Who participates in ESP Mayhem, and how do they contribute?
Bruce - Synth; Clock - Vocals; K@rrl - Synth; Klown - Synth; Ralph - Drums. We might change the names and/or people around in the future.
What is the thesis or animating logic behind the group?
In our view, extreme music is an arms race. It's a race that can never be won because the escalation will never stop. The goal is to make the most unsentimentally rageous [sic] and mechanistically horny music we can. Even if we do something that reaches the goal it’s already history because it’s just a matter of time until it’s surpassed. The only options are to go even further or give up. Hyperextend until you explode.
How did you settle on your name?
We decided our logo should combine a metal band’s logo and a logo from outside that world. The combined logos had to form a phrase or word that worked as a band name independent of the source material, and the component logos had to have finger-snap recognisability. There was a very short list of bands, brands and logos that worked. We appropriated Mayhem and ESPN as a graphic shorthand for sonic extremity on the one hand, and the sublimation of violence through spectacle on the other. We chopped “ESPN” down to “ESP”, in the sense of “Extra-Sensory-Perception”, to underline the psychic dimension. Hence ESP Mayhem. The name means no distinction between our music and everything else in the product-scape, no brakes on our out-of-control hubris, and no limits on what we’re prepared to steal.
Why grindcore?
Grindcore is obsessed with aggressive hyper-velocity, instantaneity and disposability. It’s also very information-dense, lots of notes in a hyper compressed burst. Tension, information overload, everything moving too fast - those are the only things in our lives anyway so it’d be dishonest to fuck around with anything else. It’s no accident that mass-entertainment is taking on more and more grindcore-like proportions and gestures. Because everyone feels and thinks this way now. It’s basically the most realistic music of all time.
Are you inspired by the work of other metal performers, or do your influences lie mainly elsewhere?
Melbourne has produced some great grindcore bands so we were lucky to see the style played by some of the best to do it. That’s the foundation of how we understand fast music and how we think it should feel. But we always want something more absurd and more brain-cracking. So we also plagiarise from the most antisocially jacked up, hyperactive dance music - speedcore, anything out of Newcastle (NSW) etc. There’s some worthless computer-world dross mashed in as well, nightcore and ear-biting 8 bit arpeggiation, high-fructose trash sounds designed to fry your pleasure centres [sic] into pouring more money/time down the shitter. Other than that, we just regurgitate the rising tempo of the sensory pummelling we’ve endured our entire lives, in the same way you might make yourself throw up after ill-advisedly eating a mysterious wrong-address delivery meal you find on your doorstep. IE an unpleasant but necessary action to avoid shitting yourself later on.
Was it a deliberate choice to exclude guitars from your ensemble, and if so, why?
It was an accidental, revelatory, bad, great idea. We happened to plug a synthesizer into a guitar amp and discovered you could make noise that lands like a tungsten cube dropped from orbit. No nuance or warmth, just pure force. But none of us had any experience playing electronic music. We don’t really understand how the instruments work, and we’re all intellectually paralysed from too much high pressure/low duration media (grindcore and grindcore-ized media in general) so it’s nearly impossible for us to learn. But synthesizers are just too loud and we’re addicted to power so we can’t stop. If someone accidentally bumps their instrument it instantly blows everyone’s ears out and we all scream in pain. It’s awful.
Bruce - Synth; Clock - Vocals; K@rrl - Synth; Klown - Synth; Ralph - Drums. We might change the names and/or people around in the future.
What is the thesis or animating logic behind the group?
In our view, extreme music is an arms race. It's a race that can never be won because the escalation will never stop. The goal is to make the most unsentimentally rageous [sic] and mechanistically horny music we can. Even if we do something that reaches the goal it’s already history because it’s just a matter of time until it’s surpassed. The only options are to go even further or give up. Hyperextend until you explode.
How did you settle on your name?
