Discordian Music

this being 5/23 it seemed like a good day to kick back and listen to some discordian music (there’s plenty of catch-all discordian links here if you’ve yet to encounter discordian thought. or not thought. or thought that is both not & not not at the same time.)

So Madghoul’s contributions are in purple. Another friend(Lefty, aka ‘daughter of chaos’)’s comments are in salmon. (This turned out to be a bit more complex than I originally thought and I had to call in back-up)

l: so what is discordian music
l: whats one good example

w: I don’t know – anything that’s pro-discordia – like the KLF or Mr. Bungle
w: eris inspired stuff

l: skinny puppy?
l: atari teenage riot?
l: butthole surfers?

w: yeah they’re all good ones


m:What do think about throwing Skinny Puppy into the mix? They have that hard techo-industrial edge that seems Erisian inspired. I’ll leave that one up to you.

w: I’d say king missle & tism.. crash worship

l: tism for sure
l: what about uuhhh
l: you know who tism sounds like to me is ……
l: dread zepplin

What I found interesting is the first band both M & L thought of: Skinny Puppy.. Cevin Key and Nivek Ogre‘s upcoming album “The Greater Wrong of the Right” has the underground salivating.

KLF is only the tip of a discordian juggernaut that most recently has manifested as Blacksmoke, whose hard industrial sounds are a far cry from classics like “Doctorin’ the Tardis” and “3 A.M. Eternal.” As “The K Foundation” these timelords published The Manual on how to get a number one hit in England, which, although dated, makes for an interesting read. Along with Negativland, they pushed at the edges of copyright law. They also burned a million quid, and filmed it.

Alternating between rock, goth, and semi-industrial, the discordian inspired band Tapping the Vein presents a mythical epic that crawls through the skin in a subtle yet tranquilizing way, before ripping you to a new reality.

Rabbi Haywire plays let’s-have-fun-with-instruments while giving traditional musical conception the middle finger. Once compared to a harder Jack Off Jill, Haywire is more a spawn of the “anti-muzak” tradition of Throbbing Gristle. Her music disorients in a way to destroy your basic knowledge of auditory contentment.

A more refined version of discordian girl style can be found in the music of the Kidney Thieves. Their Zerospace cd was enough to give a friend of mine hallucinations while he was dosing off on our near cross-country trip last year. They recently released a recontruction/deconstruction of their first cd: Trickster.

Jack Off Jill, though now disbanded and often thought of as nothing more than angry chick rock, presented a meddley of Erisian, screw-the-norm, music with their cd Clear Hearts Grey Flowers, turning anger into flippant protestation against hierarchical society and a stagnant reality in true discordian fashion.

Going back a bit now, there’s the very strange sounds of Genesis P-orridge & Psychic TV, the discordian element coming through most clearly in works like “Towards Thee Infinite Beat” or the work he’s done with the industrial-tribal act Pigface. Another seriously tribal experience, certainly the most incredible concert I’ve personally attended, is Crash Worship.

Also check out the discordian hip-hop stylings of Noah 23 and the other releases out of plaguelanguage (and don’t miss the ginsberg sample in his track Magnesium Viper)

(As for me, I intend to spend the day downloading and listening to the 23 tracks of Latent Chaos , unless someone has another musical suggestion..)

12 Comments

  1. I didn’t even come close to hitting all the bands I think are chaos-inspired… they might be giants, cradle of filth, tad, todd rundgren, bare naked ladies… bad brains, dead milkemn..

    I forgot the dead milkmen!

    what else did I miss???

