Survival Sickness
The International Noise Conspiracy

INFORMATION THAT MIGHT BE IMPORTANT FOR THE CONSUMPTION OF THIS RECORD

Music is limiting in it's [sic] output, we only have a certain amount of time to try and reproduce the ideas that we want the listener to take a part of. They lyrics all have to fit into the limits of the song, thus making them object to issues like rhythm, rhyme, and length, making it very hard to get across complex ideas, thus making the words one-dimensional and hollow of sorts. So, instead of abiding to the common practice of adaptation, we are giving you a more a full spectrum of the ideas behind the song, once again still limited to the layout of the record but at least a bit more detailed than the lyrics of the songs.

#1 I wanna know about U - communication of knowledge and ideas.
#2 The Subversive Sound - Poetry and action fused together.
#3 Smash it up - The creative urge to destroy bourguise culture
#4 Survival Sickness - My heart still hurts from last night
#5 The reproduction of death - Selling of the biggest commodity
#6 Impostor costume - The collective changing of identity
#7 Intermission - A Time to Contemplate
#8 Only lovers left alive - True Romance
#9 Do I have to spell it out - Smash the neo-liberal agenda
#10 Will it ever be quiet? - The joyous sounds of progress or...
#11 Enslavement blues - We are all cultural prostitutes
#12 Ready steady go! - The celebration of passion and resistance
#1 Questionnaire
Your name:
How do you determine age?
a) with some reference to how long you have been alive, b) with reference to what you have done, c) with reference to what you will do, d) age has no meaning to you.
You live where you live because:
a) it is where you were born and raised, b) it is where your source of economic support determines that you need to live, c) you are interested and stimulated by your environment and those around you, d) it is a place where your social, political, and moral values are most in line with accepted norms.
You would define your sexuality accordingly:
a) Something natural / given by god, b) something constructed by social / economical/cultural conditions, c) something that is and has always been under attack
by the conservative forces of self-proclaimed leaders.
While listening to music I partake in the following ritual:
a) I dance and sing along, b) I use it as a background setting, c) I lay down on the floor trying to analyze it, d) I don't listen to music,
Listening to this record you take in to consideration:
The creative process of creating music, b) the cultural implications of writing music, c) the relationship between producer and consumer, d) the passion evoked in the expression or e) the image portrayed by the group
Searching for salvation, you seek:
a) Abolition of hierarchies b) personal freedom c) liberation by divine forces d) you are pleased with your situation

In a time where every decision is made by experts and bosses and leaders and rockstars and where we, from day one, was taught not to ask, end up knowing what we need to know and not what we ought to know. In the domain of leader mentality we get taught that there is always someone how [sic] knows better, looks better and creates better than we do, making sure that we will always be followers, that we will always be sheep. If we never ask why there will never be any sort of change at all cause imbedded in our culture is a sort of vis-à-vis understanding that ignorance in [sic] bliss. But the fact that we remain ignorant is also the same trajectory that allows production and consumption to be the almighty gods of modern culture. There is a need to ask ourselves why in every possible way, to analyze the power structures and cultural settings of our lives, to take apart the machinery of capitalism into the smallest parts, to come to a conclusion about why we look the way we look and why we listen to the music that we listen to. The truth is not out there and therefore we have to question everything so that we can create and learn and live.
I wanna know about you...

My heart still hurts from last night/ Survival has become the paradigm of economical circumstances, we spend our lives fitting in to the scheme of production/consumption. Thinking that the freedom to choose between items or rulers is a choice, spending our time reduced to nothing. The economists, neo-liberals, media and the other peddlers in human misery promise salvation through more reification. They make us believe that this system is natural or the best for us all, which is as likely as saying that Durruti was not a [sic] anarchist, that we have to live like this cause there are no alternatives, that we have to be satisfied with survival, that we have to get used to just think [sic] of ourselves to get by, that we can not [sic] change the world we live in. Economy has replaced god as the new theology.
We are being forced to live petty lives, thinking that the freedom to indulge in the rat race is the only action that we can make, cause we have all been reduced to numbers, but if we work hard enough we can become objects. Rally me up in this non-decision, my mind is up for the taking. "Survival is life reduced to bare essentials, to life's abstract form, to the minimum of activity required to ensure men's participation in production and consumption."
It is a sad state when we are being dragged into a life that we have no desire to live, but that we have nothing to benefit from, into a life that we have no desire to live, but that we have no ability to avoid in this day and age. People have never been more poor and still we keep hearing about how the economy, this abstract entity, is doing better than ever, and while the rich are building summer houses they are also building ghettos for the rest of us. Change can never come with this system, we can not [sic] reform capitalism no matter what these cretins keep telling us.

