Liner Notes on Al Karpenter Musik From A Private Hell
Spanish Translation here
/ NO MORE HEROES ANYMORE
To remake the world appeared impossible. Neither god-apparant, dionysus, nor busybody, capital began to abandon us. In this privatised purgatory, some common apparitions. Old demons, new movements, a few hells. And a few lost souls spent the decade online, fabricating ways to make depletion seem worth something, tying themselves in chains.
That same day, sounds were freed from their natural sites. Cut, synthesised. We were staggered by this vacancy. Our ears remained open (how else could they be) but no longer connected to our minds. And I heard a voice say, sound should be political, which is to say graze the generous disarray between genres, which is to say should be sound, inaudibly.
Of forgetful king capital we’d catch glimpses from time to time. When we paid for our self-scan shopping. When we idly applied for new jobs. These hardly sullied its hem. Instead it was the state that sent us decrees, that demanded duties and debts paid. If we fell into indecision the state soon decided for us. An automated fortune teller. Left hand, right hand. Either faster, or fewer, were the binary commandments on its slips (it had no ideas).
Sounds became stateless, forfeiting all rights and duties. Incommensurable to each other. Equality of hearing, despite what Cage said, made for no real sense. It was as speculative, and well-intended, as the ineliable rights of man. Lyrics became polemic, which didn’t help.
This was what we meant by vacancy.
/ LIBERTARIAN SONG
The rent, or rather rend, between private sphere and public life, present in so many other Greek thinkers, does not figure in Plato. Better put, Plato registers it only to advocate for its abolition. In a strange, yet undeniable, sense Plato was the first family abolitionist.
Without denying that the private oikos was the cell-form of the public city, in his Republic he proposes its immediate dissolution by the rulers. And in his Laws, which lets us see a standpoint on the state from below, the abolition of the oikos leads to the instantiation of the klêros, an evenly shared out allotment of land which each citizen works upon, but which does not subsist as private property. In a way, they are a political oikos, the private made agonistically public. There is no private property, and in some sense no private life.
Arendt wrote in ‘What Is Authority?’ that while the allegory of the cave story in the middle of The Republic is for the few or the philosopher, the myth of hell at the end is for the many who are not capable of philosophical truth. Elsewhere, that in the Laws Plato deals with the same perplexity, but in the opposite way; here he proposes a substitute for persuasion, the introduction to the laws in which their intent and purpose are to be explained to the citizens. Ergo, hell is other people.
The spindly banner at ‘Evacuation of the Great Learning’, which is to say Social Dissonance Zero said, by necessity, ‘if we can tolerate each other then we can tolerate anything’.
This was what we meant by vacancy.
/ EYES WITHOUT FACES
There is a sensation called fenfever, where a walker feels lost in a flat plain, and the hold of the horizon is held at bay. This was how we started to feel. What we thought was a castle on the mound, was nomore than a mere mess of huts. And in every hut a heartache.
This was what we meant by vacancy.
/ GAG GOIN' AGAINST GOVERNMENTS
Simone White, ‘sounds and words that emerge from laptops … the formation that is trap music … cracked time of where we are and where we are going now … We don’t have the words for how broken’
Every record obsessive is an averted incel. If Billy Bao was a rock star, then Als are the fans.
Similar with rap stars and trap heads (glorious, sweaty chanting fans lit suddenly on stage).
Even better, if Bordowitz in 'Some Style of Masculinity' offers us three figures, the rock fan (he titles it star but writes it as fan), the rabbi and the comedian then Al is all three. Masculinity defused, distended. It’s sweaty inside this record, greasy, it’s a garage and they are materialists working on concepts with their shirts off. Men Dismantled Here reads one tin sign. Spare Social Parts a second. Mascs Disaligned. There’s slick potbellies, red muscles. Two yard dogs. The older Al (is he the boss?) slurps from a dirty mug that says Male Tears.
Many names can be shortened to Al, and from across the world (The Internation-Al). An Al-nonymity more potent than any online anon account, alt, sad-sock, clone. Closer to Pessoa’s heteronyms. Al, that random at the gig who knew all the words. Al, that person whose digits wrapped what you clickbought online.Al from Lisbon who studied ship engineering in Glasgow. A Universe of Als (class position) ¬ The Universal. Karpenter is a band of Als, a bounded tot-Al-ity. Als, all elided A ∀ ls against A.I.s and other dull standardisers. And now a recording of Als, to two Als as they talk about this record made by two Als. In(para)constant pairs gainst presumed unity. Asyzygy and Du-Al-ity ¬ die-Al-lectics.