  2. You missed The Fugs, but it’s okay, they were sort of even before my time.

  3. http://www.thefugs.com/history3.html

    Exorcising the Pentagon
    October, 1967
    All through the history of the Fugs in the ’60s, the war in Vietnam throbbed like an ever-seething soul sore. However much we partied, shouted our poetry and strutted around like images of Bacchus, we could never quite get it out of our mind. It was like that Dada poetry reading that Tristan Tzara gave in 1922 in Paris, with an alarm clock constantly ringing during the reading. The war was THE alarm clock of the late ’60s.
    It seemed as if the war might become permanent, so there were big demonstrations planned for October of 1967 to surround the nerve center of the war– the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Somebody came up with the idea of holding an Exorcism of this mystic pentagonal citadel of napalm and incineration.
    I agreed to write and create the actual Exorcism. Tuli and I rented a flat bed truck and a sound system. The Fugs and a group of San Francisco Diggers climbed aboard and joined the protest march across the bridge from D.C. to the Pentagon. We positioned ourselves on the edge of a parking lot a few hundred feet from our target, while tens of thousands of marchers walked past, and I intoned a sing-song litany of exorcism after which we all began to chant “Out, Demons, Out!” over and over for about fifteen minutes. Filmmakers Barbara Rubin and Shirley Clarke filmed the chanting, while magician/ filmmaker Kenneth Anger positioned himself beneath the truck and performed his own ritual of exorcism. It was quite an afternoon.
    When we had finished the exorcism, we walked onto the lawn in front of the Pentagon where lines of armed soldiers with rifles thrust forward stood guarding the entranceway. We were carrying dozens of yellow daisies. We paused in front of the young and obviously nervous soldiers and gently shoved some stems into some rifle barrels, then glanced back over our shoulders as we walked away, marveling at the vision of white petal jutting from dark metal.
    It was a famous thing we did, and people praised us for our audacity, yet the Vietnam War went on for another seven years. So much for “Out, Demons, Out!” You can learn more about the big demonstration at the Pentagon in Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night.
    After the exorcism, The Fugs began their final series of performances at The Players Theater in Greenwich Village. Personnel had changed. We had assembled a very talented musical line-up: Charles Larkey on bass, Ken Pine on guitar, Dan Kootch on guitar and violin, and Ken Weaver on Drums. Richard Alderson recorded some of these final shows of 1967, which closed on New Year’s eve at the Players Theater.

  4. I keep a list of more-or-less overtly Discordian music here: http://singlenesia.com/links/?browse=1&category=19 although it is woefully incomplete.

    I also consider Devo to be overtly Discordian (well, Subgenius. Same difference.) I agree about TMBG. Perhaps also Oingo Boingo?

  5. Fugs! I’m thinking Kill For Peace should be easily found via 2pp (perhaps it should get some radio airplay on the university stations?)

    and the various monty python songs – ( the fcc song http://singlenesia.com/news/story/3170027007 )

    oh, & Spot 1019. ( http://www.spot1019.com/spotindex.html )

  6. I’ll add Camper Van Beethoven to the list.

    Re: Crash Worship. Yeah, totally crazy live. I had one eye on the fire exits. Absolutely insane. They do what they do very well.

  7. How about Tool? They’re quite into pulling pranks and not taking stuff too seriously. Read the FAQ and specifically look at the lachrymology stuff and the song “Die Eier Von Satan.” http://toolshed.down.net/faq/faq.html

  8. & the secret pages on the whole noon blue apples weirdness, & the last track of salival

    you’re right, tool’s pretty damn funny

    primus too

  9. Just plugging some of what is sometimes considered “disocordian” or “Erisian” music. I’d tend to agree myself most days.

    First project is:
    A kLoKwErK kAoS which is an industrial/metal/goth blend with a few other genres thrown in for good measure now and again. Lyrical content often has to do with paradoxical views, psychological and philisophical material and various other crud.

    Second is A kLoKwErK kAoS presents…
    Which is an instrumental techno side project of the former and is often reportedly rather chaotic sounding especially in moer recent recordings (circa 2007).

    There’s also a whole host of bands I plug on the band links page that I’d recomend anyone check out whether they consider them discordian, erisian, niether or whatever; they are just good musicians that deserve a listen.

    website for both projects is: http://www.aklokwerkkaos.com use the audio nav to pick which project you’d like and listen or download free.

    Ambassador KLOK KAOS

  10. I think Tool is pretty un-Discordian if you ask me. Sticking to a songwriting formula for three albums is not very Discordian-like. However, I would suggest the “Perfect Symmetry” album by the progressive metal band Fates Warning. There are a lot of themes in the songs that are related to Discordianism. About self-identity, The Machine(tm), etc.

  11. I would say that The Toilet is very much discordian music.

    http://www.behappyordie.com
    http://www.myspace.com/toiletpower

  12. That Handsome Devil have a song called “Viva Discordia”, and they’re suitably unpredictable. Should be on the list I think.

Comments are closed.

© 2024 Technoccult

Theme by Anders NorénUp ↑