Eno has remained central to the creation of a cyberian aesthetic. He gives regular interviews to Mondo 2000 magazine and is often spotted at virtual reality events and house parties. His forecast for the future of his own and the rest of popular music mirrors the evolution of the computer subculture, which abandoned the clean lines of the Space Odyssey vision for the gritty, urban realism of Bladerunner and, as we'll see, cyberpunk books like Neuromancer. Eno says that the new music is ''built up by overlaying unrelated codes and bits and pieces of language, letting them collide to see what new meanings and resonances emerge. It is music that throws you off balance. It's not all tightly organized ... a network rather than a structure.''
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The TOPYs, of course, took the idea of a collision-based nett-work even further. ''Industrial'' pioneer and TOPY founder Genesis P. Orridge also bases his music on Muzak, attempting to create an even more violently antibrainwashing style of songwriting than Eno's. His original group, Throbbing Gristle, was the first major industrial band, and even his current industrial/house band, Psychic TV, incorporates industrial sounds to deprogram what he sees as a Muzak-hypnotized youth culture. In his treatise on fighting Muzak, P. Orridge testified:
"We openly declared we were inventing an anti-muzak that, instead of cushioning the sounds of a factory environment, made use of those very sounds to create rhythmic patterns and structures that incorporated the liberating effects of music by unexpected means. This approach is diametrically opposed to the position of official muzak, as supplied by the Muzak Corporation of America. Their intention is to disguise stress, to control and direct human activity in order to generate maximum productivity and minimum discontent.''
Throbbing Gristle's mission was a social reengineering effort to decode brainwashing stimuli from the oppressive status quo. This motivated them to create what they called ''metabolic'' music, for which cut-and-paste computer techniques were necessary. They took irritating machine noises, factory sounds, and other annoying postmodern samples and overlaid them using the computer to create a new kind of acoustic assault. They knew the new sound was unpleasant – so much so that they considered it a "nonentertainment-motivated music.'' Orridge was more interested in affecting the body directly through the textures of his sounds than he was in making any aesthetic statement through entertaining songs or ear-pleasing harmonic structures.
The bare-bones quality of his music was thought to go right past the analytic mind, de-composing the listener's expectations about music. Making use of Muzak's painstaking research into the effects of various frequencies and pulses on the physiology and psychology of listeners, Orridge picked his sounds on the basis of their ability to ''decondition social restraints on thought and the body.'' Orridge claims certain passages of his songs can even induce orgasms. In industrial music, it was not important that listeners understood what was happening to them any more than it was in Muzak technology. The music needed only to deprogram the audience in any way available.
For his current, more house-oriented Psychic TV project, Orridge has made a more self-conscious effort to expose Muzak and the societal values it supports. The music still contains deconditioning elements, but is a more transparent parody of Muzak techniques. Listeners can feel the way the music works and enjoy it. It is less angry and abrasive because it no longer seeks to provoke fear and anxiety as its weapon against passivity-inducing Muzak. Instead, this lighter music invites thought and even humor by creating new and greater pleasures. Orridge is not merely fighting against Muzak; he is trying to do it better than they are. He not only deprograms his audience but reprograms as well, and makes listeners fully aware of the conditioning techniques of modern society in the process. This creates what Orridge calls ''a distorted mirror reflecting Muzak back on itself.'' He believes he can show his listeners and followers – through self-consciously cut-and-paste house music – that the technologies in place around them can be successfully analyzed and reversed. They contain, in code, "the seeds of their own destruction and hopefully the structure that nurtures it.''
Cut and paste technology, applied to music, becomes a political statement. While beginning as a confrontational assault on programming, it developed into a race to beat Muzak at its own game. Muzak teaches that the world is smooth and safe. There is no such thing as a discontinuity. If a shopper in the grocery store experiences a discontinuity, he may take a moment to reevaluate his purchases: ''Did I buy that because I wanted it, or was I still influenced by the commercial I saw yesterday?'' If a voter experiences a discontinuity, the incumbency is challenged. Muzak's continuous soundtrack promotes the notion that we are in a world that behaves in an orderly, linear fashion. Cut-and-paste music like Psychic TV is an exercise in discontinuity. But rather than angrily shattering people's illusions about a continuous reality, it brings its listeners into a heightened state of pleasure. The teaching technique is bliss induction directly through the sound technology:
"We've been saying that pleasure has become a weapon now. You know, confrontation just doesn't work. They know all about that game, the authorities, the conglomerates, and even the supermarkets, they know all those scams. So straight-on confrontation isn't necessarily the most effective tactic at the moment. Ironically, what used to be the most conservative thing, which was dance music, is now the most radical. And that's where the most radical ideas are being put across, and the most jarring combinations of sounds and sources as well.''
Filtering Down to the Posse
Many musical groups in various corners of Cyberia took their cue from the industrial and early house eras. We link up with our own crowd in the form of a house band Jody Radzik promotes, Goat Guys from Hell. The guys in this group got to know one another at Barrington, a cooperative house for some of the most artsy and intellectual students at Berkeley. This was the sort of place you could easily find forty people tripping to Eno records or Psychic TV and, needless to say, a household the university was happy to have an excuse to shut down after one student committed suicide on the premises.
But even after their building was confiscated, a core group remained true to the Barrington ideals modeled after the philosophies of musical pioneers like G.P. Orridge. As the band GGFH first formed, they chose to use anti-Muzak recording techniques similar to those by Psychic TV, but for less overtly political purposes. The closer we get to today's house music and pure cyberian enthusiasm, in fact, the farther we get from any external agenda. To GGFH, the enemy is not the authorities, but the repression of the darkness within ourselves.