We decided our logo should combine a metal band’s logo and a logo from outside that world. The combined logos had to form a phrase or word that worked as a band name independent of the source material, and the component logos had to have finger-snap recognisability. There was a very short list of bands, brands and logos that worked. We appropriated Mayhem and ESPN as a graphic shorthand for sonic extremity on the one hand, and the sublimation of violence through spectacle on the other. We chopped “ESPN” down to “ESP”, in the sense of “Extra-Sensory-Perception”, to underline the psychic dimension. Hence ESP Mayhem. The name means no distinction between our music and everything else in the product-scape, no brakes on our out-of-control hubris, and no limits on what we’re prepared to steal.
Why grindcore?
Grindcore is obsessed with aggressive hyper-velocity, instantaneity and disposability. It’s also very information-dense, lots of notes in a hyper compressed burst. Tension, information overload, everything moving too fast - those are the only things in our lives anyway so it’d be dishonest to fuck around with anything else. It’s no accident that mass-entertainment is taking on more and more grindcore-like proportions and gestures. Because everyone feels and thinks this way now. It’s basically the most realistic music of all time.
Are you inspired by the work of other metal performers, or do your influences lie mainly elsewhere?
Melbourne has produced some great grindcore bands so we were lucky to see the style played by some of the best to do it. That’s the foundation of how we understand fast music and how we think it should feel. But we always want something more absurd and more brain-cracking. So we also plagiarise from the most antisocially jacked up, hyperactive dance music - speedcore, anything out of Newcastle (NSW) etc. There’s some worthless computer-world dross mashed in as well, nightcore and ear-biting 8 bit arpeggiation, high-fructose trash sounds designed to fry your pleasure centres [sic] into pouring more money/time down the shitter. Other than that, we just regurgitate the rising tempo of the sensory pummelling we’ve endured our entire lives, in the same way you might make yourself throw up after ill-advisedly eating a mysterious wrong-address delivery meal you find on your doorstep. IE an unpleasant but necessary action to avoid shitting yourself later on.
Was it a deliberate choice to exclude guitars from your ensemble, and if so, why?
It was an accidental, revelatory, bad, great idea. We happened to plug a synthesizer into a guitar amp and discovered you could make noise that lands like a tungsten cube dropped from orbit. No nuance or warmth, just pure force. But none of us had any experience playing electronic music. We don’t really understand how the instruments work, and we’re all intellectually paralysed from too much high pressure/low duration media (grindcore and grindcore-ized media in general) so it’s nearly impossible for us to learn. But synthesizers are just too loud and we’re addicted to power so we can’t stop. If someone accidentally bumps their instrument it instantly blows everyone’s ears out and we all scream in pain. It’s awful.
What was the thought process going into your latest release, Cyber Bully?
We wanted it to sound like Megatron trying to auto-fellate and accidentally machine-gunning his own head off. More piercing sonic aggression, more jarring speed-to-dance transitions, more blatantly ripping things off, more gleeful mockery and disrespect, just more. There’s no point or really any possibility of subtlety or thoughtfulness now so we always want to go as far and fast in the wrong direction as we can.
What are your thoughts on the circularity of time and history?
Time and history are circular, but also linear. We have no evidence to back this up, we just infer it from the overall feeling of constant upheaval combined with total inertia.
How do the contradictory but intersecting modern phenomena of stultifying boredom and constant excitement and/or agitation play out through your work?
Things are so continuously exciting now that excitement itself has become experientially boring, because it never lets up. Like when was the last time you didn’t feel angry, horny, scared or otherwise wound up. And it’s not just you, everyone is sitting there in a state of private agitation. But it’s not like you can opt out of the situation, so why not go further. There’s an episode of the TV show Max Headroom, where watching a high speed advertisement is found to spike the viewer’s nervous system to the point that they spontaneously combust. Ratchet up the boredom, ratchet up the pressure until the whole thing explodes in media-induced, self-obliterating tedium. You should be trying to cross that line, one way or another. Extreme boredom makes extreme music.
How does your work draw attention to the invasive nature of technology and underscore our intimacy with it?
