Repuncturing Kenji Siratori's RETROADAM

BLOT: (11 May 2011 - 02:10:52 PM)

Repuncturing Kenji Siratori's RETROADAM

I sat down to write this article as a review of Kenji Siratori's Melancholic Creature. Which I will still review, likely later tonight. Still, while searching around for something like an introduction to Kenji Siratori to help explain the review in better context, I came across a YouTube video: JapiHonoo & Kenji Siratori - RETROADAM. Not only does it feature Siratori's music [along side the surreal art of JapiHonoo], which was kind of the point of the introduction, it also features words written by him. Now, there are two rough things to explain. One, his words are often bizarre and mechanical to the point of glitch and failure. He is to William S. Burroughs what William S. Burroughs was to Jane Austen. With some J.G. Ballard and some, well, glitch and failure thrown in. Second, his music is often noise in the Japanese sense of noise. Electronic warbles. Passing glitches. Angry outpourings of pure decibelation. Neither is for everyone. The music, though, fits a definite niche in my psyche, an embracing of the rage of living dead electronics (more of that in the review forthcoming), and his droning Japanese voice is surprisingly calm and soothing in its oddity.

While his words tend to feature breaks in grammatical structure and high degrees of repitition, I was interested in the degree to which the words in the linked video above actually moved away from the style seen in, say, Blood Electric. There were some of the same glitches and, frankly, I am not sure if it is meant to be a single piece or merely a bunch of short exerpts aligned with the still images in question. DanielSanta, the owner of the video, might have edited together clips not intended to be together. I don't know. I don't claim to know. What I thought would be fun, though, would be to crank up the aforementioned Melancholic Creature, and then take the words from the video and recast them with my own line breaks and punctuation, assume they are a whole, and mostly keep them the exact same and in the same order as they appear (the only example are a couple of short bits in [square brackets]). The resultant piece has a certain broken beauty, and I think that's appropriate.

The following words aren't mine, and I won't even claim the punctuation added to them. I do this only in the sense of fandom and playing with art, and no offense nor ownership is intended. Whenever you ready, go click play on the above Youtube link (open it in a new tab or go watch and then come back, or read below and then go watch it...whichever)

RETROADAM RE[punctcured]

blue sky, to the disillusionment of the mechanism of the fetus that swims the spider of paranoia, scratches the jungle of the darkness— where is born and radiate[s] the cruel black hole of the feeling particle, the code of the callousness of the grief electron list of the molecule that divides lack. your caress! your siren form oculus! you are committed to (R of the capital letter is committed to) the chaos of the murder that crowds, to [the] road in the night: stores the organ of the darkness of a corpse. be tortured to the color of blood! BOX of the pain to the keyhole of the massacre of the fetus horizon that crystallizes; got crooked. the feeling record apparatus cell connects and discharges to the state that gets drunk: darkness scratches the desire of the antibio code and establish[es] to the part of the shadow... I turned with the mineral living body.

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