FADE SCATTER REPLICATE
Migrants are often between two worlds that do not really have a place for them: fleeing economic or political hardship and entering a place (ostensibly the U.S.) that fundamentally demands their labour yet officially outlaws them and treats them as sub-human. The coyote is doing a kind of extraordinary favor by rendering an extra-legal service, and putting themselves in harm’s way to do so.
Why choose this particular job?
Perhaps because the coyote is “between,” themselves. This casts them as a kind of archetypical shamanistic figure: a psychopomp, a guide of souls like Anubis, Charon, Hermes, Mercury, or Tarkovsky’s Stalker. But, unlike this Jungian pantheon of tricksters, our the coyote is not bound by divinity or magicks — they are a mercenary; they are bound by cash.
In Nomadology: The War Machine, Deleuze & Guattari “redefine the relation between the state and its war machine. Far from being a part of the state, warriors (the army) are nomads who always come from the outside and keep threatening the authority of the state. In the same vein, nomadic science keeps infiltrating royal science, undermining its axioms and principles. Nomadology is a speedy, pocket-sized treatise that refuses to be pinned down. Theorizing a dynamic relationship between sedentary power and schizophrenic lines of flight, this volume is meant to be read in transit, smuggled into urban nightclubs, offices, and subways.”
It then follows the special economic zone is a stage for our coyote, our trickster, to turn logics and fortunes of capitalism inside out and upside down. The interior shared-self which persists through ultra time flow is, yes: dancing in place to move forward… and the special economic zone suspends the rules to incentivize a certain dancing, a particular folding back into itself to realize commerce, competition, fucking, running, transgressing, renewing.
If the trickster makes this world, it follows the mercenary makes the state.
Lines Context
I designed this album name almost ten years ago for The Northern Information Movement. I was very pleased with the “mouth taste” and look if it. Then, I realized it was too similar to Meshuggah’s Destroy Erase Improve. I didn’t want to imply a vague lineage or remix project, so I left it in a dark, warm corner of my data cores - presumably for dead.
Then a few weeks ago, the pattern emerged again. This time it manifested as the names of shell and python scripts. I had created them to consume and organize norns community data. Their names: 00-nuke.sh, 01-curl.sh, 02-build.py.
Nuke. Curl. Build.
Fade. Scatter. Replicate.
Destroy. Erase. Improve.
“If it was a snake, it woulda bit ya,” they say back home in the midwest. I ran from the very thing I was seeking. I have seen as much terror in the light as I have beauty in the darkness. Embryonic, it reactivated: FADE SCATTER REPLICATE.
Perhaps I’ve been working in the tradition of Meshuggah all along.
(And fear not, I will tell you the tale of curling nuclear pythons sometime in the near future…)
thank you so much for the feedback and for the observations with regards to my previous work. one of my favorite parts of music is comparing what i thought i was doing in the moment to how it is perceived when listening later (by both myself and others). you’ve given me some interesting ideas.
emoji now!!