GX Jupitter-Larsen, “Alluring”

Our first two contestants (Spastic Colon and Moth Drakula) really rang my bell in part because of their editing/shaping/composing acumen. It should come as no surprise, though, that GX Jupitter-Larsen (of The Haters) won't be judged on these criteria. Larsen does here what he does on nearly all Haters records; he amplifies something that destroys, applies it to something that can be destroyed, and lets nature take its course. No shaping, no editing, and no clean-up, save for a broom or a shovel (!) afterwards.

Critiquing individual Jupitter-Larsen/Haters releases is somewhat futile. For one reason why, I’d like to direct your attention to this lengthy tangent.


If you’re ever heard the Robert Ashley piece In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women, or better yet, if you’ve read the story behind the work (go to UbuWeb, now!!), you already know about John Barton Wolgamot. He published two books in his life – one was called “In Sara Haardt Were Men and Women,” and the other was titled, “In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women.” Both books contained identical text, a series of names inserted into a purposefully meaningless sentence. Each page contains the same sentence, with approximately eight names of historical figures inserted throughout (Wolgamot himself makes appearances too). Each page is exactly the same sentence with a different combination of names added.

Wolgamot claimed that the name combinations produced music in his head, and he spent decades deciding upon the specific names used, and the combinations in which they would be deployed, in order to meet his rigorous compositional standards (He expressed regret many years later that two names in the text were “incorrect” – Camille Pissarro and Thespis didn’t quite fit, due to incorrect syllables. He replaced the former with “Peter Cornelius” and the later with “Ruth Page” and was then satisfied). Conversely, he could hear historical names being spoken within performances of classical music he attended; hearing a litany of exotic-sounding names from within a performance of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony was the original impetus for the books.

More importantly, he claimed that, as the text of both books was identical, the actual writing of each was the creation of the books’ titles. A third book was planned before he died, again with the same inner text but with different title, exactingly composed. He believed that the title page was the body of the work, and the text was “the blood that ran through it.”

I love this story, in part because when I get REALLY exhausted, I’ll sometimes find that I get a name stuck in my head, a random name I’ve seen somewhere, and my mind will keep repeating that name, soaking in the musicality of the syllables, for as long as it takes before I finally go to sleep. The name “John Krogman” once haunted my exhausted hours for nearly four months!

Apart from that, though, the story doesn’t seem so far removed from the history of The Haters (and Jupitter-Larsen himself). The framework and its tools change…sandpaper, funnel, bikes, calculators, wrestling belt, ladders, shovels…these are the creative elements that are brought to each Haters performance (or “jam” if you’re a noise dude from the Midwest, or “Aktion” if you’re a PE collector from Europe), but the blood that runs through it is the mindful destruction.

I think that’s why the Haters sometimes get the old John Cage “I admire his ideas, but I don’t like to listen to him” stigma. The shit just isn’t fun if you’re not as excited about the whole process as GX is…it’s like watching someone get all worked up about butterflies, or teacups (or, hrm, noise cassettes) when you don’t share their interest. Without a common thread between you, documentation of the obsession just seems…tedious.

The fame/public interest of people who are truly obsessed AND productive seems to wax and wane randomly against the cycles of popular taste. People flock to the scene, then they wander off, but at the end of the day, one more funnel is destined to meet its maker, same as all the others. You never get the sense that any particular album or piece is “stepping up the plate” or has any specific desire to please anyone but its creator, but neither is any one “phoning it in.” Each and every track has the weight of the entire discography bearing down on it, documenting an undying devotion to gilt-framed entropy.

As for how this specific track sounds….it’s quite agreeable to my ears. It’s physical, undulating, even sexy at times (think of the Dada Drumming label’s motto)! It sounds distant, subterranean, a bit dreary (atmospherically, not aesthetically). There’s a few minor modulations throughout, as if some piece of machinery slipped off its track and had to be re-reattached, concluding with some disturbing speaker clipping; a piece of obsessive, unfettered noise.

This is the point where we find out, if I may wax metaphorically, whether you’re dancing with your date because you wanna see his/her killer dance moves, or you just want to rub up on some body heat. Conventional critical factors like technique, timing, flash moves deflect from this record – entropy makes all the important decisions. After you’ve hoisted a bike with the funnel on it above a piece of spinning sandpaper, decision time is over; it’s time to let nature (and obsession) take its course.