As racist, woman-hating fantasy writer Vox Day (aka Theodore Beale) likes to remind people, he was kind of a big deal in the industrial dance music scene back in the day, with three Billboard Club Hits to his name.
Well, sort of. Beale — he wasn’t known as Vox back then — was briefly a member of a largely forgotten industrial dance group called Psykosonik in the early nineties.
Now, I was listening to a lot of industrial dance music back in those days, and was particularly enamored of the label (Wax Trax!) that Psykosonik was on. Yet somehow I never noticed them.
Listening to their first album today — the one that Beale was involved in — I can see why. Musically, they’re a peppy, if highly derivative, mix of industrial and rave, at times sounding a bit like the Shamen or Pop Will Eat Itself or even, unbelievably, EMF.
The trouble comes when the group’s vocalist opens his mouth to sing or, even worse, to rap some of the most cringeworthy lyrics I’ve encountered since I listened to this. The bassy “rapping” in their song “Acid Hammer” is on a par with the rapping in Aqua’s “Barbie Girl,” except that Aqua was in on the joke, and Psykosonik clearly wasn’t.
And that’s where Mr. Beale comes in, because a lot of these very very serious, very very terrible lyrics are his. Psykosonik seems to have been built largely around two guys — Paul Sebastien (vocals, lyrics, music) and Daniel Lenz (music). Beale, a member for only two years, is credited by Wikipedia as being responsible for “composition, lyrics.”
So let’s take a look at some of them, shall we? The lyrics below, which I found on Lyrics Wikia, are excerpted from songs he’s credited with co-writing; click on the titles to see more.
Fractals fusing, brain abusing
Drink your smart drug, find illusion
Ride the air on an angel’s dare
Mandlebrots fly everywhere
Illusion the solution
You will find your absolution
Within silicon, in silicon, in me
Mondo rave, magnetic wave
Cyberbaby, my love slave
Computational attractivity
New world networked connectivity
Down to the ground, down to the ground
Social entropy is reigning today
Burn it down, burn it down, burn it down, down to the ground
A generation’s coming your way
Feel your heart explode with lust
Vacationers, this one’s a must
If you choose to take this drug
You will feel your libido erupt ….If you choose to lick my brain
Use your tongue to taste the same
Feel the acid reign
Servitude is in the mind, a death in life
Don’t be confused by the terms of Left and Right
Statism is statism, by any name the same
Apathy is suicide and we will bear the blame …Huge berserk rebel warthog error
Zeroboys unleash domestic terror
Jack it in and burn the data
Violence a religion they can relate to
Now, it’s not completely clear from the scanty info I’ve found if Beale wrote all of these lyrics by himself — Wikipedia also lists Sebastien as being responsible for lyrics — but quite a few of them have the stink of Beale about them. I mean, “social entropy,” “statism is statism?”
Oh, and that bizarre bit about the “huge berserk rebel warthog?” That may be Beale’s only bit of cleverness. After puzzling over it a bit, and listening to that part of the song over and over to make sure that was really what was being said, I put the phrase into Google and discovered that it’s an anagram for George Herbert Walker Bush.
If you want to listen to any of these songs — and really, they’re not bad, if you can manage to ignore the awful lyrics — you can find the whole album here.
And here’s the video for their single “Welcome to My Mind,” which features Mr. Beale’s rotating head.
I’m reminded of this bit in Psychonauts where whenever you find one of the other camper’s stolen brains, Raz kisses it and then puts it in his bag, and it always wigs me out.
I think I’ve actually heard of them somewhere. Ah must have been the Mortal Kombat CD.
No wait, they were on the cd for the shittier Mortal Kombat sequel. *shrug*
Their second album ‘Unlearn’ (minus Beale) is a much better and much more chill album, if lacking in cheesy early-90s cyberpunk obsession of the first. I really recommend Daniel Lenz’s post-Pyskosonik album with Hednoize called ‘Searching for the End’. It’s much better than either Psykosnik, most likely helped by having a different lyricist/vocalist.
Vox is a frigging douche but I’d love to see how “cool” you were in the late 80s-early 90s and especially if you wrote anything. Yes it’s corny techno (the 2nd album Unlearn is much superior) but I don’t get what it has to do with who Vox is today, nobody listened to them in the 90s and thought oh wow I bet one of these guys is going to write polarizing content on his blog 20 years from now.
Y’know, I have a real love of Psykosonik’s stuff, even their crappy first album, and most of it is because of the fact that I’m a sucker for nostalgia, and things that are so bad they’re good; for me, Psykosonik (the album, not the band) fits the bill on both accounts. Unlearn is genuinely great though, and my nostalgia goggles make it even better. Paul Sebastien and Daniel Lenz both did much, much finer work without Theo, which makes me sad that Spiritual Machine, their ’97 album, never got released. Apparently that started an argument between Psykosonik and Wax Trax!, and they disbanded because of them getting nowhere, although Paul having a daughter that year as well might have had something to do with it.
Two of their first album’s songs ring with me because of how much of a fool I am for tabletop role-playing games, those being Teknojihad and Silicon Jesus. The first one simply fits the crapsack feel of the setting used in Shadowrun, but the second is a song about a virtual reality AI. In Shadowrun, they have these things called BTLs (Better-Than-Life), which are a cross between virtual reality and hard drugs, and so when I first read about them, my mind immediately jumped to that song. If a Shadowrun movie was ever to be made, I would be very sad if Daniel, and maybe Paul- he’s a very busy man now, basically being hired to be peoples’ boss- didn’t get seriously involved with the soundtrack.
