33 rebellions per minute
1997
Eat Static, SCIENCE OF THE GODS
I don't know how, or even if, you were taught the concepts of evolution,
but I have vivid memories of visiting the Chicago Museum of Natural
Science and playing this simulation/game about predators, prey, and the
"balance of nature". The idea was that if you selected a good initial
ratio of predators to prey, then any fluctuations would be temporary and
corrected, because if the predators ate too many prey, the predators
would become too numerous relative to their food, and they'd start to
starve and die out, causing the prey, given suddenly easier lives, to
start expanding their numbers, perhaps even setting a new record, at
which point the straggling remnants of the predator population would
have easy pickings of a many-course menu, and regrow starting the cycle
over: stability! Or, if you picked an unworkable initial ratio, the
predators would kill _all_ the prey, and all the predators would die,
and from then on: stability! And observed over a short period of time,
say a few tens of thousands of years, nature can indeed look pretty
stable, hence the Biblical notion that all species were created, and
two-by-two (or seven-by-seven for "clean" animals) preserved, in a
simple ordained form and role.
But even in our feeble human lives, maybe
aided by books, we can see how not all animals are following ancient
traditions. Horses did not always weigh enough to let human beings, even
midgets, ride them. Dogs did not always disguise themselves as yapping
handheld swaths of cotton in order to attain edible flesh on styrofoam
dishes. Humans were not always capable of pretending to sense a vast
flavor difference between Coke and Diet Coke. Insects were not always
capable of living through large doses of DDT and other poisons. Cow
bacteria were not always capable of surviving the various types of
antibiotics that have been injected massively into beef cattle to make
those cattle grow faster, and if any of those bacteria escape into human
populations and by mutation develop homicidal traits, humans won't begin
as capable of not dying from them. Only when nature has picked out the
few lucky winners with accidental random immunity, and let them pass it
on, will the human race reflourish, and in that way it will be
different. Because nature, really, is an arms race: new means of exploi
tation are, through sheer slow randomness, developed, and the only
exploited who survive have developed new (unconscious) strategies to do
so, strategies which eventually be challenged by a new attack. So over
billions of years, initial mold cells and paramecia evolve into
radically different mold cells and paramecia, or into sharks, or into
former Senator Alfonse D'Amato, and it's a remarkable, logic-challenging story,
the sort that could easily make one believe in God--- but a God using a
too-goddam-slow processor.
On the other hand, certian people, in what way or may not turn out to be
a reproductively advantageous streak of curiosity, have developed means
of simulating evolutions in their own, visible, much faster computers.
That makes it possible for predator and prey to discover and discard
millions of new weapons in less than 80 minutes. And SCIENCE OF THE
GODS--- no vocals, no melodies (although a lot of tuned sounds, already
on their scrapingly legato way to new pitches even by the moment you've
noticed them), no pauses to restart, and entirely mechanical--- could be
the soundtrack. The plot seems to be the co-evolution of stalking,
authoritative drum-machine beats (predator) and other more scattered,
fidgety noises (prey). It's not remotely linear, nor should it be; since
any number of evolutionary strategies _could_ work in a given dilemma,
which one gets picked is always a result of randomness, meaning that the
constant change is not, in detail, forecast-able.
Plus there's
"punctured equilibrium", in which many many species die at once. On
earth, we don't know why, but on the Eat Static record I've identified
some of the causes by hearing them. The soft wordless choirboys, whose
assault failed to wipe out the zipper creatures of the echoing caverns
early in "Science Of The Gods", return, dead but ressurected by Brian
DePalma, to this time wipe all incumbents out. "Interceptor"'s growling
robot endomporhs are simply chased until they drop dead of CPU attacks,
but their successors, both predators and prey, are caught deliberately
motionless, too busy witnessing a spectcular cosmic light-show to react
as the showmen turn out to be Martians with deathrays (fortunately, a
feeble few children escape and develop from a hapless scurrying cringe
to agile amphibianism). "Psuedopod"s denizens have their souls ripped
out by banshee coal-miners, who fight for their niche with vocordered
ghouls until a trick of the deity's whim ("Contact") suddenly rewrites
the rules so that "having surviving children" is no longer the secret to
fitness, "making a good audition for the theme music spot if they ever
revive Doctor Who" is. But then the Doctor's TARDIS is crushed by a herd
of mechanical cows, and all further attempts to play by the old rules
are restricted by an excess buildup of cosmic entropy, such that even a
new race with the neat trick of guaranteeing its food supply by earning
multimillion dollar basketball contracts is run down by low energy,
persistent leakage, rains of cosmic debris from an Astrosmash game,
unbelievably bad violinists, and inevitable violent disintegration ("the
Hangar"). Luckily, even the final universal triumph of formlessness is,
under these rules, conducted in danceable 4/4 time. All Gods should be
so considerate.
P.S. It has suddenly occured to me, weeks after writing this, that the album's title suggests that my concept of the album may, in fact, be the same as the band's concept of the album. So instead of being quirky, I'm maybe being insightful? Well. I wonder if that's an improvement....
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