Chords for Arto Lindsay: Space, Parades, and Confrontational Aesthetics

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In a much more simplistic way, when we started out in DNA, we also worked with, we worked
directly with some of these kind of metaphors.
You know, we had like a thing where we wouldn't improvise.
And many people would hear us and they would think, oh, they are improvising.
And we were like _ rehearsing this stuff endlessly.
You know, it was just we were building it from whatever kind of techniques we could
cobble together because we hadn't studied music at all.
So we didn't know what a count was, you know, much less chord sequence or anything.
We didn't even know what 4-4 was.
We'd never heard of it.
_ So we didn't want to improvise though, you know.
And we would only allow ourselves to improvise at the top of the stairs was the way we put it.
So in other words, only when we had really sweat and when we were, had been bearing down
hard on something that we knew because we'd repeated it a million times, would we allow
ourselves a spurt of improvisation.
You know what I mean?
It's a much more kind of basic metaphor.
You know what I'm saying?
But it's kind of similar.
You know what I mean?
We would like squeeze the thing and then we'd allow this, this break, you know what I mean,
jump back into it, you know. _ _ _ _ _
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_ _ _ [♪ [N] singing in Portuguese ♪.
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[♪ singing in Portuguese ♪.
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_ [Bb] at the very beginning, but when Tim Wright joined DNA, Tim Wright was a sound man, you
know what I mean?
And we were super concerned with sound.
And, you know, _ I was reading all this John Cage, Morton Feldman stuff, you know, and
we were listening to music from all over the world and a lot of jazz and some classical,
you know, stuff as well as all the rock and roll stuff, you know what I mean?
We were really concerned with sound.
So sound was more, _ _ _ we made a vocabulary to express ideas about sound.
And we, you know, people called it noise.
You know what I mean?
And we didn't, you know, like somebody says in the paper, king of noise, you know what I mean?
[G] And _ _ _ _ _ no, I didn't really, you know, we also didn't think we were, we were _ like anti-everything.
And people immediately assumed that we were anti-this and anti-that and we were just kind of like,
we were just trying to make something that nobody had made before, you know what I mean?
We're just trying to do something, put something [Bb] out there.
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_ mean, the first kind of noise wall of sound, block of sound or whatever, guy that I heard _ was,
I mean, we all did it, you know what I mean?
But a guy who did it, that was his thing, was this guy, Nan, Boyd Rice,
who also was then this kind of Nazi fetishist, totally weird guy.
I only met him maybe once or something, but he used to do this like,
kind of like what Merzbough did too at the beginning, you know what I mean?
Just like, how, and he would achieve it in different ways and it was super loud and that was his hit.
_ The bands, you know, like _ DNA, Mars, you know what I mean?
We would achieve this kind of roar, but it wasn't that different than the roar that television would achieve.
Or, you know, I don't know, the Stooges, whatever, Minnie, you know, Lurid, you know,
people would just rise to a roar and just, you know what I mean?
It was a kind of basic rock thing.
Everybody plays too loud, no matter what you do, you can't affect it, it's just there, you know, it's this thing,
it's this cloud, now you're in there, what do you do?
You know, you're like, where's, you know, please play a beat, you want to make a dent,
you want to [N] slice a little silence in there, you can't, you know what I mean?
It's very frustrating, the audience, you know, what, you have to kill it, you know what I mean?
In a rock band, at least you have a kind of common throb, you know?
_ But when you're improvising, that's really the worst, you know, because there's not even any pulse,
there's no connection to your thighs, you know what I mean?
It's just like bleeding, it's just like the intentionality seems wrong, wimpy, offensive, _ vulgar,
like spiritually vulgar, or something like that, you know what I mean?
You're just like, ah!
_ That's one of the worst experiences I've ever had musically,
is like, everybody's improvising at the same time and you cannot affect that thing.
And yet nobody will stop and everybody's kind of continuing and you wonder what the hell they think they're doing,
and you know, who are these people, and get me out of here, let's go to a disco, you know what I mean? _ _ _
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