Despite how terrible the first album otherwise is, Paul and Daniel did some other stuff that was great. Hednoize, as you mentioned, and Daniel also did a solo album called Stuck In A Dream, which features Brent Daniels and Paul for a really fun collection. Paul worked with a man named Caesar Filori as a duet called Basic Pleasure Model and made two interesting albums, Sunyata and How To Live. They’re both like giant singles, simply featuring one song and a boatload of remixes of it, but the mixes are all so distinct that the only hint they’re all the “same” song is the lyrics.
All this is testament to how much better they were without Beale. And, in all honesty, I’d say it’s a hint that everyone would be better off without him.
The ideological beliefs expressed in this article (and the ignorant comments) are toxic and flawed, not to mention. To attribute labels to artists from former periods in time is an invalid argument, if one at all.
Many of the former (and current) fans for bands from WaxTrax (Yes, a label founded by gay men. Who cares?) carried the torch along with Ray Kurzweil and fought for years against the military industrial complex, fundamental religions (mainly Christianity) but basically taught us post-millenials and gen-x’er’s to reject the status quo and smash the control system / machine. This machine that has been hijacked by corrupt politicians (ALL of them, not just left/right).
To malign artists is the anti-intellectual stance, the politi-sphere itself is a parasite as is the government (Not self-sustaining). KMFDM, for example (En Esch, in one interview) wished for a global world government which was put in place by George Walker (A known Right Wing Conservative and leader of the VAST right wing conspiracy, as coined by HRC.) and this agenda was then passed on through each president up until now which I believe is still ongoing despite popular belief.
As far as taste, that is subjective as the time period we are in now celebrates that which in the early 90’s we would have slammed as reserved for boring old people. (Which is why ‘Unlearn’ never sold well at the time and hence they didn’t take off as the previous album did, but now is regarded as brilliant standing-the-test-of-time album.)
While you have the right to inject whatever you wish and pretend to be the moral authority (who likely never adventured much into it), the goth/industrial scene of the 80s, 90s and through the 2000’s in various forms had purpose beyond your borrowed dreams and the kids of today are not satiated with what they have been provided (mindless listen & believe rhetoric) hence the yearning for that framework and all creative output which has since long past. (That ‘sound’ all these hipster douches now want to recreate.)
@ray
This is a blog that MOCKS horrible misogynistic people.
Get the fuck over yourself.
Your shit reads like copypasta.
Dude. It’s a lighthearted three year old post about the past of someone who is regularly mocked here for his horrifically misogynistic and racist beliefs.
http://gifimage.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/its-not-that-deep-gif-2.gif
There were so many run-on sentences.
I kept trying to make sense of it. I’m still not sure wtf that was all about. That last paragraph, bad.
Notice to trolls! Be SUCCINT!!
@cornychips – I appreciate the discourse. I also appreciate (while perhaps not reconciled) the blog owner whom has allowed critical knowledge. I took the time to write to you, and you did to me. That is unique.
This is an article, which attempts to malign a musical act that while burning fast burned bright and had an impact (however substantial is up for debate) on an entire generation taking innovative ideas and expanding our minds, even so far as to taking part in creating one of the first virtual worlds. Just as ‘Manly Man’ up there stated it was the soundtrack to their tabletop game, when people got *together* and spoke to each other, competed against one another and had goddamn fun doing so.
What next? A tear-down and placing of Cubanate’s Marc Heal under the skewed hyper political lens of today for sex-ism misandry-ism rac-ism masoch-ism alcohol laden rants he made decades ago?
And for the comments, you were all / are all fanboys. And if you aren’t, were you alive and a kid or young adult back then you would be as well.
As an aside, yet should have been in the header: Psykosonik *IS* Paul Sebastien (Lyrics, vocals) and Daniel Lenz (Legendary Video Game / Movie soundtrack composing artist, who has a body of work spanning nearly every piece of media you have consumed in the last decade.)
We must reject the ‘ism’.
-Yours truly / sincerely,
rayz
Ray.
Vomit up the thesaurus, before it’s too late.
Oh, wait … commenting on a three year old post. It’s too late.
weirwoodtreehugger: chief manatee: I believe your image is cultural appropriation. Please cease and desist (I kid, I kid). That is all, goodnight america (your government is in control again).
Ok now it really does seem like copypasta.
………Zzzzzzzzzzzz…..
@rayzrz
Your head is so far up your ass it’s coming out of your mouth.
Pretentious? Yeah. A point? Not so much.
Someone get the hose. I smell hipster.
Pretentious troll is pretentious.
And if you’re going to talk about rejecting “isms”, how about rejecting sexism? And racism? Beale reeks of both, and he taints everything he touches.
Rayzrz,
???????
Kurzweil’s a hack
I’m still laughing at the “of human wankage” style of posting rayzrz seems to favor.
@Makroth: That’s a … peculiar image. If it was a creature from ancient mythology, would it have been called Anoboros?
@Scild
You’re overestimating him.
When attacked, the parasite will scream and writhe violently while segmenting as if it has multiplied.