Escape Velocity (11 page)

Cyberpunk started out as a fashionable subset of science fiction, showing high technology subverted by opportunists on the margins of society, for profit or just for fun. . . . But by 1987, [it] had become a cliche. . . . Ironically, as the term . . . was losing its meaning for us, it was escaping, virus-like, into the mainstream, where it continues to thrive."*

Instead of speaking truth to power, he argues, mass market cyberpunk "offers power fantasies, the same dead-end thrills we get from video games and blockbuster movies"; it mythologizes "our obsession with material goods" and reaffirms our faith in "technical, engineered solutions" to economic ills and moral malaise.^

Shiner's worst suspicions about black leather synth-rockers who call themselves cyberpunks were confirmed in 1993, when Billy Idol-a onetime punk rocker whose market-sawy makeovers have helped him outlast the class of'7 7-released Cyberpunk, a bald-faced appropriation of every cyberpunk cliche that wasn't nailed down.

At the same time, who is more deserving of the "cyberpunk" moniker than techno-rockers communing wdth matte black modules through what one ad called "neon backlit Mega Screens"? Prosthetically enhanced by a daunting array of samplers, sequencers, synthesizers, signal processors, and software that turns computers into recording studios, today's musicians are not far removed from Neuromancer's outlaw hackers, their sensoriums physically interlinked with the cyberspace matrix. More and more, musicians of all stripes compose and perform patched into cybernetic nervous systems whose ganglia are "interactive music workstations" such as the Korg i3, an inscrutable, button-studded machine resembling the instrument panel of a Stealth bomber. "Unlike other workstations," boasts a magazine ad,

the i3 is capable of producing musical "ideas" of its own-phrases and patterns called Styles that can be modified, looped and

combined to block out songs in minutes. The interactive i3 extrapolates or produces chords and patterns from the notes you play. And with Korg's Full Range Scanning feature, your chords won't be forced into the simplistic, default versions found on other instruments.^

A cursory browse through Keyboard, a technical magazine for electronic musicians, reveals the extent to w^hich the contemporary musician has been borged and morphed. An ad for E-mu's Morpheus Z-Plane synthesizer ("the synthesizer to move your music into the next century") rejoices in "multi-segment function generators for microscopic sound-sculpting" and "14-pole Z-Plane filters"

capable of modeling virtually any resonant characteristics and then interpolating (or "morphing") between them in real time. Imagine sending a saxophone through the body of a violin and then smoothly morphing it into a distortion guitar. Or send[ing] a piano through the resonances of the human vocal tract pronouncing a variety of vowels.''

In much the same way that virtual personae adrift on the Internet seem to be floating farther and farther away from the physical bodies to which they are anchored, virtual instruments are taking leave of their acoustic bodies-the guitars, pianos, saxophones, drums, and other Renaissance, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century artifacts that originally produced their characteristic sounds. "Perhaps [virtual] instruments should feature a wide variety of control interfaces, both traditional and forward-thinking," muses Keyboard's technical editor Michael Marans. "Given the vast number of parameters that can be controlled, maybe virtual reality goggles and a DataGlove are in order."^

In fact, a handful of composers are using DataGlove-style "gestural interfaces" even now. Tod Machover, the director of the Experimental Media Facility at MIT's Media Lab, utilizes an Exos Dexterous Hand Master-a cy-borgUke gauntlet with aluminum phalanges and wire nerves-to translate his conducting gestures into commands for electronic instruments via a computer. "It uses sensors and magnets to measure the movements at each finger

joint," he explains. "This system works fast enough to monitor the most subtle movements of a finger as well as the largest hand gestures, with great precision, accuracy, and speed. . . . [T]he glove movements influence [dynamics], spatial placement, and the overall timbre of the whole piece."^ In "Bug-Mudra," on Machover's record Flora, the composer-performer uses the Hand Master to direct the course of a giddily syncopated figure churned out by electric and acoustic guitarists and an electronic percussionist. The trio is plugged into Machover's computer-based "hyperinstrument" system, in which "intelligent, interactive machines" respond, in real time, to the performances of live instrumentalists. "The piece's entire timbral content-all the sound color of these instruments-is determined by movements of the hand," the composer informs.^^

