Apparently more than a few people wonder what connection this has to the dense, eardrum-rupturing sound of The Giger Sanction and its apocalyptic lyrical content, not to mention the frequently gruesome stage spectacles. Not to worry. One gets the feeling Jaeger has often explained this too.
“Modern society is breeding sociopaths at a rate higher than it’s ever been. We definitely believe that. And dehumanization is everywhere you look. Sure, you have obvious examples — mass murder, the military/industrial complex — but it’s in the ads for your breakfast cereal too. Those commercials don’t care that you’re a human being, they take for granted that you’re some kind of meat machine and then try to push the right buttons. People are getting torn in two inside, because they’re expected to function in a world where everything’s progressively more mechanized, but they’re still human beings. We don’t try to make sense of all that, we just look at it really hard.”
“At its heart, what our music is,” says Jaeger’s bandmate and paramour Jasmine Snow, “is a wake-up scream. Wake up and smell the corrosion.”
Which makes them prophets of gloom, doom, and apocalypse?
“Definitely. Hell yes,” says Anthony Newman, but with a wicked grin that suggests he gets a thrill out of the world just as it is. “I mean, when you look like us, and there’s still lots of streets we’re afraid to walk, you know there’s a big problem.”
The Giger Sanction must surely win some minor award for their physical transformation between debut and sophomore releases. The liner photo in their first album, Virtual Neurality, doesn’t do much to distinguish them from any of several anonymous techno bands, decked out in colorful rave-wear. One look at the photo in their new CD, Acetylene Torch Songs — not to mention the band in the flesh — suggests that in a year’s time, they’ve undergone an evil metamorphosis.
Leather cycle and bomber jackets abound, on top of commando pants, unwashed T-shirts, and combat and Doc Marten boots. Jaeger sports a head of crusty white-boy dreadlocks. Jasmine Snow, the Sanction’s primary keyboardist, has sidewalled her own scalp, the remainder braided into sharp-looking, whiplike rat-tails. Both guitarist Kevin Lanier and Anthony Newman, who handles electronics and percussion when the Sanction isn’t propelled by a drum machine hammering hard enough to shift continental plates, bare menacing skulls shaved within a millimeter of skin. This crew looks as if they stepped out of the post-holocaust wasteland of a Mad Max film, and frequently come across as grim as if all they have to look forward to are lives spent sweating over the foundry in a steel mill.
“Oh, that,” says Jaeger, uncomfortable with the comparison to a Mel Gibson character. “It wasn’t really anything calculated.”
“If anything,” Lanier adds, “we’re more comfortable now in whatever we project. We quit caring. That makes everything so much easier.”
Says Jasmine Snow: “It just seemed a mutant outgrowth of the direction our music started taking.”
One listen to their two releases supplies all the evidence needed to back that up. Virtual Neurality is sonically the smoother album, heavily reliant on synthesizers, sequencers, and a few samples of caustic unnatural sounds. All of which are present on Acetylene Torch Songs, but this time deeper in the mix, combined with the frenzy of Lanier’s grinding guitar and Newman’s sledgehammer drumming. It all blends into a devastating wall of beautifully ugly noise. Live on stage, it’s as dense as a wrecking ball slamming you in the chest.
This time around Jaeger promises a visual presentation worthy of the music. “Our first tour, we opened for Ministry. Which was great, but when you’re the opener, you’re limited as to what you can do. This time we’re headlining in clubs and small theaters, so we figure, why not make it memorable, in a visceral, propagandized way. I wear a headset, so I’m not chained to a mike stand, and I spend the first two-thirds of the show wandering around the stage, doing an autopsy on myself. The special effects makeup’s pretty intense. I tear out the pieces that we perceive modern society to be minimizing in importance — say, my heart, for instance — and I put them on various altars. Then for the final third, I go gathering different pieces from the junkyard onstage and putting them in me, as replacements for everything that’s missing. Gears, wiring, tools of control. Like, one of them is this oil-dripping videotape.” He pauses, looking a bit sheepish. “Well, we kind of stole that one from the movie Videodrome, but it works so well with the overall concept, we like to think Cronenberg wouldn’t mind.”
Just in case you need an excessively high level of visual stimulation and tire of watching Jaeger go through his breakdown and reconstruction, all of this is played out before a backdrop screen on which they project a constant barrage of imagery: Nazi propaganda reels, combat footage from Vietnam and Desert Storm, news video, films of grisly medical procedures, once-classified documentation of weapons testing, films of primitive tribal body modification, pornography out-takes and bloopers, a collection of political assassinations captured live as they happened … there’s no telling quite what’ll show up at any given glance.
Jaeger smiles cryptically. “Think of it as a party tape of all the stuff that fascinates us.”
Jasmine Snow freely agrees. “We admit it. We’re total pervs.”
*
We used the next day to take in the Museum of Science and Industry. When in Chicago, do as the tourists do. Kevin got an especially enthusiastic charge out of the jarred display of fetuses in various stages of growth. I could see his mind at work, running through an idle exercise, figuring out how to steal them.
“I could shoot a picture with me in the middle of them all,” he said, “and send out still-birth announcements.”
Anthony picked up on this. “‘However, the proud father regrets to announce that he doesn’t know who the mothers are.’”
“They’re better off here,” I told him. “You’d just end up abusing them.”
I still had them on my mind when we got back to the hotel that evening, these tiny orphans, neither alive nor truly dead. They did have lives of their own, of a sort, floating placidly, their embryonic and fetal oceans their entire worlds as the older ones seemed to reach toward ours with delicate waxy fingers. I didn’t even know if they were real or not — probably they weren’t, just lifelike rubber dolls — but I found that didn’t matter. I felt sorry for them and I loved them, and most of all I was jealous of the potential they represented.
Fetal tissue is so adaptive, it can become anything. That’s why doctors find it so easy to work with in restoring the bodies of those who made it past the womb, but left room for improvement.
It can adapt to anything.
Even the cool, hard, metal skin of technology?
I’d have to see what Josef thought of that. I doubted this small revelation could have spared him all his pain, but to me it was intriguing to ponder. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Josef had claimed that the body becomes malleable when the mind reaches a certain level of cellular and spiritual awareness, but I’d half-suspected that he’d just gotten carried away with the special effects from our earlier tours.