Catastrophising about catastrophic reactions is itself a reactive trap. For all the toxic radiation, neoreactors are dull, hollowed out otakus, angelicists mere flubby beatniks, sunsymbolist pagans fuggy hippies. It all reeks of closed rooms. Earl, ‘walked outside, it was still gorgeous’. Just step s’ways. There so much good shit happening, so much.
This was what we meant by vacancy.
/ 1994
1994, China connects to the internet, Blair leads Labour. But as this is the fifth track, and two minutes fifty two long (1994-5-2.52) the title must be referring to concluding stages of the court ruling, Three Boys Music v. Michael Bolton between May 2nd and May 25th 1994, that Michael Bolton had plagiarised the Isley Brothers, a decision which led to the largest single payout for a copyright infringement in music. ‘The song is an original song,’ said Louis Levin, Bolton's manager. ‘We view the claim to be without merit and are vigorously defending the matter.’ This defence was grounded in Bolton’s assertion that he never heard the Isley Brother’s song before.
Bolton’s gesture was clear, if misunderstood. Having begun, like members of Al Karpenter, from an Anti-Copyright position (his first big hits were covers and standards like ‘Time Is On My Side’ and ‘Dancing In The Street’) he had begun to see its limits. Two early signs of this, of his shift towards socialised dissonance, constitutive dissociation, feeding back filters of character. They know ¬ what.
(Lyotard ‘narratives are like temporal filters whose function is to transform the emotive charge linked to the event into sequences of units of information capable of giving rise to something like meaning’. Elsewhere ‘The Character Filter as Effect of the Repressive Process’)
In 1982 Bolton gave the song ‘How Am I Supposed to Live Without You’ to the then-emerging Laura Branigan, but then covered it himself / covered his self on the aptly named ‘Soul Provider’ of 1988 (the title a clear evocation of the music industry’s factory production of romantic concepts like ‘soulfulness’).
Even more tellingly, in 1993 he released the compilation record The Artistry of Michael Bolotin, which consisted almost entirely of covers, demonstrating that he saw the artist-figure and artistry/creativity concept as empty, a sublime sham. What initially seems like a typographical error, the spelling of his second name as ‘Bolotin’ in the title, is in fact an indication of the gap between persona (Bolton) and person (Bolotin), a construction he made after failing to audition for the vacant lead vocalist position with Black Sabbath. Change one letter and you can create a persona (Mattin). The alternative spelling of Boltin was likely rejected for its Lenin and Bol-shevik evoking sound that would have given the game away (on an economic base-level, Bolton has used his grotesque persona to redistribute funds to organisations committed to abolishing child labour).
With all this in mind, we can only think that Bolton’s gesture went deeper, and it is this hidden history that Al Karpenter are striving to uncover. Several other clues point to this, aside from the 1994 reference, such as the non-cover of The Stranglers that starts the record, or the uncanny evocation of the departed Mark E Smith on ‘Eyes Without Faces’. Are we reiterations of the same stock phrases, identical self models in shop windows?
If my theory holds, this song is more than a reference, because it is precisely referentiality (the coversong / anti-copyright) which it seeks to undermine. Instead it is an inhabitation, a wearing of the character mask, an interior monologue of Michael Bolton’s as the lawyers settled the case.
Bolton begins (and our Al-nonymous singer ventriloquises this) by musing on the collapse between karaoke, the singing of ghost words, and the interior self, the geist-mind ‘Inside your mouth. Inside your mind’. This leads him to the recognition of a third element, a libidinal charge or cut beneath this apparently stable pairing of mind / word, ‘Inside your sex’. A series of cinematic cuts essentially, that take us inexorably into the void of Bolton.
(Is this what the cover image of MFAPH maps? Descent into the spewing void of the self?) ‘Inside your soul’ marks the innermost layer of the off-the-shelf-self, Bolton’s dissonant yet persistent presentation as a soul-fan / soul-man / soul-provider. Inside are mere inflections, drives, intercapacities, ‘Inside your goal’.
His gesture, against the figure of creativity, Bolton realises will be misunderstood. ‘Somebody kill me’ he thinks, but not his fleshy part. He wants to go up in smoke (‘I’m the invisible man’). Not counter-revolutionary suicide, but the smoke sending immolation of the figure of the individual musician, a form that Bolton has intentionally distended, made gross, wagering that this dissonance can dissolve the character mask.
And yet he doesn’t simplify. Bolton recognises that inhering in the commodity are these frantic, terrified needs. ‘I want my money back’ Bolton’s lament runs. Could it have been caused by him looking around the court, re-seeing the apparatus of the law and state?
‘I am the invisible man’
‘My impossible love’, intones through Bolton’s mind, ‘My impossible love’. The impossibility being that of that now lost ‘Wonderful Thing’ Love, the derelict site of the universal.
This was what we meant by vacancy.
