IOS40 by Illusion of Safety
IOS 40
no part of it/complacency/personal archives PA//210
Releases 11/4/23
40th anniversary 10 TAPE SET, in black case edition of 40, includes the first IOS releases on tape from 1986-1991 + bonus tracks from the second IOS performance in 1984, + live performances in Colorado 1988 taken from the More Altitude Than Attitude tape on We Never Sleep + digital files with many rare flyers and photos pre-1991 & more.
Tape 1. CPC-01 -Its a dead dog 1986
Tape 2. CPC-03 -ecstatic crisis 1986
Tape 3. CPC-09 -my mind is killing me 1986
(with bonus tracks from live @The Cubby Bear
Chicago on 2-5-84 end of both sides)
Tape 4. CPC 07 -live sound IOS post effects 1987
Tape 5. CPC-13 -violence and geography 1987
(with bonus tracks from live @The Cubby Bear
Chicago on 2-5-84 end of... more
credits
releases November 4, 2023
JIM HAYNES-
It's 2023, and Illusion Of Safety enters now a fourth decade of existence, one as a constant state of flux. Those rhizomes and mutations were on display at their very beginning, as can be heard on this boxset. It must be said that any historical revisionism about Illusion Of Safety must recall how asynchronous they were in comparison to many of their contemporaries. The adoption of any given technology was put to a use that served the ideas for Illusion Of Safety, exposing the glitches and never compromising on what needed to be addressed through sound, through noise, through disruption, through distress. That remains true today in the research and development through dynamic splatter of IOS's late-period digitalia as it did with primitive sequencing on the earliest tapes. Yet technology is just a tool in the complication of meaning, or in the gleeful manifestation a sonic violence, or in the rupture of cultural references that required an explosion and subsequently mangled re-composition.
The origins of Illusion Of Safety within Industrial Culture are relatively well-known, the project having been sparked by the impact that Throbbing Gristle had upon a young Dan Burke during TG's final shows in California in 1981. Industrial Culture can (and should) be a deliberately vague term, one that may be best described as less as a set of aesthetics and more of litany of ideas put forward by the likes of Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Z'ev, Survival Research Laboratories, and many other provocateurs in the late '70s and early '80s. Cut-ups. Noise. Audio collage. Rhythmic assault. Secret messages. Cultural critiques by way of aggression and confrontation. The Death Factory. Cults of personality. Art brut. Ironic reflections of control tactics. Situationism turned very very grim. The queasy and troubling interface between man and machine.
Ideas such as these run through Illusion Of Safety's catalogue, coupled with numerous compositional detours, conceptual endgames, and deliberately contrary stances that confound expectation. That's clearly by design. I don't think there can really be something as an aesthetic framework that had been pinned onto IOS. If anything, Illusion Of Safety addresses an aesthetic of the schizophrenic - a shattering of signifiers whereby meaning is severed from experience. Sound dislocated from its origin and given over to a problematic, shifting, and scrambled agenda. An illusion of safety, indeed!
It's hard to qualify Illusion Of Safety as a "band," though numerous people have worked under the IOS banner. Dan Burke has been and remains at the center of Illusion Of Safety. For the latter half of IOS' history, he has more or less stood as the lone pilot; but in first two decade, he brought in a number of people from the Chicago underground with various backgrounds in improvisation, electro-acoustic composition, synth-punk virulence, and technical know-how (or lack thereof). Jim O'Rourke is the most widely recognized musician to matriculate through the ranks of Illusion Of Safety, with his studious approach to granular synthesis, razor-splice noise-rock, minimalist composition, and his many eccentric plunges into avant-pop. The O'Rourke-era albums from 1989 to 1993 - particularly Probe, Cancer, and Water Seeks Its Own Level - were pocked with pronounced segments of quiet and near-silence that stood in stark relief against the mediated brutality found elsewhere on those recordings. To be clear, Dan Burke has been responsible for the final compositional shape to every album. So, O'Rourke's sphere of influence upon the sound of Illusion Of Safety only went so far. Thymme Jones of Cheer Accident, Mitch Enderle of Dead Tech, and Chris Block also contributed mightily during these early works alongside a handful of other shadowy figures, whose histories appear murky to those looking from the outside in.
Burke offers three distinct periods for the cassette era, with the content and direction of each of these releases being his call, with some exceptions. The earliest incarnation was the equal collaboration between Mitch Enderle and Burke, embracing more of the TG ethos of primitive electronics. The second phase took a sharp turn toward improvisation with Burke joined by Jones, Block, and other members of a project called Dot Dot Dot. While this phase was not particularly well represented on the actual releases, much of the bonus material found on this boxset is culled from these sessions and live recordings. The third phase involved the main core of Mitch Enderle, Mark Sorensen, and Mark Klein.
The cassettes from this boxset are mostly new to me, as my discovery to Illusion Of Safety came by way of a feature in Option Magazine sometime around 1990. With the limited resources of a college student, the albums I began to explore were on CD, with the tapes from the previous decade being ignored, furthered by the misconception that the tapes were somehow lesser than the CDs. In hindsight, that was clearly a mistake, as these tapes are fully formed statements, even when using rudimentary tools.
