FEAR OF MUSIC is a podcast and occasional event series with contributors in Berlin, New York, and Los Angeles. Contact us via email, subscribe via iTunes, or add yourself to the mailing list (we promise not to abuse the privilege):
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Karl Meier, Ken Meier, Israel Vines
‘I’ve spent the last years of my life working in commercial media: that is, information packaged for consumption in order to make money for large organisations… Most of what you read and hear is produced in accordance with these “package-consume-money” conditions as we are encouraged to live not our own but others lives. This is not an entirely irrevocable fact of life in our present state. From my work I now understand that mainstream media seeks to ignore any Truths as much as it can. This force, with such power over our lives, actually prevents us from realising certain root facts — we all die, and virtually everything presented to us on this material plane is one long trivial diversion and denial of that fact. There is, of course, considerable pleasure in trivia, in consumption — otherwise it wouldn’t work — but it is important to realise that our life is temporary and that the way we live is a temporary state — brought on by various economic and social forces — and that, contrary to the propaganda, we needn’t and won’t live this way much longer. This realisation is at once terrifying and liberating…
Our society — and we too — work by pretending that ours is the only age; the past, the future do not exist except in terms of the present: the best work is that which doesn’t remind you, but puts you into other, future, past, alternative present ways of thinking and being.
I salute the future. We are taught today that there is little, that there is nothing. If only we knew it, there is everything and anything.’
— Jon Savage, The Tape Decays, London/Manchester, 1981