How
to Destroy the Universe Festival
|
How to Destroy
the Universe
|
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Downloads| |Press Information/photos|
"The Crisis of our Country is not caused by External Forces... The
Danger Lies Within..." Jeff's
Triumpant 23 year REturn: "Some
view [the new F-SPACE CD] Preliminary
Impact Report as the statement Recent News
Click image for Show Details
We
have a few 3 Day FESTIVAL PASSES available: (if you have trouble with the buttons, just Pay Pal your payment to payme 'at''[REMOVE] mobilization.com) or from BrownPaperTickets.com Note:
Like last year, We continue our Fiercely Independent, annual DIY collaborative Event focused on exploring ARTISTIC INDETERMINACY and just what it means to be a BURNING MANN and Post POST-PUNK in the modern world. We also continue to emphasis (or at least share the stage equally) with Female heavy hitters. Many of the bands are fronted or composed mainly of women, all of which are not afraid to Launch! Including Punk Cholita Pioneer Alice Bags (Decline of Western Civilization)! We've stepped up the art focus this year and turned the reins over to the SHIPYARD and the FLAMING LOTUS GRRLS. We've also invited three bus loads of "Modern Primitive" extreme performers. It's hard to classify just exactly what these very real Freaks do, but needless to say it is Extreme performance. There are no slackers in this years lineup. The list is overwhelming! Everyone promises to DESTROY! HISTORY:
In the early 1980s, gaggles of crazed angst ridden youth, sharing
who-knows-what drugs, safety pins and multicolored hair products,
were bussed out to the Mojave desert to unleash their Extreme
culture to the cosmos. Los Angeles Punk/Post-Punk Scene icons
such as DESTROY 2005: This years events takes this Invariant reference point, and Worm Holes past the Northern "Rave in the other Desert" to present an Apocalyptic festival of Extreme energy, Quantum Contradiction, and Sardonic Conservatism. This is the event that promises to leave us spent and scratching our mottled heads as to just What transpired. And like all good science, hopes to leave us with more questions than answers. The bill is ENORMOUS this year!
Please come out and help support this rare opportunity to build
and re-invent extreme underground community.
Co-Presented by: KFJC, KZSU, KUSF, KALX, KXLU (Los Angeles) Wed
June 22 @ the Great American Music Hall For each night, choose the number of tickets you want and provide at least the buyer's name. Tickets will be Will Call at the door. Use the Donation button to donate any additional part of the "sliding scale". Please print out your Pay Pal email to use for discounted merchandise at the event. For lower ticket prices or a sponsored admission, please email "orders at mobilization . com" We've provided suggested base ticket prices, plus a donation button you can use to contribute anything above the suggested price. Prices include Pay Pal charges.
More information will be here shortly |
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Press Releases from the Part 2 Festival
ALL AGES! Free Ear Plugs provided by HearNet.com
EXTREME TIMES WARRANT extreme measures. At least that seems to be the philosophy behind 'How to Destroy the Universe: Part 2,' product of the evil-genius ruminations of Mobilization.com's seminal, deliciously idiosyncratic Ethan Port and Scot Jenerik. If you're looking for a medium for the collective release of fury and psychosis, and want to have a kick-ass good time while you're at it, then head to the Shipyard in Berkeley for this two-day festival of extreme art and music slated, appropriately enough, to coincide with Hiroshima Day. Imagine an industrial version of Burning Man sans the yuppies and dippy rave music. This time around, subject yourself to F-Space's homicidal trance-inducing wall of pyro-post punk noise, heightened by a Butoh-influenced collaborative performance by Collapsing Silence's Indra Lowenstein (Fri/6 only). Suffer the wrath of Black Ice, the Sixteens, and Binky broads who'd just as soon spit on you as look at you (no cutesy bullshit here, thanks be). Take a moment to ponder the absurdist performance art of Berlin's Indra and Deedee Lux. Feast your eyes and ears on Kiki's three-story fountain of weeping fire Egeria, Shipyard manager Jim Mason's two-ton, sonic ice sculpture, and explosive fire art by Charlie Gadeken. Surrender to the Aesthetic Meat Front's corporate deprogramming ritual. And regale in the visual stimulations of extreme video and the aural pleasures of independent DJs. Proceeds go to keeping extreme art and music alive; but if you're really broke, just e-mail imbroke@mobilization.com and see what you can work out. Fri/6-Sat/7, 8 p.m.-1 a.m., Shipyard, 1010 Murray, Berk. www.mobilization.com. $10-$20 sliding scale. (Camille T. Taiara)
Note: We are encouraging friends of the Shipyard and Mobilization to please purchase advanced tickets. This helps us cover the cost of obtaining the permits for the festival and the travel and fuel expenses for the artists to get them to the festival, and to ignite their art pieces. Also, the Shipyard has relatively limited space so the event may sell out. .
