As a card-carrying, music-blogging member of the contemplative class, I have never been properly camping and have no poison ivy stories. Toxicity revealed itself in my youth only errantly through sulfuric mixture in an aged chemistry teacher’s classroom, improperly equipped with fume hoods. I am still waiting for my hemlock. Socrates was very Contemporary; instead of selling something material, he sold a Brand to which I owe many of my opportunities to think out loud. But in the Western idea-historical vision, the professional thinker is poisoned by their very health.
There is no linear history of poison, which linear thought anticipates as a final, isolated hemlock-event. Poisoning is insemination, which is being-in (Inn-syting). There are many histories of poison possible within the temporality of the body in circular transformation. Bodies are mixed in a drama of containment, from which time materializes as cinders of remembering or awaiting. The faintest of these cinders gives account of a time when the mother was a world of “Pleasurable Possession” in which poisons didn’t properly exist, a lone intruder not yet understanding what it means to intrude. Light and breath are first hemlocks. The mother’s voice loses its thunderous sonority and becomes just another one in a cacophonous many. Deprived of our original abundance and companionship, we are now poison(ed/ous) nomads: containers of breath and shit; objects falling into world-holes and joining new unities. We learn to relocate intimacy while building immunity to poisons. We look for aristocratic quiet wherever there is noise, and for noise to interrupt any awkward silence.
We can act with technology for technology, or we can act with technology for us. Syncopation can be metaphysical or clinical — it depends on your point of view. Actress’s Ghettoville was, like a Brutalist hospital, a healing place that some feared to enter. The stream of 12-inch releases from Brooklyn’s Long Island Electrical Systems over the past couple years has left many bodies sweaty and strangely aroused. Sometimes I listen to (L.A. Club Resource label head) Delroy Edwards’s SLOWED DOWN FUNK tapes and think about sinning. Sometimes I listen to Container’s LP and think about never writing anything again. Like all of these reference points, Innsyter’s debut album cultivates errancy into a vibrant life form and shapes noisy unities into ecstatic mixtures. The distortion many producers toil thanklessly to purge from their mixes becomes a compositional touchstone. But Poison Life repels comparison to other works just as easily as it invites association with a musical tendency. Again: poison has no history on the timeline of separate events. Errant syncopation is a denial of the metaphysical urge to distinguish between machines that create and machines that copy.
So, in a perfectly natural way, everything is out of order. “Cut Four” got pushed up to third, “Cut Eight” slipped down to ninth, and somehow “Cut Eleven” ended up first. The disorder contributes to an economy of interest that reduces conventional beauty to a dead commodity. “Coffin Time” for hegemonic aesthetics. Like Beat Detectives letting us Call It What We Want, Poison Life testifies to the anonymity of a product that descends immaterially into the poisonous circulation of the world. Nothing beautiful and complete can move me the right way. Health is a dance of poisons under the gazebo of immunity.
“I began to feel very bored at clubs. It was when I realized that the music they were playing there was pretty boring. Even some DJs I used to like here started playing tedious club tracks. Somehow, it gave me a certain impulse to create my own dance music. Club music doesn’t need to be dull.”
– Innsyter
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