released May 9, 2012

GRINDCORE CINEMA presents
a CEPHALOCHROMOSCOPE production
"Sketchgrind"

KiKurachiyo [Canada/Croatia/Japan]
Orfee : distressed vocals (all TRKS including 6 & 7), lyric
for "L'Amour Fou", sample mastery and sketchy sketching.
Karlo/Zmaj : guitars, lyrics and vocals (only 3, 6, 7 & 9),
speeding it up and all the img shit.
Matsui, IKEDAAA : drum sounds, blastbeats.

contact Karlo : zmajeee(at)yahoo.com
contact Orfee : dreadfoul(at)gmail.com

THE SKETCHGRIND ANTI-MANIFESTO

"(There is no bass, yet the guitar roars as heavily as Teddy D. Roosevelt's animated corpse that somehow does not slouch nor smudge its dance-moves but swings the axe gracefully flowing with blastbeats like foam gushing from its wave while the yelps, screams, growls all vibrate rhythmically through lyrically unforgiving Engrish swearing at politics and the corporate machinery one grind song at a time...) pure... grindcore. It's the unmistakable grating riff & furious screaming over a snare-blast producing this extremity of feeling, music on the edge of music, a sound denying nihilism completely and utterly, grindcore, you are ballet for the angry prole, a ballerina caught on fire spinning endlessly, you are Camus' clearest thought, Sisyphus enraged headbutting the colossal existential boulder till his skull cracks open and a bloody flower blooms proclaiming the ultimate blastbeat form!"