DESTROY PART 2 DESCRIPTION:
===================================================================
DETAILS ON THE FESTIVAL - PART 2:
How
to Destroy the Universe is an ambitious curatted extreme music/art/performance
festival series dedicated to presenting fiercely individual and independent
artists to the community. The festival is roughly grounded in the "post
punk" tradition, but is open to any new and innovative ideas. The
festivals are inherently grass-roots and community based, focused on promoting
and supporting alternative arts culture both locally and globally.
Destroy-Part 2 takes place on Hiroshima day, book-ending the hugely successful first festival last DEC 7, 2004 (Pearl Harbor Day) at Studioz in San Francisco. Inspired by the historic date, the performers and artists have been picked with perhaps a darker or more somber slant, while all still being quite explosive and transgressive in their own individual way. The festival is organized by members of the bay area pyro post-punk group "F-SPACE" (members of SAVAGE REPUBLIC and CHROME, and noise artist SCOT JENERIK), who combine homemade incendiary percussion instruments with hypnotic alternately tuned guitars and runaway locomotive drums. F-SPACE takes their name from the art space Los Angeles artist Chris Burden and colleges used to present their essential and extreme physical artwork that was otherwise banned at any other gallery, and it is this tradition that inspires the How to Destroy the Universe Festival.
The Shipyard's outdoor location for this festival is compatible with large scale fire art and sculptures. Bay area artist Kiki will bring her 3 story water fountain "Egeria" to the space (featured at the recent Burning Man Fire Arts Festival), configuring it to weep tears of fire during the F-SPACE performance. Indra Lowenstein from "Collapsing Silence" will also accompany F-SPACE at this performance with a special Butoh style dance dedicated to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Jim Mason (manager of the shipyard and known at Burningman for his fire canons that spew 100+ foot columns of burning diesel fuel) has volunteered to create a massive John Cage inspired super-human sized ice sculpture porous enough to allow flames to pass through. The result will be a cacophonous and chaotic sound generation machine driven by the slow devolution of human body to water and industrial bones.
Ryon Gesink's is pulling out all the stops with his rolling F*CK MACHINE and giant EYE ARCHWAY, backed by Mark McGothigan and Kaosmi Kitty's "BONE TREE Soundtrack", including sweeping epic industrial audio that accompanied Dana Alabany's roving bone sculpture at Burningman 2001.
This event also highlights many bands and artists with women in non-traditional roles, such as bands like "BLACK ICE", "THE SIXTEENS" and "BINKY" with women taking dominant and aggressive roles that are traditionally identified as more masculine. Videos by legendary Los Angeles performance artist RON ATHEY deal with transgressions of societal assumptions of gender, orientation, power,control, and "grown-up" topics such as sexual and social deviation with depth and grace.
Performance artists "The Indra and DeeDee Lux" use dada-ist sarcasm and extreme elaborate costumes to emphasize and critique female roles and sexual assumptions. The Aesthetic Meat Front close out the festival with a bang via their public "Deprogramming ritual" aimed at transforming themselves and the audience to an alternate state of reality beyond our commercially controlled corporate universe.
Other extreme visual artists featured at this Destroy 2 event also focus on other transgressive themes. Archive footage from the astounding and confounding KIPPER KIDS, whose Cartoon-like scatological physical slapstick predate JackAss by 30 years, but also contain actual "Content" rather than a shallow made for TV "Template". JOHN LAW demonstrates physical urban transgression with documentation of how his secret clan illicitly scale large public buildings and bridges around the world and holding and carry out random DaDa-ist events, often to the confusion of enforcement officials. The CIAbnormalArts and SHAYE SAINT JOHN take an urban approach to psychological transgression using a "Trigger" style to produce rapid video clips whose central character is a disfigured paraplegic dressed and controlled as a life sized marionette and her disfigured doll Kiki.
Oakland spinners CAT 5 will be projecting a mix of Atomic Bomb oriented video.
