When he was ready, I turned it on.
Our arousal was, I think, born out of a delicious fear more than anything. Like the first time we made love after Josef had gotten his ampallang piercing, a steel post through the head of his cock. Or after the time I’d gotten a ring through my clitoral hood. This was no different. We had no idea what to expect, we only knew it would be momentous.
I caressed him, lovingly, gently, and from the practice amp rolled soft waves of sound. Thunder from a kiss upon his thigh, earthquake from a grip upon his arm. I straddled his outstretched leg and dragged my cunt along it from ankle to hip, and the air itself swelled with sound … each distinct but overlapping, an evolving glissando of a world’s end.
Josef’s hands on me, urging me on, I stretched out atop him as I might my own grave. It was like swimming across his flesh as it buoyed me. There could never be too many points of contact, for each had its own voice, and when I impaled myself upon him and we strained with flailing limbs and wet mouths, I heard the throats of an infernal choir drowning out my own cries, and all I could think of was what if we were onstage, with fifty thousand watts of power at the other end of our union.
*
From Spin, December issue, two months ago:
For a lot of disgruntled urban and suburban youth, industrial music picked up where punk left off, after it burned itself out or softened into New Wave. The appeal was basically the same: atonal noise, pounding rhythms, inhuman energy, frequently indecipherable lyrics expounding a bleak world view, often sung in a garishly distorted voice.
But a funny thing happened to the industrial revolution: it got mainstreamed. Which is the way of all deviant pursuits, and that it’s happened should surprise no one who’s ever tuned in to MTV and seen Johnny Rotten acting as guest VJ. Sounds and rhythms that smack of industrialism have shown up on recent releases by such unlikely converts as U2 and Suzanne Vega, and even Nine Inch Nails copped a Grammy, albeit under the Heavy Metal category.
On the eve of The Giger Sanction’s fourth release, which goes by the unwieldy title of Liturgical Music For Nihilists, it seemed a fruitful idea to check in with Josef Jaeger, their enigmatic and troubled front-man and theoretician, for his views on the state of the art and how the Sanction is coping with industrial’s being co-opted by seemingly anyone with a yen to cut a dance track. One listen to an advance tape of their new release caught my ear as a departure from their in-your-face sound. While no less unsettling, it would seem that the band has decided the most subversive route they can now take is — can it be? — subtlety.
SPIN: Why the sudden vector away from the path you’ve established?
JAEGER: I don’t see it that way. I see the new CD as a synthesis of all our prior experiments, with new elements incorporated… just like we’ve always done. On the surface, it’s got a quieter approach, I won’t argue that, but deep in the mix it’s all there. There’s a lot of grinding and clanking going on in the background, but more subliminally, less overt. We went into our sessions to record this with a motif written on the studio walclass="underline" “Ritual hymns from decaying cathedrals of rust.”
S: When you put it that way, it does sound like you’re coming from inside a hellish church of some sort.
J: What we wanted to map out with the sound is the collision between, say, the human spirit and harsher mechanical realities. Plus, it’s a veiled reference to the human body as a temple, and its decay.
S: Which is a topic you’ve become notorious for exploring onstage, in some of the most graphic ways possible.
J: Considering what’s coming on the next tour, you haven’t seen anything yet.
S: Can you give us a hint?
J: Not really, it’s still in the planning stages, but it works in theory. I’ve found a … well, let’s say technician, in Switzerland, who’s not afraid of taking some of my more outré ideas and trying to actually implement them. It’s not so much of a visual effect as a way to interface with the audience. Totally. While at the same time creating a new sound source.
S: Considering your usual candor, this is sounding very secretive.
J: You’ll understand why when we unveil it in Chicago. I’m so excited about it I’m pissing down my leg right now.
S: And that’s all you can say about it at this point?
J: (after sigh and long pause) If it means that much to you, I’m calling it the “Human Resonance Chamber.” But don’t print that.
*
For the first night of the tour, all four of us went to the theater to watch our support band from the wings, then withdrew to the dressing room to nervously await our turn. We remained oddly quiet, as if realizing that tonight marked a turning point. We — Josef above all — would be viewed either as messiahs or lepers.
I’ve never claimed to wholly understand the way his mind works, or what compels him. Or what drove him to Switzerland to meet with a renegade surgeon whose obsessive fascination with the human body and its sonic potential equaled his own. My only claim is that, bathed in the glow of it all, I sometimes feel very humbled.
Such faith Josef had, that his flesh would not reject the implants studded over his body. But why would it? Millions must be walking around at this moment, skeletons held together with metal pins, or plates sealing broken skulls. The body adapts. Metal is coated with blood and tissue, and incorporated. Insulated wiring integrates along muscle like a new kind of artery.
The body embraces.
And bone conducts sound with eerie ease.
Twenty minutes to showtime, I took him in my mouth, tasting steel and his sex, and thought I could hear the humming of his blood.
And when we took the stage, our places were ordained by our function in the machine that the four of us became. The curtains parted and angry red lights burned and five thousand throats rose in one mighty cry of welcome. And we were a collective god … the god out of the machine.
They saw us integrated within a setpiece of ruin, amid rusted mutant pews that would never again hear prayers from pious lips. Meat rotted atop a blasted pulpit, and our projection screen hung between corroded cathedral arches that housed shattered stained glass, while across the screen itself, herds of central Europeans from a half-century past marched to the gas chambers in grainy black and white.
The drum machine and Anthony’s kick bass slammed in sync with a dirgelike pounding that shuddered the stage. A latched loop from one of my keyboards chugged away with a sound of distant oil pumps, while I called up a wailing wall of pipe organs in anguish. Kevin’s guitar spat caustic chords. Spliced through it all were audio cut-ups of savage modern prophets exhorting their countrymen to jihad.
And from the wreckage at center stage, he rose. A hydraulic hinge lifted Josef up, up into view, lashed to a twisted cruciform fashioned from old discarded television aerial towers. Skin along the backs of his arms and elsewhere had been pinched and fed into tiny breaks sawn in the metal rods, so that in several places he looked skewered in place.
With distorted voice, he chanted the faithful to Mass:
“Fathers feed on daughters
mothers feed on sons
and you will feed on emptied wombs
incubate in scraped-out tombs
with maggots thy kingdom come.”
We never broke between compositions — we segued. We never spoke informally from the stage. The medium was the message, and there was nothing we wished to impart that wouldn’t translate better from the speakers and the screen.