Among other things mortmain() was/is about machinery, especially the old machinery we can't rid ourselves of. (Look up the history of why roads are the width they are for a prime example.) In the process of doing these remakes, I spent a lot of time trying to get the old machines to work, but I couldn't. I would say I trashed about one cubic yard worth of sound equipment. If only it were possible to record these devices in their broken run-down state, but of course, digital sound devices don't have a lot of failure modes where their sound is distorted, only silent. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mortmain() got some reviews that were very good, but from irrelevant critics. To ballance them out, we wrote phony bad reviews in the voices of our ex-girlfriends and posted them in a similar section of the web site. mortmain() has no problem with dishonest context any more than they do appropriated text. At one point we decided that we should have a question and answer interview, so we interviewed ourselves and pretended. Q: how did you come up with the name mortmain()? jfm3: 'neo cyber christ' was taken There literally was a band called "Neo Cyber Christ" at the time. Apparently they eventually shortened their name to "NCC", and subsequently disbanded to engage directly in the political conflicts of the middle-east. Code names and acronyms were quite fashionable in the related local subcultures of the prolific years of mortmain(). Shortening the name of your band was a kind of coming-of-age. "I, Parasite", eventually became "IP". "Crocodile Shop" went to "Crocshop" then "CS". Et cetera. The "IP" and "CS" were drawn, blending the characters into a kind of symbol. mortmain() probably should have eventually become "M" and subsequently "m()", but to date has resisted the change. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- I have a thing for headphones. I'm wearing a pair right now. These headphones have microphones and active circuits that cancel noise before it reaches one's ears. Of course it is not entirely perfect silence, but it does eliminate a lot of what our brains/minds regularly filter out. This particular pair has been sent back for repair on two separate occasions, both of which involved one of the arms just above the yokes for the ear cups cracking or breaking. I don't abuse theese devices, I just wear them a lot, so I send them back, and the manufacturer dutifully replaces them. The latest pair, which I wear now, are reported to have stronger parts. They're also silver, rather than gold, which pleases me. I tried to remove the logo from the side of one of the cups with nail polish remover, but it left a significant scar. I thought of painting over the logos, but it would have been too difficult to get the paint to form an edge just right. I wound up just covering over the logos with electrical tape. The world horrifies me, in a very close way. My ears sometimes feel like they are burning inside of these headphones. It is clear to me that they are a way of shutting the world out, or at least acting as a valve. All this is entirely purposeless. It is not a way of saving the world, or making it better, or even of decorating it. It will not shut the world out, bring the world in, or declare anything regarding the world. Nor will it repair me, strengthen me, or otherwise reconcile me with the world. It is something that I can turn away from at any time, yet I force myself to do. I have no idea why I'm doing it. To be honest, the process is beginning to disgust me. In the end, despite all the sentences here that start with the letter I, all I am is a man in a basement wearing ear protection. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- One of the more interesting ideas mortmain() had was to use the language lojban for any and all lyrics. Eventually we abandoned words at all, unless they were misplaced from some found sound (for example, "irate", "mr. machine"). So, lojban is a classic mortmain() tangent. No recording. The idea of lojban is thoroughly romanced but ultimately rejected, both as impractical and somehow unworthy. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "Mortmain" appeared on some word-of-the-day list for July 11th, 1998. The entry for it referenced a part of a poem called "The Refinery" by Robert Pinsky. "The gods batten on the vats, and drink up Lovecries and memorized Chaucer, lines from movies And songs hoarded in mortmain: exiles charms, The basal or desperate distillates of breath Steeped, brewed and spent As though we were their aphids, or their bees, That monstered up sweetness for them while they dozed." I had rewritten it then as a kind of way in to the whole thing. the metal men tap the cables and drink up vital records and memoized routines and digital signals hoarded in mortmain the desperate draw of electrons prefetched cached branch-predicted and executed as though we were their terminals who entered data for them while they idled Of course we thought of it as half bullshit. When you fuck around with line noise for an hour, recording it, treating it as an art object, you experience exhilaration. You have engaged in an act of pure creation, like a child scribbling, and it feels right. "How can this be?" you might then think. "Only those elite, born wealthy, and who have trained their fingers for decades, should be allowed to feel this." So in your shame you make fun of it. "Look at what I got away with! Next I'm going to paint a canvas white and sell it for a million dollars!" Gradually, both the shame of poor finger training and the exhilaration go away, and it's just pure creation. But, a lot of the verbiage written