DJs from TIKINEWS.com, POST-PUNK.com and KFJC 89.7fm keep the juice flowing spinning an wide range of extreme music around the Video projections and BBQ area.
FOR MORE INFORMATION, DIRECTIONS AND TICKETS go
to:
http://www.mobilization.com/destroy.html
eastbayexpress.com | originally published:
August 4, 2004
How to Destroy the Universe
- Part 1 Sunday Dec 7, 2003 at Studioz
Photos from How to Destroy the Universe - Part 1 at Studioz, SUNDAY DEC 7, 2003
SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN - 8 Days a Week Mention:
Dec. 7
Sunday
Destroy! It's no accident that Mobilization Recordings, Laughing Squid, and KFJC, 89.7 FM, chose Pearl Harbor Day to launch 'How to Destroy the Universe Festival Part I.' By creating mass fear, the attack on Pearl Harbor not only pulled the United States into war but also ushered in a backlash against civil liberties facilitated by an oversimplified and misguided concept of security. What better way to raze today's false safety net than with fire, steel, and sound manipulated by veteran masters of extreme music and art? Dr. Howland Owll of the Church of the SubGenius MCs the event, which features psycho-surf-core by the Mermen, pyro-industrial post-punk mantras by F-Space (including Scot Jenerik and former members of Savage Republic and Chrome), gothic cabaret by Neither Neither World, psychotic episodes by the Serotonins, and classical covers of '80s hardcore hits by the Punk Rock Orchestra. Burning Man artist Charles Gadeken and We're Desperate early L.A.-S.F. punk-scene photographer Jim Jocoy provide added visual stimulation, and DJs Fernando (Thunderdrome, DeathGuild, Assimilate) and KFJC's MC Christ confer their special sonic touches. 5 p.m., StudioZ.tv, 314 11th St., S.F. $10. (415) 252-7666. (Camille T. Taiara)
Local Live Review: San Francisco Bay Guardian
'How to Destroy the Universe Festival, Part I'
StudioZ.tv, Dec. 7
MORE THAN 20 years ago well before Burning Man's first death by
fire on Baker Beach rumor spread of a Los Angeles-based experimental
band that would fill an old school bus with generators, a P.A. system,
and a load of friends and head out to the middle of the Mojave Desert
to play with fire and make some serious noise. Their instruments: pipes,
chains, an empty petroleum barrel, a drum set, and close to half a dozen
guitars. Their name was Savage Republic, and they fused our most primal
instincts, punk rock's appetite for destruction, and the urban sounds
of industry.
I instantly became a fan.
So when I heard that Savage Republic member Ethan Port (now living in the Bay Area) had gotten together with local pyro-noise artist Scot Jenerik and Chrome drummer Aleph Kali to form F-Space, I knew I had to check them out.
I got my chance at the "How to Destroy the Universe Festival, Part I," an eight-hour affair that, as it turned out, was the brainchild of lifelong DIYers Port and Jenerik themselves. The bill included multiple 16mm projections, slides by We're Desperate photographer Jim Jocoy, a few DJs, and live music by Neither Neither World, the Punk Rock Orchestra, the Mermen, and the Serotonins (the latter from L.A.).
The crowd was a blend of aging though still disaffected Reagan youth, artsy brainiacs, and thirtysomething occultish types.
We arrived in time to catch the Punk Rock Orchestra, a 20-plus-member ensemble of mostly female classical musicians that covers old favorites by the Avengers, Joy Division, and others. The PRO was led by a tyrannical, Mohawked conductor in black coattails who, given a different look, could easily double as a World Wrestling Entertainment referee. And they did a decent cover of Dead Kennedys' "California über Alles" even adapting some of the lyrics in honor of Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the end, though, the act boiled down to a kind of theatrical "name that '80s cover" trivia game that could get a bit tedious after a few numbers.
Next, a corpulent, middle-aged white guy took the stage donning a red velvet Masonic hat emblazoned with a single, blue eye: not a particularly reassuring image. MC Howland Owll soon won us over, though, with a masterfully executed, deadpan soliloquy on the causal relationship between Annie Oakley, World War II, and the advent of punk rock.
On his heels, DJ MC Christ set himself to spinning 45s of obscure indie music from the Devo years. Collaborators threw up as many as six projections at a time onto StudioZ's walls: Jocoy's portraits of early-'80s punks in San Francisco and LA, '60s car crash test footage, a nature film on carnivorous frogs.