Machover's Exos controller bears a $20,000 price tag; meanwhile, in the bargain basement, Mark Trayle employs a Mattel PowerGlove purchased at Toys 'R' Us for $79.95. (The discontinued PowerGlove was originally designed to enable young users to interact with Nintendo video games through gestures, rather than joystick movements.) In Seven Gates, "an interactive computer music composition with a touch of virtual reality," the deconstructionist composer uses a PowerGlove to spindle, fold, and mutilate scraps of TV programs, radio broadcasts, and musical quotes stored in the memory of a computer, among them the "Lacrimosa" from Mozart's Requiem, Latino radio announcers, Handel's Water Music, "the gray-haired guy with glasses on The Nightly Business Report,'' and "some drumming from the South Pacific." Conceiving of his prearranged samples as sonic oddments arranged on "invisible shelves" behind an "imaginary fence," Trayle plucks sounds out of thin air by reaching through a "gate" in the fence, removing a sonic bauble from the shelf, and brandishing it in a series of high-tech incantations. With a wave of the Glove, he can raise the sample's pitch to a helium squeak, lower it to a Novocain slur, or loop it so that it stammers frantically until cut short by a flick of the wrist. A reviewer reports that some who have watched Trayle perform "tell of actually visualizing the manipulation of sounds as if they were images projected onto a screen."''

DataGlove-style controllers are not the only futuristic interfaces currently in use. BioControls' BioMuse uses an eye motion tracker, together with EMG and EEG signals generated by muscle movements and brain

waves, to control virtually any aspect of a MIDI instrument-pitch, panning, timbre, volume, and so forth. (MIDI, short for "Musical Instrument Digital Interface," is an industry-standard computer language that facilitates the communication of pitch, duration, and other musical information between electronic instruments, thus allowing them to control each other. For example, MIDI pulses from an electronic drum machine can play back, or "trigger," sounds recorded and stored as digital data by a computerized device called a "sampler.") Sensors embedded in the Bio-Muse's headband and two muscle bands detect and relay bioelectric impulses to a personal computer by means of a specially designed interface. Erik Davis witnessed a performance in which a BioMusician "played air violin, controlling pitch, volume and vibrato with his arms, while producing stereo as he shifted his gaze across the room, and changing the violin sound to a glockenspiel by closing his eyes and lapsing into [an] Alpha [wave] state."'^

Ultimately, the story goes, human composers will be superseded altogether by artificial intelligence. Tod Machover imagines the evolution of artificial life whose Darwinian struggles make posthuman music. "One of my dreams for a long time has been to have compositions which are like living organisms . , . [comprised of] musical agents," he says, "each of them a musical tendency, a melodic shape or harmonic progression or tone color. The trick would be to set up an environment with some kind of constraint language where you could put those things in motion. You might just push a button and watch it behave."'^

Clearly, the "cyberpunk" tag is adequately earned in state-of-the-art electronic music, be it pop or avant-garde. Nonetheless, Shiner's point is well taken: There is something suspect about the light-fingered appropriation of a mediagenic label like "cyberpunk" by pop music, a voracious medium that has perfected the pasteurization of underground trends. A buzzword that must be made to fit artists as disparate as Information Society and Sonic Youth ends up stretched to a transparency.

Information Society invites the cyberpunk classification with records such as Hack, whose cover features a Road I4^rrior-style scrapmobile festooned with corrugated tubing and whose lyrics are larded with references to cyberculture (a cassette single features "virtual reality" and "phone phreak" versions of a song, a phone phreak being a hacker obsessed with the

80 MarkDery

intricacies of the phone system and skilled in the illegal art of making longdistance calls for free). Paul Robb, who has since left the group, once observed, "We're musical hackers. What we do is similar to computer hackers breaking into sophisticated systems to wreak havoc."'"* But the band's glossy dance tracks, which swaddle funk lite and disco rhythms in swooning vocal harmonies, are more robopop than cyberpunk.