And what better way to start than by egoistically quoting oneself? If art is expression, there is an irrational striving toward its perfection, a conscious realization / transcription of an ideal, like a work could remain uncorrupted in the process of its making and somehow untouched in its thought-out form, an original entity not from the self, the ego, but from some sort of higher sphere of art that makes it predetermined, unoriginal by default. Only hypocritically can this perspective allow itself to be the judge of any work, when it is inseparable from the egoism of judging, assuming of others in regard to yourself or your culture, a subjective romanticizing of what art should be, not what it is. This conscious concept-ideal of perfection might as well be destroyed by naïveté, an approach apathetic to vague cultural notions of what values define one artwork superior to the other; then the only worth would lie in extremity of expression, sincerity of words, sounds, sculptures, symbols, structures exerted from oneself, presumably an exhilarating release, emotional or intellectual. This is what I see at the core - if not as root, then as potential - of, for example, grindcore, if I consider its objective my full-on expression, a desperate attempt at self-realization outside of myself, destruction of kitsch, cliché, vapid idealism in and out of music, at a tempo blown out of control, sounds bordering with what might be considered noise, emotion peaking at its explosive totality interlocked with itself as much as possible; everything that I am, screaming, orgasming toward the sky. Sketchgrind must be free-form grind, minimalized pre-construction, pro-improvisation as in free jazz, the punk as fuck avant-garde, perceivably abstract anti-symbolism & impressionism, influence rendered irrelevant, free of ethical or religious bounds, driven beyond comprehension 'cause it ain't rock'n'roll and nobody likes it. Nihilism will be no more welcome than any other ideology, the only negation being of the self, of rules, of decency, of shame, destruction of all things civilized in order to become free of collectivist, idealized humanity that demands your art stays human in quality, i.e. not overly self-indulgent, egoistic, inhuman in regard to a self-centered self making art of oneself, whose work is unclassical and does not come to be strictly as extension, improvement to a civilized, cultural heritage, rooted in it to the extent of will, sprouting of it - inwardly. You do not attempt to "transcend" or make subjectively transcendetal music, a sound beyond sound; you just try to express as sincerely as you manage, as you like to, any way you want to, the circular drone of existence, the cycle of life, relative / irrelevant as to whether it can be ascribed properties like slowness or haste (one side sludge, the other grind), because a circle has no ends and this negates the idea of polarity (life - death, love - hate, conscious - subconscious? - unconscious), its only quality being perpetuity. The realistic juxtaposition of the conscious and the subconscious is what happens if the creative process is not conceptual beyond its approach - approach being always a concept one way or another, like the idea of free improvisation being what it is regardless of its non-conceptual results, abandoning the search for some final truth. One might find the sketchgrind approach-philosophy blending with similar concepts, yet this is irrelevant because such things do not WORK on a theoretical basis, only in practice, because it's realistically nothing more than a human or inhuman person, you and me, twitching over any instrument, spreading incomprehensible self-explosions because it's in the immediate, momentary, close to instinctual short-term approach that we find the most beauty in and it's too much to take and because of this exact reason will I attempt to inscribe into my tombstone the very experience when you can't even think, you can't even speak, describe, or explain; you can only convolute, growl, yell, scream, shatter anxiety and lose control in the most grotesque of ways. It is primitive, unintentionally deconstructive dadaist destruction holding no appreciation of culturally objective quality because it loses grasp of things cultural which is why it cannot be submitted to theory and its manifesto is an anti-manifesto; while it ascribes nothing to its perfection, it can never be accomplished except by oneself in the moment, the one acting out the approach that is no more than his/her own. Free, heartfelt, idiotic, with no rhythm except inner-rhythm, the pulse of intense life to which a blastbeat comes naturally being the extremity that it is, achieving a release of tension, now becoming a droning joy in your head, vain to take form of pure energy and becoming and being that but only in the desperate moment of thrashing about on the surface just before drowning, the process of transmitting this energy into the force of creation that violently results in a work that is yourself. Your artwork does not become you; you come to be artificially in your artwork and remain dead, but in the moment of playing, sculpting, forming / performing, sketching, you give it your all and are as much of your art as your art is of you, and you become it completely individually regardless of subconscious influence, effects of upbringing or learning. The product is finally ineffable because it attempts to uproot out of what makes it what it is, blowing up the deep core and things wrapped around the core of the self. Each heart is unknown to any socialized impulse of what civilized being should be, inherently longing for an existential freedom through self-destruction, defining also sketchgrind completely a thing of the individual, an indefinite urge that lies at the root of the creative need, l'art pour l'art being nothing more than l'art pour moi in the end, demanding death to collectivist notions of art, the death of the Death of the Author, and life to the immediate expression of oneself, indifferent to critique or opinion and untouched by everything except for what is "felt", the burst experienced in the creative moment, its concept being rationally a non-concept. A bird sings, but we do not call it art because it is not human; it is natural, it is instinctual, it might not entail consciousness, it is not of the ego, yet there is as much sense in implying unnatural qualities to the ego as to anything that ever consciously was (thought included), as if conscious impulse must have come from above, rather than evolve alongside intellectual capabilities. Not to speculate any longer, practical examples to disprove such anthropocentric egoism can be found all over, e.g. the internet, if one searches for animals creating art as defined by the human "non-animals", like an elephant taking a tool such as a brush in its trunk and painting. It is obvious that the possibility of physical action is determined by motor skills, but the potential to create, paint on a canvas, does not belong to instinct. Yet sketchgrind is still - at the level of acting out the "creative" impulse - practically comparable to any other genre or artform; e.g. in writing, you would start with an empty page of some notebook, a blank piece of paper, that would come to be filled with words, symbolic and meaningful, or void of meaning and "senseless". Compare this to musical construction, irrelevant as to whether the work in question is a classical composition, noise, or if I'm playing around on my guitar, coming up with riffs that I might consider heavy and such; further ahead, the blank would be blank no more, for we would find a theme, a melody, a beat, rhythm, tempo, and this is how we conjure the sound that we culturally perceive as music (or noise) regardless of the process, be it thought-out composition or hands-on improv - you start with some sort of blank canvas meant to become an artwork either way (in the head or on paper). Sketchgrind is not consciously thought-out sound; it is primitive, sketchy, rhythmic, i.e. beat-based, like rock'n'roll and jazz, hence the beat might be considered the canvas. The "sketch" adjective to grind comes reasonably, because in sketching grind (/writing a thriller) I cannot use paper or any old mid-tempo beat (/atmosphere without suspense) as the canvas - I consider my canvas the BLASTBEAT. Thereby, my sound is merely rotation around a blast-core, at least to the extent that I want it to be. Entailing a perceived canvas in spite of being - in itself - destruction, its philosophy is an anti-philosophy akin to dadaists making art that might as well be considered anti-art, yet I do not make art of readymades, objects, but of my figurative self, because I assume a self-destructive mode, repressing thought in favor of subconscious urge, denying a conscious totality to creation, i.e. my deconstructive re-creation of the self. Sketchgrind comes in stream of consciousness dissimilarly to, for example, the writing of Virginia Woolf, being more akin to beatnik poetry written to the beat of bebop, or the mad surge of Faulkner à la The Sound and The Fury and Breton's desperation in Nadja or L'amour fou. Free yourself of generic form, of realistic adjectives to your art, like "death-" to "death-grind" (unless you don't want to, of course), or the hollow "-grind" to blast-less downtuned chugfests. Don't go for heavy riffs, don't have specific song construction / composition in mind - just DO. Approach is completely individualistic. I'd prefer to louden up, fasten up, free up of elitist chains and maximalize my sincerity, rather than rewrite, recite what I've heard in regard to a cultural perfection-ideal forming in my head, the bombastic meaning that I ascribe to its recurring cliché, the kitsch that I set above expression - above myself. But why would I reach for outward heights, never to know those within? I'd rather just GO without ideals or gods, including self-concepts, and try to make be what IS, without authorities to my art other than those that I set myself, the ones I find suited to my expression (e.g. speed, extremity, love & blastbeats). This entire wall of text is redundant, so "see you next life, thrash cowboy", 'cause grind songs are usually pretty short, and nobody can claim that I cannot make, say, show, be exactly what I want during less than a minute's time. It would merely be wonderful if I was allowed and capable of being as much of myself as I could and wanted to while being, defeating of what I am not or what I should be. Sketch away!

Love & blastbeats,
karlo

cephalochromoscope.blogspot.com