style="font-size:15px;"> The moon is made of gorgonzola
Determined not to be entirely ignorant in the face of ‘the scene’ event tomorrow, I pass much of the day in Ambient Soho, Unity, Tower Records in Piccadilly Circus and with a pile of NMEs, Melody Makers, iDs and Mixmags catching up on being young. Nonetheless, I feel like someone trying to swing. My one comfort is that at least I now know what ambient techno is. It’s aural wallpaper, slews of electronic sounds devoid of narrative. Future noyz. Geek pop. Which makes Daniel a geek pop king.
Four hours with the music press has taught me something else too: Geek pop kings make it big on the quiet. They don’t appear on the covers of NME and Melody Maker. Aphex Twin, the Orb, MLO, Muziq, Wagon Christ, Cosmic Baby – a bunch of egghead boys with tiny marble eyes and thin white features bounded by fuzzy hair and street style. Mostly they work alone, up in the teen-boy heaven of circuitry and kit control, remixing, remodelling, switching names as fast as record labels, in constant drift and flux; sampling, distorting, sequencing, dipping, cruising around the musical ether. Occasionally they collaborate – two tides of repressed testosterone converging in a sound wave.
Geek pop albums – Lunar 7, Electron Pod, Weimar Supernova – are named after bits of Germano-Japanese technology and scifi tropes, presented with sleeve notes quoting from French deconstructionist theory and The Brady Bunch. The albums are divided into quadrants and sectors, their tracks given numinously impenetrable titles. ‘Phragmal Synthesis Part 3’. ‘Nexus Techtronics’. ‘Tokyono’. ‘Space Warp Exodus’. Albums more like pieces of machinery, heavy with devices, levers, buttons, musical gadgetry, technical gewgaws, bytes and showy displays of novelty. Sometimes a secret track lurks beyond the album’s seeming end, causing entire Internet newsgroups to spring up in order to explore more fully the profundities of geek pop secret tracks, the digital generation’s equivalent of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ played backwards.
From ‘A Thousand Plateaux’, a geek pop manifesto, written by two French theoreticians, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari:
A musical consistence-machine, a SOUNDMACHINE (not for the reproduction of tones) one, that, molecularises the sound material, atomises and ionises and captures the COSMIC energy. If this machine should have another structure than the synthesiser, in that it unites the modules, original elements and working elements, the oscillators, generators and transformers and brings together the micro intervals it makes the sound process and the production of this process itself, audible. In this way it brings us together with more elements that go further than the sound material. It unites the contradicting elements in the material and transfers the parameters from a formula to another. The synthesiser, with its consistence-operation, has, a priori, taken the position of establishing in the synthetic decision: this is a synthesis of molecular and cosmic, of material and energy and no more of form and material, ground and territory. Philosophy no more as a synthetic judgement but as synthesiser of thought, to allow thought to travel, to make it mobile, and make it to an energy of the cosmos as one sends sound off to travel…
A reminder, incidentally, of a course in formal logic I took at college:
It is raining
It is not raining
Therefore Paris is in France.
And the moon is made of Gorgonzola.
SUNDAY FOLLOWING
The Big Chill. Daniel’s hair is plaited into embryonic dreads and stuffed into a multi-coloured woollen hat with woollen tube extensions running from its centre, giving him the appearance of a sprouted octopus at carnival.
Neo-hippies crash on sweaty mattresses caressed by the velvet pall of ganja smoke and Daniel’s ambient techno seepage. Chillin’. Overhead a video jock projects computer-generated images across the walls as Daniel mixes the Radio One Top 40 live into his set. The room so dark that, save for Hindu goddesses, mandalas dancing alongside dolphins, the sun rising in reverse, a tribe of faceless mannequins running through a perspectival tunnel, it might be a solitary cell or even a womb.
Across the corridor in another room technopagans flip through the World Wide Web and patrol the alternative spirituality channels in Internet Relay Chat, pondering the Jungian archetypes over leaden carrot cake.
And all this time Daniel is looming over his mixing desk, shaking his tentacles and mixing the Radio One Top 40 live.
Afterwards he says: ‘That was the first Radio One Top 40 ever mixed live into a set. Hahaha.’
I doubt anyone noticed Daniel making musical history, but that’s the way it goes.
TUESDAY
I phone the editor of iD on a whim.
‘Daniel, oh yes. After our piece about him appeared, he called wanting to write for us and he didn’t stop ringing until I’d given in.’
‘Guts.’
‘Yeah,’ the editor chuckles to herself. ‘Daniel is definitely a one-off.’
Memories of my late teendom include a tumble of hopeless crushes, Steppenwolf, Jaws, electro-pop, Saturday Night Fever, suicide bands. And a permanent rictus of raw and unrequited rage. All the usual teenage apparatus, in other words.
WEDNESDAY
E-mail from Mac, requesting my public key. Whatever that is.
THURSDAY
More discoveries. A public key lets Macadamia send an encrypted message. What message, he won’t say. Some time after midnight he forwards software called Pretty Good Privacy, along with a list of instructions which will supposedly enable me to generate some secret codes called keys.
Note: Though we both live in London, we work on California time. Like I said, we’re sadsacks.
>The US government has classed pgp as munitions. Exporting it from the USA is illegal, like running guns writes Mac.
I can’t imagine what he has to tell me that’s so secret. That he’s a hitman perhaps? A secret agent? Herpes carrier? Cricket fan?
In order to send or receive a PGP-encrypted message, I have to command the software to generate two keys, a public one which I can give out to Mac and a private one, which I have to keep to myself. The public key can only encode. It can’t decode. So the principle is that I send Mac my public key, he encodes his message with it, sends it back to me, and I decrypt it using my private key. If he sends the message via an anonymous mailer, a computer which removes all reference to his name and e-mail address, it’s almost untraceable and almost completely secure.
Oh well, however shocking or terrible the message is, I don’t care. Mac makes me laugh and I like the way his mind works and we’re only friends in any case.
A long paragraph of capital letters and keyboard symbols appears on the screen some time after two. I instruct the programme to decrypt and stand back. The hard disk light topspins on-offs. Symbols flip as fast as numbers on the propaganda boards
