WHITE DOPES ON PUNK

Fact, stranger than fiction: BIG BLACK, belligerent Americans, have stolen Simon Reynolds' heart and soul with their very nasty business.

BIG BLACK. One of the rock names. BIG BLACK says it all. The looming threat. The black hole of noise. The yawning abyss of horror that swallows up all the words we can muster in our attempts to master the experience.

Big Black are alive to the psychedelic possibilities of horror. They are drawn, instinctively, to those phenomena--atrocity, psychosis, calamity--before which the mind reels and language dries up. If fascination is a fixation on an ineffable, arbitrary manifestation of beauty, then horror is simply the inversion of fascination--that chaste, hideous rapture that comes when the mind faces that which undoes it, the unaccountable. Awe (a word which contains both wonder and terror), the ecstasy of dread that comes when meaning fails--these are the dark, religious feelings that shudder at the heart of Big Black.

Big Black have hit upon a kind of subterranean psychedelia, music whose message is not "rise above", but "let's submerge". There are several solutions to the problem of escaping the cage of identity--"make music to satisfy angels" (Paul Morley), "play like beasts" (Lester Bangs)--but Big Black have located a kind of liberation in the mechanical. Like Swans, they have turned themselves into a pop abattoir, a concussion machine whose function is not to expand consciousness, but to compress it, obliterate it.

So I meet Big Black and what I really want to know is what is it about them, about me, about all other like minds, that draws us to this metaphoric self-destruction? Why is it that these sensitive, caring boys, these self-confessed wimps, avowed humanists, are obsessed by everything that subverts the humanist project, all the traumas and sicknesses that contradict our faith in perfection and progress?

Big Black--at some instinctive level--resist the kind of liberal humanism that invents a notion like "death education": the delusion that you can prepare people for this arbitrary, terroristic fact of life, somehow cope with this final sick joke! Big Black want to restore to us the vividness of death, of the threshold situations that compromise our balanced lives.

"What it is", says Steve Albini, singer and guitarist, "is that I just happen to have a fascination for certain kinds of human interaction--where people try to dominate each other, or the means of expression people resort to when pushed to their absolute limits. When people go beyond their training and morals and do exactly what their urges tell them to do, they are, in a sense, being most true to themselves. What intrigues me is that here are situations and phenomena that are severe, and yet I can't understand them."

Does the fascination lie in being confronted with the sheer arbitrariness of tyrannical reality?

"Well, recognising that you are helpless, that you have no power, over others, over your own drives--facing that, accepting it, is a step to stability. Because, if you think you've got the reins of your life in your hands, you're wrong! But basically there's something fascinating about the dirtiness of things going wrong that really stimulates me. I can't explain it, just acknowledge it."

Does the pleasure reside in the disorientation induced by the unmanageable? Or are our nerves so enfeebled that only violent music and violent imagery can wake us up? It's a truism that the presence of death makes us feel more alive.

Bassist Dave Riley speaks: "When I hear the word 'violence' I think of 'victim'. When I think of 'aggression', I think of intensity. Big Black are about intensity."

Santiago Durango, guitarist: "And the opposite of intensity is numbness--who wants to listen to music like that, to live like that? My life is so boring and regular, I need this kind of disruption."

I tell them my interpretation of "Kerosene", their masterpiece: that this story of a man so bored he sets himself on fire is like a metaphor for the Big Black method--their music is an equally drastic solution to inertia, a metaphorical self-immolation.

Dave: "That's quite neat, but actually the song is about something different. It's been widely misinterpreted as being about gang raping a woman and then burning her to death, and we have received a lot of shit about it. In actual fact, the song is about American small towns where life is so boring, there's only two things to do. Go blow up a whole load of stuff for fun. Or have a lot of sex with the one girl in town who'll have sex with anyone. 'Kerosene' is about a guy who tries to combine the two pleasures."

It's as if Big Black use other people's most extreme moments of reality--madness and death--as an escape from their reality. The horror that is someone else's life becomes for them a kind of oblivion.

Don't they worry that they'll develop a tolerance to all this? And that if they try to maintain the level of impact by piling on yet more noise/horror, they'll get sucked into an upward spiral whose ultimate destination is total musical seizure/sensory burnout?

Santiago: "If we reach the point where we can't add anymore, we'll stop. Once we've shot our wad, seen Jesus, we'll give it up."

Dave: "Getting numb to our own material is not really a problem. It's not like we have this stable version of the set, which we've honed over the months. Becoming familiar with our material is helpful, because if allows us to improvise. Someone will always throw in a new rent..."

Santiago: "The song defines the parameters within which we can be creative."

What I like about Big Black is that there's a kind of lucidity to the violence--it's not a fog of noise, everything is picked out articulately, for maximum impact.

Dave: "That's what I liked about the band when I joined--everything's focused."

Big Black are not about making an incompetent din. Unlike British noise groups, I don't get the impression that you're frightened of virtuosity.

Dave: "Getting skilled, acquiring knowledge of music theory, these are not problems. The point is to eliminate those skills and pieces of theory that are not appropriate at any given time. Knowledge is not a problem, knowledge is power. What you need is the right mindset, the attitude to use that knowledge well."

Santiago: "It's the same with learning to use studios. The studio is just a big instrument."

Will Big Black start to take on other textures apart from guitars, exploit other kinds of noise-making technology?

Dave: "Well, there's a synthesizer on 'Bad Houses'. We've done some primitive sampling. I've got a sax I can't play. We're working with Vocoders."

