But as I sit at Pico Paco Tacos with GGFH members Ghost, a slightly scary-looking big white guy in black guy's rapper clothes, and Brian, a toonish, long-haired Iro-Celtic keyboardist, I learn that implicit in their sampling techniques are some strong points of view about our society. Brian (the Celt) takes a break from his veggie burrito to explain:
"We take American culture in all its fucked-up-ness, its expressions of violence and sensationalism of violence – and stick it back in its face. Our culture tries to suppress and repress the negative impulses and then people like Ricky Ramirez go off and do these sick things. Then the culture feeds on the sick things and trivializes or sensationalizes them.''
As a Spanish-language muzaky version of ''I've Got You Under My Skin'' plays on a radio in the kitchen, more tacos arrive, along with Jody Radzik, who begins to iterate his take on the band: "GGFH is the shadow of our culture. These guys are channeling the global shadow. Their album is a kind of Jungian therapy on a social level.'' Ghost shrugs. Brian nods, but doesn't fully agree:
"The guys that we're talking about are people like Ricky Ramirez, being sentenced to death saying, `See you at Disneyland,' or mass murderers at McDonald's.'' He swallows his food and continues in a more collegiate dialect: "The polar opposites in our culture are very interesting to us.''
Radzik's enthusiasm prevents him from allowing his prodigy to speak further. ''The more of a good person you think you are, the more of a model citizen you think you are, the bigger the evil shit you've got stored away back there. You can never purge it. You've got to accept it. You allow for it, and then it becomes harmless. The cultural repression of the shadow is what is leading to the high level of violence in the world today.''
The juxtapositions of these polar opposites – the post office order and chaotic bloody death, McDonald's clowns and automatic weapons, Ramirez and Disneyland – are the subject matter of GGFH. This is why their style, then, is correspondingly polar and depends on the cut-and-paste computer techniques that can bring disparate elements together. Melody takes a back seat to texture, and again we see musicians creating atmospheres and timeless moments instead of structured pieces with heroic journeys. The music has moved from an LSD sensibility to one of Ecstasy.
Likewise, Brian's composition process is a feel-your-way-through-it experience. He'll begin with a sampled sound, then tweak knobs and dials until he's developed a texture. Like Eno, he thinks of sound waves as currents to be surfed, and consciously gives himself over to the sound, working as a mere conduit for its full expression. ( The sound simply demands to be treated a certain way.'') But this Brian's surfboard is language and image from popular culture: "We find samples and cut-ups that fit with the atmosphere of the sound. We've got one that's very dreamy so we used a sample of Tim Leary saying `flow to the pulse of life.' Another is a real hard dance beat, so it has Madonna sampled saying `fuck me' – which I think is really cool because if you wanted to put Madonna into two words, `fuck me' is pretty good.''
Radzik can't resist making another comparison: ''It's like me! I've sampled all these different religions, and created my own belief system. That includes psychedelics.''
House music is never remembered for its melody but for a particular texture – that genre songwriters call ''the main ingredient.'' Like Eno, house composers start with the sound, then surf the system that forms around it. The songwriting process is not exactly random – it depends on the composer's taste and the samples he's assembled, but the machinery does take on a life of its own. Cyber artists like GGFH experience a kind of cyber journey as they create and layer a given piece. Although listeners might detect only one basic set of textures, each moment of the song can be decompressed like a DMT trip into any number of more linear experiences.
Climax
Sarah Drew, girlfriend of Mondo chief R.U. Sirius, is a house musician/performance artist who herself needs to be decompressed in order to be understood. The final frontier of house artist, she's a consciously self-mutated psychedelic cyborg. Eno developed the idea of music as a texture; Orridge exploited it; GGFH plays with it; Sarah Drew lives it.
"She just showed up at the door one day,'' recalls R.U. Sirius about Sarah's arrival at the Bay Area and the Mondo 2000 headquarters. "And I just said. 'Okay. Yeah. Looks good to me!' I guess it was a sexual thing.''
Sarah – a beautiful young woman from an extremely wealthy family – turned on to psychedelics and the notion of designer reality as a child. Her social status gave her the luxury and time to choose exactly who – and what – she wanted to be. By the time Sarah entered college, her life had become an ongoing art project. When she saw a Mondo magazine, she knew it was something she wanted to be part of – not simply to get on the staff, but to become Mondo 2000.
First step: to link her body with the brain from which Mondo emanates. Within a few weeks, she and R.U. Sirius were a couple, so to speak, and they lived together in a room in the Mondo 2000 mansion, publisher Queen Mu's cyberdelic answer to the Hefner estate.
We're at the aftermath of Queen Mu's birthday party. It is about three in the morning, and almost everyone is in the same altered state. The remaining guests include Walter Kirn, a GQ reporter doing a piece on Mondo, to whom Sarah is speaking in a psychedelic gibberish. The poor boy is having a hard time telling whether Sarah's trying to seduce him or drive him insane.
She's been talking about a past DMT experience, then suddenly she cuts herself off in midsentence and pins the journalist against the refrigerator, making a rapid ''ch-ch-ch-ch-ch'' sound while widening her eyes. Perhaps she is describing the frame-within-a-frame-within-a-frame zoom-out feeling on psychedelics, when one suddenly experiences a broad and sudden shift in perspective. Or maybe she's pretending to be a snake. A few other heads turn as she looks into Walter's eyes, flips back her long brown hair, and, her mouth an inch from his, again spits out "ch-ch-ch-ch-ch''
One Mondo newcomer explains to the mesmerized New Yorker that Sarah means to express the feeling of many scenes receding suddenly and the accompanying realization of the kind one gets when he conceives an idea from hundreds of points of view at once. But the veterans know what's really going on: Sarah is a media personality. She's a multimedia manifestation of the magazine itself. She's leaped off the page. She's a house song. She's a human cyborg.
At about four o'clock, Sarah turns off the lights for the half-dozen survivors of the psychedelic excursion and plays a cassette of freshly recorded music called Infinite Personality Complex.
The listeners close their eyes and the stereo speakers explode with a vocal fission. Moaning, keening, and howling make up most of the sound, but it is so deep, so rich, so layered – or at least so damn loud – that it creates a definite bodily response. To listen to her music is to have the experience of your brain being dehydrated and reconstituted many times per second. ''Come inside my little yoni,'' her lyrics iterate over themselves. Somehow, Sarah Drew's music is the real thing. This is a woman on the very edge of something, and even if that something is sanity itself, her work and persona merit exploration.
By dawn, everyone has gone to bed except Sarah, Walter (who is no longer in this thing for the story), and R.U. Sirius, who watches the whole scene with detached amusement, utterly unafraid of losing his girlfriend to the journalist.
As Walter talks to Sarah, she manifests totally. Sarah is a magazine article. She ''groks'' what he says, making an mm sound again and again as she nods her head. This is not a normal, conversational acknowledgment she's making, but a forced feedback loop of rapidly accelerating mms – as if the faster Sarah mms, the more she's understanding, and the more she's prodding him on to explore deeper into the phenomenon he's describing. He's simply trying to tell her he's attracted to her.