The first cassette for Illusion Of Safety is It's A Dead Dog from 1986, self-released on Complacency. The tape begins with a common trope within Industrial Culture, that of the mocking critique of the self-righteousness of American evangelicalism. It's an easy target, but given the context of high profile TV preachers in the '80s getting busted with their noses in a pile of blow while being serviced by a streetwalker, it had more of an antagonistic thrust back then than it does today. Elsewhere on "Let's Cut The Small Talk," dilated trumpet tones cycle into a sinister piece of noir electronics that could easily be setting the mood for any given Giallo murder. Power tools, bashed metal, seering amp feedback, snarls of processed guitar drone, and peculiar tape machinations drive the freenoise expressionism of "Ethical Nihilism," adjacent to the collective improvisation of Morphogenesis or AMM. The tape is literal pandora's box of ideas that Illusion Of Safety has been wrestling with ever since.
1987's Geography And Violence is the prequel to the more well-known More Geography and Violence, which got an LP edition through Complacency in 1988 and a remastered CD version in 2002 on Die Stadt. Tracks such as "Katalavox" and "Fade-N-Die" might be seen as the industrial "hits" for Illusion Of Safety, the former being a track reworked from a Dead Tech number of proto-EBM rhythms and disembodied voices, thematically and conceptually linked to a cybernetic, voice-activating chair designed to help those with special needs. The track is loaded metaphors that can run the gamut from congenital mental illness, malfunctioning phantom limbs, and social alienation. Pick your poison. "Fade-N-Die" is a blunt-force-trauma piece of rhythmicist electronics and desperately bad vibes, built upon a sample from a woman blankly stating those eponymous words from the title. It's neither disparaging of another nor self-deprecating, rather it feels like an emotionless description of an inevitable existential condition. Both of these tracks got reprised and reconstructed on Inside Agitator from 1992.
Repairs was a cassette originally released by Sound Of Pig in 1988, and got a reissue on Notice Recordings in 2010. Most notable on the tape is the deliberately monstrous cover of Throbbing Gristle's "Discipline." Structurally, the IOS version keeps the pounding rhythm intact, but vocals take on an alpha-male posture akin to power electronics sloganeering, rather than Genesis P-Orridge's magnetic if unconventional delivery. As such, IOS's command and control leans into the confrontation and hostility where I had always felt TG to be imploring an communal experience. "I Was The Killer" foreshadows the true crime fascination that was so perfectly manifest on Historical. But, here the eponymous sample shatters the spectral drone and mediated samples almost like an unwelcome EVP.
The heavy tape hiss of Finance And Ideology from 1989 harkens back to Burroughs' tape experiments with the cut-up. But Burke has assured me that it was a Mirage sampler and not tape loops that were employed in the construction of this album. In these hulking sonic lurches, warbling sicktones, and unsettling home recordings on self-immolation, IOS revels in the wasteland of human greed disguised as religious piety and the tragic forms of domestic violence. On the original pressing of the tape, the title reads Chris Block's Illusion Of Safety Finance And Ideology. However, Block does not appear at all on this cassette. A deliberate piece of misdirection from Illusion Of Safety.
The 1991 cassette RVE (Robol Verification Exercise) is a reference to The Hafler Trio, who maintained a connection to Robol, the sound research laboratory in Sweden, founded by an eccentric acoustician named Dr. Robert Spridgeon whose improbable / parapsychological research into sound has been passed on to Edward Moolenbeek, one of the founding members of H30 with Andrew McKenzie and Chris Watson. All of that - Robol, Spridgeon, Moolenbeek - proved to be a very elaborate fiction, which added to the lore of The Hafler Trio's gnostic inclinations. As homage, IOS blasts forth lengthy tendrils of bleary, smeared grey noises and resonant drone constructs punctured with low-bit rate explosive noises and musique concrète errata. It's unclear if McKenzie took the homage as a compliment as it was intended. Better not ask.
The final tape in this box reflects the exchange of ideas that was prevalent in cassette culture. Trading tapes and sending source material along with handscrawled letters in the post with none of the instant gratification of social media or digital communications. The A-side finds Illusion Of Safety reworking source material sent by the Swiss aktionist Runzerlstirn & Gurgelstock (aka Rudolf Eb.er). The signature explosive noises, grunts, mechanical monstronisties, and plenty of unkempt bodily functions from Eb.er are heavily featured amidst dilated samples and kirlian echoes from Illusion Of Safety's re-engineering. It's an exhilarating listen. In turn, Burke sent material to Rudolf for his 1990 Stuhlgangblockade N! LP. The B-side features a few tracks from the 1990 Finite Material Context double cassette, which contained solo material from the extended Illusion Of Safety constellation. Some of this tape was collected on the Fifteen / Finite Material album, published by Functional / Tesco Organisation in 1993, and on this box, all of that material has now seen the light of day once again.
Through the revisitation of this material, Burke has begun to produce a new batch of recordings and a renewed desire to get out on the road. Call it a reanimation, a reinvigoration, a re-ignition, Illusion Of Safety's existential challenges remain vital and necessary.
Tracklist
Credits
[PA//210]