in association with mortmain() was overblown and self-important with tongue half-into cheek; it was grappling with the exhilaration and shame. I'm not suggesting there aren't artistic successes and failures, but I am saying that we need to love the failures too. My cousin, as a very young boy, drew on the walls of his house. He was punished for drawing in the wrong place, but those drawings were never erased or covered until the day after the house was sold to another family. I'm convinced that both the exhilaration and shame come from the frequent human mistake to implement control where cooperation works better. There is a certain kind of clarity you reach when you are working creatively and freely. Frankly, the only other thing like it that I've ever experienced was moving out of my parent's house. The three biggest failures of mortmain() were "aging", "pleasure?", and "ignorant". They contained vocal samples from STD scare films of the 1950s and the character "seven of nine" from Star Trek. "aging" contained a sample from a track by the Residents. It was corny. It needed to move through. You carefully come up sideways on the boil with the lance, but you wind up stabbing yourself all the same, and then there's blood and whatever was in there in the first place oozing out all over the place, and yeah. I'm happy to report, we failed to make the transition from scribbles to radio-format body music. Not all of the verbal samples we used fell into this particular heap of failure. Mr. Machine and irate were far more successful in having no aspirations. Who really had the awareness, "the knowlege" as the London cab drivers call it? If it didn't matter, then was separation really an illusion? If you listen long enough to noise, you can hear voices. Maybe it's just that. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You really had to be there. Like cliched wrench-toting ghosts at an abandoned car factory, two men in Fords, New Jersey, worked on a project called mortmain(). In a way, they still do. Both of these men are "high functioning" autistic. For them, to simply turn a screwdriver was to enter, singing, into glorious creation. Being there was enough. From 1998 to 2001, work on mortmain() took place one night a week with rare exceptions. But an evening could be spent on a single computer trying each of seven available device drivers in combination with five audio recording programs under three different configurations, measuring latency, or otherwise analyzing. At the onset, both men were at a point in their creative lives where they were simultaneously repulsed and attracted to music. Remarkably, not drugs but music had defined their subculture. Yet they had seen several of those same definitive artists start producing works with FCC-safe lyrics, and structures generic enough so that they could be easily coupled with video of dancing boobs, commoditized into the then adolescent "music video" format. Whether conscious of it or not, they were watching their particular round of avant-garde being consumed by the mainstream, as it always is. Instead of becoming "rock critics" and complaining about said consumption for the rest of their lives, they chose instead to destroy it, sometimes with fire, sometimes with a dissecting needle, and sometimes by creating mocking effigies. Failure was an option. Music itself had failed. It was all failure, but because even turning a screwdriver was work, and being there, and therefore enough, failure didn't change anything. There was no goal. There was no producer. There was no deadline. There was no budget. No A&R Guy. No potential or actual sexual partners to impress. There was no audience. There was the thinnest thread of social fabric, a few recordings here and there, and a few live performances. The recordings are all lost now, just a few mp3s remain. The performances took place at a cafe in Bound Brook, New Jersey. Imagine the town far enough away from the car factory town, such that you can build an adult movie theater there without having it burned down by the local PTA. That's Bound Brook. Of course, Bound Brook is also on the outskirts of a college town, and so helplessly hosts whatever wanders in. mortmain()'s first performance lasted six hours. It was one of their usual evenings of work, transplanted into a public venue, and subject to the unusual constraint that the sound couldn't be stopped until the end. For all their giving up, mortmain() were quite politically prescient. They released their recordings, such as they were, for free under a shareable license, long before the terms "Podsafe", "DRM", and "iTunes" were in the vernacular. From an early version of their web site: mp3 is a fantastic audio compression technology that will ultimately democratize the music industry. It allows the relatively large amount of digital information stored on an audio CD to be compressed down to a much smaller file that may be easily transferred over the internet. Anonymous and expedient trade of music over the internet, coupled with the proliferation of inexpensive high quality recording equipment, takes the power away from the recording and distribution industry, and puts it back into the hands of the artists. mortmain() proudly takes this power. The recorded material on this page is Copyright (c) 1998-1999 by mortmain(). Permission to make copies of and/or distribute any part of these materials for any purpose is hereby granted subject to the condition that on any associated printed or written material, mortmain() must be credited as one of the authors. Preferably, a hypertext link to http://www.mortmain.com on the internet world wide web will be given.