Melt Sounds: Miss Machine and Impersonal Construction (Modernism and Pop Music 3)

DESTROYER, THERE'LL BE ANOTHER JUST LIKE YOU

- The Dillinger Escape Plan, "Sunshine the Werewolf"

This is my third post on modernism and pop music. Check out the first two posts in the series here and here.

I stumbled upon The Dillinger Escape Plan when I was getting into metal in middle school and Between the Buried and Me's The Silent World was the heaviest record that I had ever heard.  Miss Machine had just come out and I was immediately interested when I saw reviews touting it as the brutal end of the genre.  I bought the record and immediately fell in love with it, but I was never impressed by it musically.  I was struck by it as a statement. Fair warning: if you had a hard time listening to Death Grips, it doesn't get any easier here.



In the original post that inspired me to write this series, I described Dillinger Escape Plan as an exploratory band. But it's not easy being truly experimental in metal.  They have choppy waters to navigate. The metal world, despite its increasing diversification, has often been slave to various images of inane masculinity.  From the moronic "virility" of the eighties to the tortured "pathos" of the aughts, the melodrama of metal through the ages is not hard to document.  Metal has also been a platform for every conceivable political perspective.  The genre is full of skinny metalcore guys that read Noam Chomsky's political writings alongside Game of Thrones, bizarro-country reactionaries, and unrepentant European neo-fascists. But DEP manages to deftly avoid these genre cliches and move toward something different.  Alongside their mathcore contemporaries The Locust and Daughters, DEP embrace the raw complexity of metal while eschewing the Power Rangers guitar heroics of acts like Dragonforce.  They embrace the intensity of metal while moving beyond the adolescent sentiments of their grindcore forebears.  In this respect, Miss Machine-era DEP fits cleanly into the constellation of other acts that we've covered in this series; like The Weeknd and Death Grips, they distill undertones of a genre into a well-formed and groundbreaking modern statement.

While DEP may indulge in some genre conventions, their particular brand of jazz-metal reveals the technically monstrous undergirding of the genre when the tradition and the histrionics are melted away. Like both The Weeknd and Death Grips, Dillinger Escape Plan modulates and contorts the human voice until it becomes profoundly impersonal.  I'm reminded here of their fellow mathletes Converge, whose lyrics would fit perfectly into a particularly erudite and fatalistic high school student's poetry diary, but whose vocal approach mutilates the human voice beyond recognition. Skipping away from this sort of underlying attempt at poetics and the genocidal pretensions of bands like Dimmu Borgir, DEP's lyrics display a distinctively cryptic cynicism.  Take, for example, the first lyrics of the opening track of Miss Machine, "Panasonic Youth", which reads like a mission statement for the rest of the record:

We wrote these plans, took the order, the architecture
And followed them to the end till the gears ground cold
And relentless, there was no remorse, we had none,
We kept on with no trace of a regret

Miss Machine is relevant and original because DEP realized that modern metal's narrative arc has been stuck in a rut, and conceivably entirely exhausted by the efforts of genre adventurers like Isis.  Even its literary forays have been fairly unimaginative. As captured by the lyrics above, DEP turned away from the straightforward agendas of its medium brothers and embraced the idea of metal as product.  Instead of sounding like organic compositions, the songs on Miss Machine sound like they were built.  And they weren't built with new materials; they were made out of scrap.  Any concessions to melody sound like they were cut out of another song because it was all that the bandmembers had on hand.  The "music" consistently takes a backseat to a haphazard structure.  Take, for example, "Set Fire to Sleeping Giants".  The weakest moments of this song sound like the blandest seconds of modern metal, but they're salvaged by the incorporation of careful jazz elements and a coda of unceasing hammering:



Black metal outfits have spent countless hours trying to convince us that their picture of the evil and explicitly anti-human nature of the world around us is a dangerously close look at reality.  DEP paints a much more convincing picture. They describe a world that is profoundly apersonal, consisting of melted together machines, both human and non-human.  The album cover of Miss Machine is instructive here:



In "Sunshine the Werewolf", Greg Puciato yelps "We fucked like a nuclear war".  In DEP's modernity, weapons, machines, and people overlap and muddle, bringing catastrophe to orgasm and vice versa.  This is not to say that Miss Machine represents a clean break from every record before it.  As mentioned above, DEP's originality is born from their commitment to the genre that birthed them. They managed to capture, for a moment, the ends and the limits of the genre of which they are a part.

Syriana and Emergent Institutions

BEIRUT RULES, MR. BARNES?