Then came the moment I'd been waiting for. F-Space battered the unsuspecting audience with a wall of noise. Port's instrumentation on an electric 12-string maintained the breakneck speed and ominous tones of early Savage Republic. He'd loop a string of notes into a mixer, then switch guitars, or forsake them for a homemade instrument created out of two thick metal springs stretched along the length of a four-foot-long segment of pipe, which he alternately beat on and picked up and let drop to the floor.
Jenerik used drumsticks and even a violin bow to elicit the most raw and, at times, excruciating sounds from a similar instrument propped on a metal sawhorse. Kali added the energy of a runaway locomotive on drums.
The result was apocalyptic: the music summoned a feral, destructive trance state that implied a catastrophic act of nature, a march through the desert on the path to war, or the offender's mental state during a crime of passion.
The Mermen followed with a set of hypnotic soundscapes rounded out with a honky-tonk surf song all deftly crafted but a bit too low-key after F-Space's ferocity.
The last band, the Serotonins albeit possessing a great name came off a bit like an inside joke that, well, just wasn't all that original. We called it a night after two songs.
Altogether, though, the evening was a promising start for what Port and Jenerik hope to build into an ongoing noncommercial, multidisciplinary series, with shows every other month or so at random nontraditional spaces.
The Reagan years that inspired the heyday of California's original punk counterculture certainly have a lot in common with today's political environment. With the neocons back in power and well on their way in their project to overtake the world, something like "How to Destroy" is more necessary than ever. For information on "How to Destroy the Universe," go to www.mobilization.com.
(Camille T. Taiara)
SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN - 8 Days a
Week Mention of last festival
Dec. 7, 2003
Destroy! It's no accident that Mobilization Recordings, Laughing Squid, and KFJC, 89.7 FM, chose Pearl Harbor Day to launch 'How to Destroy the Universe Festival Part I.' By creating mass fear, the attack on Pearl Harbor not only pulled the United States into war but also ushered in a backlash against civil liberties facilitated by an oversimplified and misguided concept of security. What better way to raze today's false safety net than with fire, steel, and sound manipulated by veteran masters of extreme music and art?
SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN - Local Live Review
'How to Destroy the Universe Festival,
Part I'
StudioZ.tv, Dec. 7
MORE THAN 20 years ago well before Burning Man's first death by
fire on Baker Beach rumor spread of a Los Angeles-based experimental
band that would fill an old school bus with generators, a P.A. system,
and a load of friends and head out to the middle of the Mojave Desert
to play with fire and make some serious noise. Their instruments: pipes,
chains, an empty petroleum barrel, a drum set, and close to half a dozen
guitars. Their name was Savage Republic, and they fused our most primal
instincts, punk rock's appetite for destruction, and the urban sounds
of industry.
I instantly became a fan.
So when I heard that Savage Republic member Ethan Port (now living in the Bay Area) had gotten together with local pyro-noise artist Scot Jenerik and Chrome drummer Aleph Kali to form F-Space, I knew I had to check them out.
I got my chance at the "How to Destroy the Universe Festival, Part I," an eight-hour affair that, as it turned out, was the brainchild of lifelong DIYers Port and Jenerik themselves. The bill included multiple 16mm projections, slides by We're Desperate photographer Jim Jocoy, a few DJs, and live music by Neither Neither World, the Punk Rock Orchestra, the Mermen, and the Serotonins (the latter from LA).
The crowd was a blend of aging though still disaffected Reagan youth, artsy brainiacs, and thirtysomething occultish types.
Then came the moment I'd been waiting for. F-Space battered the unsuspecting audience with a wall of noise. Port's instrumentation on an electric 12-string maintained the breakneck speed and ominous tones of early Savage Republic. He'd loop a string of notes into a mixer, then switch guitars, or forsake them for a homemade instrument created out of two thick metal springs stretched along the length of a four-foot-long segment of pipe, which he alternately beat on and picked up and let drop to the floor.
Jenerik used drumsticks and even a violin bow to elicit the most raw and, at times, excruciating sounds from a similar instrument propped on a metal sawhorse. Kali added the energy of a runaway locomotive on drums.
The result was apocalyptic: the music summoned a feral, destructive trance state that implied a catastrophic act of nature, a march through the desert on the path to war, or the offender's mental state during a crime of passion.
. (Camille T. Taiara)
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