Our band setup is like reverse-cybergrind, we kept the drummer and replaced all the guitars with prosumer electronic equipment. IE more unwanted and unasked-for change for the sake of it masked as “innovation” and “development”. It’s like what we see with technology, but even more stupid. People don’t really want it but we keep pushing it on them and eventually they give in. A few people might say it’s good, they don’t really think that, we just shoved it in their faces til they thought they did. After we convince them, it's not too long til they think they convinced themselves. But unlike the technologists we make no claim to be improving anything. We’re making things worse and more difficult, so perversely actually making things better.
How do you think our interactions with information technology, particularly social media, transform and augment our sense of identity and place in the world?
The Self As Asset has been realised through social media - the kipple machine that crushes everything into advertising, as it simultaneously crushes advertising into everything. The term Personal Brand used to get thrown around but you don’t hear it now cause the concept has become so internalised that it’s redundant - of course a person is a brand, why bring it up. Between Personal Branding and Corporate Personhood a circle is completed - on the one hand people take on the characteristics of brands, and on the other corporations take the characteristics of people. We’re encouraged to understand ourselves through the language of therapy but we should use the language of marketing instead, it’s more accurate.
How does the concept of "junkspace" relate to your approach, outlook, and output?
Neo-Melbourne is a quintessential junkspace. It’s like living in a big cardboard box full of print-on-demand neon signage. All lowest-bid-contract dross stretched over the skeleton of a failed plan. Nothing rings true here and things don’t work out for the good. So ESPM makes something else from the junk. We grab whatever we like and use it however we can to advance our project. You see the bare bones of everything we ripped off and how starkly we smashed it all together, a junkspace aesthetic. But it conforms to our logic now. The incongruities made sense all along, we are just stacking the pieces up in a way that makes the pattern reveal itself.
What is the value of novelty in popular culture at this moment? Is it still attainable, is it worth pursuing?
It’s not attainable but it’s worth pursuing. With pop culture It’s more straightforward and more rewarding to repeat things, and in life it’s easier to do nothing at all. But tomorrow will arrive whether you want it or not. And you have to put an idea forward if you don’t want more of the same. If we have to live in a bullshit future then we’re gonna try and make it our bullshit, not someone else’s, stinking the place up. And everyone else’s bullshit is ours now anyway. Intellectual property is theft and anyone bristling at their art/bullshit being stolen is dumb for imagining they’re losing something and a cop for caring. All we have ever done is lift so many touchstones from the manic ends of popular culture and music scenes into the one mix, so there’s nothing really new. But on paper ESP Mayhem is a novelty act because of what we steal and why. We would go further and say that now, every act should be a novelty act, and this is the only way to stay ahead of the kipple machine. Realise your own delusions or steal ours and turn it into something else, we don’t care. But you are either a novelty act or you enter the kipple factory, that’s the choice.
What if any, are the beneficial and ethical uses for AI in art and creative endeavors at this stage of its technological development?
There’s no ethical use for AI because it’s a big machine for ripping things off. ESPM is in direct competition with AI in that regard. And we are winning. With all the money and raw intellectual horsepower sloshing around in the AI industries it should be the other way around but no, we can rip things off faster, more totally and more fluently than the stupid AIs. That’s where we’re at, historically speaking. The great white hope of technological advancement has been outperformed by a synthgrind band from the Cleveland of the southern hemisphere. It’s a grim outlook.
What does the term "cyberpunk" mean to you in relation to your work, if anything?
“Neo-Melbourne” alludes to the idea that all those old Cyberpunk stories have been more or less realised in our present day. But the term cyberpunk is historical now, it makes sense as a pinterest moodboard but doesn’t quite capture the flavour of this moment. We need a new anachronistic portmanteau to describe a world of grinning human sharks swimming upstream in a sea of techno-garbage. It should keep the “social technics vs music subculture” form of “Cyberpunk”, but instead blend the relentless pumping of uptempo hardcore, with overblown CCRU-style net-mysticism. Something like Xenodonk, or Deus Ex Makina.
What is the most dystopian part of living in Melbourne?
Smelling the countryside burn as you walk past 3-million-dollar townhouses in your old neighbourhood.
