The Convulsion Factory

On the eve of The Giger Sanction’s fourth release, which goes by the unwieldy title of Liturgical Music For Nihilists, it seemed a fruitful idea to check in with Josef Jaeger, their enigmatic and troubled front-man and theoretician, for his views on the state of the art and how the Sanction is coping with industrial’s being co-opted by seemingly anyone with a yen to cut a dance track. One listen to an advance tape of their new release caught my ear as a departure from their in-your-face sound. While no less unsettling, it would seem that the band has decided the most subversive route they can now take is — can it be? — subtlety.

SPIN: Why the sudden vector away from the path you’ve established?

JAEGER: I don’t see it that way. I see the new CD as a synthesis of all our prior experiments, with new elements incorporated… just like we’ve always done. On the surface, it’s got a quieter approach, I won’t argue that, but deep in the mix it’s all there. There’s a lot of grinding and clanking going on in the background, but more subliminally, less overt. We went into our sessions to record this with a motif written on the studio wall: “Ritual hymns from decaying cathedrals of rust.”

S: When you put it that way, it does sound like you’re coming from inside a hellish church of some sort.

J: What we wanted to map out with the sound is the collision between, say, the human spirit and harsher mechanical realities. Plus, it’s a veiled reference to the human body as a temple, and its decay.

S: Which is a topic you’ve become notorious for exploring onstage, in some of the most graphic ways possible.

J: Considering what’s coming on the next tour, you haven’t seen anything yet.

S: Can you give us a hint?

J: Not really, it’s still in the planning stages, but it works in theory. I’ve found a … well, let’s say technician, in Switzerland, who’s not afraid of taking some of my more outre ideas and trying to actually implement them. It’s not so much of a visual effect as a way to interface with the audience. Totally. While at the same time creating a new sound source.

S: Considering your usual candor, this is sounding very secretive.

J: You’ll understand why when we unveil it in Chicago. I’m so excited about it I’m pissing down my leg right now.

S: And that’s all you can say about it at this point?

J: (after sigh and long pause) If it means that much to you, I’m calling it the “Human Resonance Chamber.” But don’t print that.

*

For the first night of the tour, all four of us went to the theater to watch our support band from the wings, then withdrew to the dressing room to nervously await our turn. We remained oddly quiet, as if realizing that tonight marked a turning point. We — Josef above all — would be viewed either as messiahs or lepers.

I’ve never claimed to wholly understand the way his mind works, or what compels him. Or what drove him to Switzerland to meet with a renegade surgeon whose obsessive fascination with the human body and its sonic potential equaled his own. My only claim is that, bathed in the glow of it all, I sometimes feel very humbled.

Such faith Josef had, that his flesh would not reject the implants studded over his body. But why would it? Millions must be walking around at this moment, skeletons held together with metal pins, or plates sealing broken skulls. The body adapts. Metal is coated with blood and tissue, and incorporated. Insulated wiring integrates along muscle like a new kind of artery.

The body embraces.

And bone conducts sound with eerie ease.

Twenty minutes to showtime, I took him in my mouth, tasting steel and his sex, and thought I could hear the humming of his blood.

And when we took the stage, our places were ordained by our function in the machine that the four of us became. The curtains parted and angry red lights burned and five thousand throats rose in one mighty cry of welcome. And we were a collective god … the god out of the machine.

They saw us integrated within a setpiece of ruin, amid rusted mutant pews that would never again hear prayers from pious lips. Meat rotted atop a blasted pulpit, and our projection screen hung between corroded cathedral arches that housed shattered stained glass, while across the screen itself, herds of central Europeans from a half-century past marched to the gas chambers in grainy black and white.

The drum machine and Anthony’s kick bass slammed in sync with a dirgelike pounding that shuddered the stage. A latched loop from one of my keyboards chugged away with a sound of distant oil pumps, while I called up a wailing wall of pipe organs in anguish. Kevin’s guitar spat caustic chords. Spliced through it all were audio cut-ups of savage modern prophets exhorting their countrymen to jihad.

And from the wreckage at center stage, he rose. A hydraulic hinge lifted Josef up, up into view, lashed to a twisted cruciform fashioned from old discarded television aerial towers. Skin along the backs of his arms and elsewhere had been pinched and fed into tiny breaks sawn in the metal rods, so that in several places he looked skewered in place.

With distorted voice, he chanted the faithful to Mass:

“Fathers feed on daughters

mothers feed on sons

and you will feed on emptied wombs

incubate in scraped-out tombs

with maggots thy kingdom come.”

We never broke between compositions — we segued. We never spoke informally from the stage. The medium was the message, and there was nothing we wished to impart that wouldn’t translate better from the speakers and the screen.

We were into an extension of the third piece of our set when the hydraulics ground into motion and lifted Josef, then swung him forward and down, an offering to the crowd. Red and blue spots tracked him, descending into a sea of reaching arms.

I watched, I played on, as Josef tore free his arms, then broke loose a number of foot-long sticks affixed to his platform. Most he dropped to the crowd around him. He kept two.

And, in tribal rhythms he began to play his own body.

It was totally improvised. I don’t even believe he yet knew which place sounded like what. But into the density of the mix he fed … the sound of meat, and machines.

Just within reach, the clamoring horde took their cue, now understanding, then took up their bludgeons. I’ve always found it amazing how strangers will naturally fall into sync after several beats, no matter how complex the polyrhythm. Entrainment, it’s called, and it gives me faith that despite our alienation, we are connected after all.

Cudgels flailed, and Josef’s sweat cascaded. He opened his mouth and out roared a feedback wall of unearthly voices.

The horde surged around him, and where there were not enough bludgeons, hands sufficed. He rolled his head back to face me, and across the burning mists of the stage our eyes met. He’d never looked happier.

And I knew, even if they tore him limb from limb, each piece would continue to sing its own song, from deep within its throat of bone.

Extract