The label seems more appropriate in Sonic Youth's case. Lee Ranaldo, one of the band's two guitarists, has used the c word to describe Sonic Youth's avant-garage rock, an eruption of crackling static, clotted feedback, and sweetly dissonant drones. The liner notes to the group's album Sister (1987) cite SF novels such as K. W Jeter's The Glass Hammer and Philip K. Dick's The Owl in Daylight as influences, and the SF critics Richard Kadrey and Larry McCafFery dubbed Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation (1988) the "ultimate cyberpunk musical statement to date," an evocation of "the confusion, pain, and exhilaration of sensory overload, via chaos theory-produced blasts of sound.'"^ Says Ranaldo, "The cyberpunk writers all hate the term, so we'll take it."'^

According to Paul Moore, a software engineer who edits a desktop-published "cyberpunk/electronic/techno/noise fanzine" called Technology Works, "cyberpunk" best describes the folk music of cyberculture. "I appropriated the term from science fiction and applied it to this music because, although nobody seemed to be talking about these bands in terms of a movement, there seemed to be a link between cyberpunk's hard-edged writing style and the edgy music made by bands like Clock DVA, Front 242, and Skinny Puppy," he says. "In a musical sense, [cyberpunk] means using electronics to express yourself You don't have to be a traditional musician to program machines and get some music out of them. Cyberpunk music is about using high technology to express a 'street' sensibility."

The music that Moore and his readers call "cyberpunk" is characterized by pile-driver rhythms, rammed home by drum machines or clanged out with the sampled sounds of heavy industry or the big city. The music's only concession to melody consists of synthesizer arpeggios that sound like a Touch-Tone phone autodialing. The lyrics, hoarsely barked or recited in a future-shocked monotone, are electronically processed to give them a fuzzy, metallic quality that makes them sound as if they've been synthesized by a computer. Hemmed in on all sides by machines, the claustrophobic vocals

embody the human condition in technoculture. A tumult of panicked voices sampled from science fiction, horror, or suspense movies evokes the sensory overload of the media landscape and the grovs^ingly surreal violence that is a sign of our times. In much of the music, a paranoia about social control is counterweighted by a perverse fascination w^ith masculinist pathologies-the dehumanization of the individual, the discipline and regimentation of the body.

A distant relative of Metal Machine Music (1975), Lou Reed's essay in ear-piercing, mind-numbing noise, cyberpunk rock is more immediately descended from the "industrial" movement that rose from punk's ashes in the late seventies. Throbbing Gristle's Second Annual Report (1977), a grainy, white-noise sound track for a Ballardian landscape of cloverleafs and concrete high-rises, is the seminal "industrial" album. In the neo-futurist music of Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, and SPK, created w^ith the aid of electronic instruments, power tools, scrap metal, and industrial noise, the journalist Jon Savage heard "the true soundtrack to the final quarter of the 20th century."'^ As TG's Genesis P-Orridge tartly observed, "[U]p till then the music had been . . . based on the blues and slavery, and we thought it was time to update it to at least Victorian times-you know, the Industrial Revolution.'"^

In a similar vein, cyber-rock uses factory clangor as an ironic metaphor for an information society whose technological totem, the computer, resists representation. Sealed in a smooth, inscrutable shell, the computer's inner workings are too complex, too changeable, for the imagination to gain purchase on them; only when it is imaged in the cold, hard boilerplate of the machine age can this postindustrial engine be grasped. At the same time, cyberpunk rockers draw on SF concepts and iconography. In so doing, they take their place alongside David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust period, the android synth-rocker Gary Numan, and the mohawked, stiletto-heeled cartoon droogs Sigue Sigue Sputnik in the subgenre formed by the confluence of science fiction and rock, both forms of gadget pornography and unbridled power fantasy that speak powerfully to pubescent males.

Front Line Assembly offers a textbook example of cyberpunk rock. The Canadian duo's 1992 release, Tactical Neural Implant, is typified by "Mindphaser," a techno-tribal stomp about mind control and mechanical

mayhem strewn with references to "implanted brain cells" and "digital murder," along with a sampled voice from RoboCop 2 talking about "cyborg technologies" and "destructive capability."'^ Another song, the quasi-symphonic "Biomechanical," grew out of Bill Leeb's fascination with H. R. Giger's "necromantic illustrations involving alien females and cyborgian penis machines."

Says Leeb, "I really romanticize the bionic dream of becoming one with technology. What journalists are calling 'cyberpunk' rock stems from the idea of using machines to make music as well as the integration of technology into the human body, like in The Terminator.'' Rhys Fulber adds, "There are similarities between cyberpunk fiction and our music, especially this idea of breaking down the division between human and machine. Most people are afraid of society's obsession with technology, what with pollution and other global crises, whereas [we feel that cyborging] would increase possibilities for individuals."