#5 1.
The dominant commodity within contemporary modes of (re)production in the working body, sold to the managers of capital in order to survive. It gets set with an installment plan on a slow suicide, with the thankful duty of supplying the planetary work machine with the desire it depends on.

2.
In order, however, to use the human body as a desiring machine in this particular fashion, as wear and tear, there is a need to reproduce it, to make sure that it is fit to produce and well off to consume. The reproduction of capital thus comes to comprise the reproduction of the body. THERE ARE SEVERAL TACTICS TO MAKE SURE THAT THE RECUPERATION AS WELL AS THE EXPANSION OF THE ABILITIES OF THE BODY IS SET. One example could be the radical expansion of the tertiary sector, which in this perspective not only is an expression of the expansion of the field of the commodity, but as well serves to expose new surfaces of the body to biopolitical power. And this power is productive. The subjects that it produces comes to know more and more about the "good life". This, no doubt, is a good consumer. But the notion of "qualitative time", born within capitalism, comes to be a sight of resistance when it becomes obvious that is potential is greater than a capital logic could allow. It comes as no surprise that "life", the subjectivity inscribed in the body via biopolitical power, has become the key sight of resistance for the working body since the beginning of the last century.

3.
Strategies has to be developed to embrace these new subjects. There has to be rewards, making sure that there is a promise of better times, after retirement, on the vacations or in the next life all depending on the faith that you have. Making sure that we enjoy our pre-packaged guided outbursts into Disneyland or world cup soccer. All potential creators of further new subjects.

4.
ALIENATION, BOREDOM, DESPAIR, CULTURE, MONEY, CONSUMPTION, RECUPERATION, REIFICATION, DEATH, WAGE SLAVERY, SANITY, PRODUCTION, SACRIFICE, SUGGERING, POWER, SIMULATION, REPRESENTATION, SCHIZOPHRENIA, AND SO ON.

5.
We have to consume, we have to make the economy flow. So in order for us to do that there has to be, apart from the basic necessities, desires to be nourished, needs has to be invented. But the latest inventions of the capital reign and companies latest advertisement campaigns creates a desire that capitalism might not be able to satisfy. The perpetual question is; will it expand or will it crack?

6. The face that you see staring back at you from the mirror every morning is not really you. Everything about that person that you look at has been designed by someone, something, and responds to things outside of your immediate control. What is your name but someone else's name being reused, your life but someone else's recapitulated? You live where you live cause others have lived there before you. Your looks are someone else's fashion, your creeds the dusty regurgitation of stale ideas that have bored people for generations. When someone hands you a list of possibilities to choose from, a list that is based upon WHO you are, there can be no unique, interesting or original outcome. The fact that we all have our OWN names, numbers, addresses and personalities is exactly what excludes us from being individuals. People become the sum product of their experiences and with each passing moment this accumulation further solidifies the image of 'self' that everyone has. People become roles that they are then forced to play out by the circumstances that they are woven into and by their personal understanding of their self as being one with this image; an image which assumes the mantle of identity. The reality of people's lives is indivisible from the momentum of their identities and all our thoughts and actions are influenced by this. We live lives that are self-perpetuating reproductions of themselves which get set adrift and are quickly lost in the same endless convoluted ocean of other reproductions that reality is drowning in. Release from the confines of being THAT individual, being 'who you are' is integral to realizing the true potential of what one can be. 'What you want to be/do' has to replace 'What you are' as the definition of identity so that the past will no longer be blinders keeping us running in the same direction. The general state of confusion, frustration, and alienation that most people live in is both the direct product of and the very cause of the contradictions between 'the self' as it is and 'the self' as we would like it to be.
When we talk about the changing of identities we talk about finding freedom by breaking from other people's conceptions as well as our self-conceptions as well as our self-conceptions of what we can do. Burning the effigies of ourselves is the only way to destroy the predetermination that undermines this discourse of our lives and our involvement in the world.

