AEM048 Dinowalrus

Some bands begin with an idea. Most of these ideas are bad: mara­cas, choirs, bassists wear­ing hats, putting a pool on the album cover. These are all bad ideas.

But let’s break this down fur­ther. If we were to con­struct a band-generator from whatever’s left of Brian Wilson’s bath­tub, that spin­ning 9-necked gui­tar from Cheap Trick, and the fore­closed ruins of Lou Perlman’s boy dun­geon, the device, no mat­ter how com­plex on the inside, would only need to have two inputs: “adjec­tive” and “noun,” or, as it states in the man­ual, “idea” and “thing.” Won­der­ful! We have just given birth to Whites­nake, Dark­throne, Big Black, Light­ning Bolt, and, why not, Cheap Trick. This con­struct is use­ful not just because you can make new bands for­ever, but because the lay­man can deci­pher what he’s about to lis­ten to before he even hits play. Whites­nake sounds like a huge penis, Dark­throne sounds like a malev­o­lent, slightly smaller penis, and Big Black sounds like Steve Albini’s idea of Par­lia­ment were Par­lia­ment to turn into a…oh wait, never mind. The idea begets the name begets the band. Click, spit, another gem off the assem­bly line.

But what are the lim­its of this mag­i­cal machine? What func­tion would fry the sys­tem? Rep­e­ti­tion of terms? No, there’s Duran Duran, the adjec­tive of Duran mod­i­fy­ing the noun Duran for extra clar­ity. Non­sense? Nope, Kaja­goo­goo comes out look­ing pretty sleek. These are all New Wave bands, of course, and should be expected to com­mu­ni­cate sym­pa­thet­i­cally with the motherboard.

Here’s where the story starts, though: the other day I was tin­ker­ing with the BG (I have one in my base­ment), and, com­pletely by acci­dent, came across the killer combo: “Dino”, “Wal­rus”. Dinowal­rus. Sparks flew every­where. There was an explo­sion inside the cas­ing. The steel bub­ble split open like the pod from Bodys­natch­ers or Cocoon. Before me were three dudes: One was tall and lanky and looked like an anorexic Slash. One was Asian, slightly shorter. The last one, hold­ing drum sticks, resem­bled a twelve-year old. He had braces for Christ­sakes! We got to talk­ing. I went to one of their gigs. They were nice guys.

Trou­bleshoot­ing the break­down a few days later, I came across the error log, lines and lines of per­fect code and then, right above the bit where the whole sys­tem went to shit, a sim­ple mes­sage: “What is the idea?”

Even as we approach the inevitable Sin­gu­lar­ity, Machines still aren’t really that good at abstract think­ing. To the CPU, an idea is really just an “idea”: “Hate”, “War”, “Love”, “Peace”. Cool ideas. The prob­lem with Dinowal­rus is that instead of hav­ing an “idea”, they inverted the generator’s fun­da­men­tal equa­tion. Dinowal­rus, like the fucked-up pri­mor­dial soup-beast they name drop, gen­er­ated their own idea.

I’ll be hon­est. I don’t really know what that idea is. But who does when it comes to a par­a­digm shift like this? It’s like ask­ing some­one circa year 0 what the idea of God is. He’d be like: “What? God is God, man.” I, who, some 2009 years later, can rat­tle off the Cliff Notes of con­tem­po­rary athe­ism with­out hes­i­ta­tion, am forced in this case to harken back to that old-time ances­tor: “Dinowal­rus is Dinowal­rus, man.”

So what do they sound like: a cyborg thrash col­lec­tive doing body per­cus­sion; what would hap­pen if they jacked a Gib­son SG into the Matrix instead of Neo’s skull; field record­ings from a future where we all live inside computers.

The Mae Shi remix of “Nuke Duke ‘Em” off Dinowalrus’s forth­com­ing record % runs the gamut from epony­mous video game quest­ing to white club spazz danc­ing, nix­ing the band’s ambi­ent ten­den­cies in favor of heav­ily tex­tured break­beats and clipped synths over an, um HEALTH-y gui­tar rum­ble and breathy, humanoid vox. What’s amaz­ing here is how mal­leable the source mate­r­ial seems to be. Dinowalrus’s music, already exist­ing in a state of near-infinite recom­bi­na­tion and remix, is ren­dered by the Mae Shi not as greater or less than, but pre­cisely, lit­er­ally as the sum of its parts. This is the real Shi-house, not a banger for the club cir­cuit, but banged up cir­cuits for club­go­ing computers.

B-side, the older track “Dole,” resem­bles some kind of self-conscious Italo-disco forgery dis­tilled with an infu­sion of Pac-man cher­ries and imported axle grease from 1980s Detroit. Jackin’ beats, arpeg­gia­tor runs, a vocal take that sounds like it was recorded in the Cave of Mon­tesinos: its like work­out music for seden­tary MMORPG addicts, the starter kit for “8 Minute Abs(straction).” This stuff makes you stronger, for sure, rein­forc­ing neural path­ways with tita­nium and fig­ur­ing out algo­rithms for life after death.

You don’t put ideas like these into the band gen­er­a­tor. Ver­sion 2.0, already rebuild­ing itself down­stairs as I write this, can sen­tiently remix itself while my weak bio­log­i­cal body falls asleep onto the key­board. Dinowal­rus is the sound of that con­struc­tion project, a new kind of frac­tal culture-jamming where all mate­r­ial is fair game, where all evo­lu­tion is instantaneous.

Ben Las­man

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