/ TRUE MAN (THE REVENGE OF TAO)
Whatever happened to Leon Walras? Did he, on an icy Swiss lake, have his ideas burned by Marx? Whatever happened to dear Lemmy Kilmister? The great forgers and Pancho Villa?
No more heroes any more but apparitions of these figures flare up from this private hell. It’s still the same struggle, hard grit of dead labour’s differends and thermodynamic demons against indifferent angelic muzak. And a conflict of frequencies as sound tries to compress and carry this. Tao’s revenge against generic Reason. Burning questions smothered as Rome’s relit. In this vacant city up pops smoke signals.
Two clips survive (1 / 2) of The Stranglers playing ‘No More Heroes’ on a show called TopPop.
For an analog to the sound of MFAPH you have to try playing them in tabs side by side, two channels. Either mute one or exquisite corpse them, let them desync. In the first (left) the band are miming, playing their expected instruments but as the performance continues the reality of their non-performance presses more and more into the frame. In the second (right) they start from the first moment by (non)playing each other’s instruments.
Jet Black, the drummer in The Stranglers, has evidently had some sort of premonition of the false prophet Zizek, and is imitating him throughout the video, in a ritualistic effort to prevent his coming (it fails).
(as a side note, Michael Bolton’s first band, a heavy metal group, was called Blackjack)
Organ bleeps, a frantic spaciousness, death rattles and metal drumming in the air, pedalless blast beats. Playing a rhythm then jumping over it then playing it from the other side. Gauzy, repetitious. No shit it’s a bit drill. Mimers’ Strike. Tao as Pattern. Soundless effort contra effortless sound. And through this brinkshiping tracing out the waves, discerning inseperable from defying. As Malaspina scribes in the Al-cibiades dialogue ‘through knowledge of one’s own ignorance, the problem of noise thus acquires an ethico-political dimension that is inseperable from the epistemological problem it poses’.
And as Miguel Prado scries, this dispersal into noise is perilous. As well as the inhuman-opening and indetermination there is the risk of the algorithmic erasure of risk, data surveillance reforming us into ‘profit-led and military patterns-of-life’ … Not only social hierarchies but the production of the future as such is being radically reformatted by ranking … filtered and classified’.
Duke Ellington 'Dissonance is our way of life in America. We are something apart, yet an integral part'
Against these Algorithims, these bitter backfacing angels, these Al-rhythms. Noisy data is meaningless data, often used as a synonym for corrupt data. However, its meaning has expanded to include any data that cannot be understood and interpreted correctly by such machines, text unstructured as.
Precedents, one and anyone. One. As if L. Voag tried a late period trap crossover, or the Fear Merchants an-Al-lyzed a non-person. Es La Guerra Chicos? Anyone. To speak Psycho-an-Al-ly is Al the figure of the music fan, the Nirvana-head, collector and collator who has finally got a belter of a band together. In stead of sitting in a basement or bedsit and degrading into an incellular copy he, and its often if not always a he, has finally got a band together and, they are effing out of control, they are effing radges, they are effing
In place of puttering about in his decently paid graft and dropping all his hard earned pennies on limited tapes and reissues he has finally got a band together and they are effing hefty, they are effing class, they are effing
In defiance of the imposition of a preset indentity he has got a band together and they are effing phenomenal, they are effing ideal, they are effing the ineffable
In football we call a megafan an Ultra which is, unsurprisingly, an anagram of Tru Al.
This was what we meant by vacancy.
/ MUSIK FROM A PRIVATE HELL
Vacancy is not emptiness. It is emptiedness. If a volume is vacated, then its prior status remains present, albeit in abeyance. Between these two freighted states a dissonance persists. Incomparable to lack, to the melancolic braying over angelic ruins and absence, this dissonance is instead a doubled presence. A diaphony.
Phony or not, punk could be defined as the genre obsessed with vacancy, seduced by its beauty. ‘I came back to England determined. I had these images I came back with... And this phrase, 'the blank generation'. … I remember telling the Pistols, 'Write a song like Blank Generation, write your own bloody version,' and their own version was 'Pretty Vacant'’. Relistening to the tune, the strangest aspect now is the space, the taut oceans between that chiming riff lifted from ABBA’s SOS. It’s as if a series of pauses are detonated amid the guitar pulses. And it makes sense that ABBA were the progenitors of punk, the Swedish Beatles that unendingly embedded emptiedness in profusion. Couldn’t A Man After Midnight have been on Marque Moon?
Compare these intermittent signals to the constant forward motion of a pub rock tune like ‘Silver Pistol’ by Brinsley Schwarz, with its interminable organ. Silver Pistol, incessant. Sex Pistols, vacant. A sexual cut, “insistent previousness evading each and every natal occasion”
This was what we meant by vacancy.
Eoin Anderson © 2024