expounding a bleak world view, often sung in a garishly distorted voice.

But a funny thing happened to the industrial revolution: it got mainstreamed. Which is the way of all deviant pursuits, and that it’s happened should surprise no one who’s ever tuned in to MTV and seen Johnny Rotten acting as guest VJ. Sounds and rhythms that smack of industrialism have shown up on recent releases by such unlikely converts as U2 and Suzanne Vega, and even Nine Inch Nails copped a Grammy, albeit under the Heavy Metal category.

On the eve of The Giger Sanction’s fourth release, which goes by the unwieldy title of
Liturgical Music For Nihilists
, it seemed a fruitful idea to check in with Josef Jaeger, their enigmatic and troubled front-man and theoretician, for his views on the state of the art and how the Sanction is coping with industrial’s being co-opted by seemingly anyone with a yen to cut a dance track. One listen to an advance tape of their new release caught my ear as a departure from their in-your-face sound. While no less unsettling, it would seem that the band has decided the most subversive route they can now take is — can it be? — subtlety.

SPIN: Why the sudden vector away from the path you’ve established?

JAEGER: I don’t see it that way. I see the new CD as a synthesis of all our prior experiments, with new elements incorporated… just like we’ve always done. On the surface, it’s got a quieter approach, I won’t argue that, but deep in the mix it’s all there. There’s a lot of grinding and clanking going on in the background, but more subliminally, less overt. We went into our sessions to record this with a motif written on the studio wall: “Ritual hymns from decaying cathedrals of rust.”