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Oh, me of little faith.

*

From Alternative Press, August issue, eighteen months ago:

There’s something about success that breeds its own menagerie of demons. It’s never enough for some people, regardless of how hard they appear to have worked for it. There’s always something more just beyond reach, a continual reenactment of the predicament of a certain mythical Greek named Tantalus.

“It depends on how you’re measuring success, doesn’t it?” Jaeger mutters, and he seems so distraught I hardly have the heart to press the matter. When I suggest we continue the interview tomorrow, he impatiently turns a thumbs-down on the idea. “Things won’t be any better tomorrow.”

He’s an unlikely candidate for such existential angst. Ticket sales have been brisk for The Giger Sanction’s upcoming tour, and their third and latest release, Cudgel, is making a surprisingly strong showing on the charts, currently within 100,000 units of going gold. No mean feat for a band whose sound is abrasive even by most FM college radio standards, and whose image is decidedly unfriendly to the likes of MTV. Ironic, since their own in-concert video productions are passionate, technically precise excursions of extremity into what the medium was originally designed for: the transmission of information. Indeed, this is a band that seems successful in spite of itself.

Lest you think Jaeger’s attitude is that of one more crybaby artiste bemoaning his being misunderstood by the mainstream, you couldn’t be more wrong. He truly does not care. In fact, Cudgel seems produced with the intent of alienating even more listeners, rather than embracing newcomers with a watered-down version of the attractions that got them noticed in the first place.

Cudgel takes the Sanction’s penchant for grinding intensity, then marries it to a renewed emphasis on percussion. The disc teems with a rhythmic tribal pounding as they make use of not only traditional drums, but such found objects as sheet titanium, high-impact plastic hazardous-material disposal containers, and 55-gallon oil drums. The effect is both hypnotic and ominous, and in evoking primitive echoes resonating from the refuse of the modern urban wasteland, it’s brilliant.

But is it enough for Josef Jaeger? He seems the least satisfied of anyone.

“It’s nothing new,” he explains while slumped over the table, heedless of the cigarette that’s about to burn too close to his fingers. “People treat it like it is, but that’s only because they have no sense of the past. And when they treat us like we’re coming up with something new, all that does is make me feel like a fraud. All these elements, they come from somewhere else. Look at some of the earliest industrial acts, from the mid-seventies on, and you’ll find them. Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Z’ev, Einstürzende Neubauten … they were the real innovators. They were the pioneers. The only advantage I have over them is being born later, so that I’m working in an age when I’ve got a marketing machine behind me that turns whatever I do into an automatic commodity.”

I suggest that he’s seeking a sort of legitimacy for himself, an area that is uniquely his. Something that — dare I voice such an empty cliché? — no one has ever done before?

He brightens faintly and finally does something with that cigarette. Only now he’s waving his hands around and I fear he’ll set one of his dreadlocks burning, like a fuse. “Who doesn’t harbor the desire to push the envelope? Everybody in this world who’s really forged ahead with something nobody’s ever seen, you could probably fit them all into one house. What makes it so difficult anymore is the hyperaccelerated evolutionary speed that affects everything. Now everything advances in increments, day by day, or week by week. You hardly ever see that huge leap anymore that leaves everybody’s jaw dragging the ground, and they’re screaming, ‘Shit, where’d that come from?’”

Since I can take for granted that he’s ruling out such leaps as a cure for AIDS, or voice-activated steering for emission-free autos, I have to wonder what leap he feels qualified to make.

“Oh, I never claimed to be qualified for anything. But … are we fantasizing here?”

Sure. Why not.

He stares thoughtfully at the ceiling. “What we’ve always been most interested in, in nearly all its permutations, is human potential. Just because we focus artistically on the most heinous potentials that have been realized doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to build some sort of linkage that would be positive, constructive.”

A linkage?

“Creating something in the spirit of a hybrid realization between technology and the primal humanity that’s our essence. Humans have to come to comfortable terms with technology, because right now it’s allowed to be the enemy, but a benign one. Machines can outlast us at every turn, and we’re killing ourselves trying to keep up. Everybody’s sleep-deprived and we’re paying for it in reduced efficiency and horrible decisions. Disasters like the Challenger explosion, and the Chernobyl nuclear accident, and the Union Carbide gassing in Bhopal, India, and more train wrecks and plane crashes than I could name … you know what they all have in common? Somebody, somewhere, without any sleep, trying to maintain a machine’s pace rather than human biorhythms.

“It’s a war of attrition, and all I’m saying is there’s a middle ground somewhere that nobody’s really occupying. What I’d like to do is harness the Cartesian philosophical construct of ‘the ghost in the machine’ and give it a new meaning in the struggle between meat and metal.”

Any ideas?, I ask him.

He doesn’t answer. He just sits still and lifts his hand and watches me watch the cigarette burn toward his finger. It’s an excruciating moment when I realize he’s not going to snuff it out, not even when the skin reddens and blisters.

“I used to not be able to do that,” he says. “It proves I can change.”

*

My name is Jasmine and I’m an addict … one who wants never to change. When Josef arrived at my door, weary from his flight from Switzerland, I let my addiction take control once more. I never realized the full depth of the pain of our separations until the moment we were reunited and I realized what was so incomplete about myself.

Beneath a week’s beard and the dark blond serpentine locks of his hair, Josef’s face was beatific, enraptured.

“It works,” he said.

“Tell me this was worth it.” I clutched him by the arms. “I have to know.”

He dragged me to the bed, and as we kissed with the fever of a month of our lives lost, we stripped away each other’s clothing. We stretched out upon the wide hotel bed, pale and naked, our hair like whips as we consumed one another.

I drew back up to my knees and ran my hands along the thin, suffering rack of his body. Still red and fresh-looking, the scars were symmetrical, up and down each limb, and in twin rows along his torso and back. They weren’t much larger than the welts writ upon one another by Africans practicing scarification as a rite of passage. I put my mouth on one. It tasted hot and raw, and I imagined that against my tongue I could feel it pulse.

“You look beautiful,” I whispered, hoarse and weak.

There’s something puny about an unadorned body. Such a body is, without clothes, more naked still. It’s why we needed our piercings, our tattoos … to lay claim to the last thing we owned that the world could never take from us or tax.

“Get your practice amp,” said Josef.

I lugged it over from the corner where it sat with one of my smaller synths that I would bring into hotel rooms. I yanked the patch cord from the synth’s output and handed the plug to Josef.