Shinjuku Filth - Raised by Wolves
Darrin Verhagen operates under several different monikers: his own name, Shinjuku Thief, and Shinjuku Filth. Each, naturally, gravitates towards a different type of music and the Shinjuku Filth persona traditionally is the home of the more beat-oriented material. Raised by Wolves brings a new flavoring to the mix: the musical cacophony of musique concrete.
It's probably best to let the liner notes explain what the listener is in for with this EP. "Raised by Wolves, a unique performance collaboration by Handspan Visual Theater, Shinjuku Thief (sic), and Regurgitator, premiered as part of the 1997 Melbourne International Festival in the massive shed 14 at Victoria Docks. The hour-long event, an epic visual and aural collage about living in a culture of gross consumption, deals with the decline of civilization and culture and asks the question 'what is the best kind of life for human beings?' The title refers to the struggle of a new generation attempting to maintain their integrity as they try to breathe life into a dying civilization."
Strong stuff and, at a pared down 35 minutes, it's almost too much. I should hold up the sticker right now. Warning: there is very little ambient content in this disc. That's because what they're about to give you is this: life as struggle. It opens quietly enough with voices from the radio, giving us the impression of a dark room colored only by the sound of a radio dial being scanned. "The Cockroach Sex" is the opening track and it is filled with a chanted melody, percussive elements, and streaks of static. Almost as if this were the primordial moments of life on the planet. Much like that part of Fantasia which we all saw as kids in grade school. Amoebas and paramecium gradually growing and evolving up to multi-celled organisms. The two strains-chant and rhythm-beginning to twine around one another as the building blocks of larger creatures.
This simply sets the stage for the thunder of the "Credit Sequence" where chant dissolves into stronger voices rising and falling, galloping drums, and the Dopplered wail of sirens. This builds into the "Galaxy" in which the voice and the drums simply begin to fight and the image that springs to mind is a two-fall tag team match with a bank of video monitors over the ring. The fight rages back and forth across the ring; sometimes voice is dominating, other times it is rhythm, over it all is a flood of commentary projected from the flickering video screens. It builds into a split instant of silence.
"The Birth." You can almost see that we've thundered through a couple of millennia to the instant of birth of our new consumer as he is thrust out into the world. And our new little tyke is greeted with a fanfare of guitar and swirling noise almost like a bank of angry bees or hovering relatives. I was eerily struck by similarities from Ammer and Einheit's Radio Inferno at this point, specifically echoing the moment when Dante and Virgil descend into Hell. (That's all right. Some of these are for me.) There is more martial announcements of the baby's arrival and then it is all dissolved into howling static, which catapults us into a montage that feels like sixteen years being squeezed into three minutes. The track is called "The Revision" and I can only imagine the assaulting barrage of TV images that are forced into this kid. From the sound alone, I can feel his personality being totally subsumed by the tripe that pours out of the television. He is being revised by the media and the flickering fuzz of television signals, the moaning of guitars, the bleeping radio signals, the hiss of enraged metal crickets, the droning voice of disconnectivity from the phone are all forced through a tiny spigot-through a tiny ear-into a receptive brain.
All in time for "The Art." Which is a beautiful and disturbing track. Up until this point, there has been little that could be qualified as conventional melody, but with 'art', we get interplay between piano, cello, and violins; a lilting piece that is undercut by a voice that begins by telling us that "no one every achieved anything through hard work and honest effort…" There is course and discourse on art until it is wracked with percussion as our consumer is presented with "The Sale."
"The Sale" is the frenzied construction of a great temple to the Gods of Consumerism. Our little consumer stands on the street before this great temple and watches it rise up before him, an unholy temple of steel and mirrors. Synth lines cascade and plummet around the rhythmic pounding of the growing structure. At the foot of the building is a minivan with a loudspeaker growing out of its roof, spouting the prophetic rhetoric of the First Church of Commercialism and the voice is distorted and twisted by the groaning metal behind it. "Socrates…once in a lifetime…do it for the children."
And then, we are swept inside the temple for the "Earnest Exchange of Ideas." And it feels like a boiler room in here. Steam is coursing out of gleaming vents. Metal clatters on metal with a steady time-clock like rhythm. There are fat bursts of bass rumblings that pour out of the speakers. And somewhere within this marketplace is maniacal laughter that slowly breaks up, almost like the dissolution of our consumer's sanity.
This dissolution follows him home where "The Match" ensues. Fat drones of electricity vie with the angry barking of dogs and you can imagine the heated argument, the words, the permanent rifts driven between two people until the consumer storms out of the house and gets into his car-his self-contained unit of consumption. There is a melody drifting in the far background of "The Car" as the consumer races down the highway, shouting and screaming as everything falls apart around him. And he finally drives the car off the road in a crackling of breaking glass. He is thrown free of the car and lies, broken and bleeding, on the bare ground.
And then, there is nothing but melody. "The…erm, 'repository of consequences' (ah, so to speak)" is this final moment when the consumer has nearly consumed himself in his greedy quest to have. And yet, as he lies there, expiring, he has achieved a sense of freedom and this freedom lingers around his head. He realizes his emptiness, realizes that he was born from chaos, fed with chaos, and could never really aspire to anything but chaos; and, in that realization, hears a pure and clean melody. It's a wonderful moment that brings us through this experience and leaves us with hope.
But there is a snarl of static around the edge. And suddenly, there is "The Pitch." Nineteen seconds reminding you that you have just been watching a re-enactment and that proper consumption of goods-methodical and well-paced consumption-will lead to a happy Consumer life. You, too, can avoid burnout. Just pace your purchases. And then it is over. The wolves have just eaten their young.
But, that melody lingers.
In my cubicled work environment, I can't get away with much more than gentle ambient and it is always nice to come home and run through this disc. I answered the phone once with this in the background and the person on the other end got halfway through their opening sentence before sputtering out: "What the hell is that?" "I'm relaxing," was my reply. Raised by Wolves is a purging, cleansing experience which leaves you rattled but adrift with that final melody of hope out of chaos. My copy reads 'limited edition 1000.' Get it now before it disappears.
Darrin Verhagen
Dorobo [1998]
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