#7 Summation of the Black Mask sub-committee of Creative Noise and Acitvity's Finding with regards to the Imposition of Limiting Hierarchies, Norms, Standards, and Structures upon the Cultural Expression of groups and individuals through the reduction of the Creative Process to an Economic Formula and the Marginalization of individuals wishing to pursue their creative potential regardless of the economic, political, or social implications of doing so:

The Album that you are holding in your hands right now has nothing to do with creativity. "Creativity" as we would like to define it is a process, and angagement, the meeting place of the mind and the spirit. Most importantly, it is something experienced. What you have right now is a dull reflection of that process, nothing more than the waste products of someone else's experience. While hopefully you will enjoy listening to the music, find some of the ideas interesting and stimulating, and appreciate our product, don't allow yourself to believe that you can be involved in the process when you press PLAY or see the band live. The Creative Process is present tense, and the stage is a funeral parlor where things long deceased are displayed for public approval.
For too long people have brought into the discourse surrounding creativity. In a world where economic influences and 'moral' imperatives prevail, creativity has been objectified so that it can be rationalized and consumerized. The focus is on the things produced and the social and economic value of them. Products have to be consumed, profits have to be made, and the social structure shouldn't be disturbed. Vast art, music, and publishing industries, in cahoots with their bedfellows in marketing, advertising, and mass media define and direct creativity, all the while determining its 'value'. Radios, TVs, Top 40 countdowns, Critics, Bestseller Lists, and magazines at the grocery store check out counters tell us what to listen to, what to read, what colors will be 'IN' for the next fashion season. We sit idly by as most modes for 'creative expression' are funneled through corporate boardrooms.
Not only is the creative process bastardized into a sculpted edifice of consumerism, with pre-ordained direction handed down from the front offices in the guise of a cultural elite, but the standards imposed serve to undermine creativity in its purest form at all levels. This can be seen in the construction of distinctions, roles, structures, and hierarchies that serve to confine the potential of the creative process while limiting possible interaction with it. The creative 'haves' and 'have nots' become necessary components within this system, with a privileged few allowed to be involved. But even those acknowledged as creative are nothing more than cultural whores, selling their wares IF they play by the rules. And for everyone else, "REALITY" is the weapon that is used to beat down all interest in being creative. People are constantly urged by all around them to be productive, to 'make a living', and relegate the creative aspects of their lives, their dreams, to pastime activities done in their spare time. There's no money in that and artist, poets, and musicians, and writers are all fools with no grounding in the real world. We are either not good enough or it is not practical enough. The question that should be asked is why anyone would want grounding in a 'real world' that is obsessed with competition and profit, limited in vision, destructive in it's nature, and where everyone's standard fare is alienation and suppression of potential?
One of the aims of this product is to urge people to engage in their own creative processes and NEVER be satisfied recapitulating reproductions of someone else's. Unfettered creativity is one of the most powerful manifestations of subversion possible for it offers us all a taste of freedom.

