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..)