- Dean Whiting, Syriana

Syriana has been one of my favorite movies for a very long time.  Along with its companion film Traffic, it takes advantage of the medium in a way that few other films do.  For those of you who haven't seen it, it's a film about the oil business.  What aspect of the oil business, you ask?  Well, what do you have?

Syriana is a part of a trend of fractured filmmaking in the early 2000s. These films follow Robert Altman's sprawling Nashville in weaving together a collection of disparate storyline that all connect together in something that looks a little more like a narrative web than a narrative line.  This kind of non-linear storytelling has been around for a long time, but the transfer of it to film brings a new dimension to the technique. Using the framed visual style of film can bring attention to the fact that what you're seeing is an inherently limited frame, and things occur outside of that frame that affect the things inside of it.  Syriana is exciting to me because it shows how these frames intersect, clash, and complicate one another.

Syriana is primarily concerned with the rights to mineral deposits in Kazakhstan acquired by a relatively small oil company called Killeen and the acquisition of Killeen by the larger Connexx.  We see this story through the eyes of one of the men working on the ground at an oil refinery in the fictional country of Syriana, (a thinly veiled Saudi Arabia), the royal family of said oiltopia, the law firm brokering the deal between Connexx and Killeen, and a CIA agent.  In true thriller fashion, everyone has their own agenda, and each of them are at the mercy of forces larger than those they can comprehend. Unsurprisingly, everything gets twisted together pretty quickly.




Syriana is well paced, well written, and well acted, but that's not why I love it.  I love it because it does not let anyone off the hook and, for the most part, refuses to place blame.  That is to say, at its best, Syriana is portraying an abstract system, not a collection of acting agents. Sure, the film is made accessible and visceral by its characterization and the idiosyncratic (read: convenient) events that drive the plot forward, but we always get the feeling that, as I mentioned above, the structures behind the characters' actions don't reduce to their individuality.  We get the feeling that although we're seeing the flow disrupted, by the end of the film the system (or assemblage of diverse systems) has corrected/adapted itself to equilibrium and the individual actions of the characters that we follow, while not unremarkable, are assimilated back into a resorted order.

Take, as a grounding example, the case of the CIA agent Robert Barnes (here a stand-in for the author whose books the movie is ostensibly based on, Robert Baer).  He begins the movie as a good cog in the bureaucratic machine, a man of action who does his job and doesn't ask questions.  When he's thrown into a dangerous situation and begins to encounter difficulties with the niche he has carved out for himself at the agency, the system of which he is a part attempts to repurpose, eject, and finally, (inadvertantly) eradicate him.  He runs the gamut of institutional mechanisms designed to deal with faulty elements.

And this is where my real fascination with the movie lies.  The film has two registers; the human and the institutional.  It overtly gives us the drama, the morality, and the pathos of the human situations that it deals with while it simultaneously takes us on a profoundly impersonal tour of the institutions in which they are imbedded.  I am reminded of Manuel DeLanda's fascinating book War in the Age of Intelligent Machines in which he essentially argues that we are witnessing a kind of pregnancy of the human race with the new emergent order of technology.  He speculates that this "machinic phylum" has several possible ways in which it could evolve beyond human dependence and warns us away from the military route.

With the help of theorists like DeLanda, director Stephen Gaghan is participating in a wave of 21st century multimedia statements that bring together an emergent approach to institutions with a certain breed of American realism.  The idea of the institution as a very special breed of parasite that fundamentally changes its host holds a profound aesthetic sexiness that goes a long way toward explaining people's fascination with the books of Foucault and the appeal of The Wire. This approach to institutions is made explicit in Michael Clayton, another fucking spectacular (if far more moralistic) Clooney movie.



Together, this axis of dour 21st century pragmatism and cynicism can be riveting.  Syriana and its ilk make you feel as though you are witness to what's really going on behind closed doors. They create the illusion that they are showing you how the real world, the greedy, violent, impersonal one behind all of our comforting narratives, is produced and has been for time untold.  In their finest moments, they show you the unthinking, amoral inhumanity of human systems.

Statements like Syriana have the potential to engender a sort of sober quietism, a kind of serene shoulder shrug in the face of monstrous odds.  But, far more interestingly to my mind, they can also bring about an increased awareness of the pervasiveness of insitutional intervention in our lives and the way these interventions govern our interpersonal relationships.  Gaghan, alongside Delanda, Deleuze, Zizek and Foucault, realizes that the minute politicization of lives is already always a reality and that the first (and perhaps best) thing that we can do is be mindful of it.