#8 excerpts from diary found the year 2009

...for the first time in my life I can taste the true excitement. With sweat running down my back and a smile on my face, it is difficult to even type this out. It isn't an accident or even strange that it is happen [sic], it had been in the works for ages, but it finally seemed like no is the time. For too long we accepted high rising concrete slabs fucking us up. Somehow along the way we got used to never feeling fulfilled or happy, we got used to taking drugs to cure our depression and to cure our alienation. We got used to work [sic] day producing commodities, and becoming commodities, and becoming commodities and buying commodities. We got used to work [sic] 8 hours a day producing commodities and buying commodities. We got used to spending our lives in a sedated state, of never living, just surviving. But today all of that is changing, the little secret that we all shared was being revealed to the world. Now I am almost running, my legs can't stop and I am to [sic] exhilarated to slow down. On the corner beneath the streetlight I meet up with a comrade, she is smiling, not hiding the passion that she was [sic] feels. We confirmed that it is finally happening. There are no cops on the streets, just people young and beautiful and alive walking in groups or alone, down to the square. There are no leaders, no union or parties behind it. Most people don't really know what is going on but they could feel the air was different, breathable, alive. You see, the universal idea of resistance and rebellion that had been lurking under modern ways of production had suddenly sprung to life, no one even needed to say it out loud. Suddenly people stopped working, they stopped listening to the bosses and the self acclaimed leaders, people started to deconstruct the oppression that had been over them for years, for their entire lives. It is a beautiful occurrence, the city is filled with colors and flags and people saying hello to each other and kissing passionately with strangers. Music is coming from buildings all over and people are dancing on every rooftop, in every alleyway. The old and conservative forces will try to prevent it for a short while but their attempts will be futile, most of their attacks end in humiliation. There will be a couple of days of fighting but everyday more and more people will throw off their uniforms and join in with the ranks of celebrating, passionate revolutionaries that are taking over the city. Things are being built at a faster rate than the old culture is being dismantled, and after a few days the city will totally change character, the only cars you will ever see used only for driving or other necessities. About two weeks after the first signs of insurrection something will happen, the old and ugly will gather in a park down by the harbor where they will kill themselves with Easyways sleeping pills. They do it because it is clear to them that we will never let the world go back to what it was and that will be too much for some to deal with. Now it belongs to us, the passionate, the young, the loving. Now it is up to us. Now there are only lovers left alive. I rush to the square with my friends and many others that I will from now on would [sic] call comrade or lover or sister, I cry openly. This is nothing short of everything that we have ever dreamed of. This is the beginning and now it was up to us. Now begins our creation of our history, this is our time, away from the production line, this is a time like never before; this is a revolution...

organist//n. the player of an organ.
organize// v. tr. (also -ise) 1 a give an orderly structure to, systematize. b bring the affairs of (another person or oneself) into order; make arrangements for (a person). 2 a arrange for or initiate (a scheme etc.) b provide; take responsibility for (organize a wildcatstrike). 3 (often. absol.) a enroll (new members) in a trade union, political group etc. b. form (a trade union or other political group) 4 a enable (a group or oneself) to offer resistance against the oppressive discourse of capitalist leadership (the man) b provide a theoretical foundation to understand the fascism-generating structures of the widely differentiated labourmarket (scapegoating so called immigrants would not be as much an issue of ethnicity, but one of class). 5 a promote a less instrumental use of the traditional learning facilities (schools, libraries etc.). b encourage learning beyond mere survival. 6. smash the neo-liberal dream. 7 a support the overtaking of the workplace, thus enabling people to build their own communities and fly their own airplanes (see the AAA for spaceexploration). b give confidence (to a person or group of persons) to realize that heroism can and will be achieved by all. 8 a confirm the suspicion that people are more than a professional title. b encourage the change of (old, broing, forced etc.) identities (see #6). 9 a give meaning to the old abbreviations (showing that further divisions are most unwanted ). 10 a take it into one's own hands. B do I have to spell it out?
orgy// n. (pl. -ies) 1 a wild drunken festivity at which indiscriminate sexual activity takes place. 2 excessive indulgence in an activity. 3 (usu. in pl.) Gk & Roman Hist. secret rites used in the worship of esp. Bacchus, celebrated with dancing, drunkenness, singing etc.

#10 Do you remember when it was quiet down her? Do you remember when it was quiet anywhere??? Before the industrialization, before the factories, before the planes and trains and cars and busses. Before The Beatles, The Rolling Stone and punkrock, before MTV, before commercials, before headaches and tinnitus, before inner city fumes and pollution, before the sounds of computers and cash registers.
Noise - silence, relationship in a sinking ship, drags us under and runs us deaf from the roaring of the marketplace. But in secret and in effect there might be a few daring forces using the apparatus available to produce counter sounds, to make so much noise that one day there will be at least a moment of relief. Guided by the mechanism produced during thousands of years of slavery and oppression, constructed by the suffering of a million men and women, we must overthrow the relationship between the abuse of noise and the creation of noise and thank the industrialization for making us amplify our manifestos and enable us to sing and scream and dance.

The perception of time:
The timeline, hours chopped into minutes into seconds into the very measurement on living. Life is lived on the basis of time consumed. The standardization of time in the 19th century was well in tune with the industrialization's maximum usage of labor power, the need to increase the profit. We learn to accept the fact that days are nothing but blicks of time to be consumed. The schematics of living is nurtured from the institutionalized learning facilities also known as schools, also known as breeding ground for future slaves.

