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Anyone who knows me well knows that I don't like to get messy. Which is why I don't paint. The reason I love digital art is that you can stay clean. So the Sepultura in my life reminds me to get dirty. But the engine and drive comes from the silicon-solid-state reality of digital art, plus my German left-brain heritage is always there, in a low-rumble background noise trying to keep me straight. I think this is why i have a professional fetish for hanging out with engineers (for example: Scott, Mike and Ray). Stupid engineers, but they are right: logic is cool and I've written essays about using logical progression to get to your end result. Not to mention I live for contrast. That's what makes me tick and that whole irony thing gives me the creative jolts I need.

This is where Meshuggah comes into play. They are a complete contrast to Sepultura and what I supposedly stand for/against; most likely deny. And that is the pure power and laser focused devastation that can occur if you embrace rigidity while wielding creative organic flow. Contrast.

Their doom world view is predicated on a few very rigid environmental influences: the Swedish socialistic government, the sun is missing or useless half of the year, they are/were in the shadow of the Soviet Union/Russia, they're in a homogeneous culture and they're very European.

This all adds up to a binary-static reality that is very rigid and clinical (think of what the frosting on a black and white cookie looks like for a symbol of binary static). Their nature is frozen solid and invisible half of their lives, Sweden has the highest suicide rate for any industrialized country, their Socialistic form of government takes care of every need in a very bureaucratic fashion that is wrought with forms and papers and the band members are old enough to remember the Communist era of nuclear-mathematical-surgical-industrial-engineered death!

Meshuggah is a mathematically influenced group of musicians that look at quantum- and meta-physics in a very left-brained way to find their creative inspiration.

So how on earth does this band drive me bonkers creatively? To the point where I'm traveling through my own neurons on a manic sled of spiked cranial overloads? Surfing synaptical blooms of retinal-induced visions of undulating subconsciousness?

Easy!

They embody what I call "unmusic" and "anti-rhythm". They are logically manufactured industrial chaos. Chaos that has been put into an endless logical realm that defies logic. that's right it defies logic via chaotic ruminations about how a carbon based organism can create ethereal thoughts of nothingness so vast that it causes a "big bang' of colorful, living reality. This imagined neuro-reality of a simulated carbon life gets emulated in a simulacrum brought to life by silicon induced fertilization and mechanical rendering.

What?

Well their themes are un-reality that is cold but colorful. They present these thoughts in unmusic that has no harmony, chord progression or depth. It's flat distortion that uses unappealing sounds to create a truly engaging form of music. The anti-rhythm they employ thrives in off-beat percussion that repeats itself consistently by never having any sort of predictable rhythm. Combine these three elements and they have truly created beauty from the beast.

In summary a band like Meshuggah, playing in my headphones and penetrating my skull causes me to confront that which I hate most and turn it into a tool or weapon so that I can be even more lethal for my clients, creatively speaking. What is it that I hate?

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