The perception of the room:
The working place, the living place, the consumption place, the enjoyment place; all life reduced to cubicles determining the role you have to play in order to live. Our economical/cultural settings of building space has [sic] not only been reduced to the mere storage of commodities (home) but also to the production of life (theme parks and movie movie theaters), the accumulation of capital (work and the consumption of the same capital (Malls and chainstores and so on). Living has been reduced to the economy of space.

The perception of self:
Having life reduced to the time/space setting of consumer capitalism means that you are, no matter how hard you try, a part of the commodity abundance that circulates around us and as long as we are living in a system where this is the "law", this relationship will never change. We are paying to live in a system that is based on the usage of humans, we get used to the realization that the objects that we produce take on more meaning than the producers, we get used to feeling alienated and used. We get survival sickness.

#12 Assuming control over creativity and productivity:
Words and images, which surround us constantly - more now than ever - are the language of power. We are totally inundated with commercials and propaganda, everywhere. It's not manipulation, nor a conspiracy. It's the expression of a paradigm which has cast its web over the globe - formulating divisions of labor, using and shaping 'culture,' ensuring its evolution, and thus contradicting itself through exploitation and alienation. This paradigm is ours, as is the language, and the imagery which represents it. Alienation is for everyone now, because it is now more than it ever way. It is total. Some won't recognize it, and others revel in it, but all of us feel it. It's easy to be attuned to it in the working class or as a student - it feels like total futility. One is more attuned to alienation when once can't afford to fool and distract themselves with bourgeois luxury, or in the converse, when, through education, one is purchasing boredom and functionalist thought in hopes of empowering their life. Will it? Only in so much as you can transcend it - only in its negation. The purpose of becoming a student now is to redefine that role. In a sense, to use creative and productive energy in opposition to the social forces that seek to harness it for a benefit alienated from yourself. The same applies to broader society. There is a practical manner in which we can combat total alienation - using its means of creativity and productivity against the social paradigm that guides them. As for creative power, we can start with language and images. Every word, image, phrase or scene has a contrasting counterpart which can alter its meaning entirely and critique it. Dada knew it and accordingly was a fantastic reflection and critique of society. Drink from the toilet. Warhol knew it when he painted Monroe's lips a hundred times. The Situationists articulated it and lived it (and not only in Paris 1968). The word "propaganda" condescends the concept we're referring to, although to a degree that's what it is. To use this word in its condescending sense is to fail to realize that everything is or can be propaganda. A more appropriate concept is that of 'satire'. We can stifle the alienation of our creative power through critique, humiliation, insult and self-criticism. Its object should be larger than its subject however: to redefine and reorganize the social control over creative and productive forces in opposition to alienation. After the critique of creative power we are left with the practical side of our social life: production. The DIY festival is a powerful example of the assumption of the assumption of productive organization on the part of the political community. Insurrection is its broader social counterpart. The former redefines productive energy in its own terms, taking massive organization into its own hands (even if its goal is only a forum for boring music), while the latter is popular resistance and refusal of the control over creative and productive power. What's next? Is the DIY festival followed by the creation of our own airlines, and is insurrection followed by revolution? If alienation stifles and co-opts creative and productive energy for its own benefit, then satire, self-reliance and resistance redefine them in rejection of alienation.
Much more can be said on these matters.

The (International) Noise Conspiracy collective:
Lars Stromberg, Dennis Lyxzen, Sara Almgren, Ludwig Dahlberg, Inge Johansson. Patrick Daly, Martin Sahline, Alfred Ruel, Erik Asell, Robin Hedberg, Axel Stattin. Produced, Mixed, and Mastered by Jari Haapalainen.
Engineered and Mixed by Pelle Gunnerfeldt.
All songs published by Songs and Stories Publishing / Burning Heart Publishing,
Sub-published in the U.S. by Chrysalis Music.
Additional percussion by Jari Haapalainen.
For more info, write to: the Black mask collective, Vallmovagen 45,
903 52 Umea, Sweden. the_spectacle@hotmail.com
www.burningheart.com/tinc
Booking and info morgan@luger.se