Steve: "You see, I hate the human voice. Our idea is to tamper with my voice as much as possible, and then bury it at the back of the mix. We're working on this song where we put the whole track through the Vocoder, so that my voice comes out composed of the same material as the music, and there's just this flurry of consonants under the beat."

Santiago: "The guitars are basically the thing though--we'll bend, we'll add certain elements--but guitars are what it's all about. And that's basically because they're extensions of our cocks, and we love them."

Dave: "We're puds. Jerks, but it's much better to be a pud with a guitar than a pud without a guitar."

This is as much the heart of Big Black as any fancy theory of trancendence through noise and horror. They're so sweet, so meek and mild-mannered, these boys, possessed with the spindly, bespectacled air of God's chosen computer operators...and yet these Woody Allen geeks have a strange otherlife onstage, where they metamorphise into a monstrous, glorious death machine. What went wrong?

Santiago: "We were never in the mainstream while growing up, we were isolated at school, we all have terrible problems with women."

Dave (mock-hysterical): "I told you--we're losers, we're puds. We're pathetic!"

Sounds like the classic course of development for rock musicians, rock critics, fanzine writers, and indeed anyone who gets into "difficult" or "alternative" music.

Dave: "Yeah, you're a loner, you want to be one-up over everyone else. Plus, you want to belong, somewhere. I mean, I never met anyone who had a good adolescence that I even wanna associate with!"

So life's losers achieve a strange kind of triumph onstage, reinvent themselves through rock noise.

Santiago: "Our lives would be just so much worse without Big Black. Without Big Black we might turn into the sickos we write about."

STEVE Albini looks like a fanzine editor--stoop-shouldered, with arms as thin as twigs and an air of bespectacled intensity about him. His writing for US hardcore rag Forced Exposure has won him notoriety, even persecution. Each day he returns home from work (as a photo-retoucher in Chicago), checks his answering machine and finds at least two or three detailed messages of abuse. He's left Forced Exposure now, after a piece entitled "Guide For Social Tards" was printed under his name, 90 per cent which had been written by someone else.

"It was a crap piece of writing. I don't mind making myself look stupid. In fact, I'm probably the best at it. So what annoyed me was amateurs messing where professionals should be."

Albini resents and resists any idea that there is an American "movement" of noise bands, groups like Scratch Acid, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, Swans, Live Skull...

"Sure, everyone knows everyone else, has each other's phone numbers, plays the same clubs. But musically, all you can say that we have in common is that we're all American, all like electric guitars, and are all inspired by punk rock. Anything more specific than that is misleading. We start from the same origin, but go in very different directions."

But isn't there at least a similarity of intended effect? Unlike, say, soulboys or singer-songwriters, who want to strengthen the listener's sense and identity and reinforce values, aren't your kind of bands into the pursuit of oblivion, using noise and horror to put the self in jeopardy?

"Well, certainly, the whole thing is about reaching that point where your eyes roll back and you get dizzy! Like the first time me and my friend heard The Ramones. All we could say was 'Fuck!' That was it for me, the beginning. I wasn't even dissatisfied with music before punk, because I didn't listen to music at all."

Perhaps what fascinates Albini about power and domination is the spectacle of pure will. You could define violence as the refusal to argue, to give an account, to justify. Maybe the kind of people who've worked around the noise/horror interface--intellectual geeks--are secretly envious of the sheer will to power, to action, that marks the psychos, fanatics, fuhrers, shamens, they deal with. The kind of potency and singlemindedness that is missing from our aimless, debilitated lives. But onstage, or in print, we can live like fanatics, monsters, live with murderous edge, high on "attitude".

I speak to Big Black while they are in the middle of recording one side of their new LP in London. Before then, in a week or two, there'll be an EP with the promising title, "Headache."

Tell us about the new material, Steve.

"One song on the new LP, called 'L Dopa', is about a Sleeping Sickness epidemic in America in 1926. It's a true story I read about in a book called 'The Awakening', written by Dr. Oliver Sachs, the guy responsible for waking up all these people from deep sleep. Some were woken up as late as 1965, awoke to find themselves old people, their entire productive life just slept away. And all these people either committed suicide or asked to be killed. They were so fucked up, so unable to cope with what they'd lost, that they wanted to throw away the little they had left.

"There's a song called 'Bad Penny', which is about the kind of person who just won't get out of your life, who sticks around and stirs up shit, in your name. 'My Disco' is the true story of a physician who has a kid that has brain damage. And rather than live with that, he beats his way into the maternity ward, grabs the baby and bounces it off the floor until it dies. The amazing thing is that the guy doesn't get sent to jail forever, he's found guilty of aggravated manslaughter, and spends maybe a year in jail. So somehow he managed to convince a jury that, hell, it wasn't such bad thing to smash a baby on a hospital floor because he was too dumb and ugly to be in your family. Any of you guys woulda done the same. That's weird! Can you imagine this guy thinking it through, carrying out the whole operation--punching out nurses, swerving through the hospital corridors and bouncing his child off the floor."

Albini and his group find a terrible poetry in the intractable, the unbudgeable, the indelible. Their music is as desperate a response to these things as any in the stories of their songs. They are drawn to desperation as to a heady drug.

"The thing about these phenomena is that they aren't that unusual; you have to face the fact that you too could be driven to these lengths. I use true stories because I couldn't think up these things. But I don't have to look."

Big Black want to make us feel awe. The paradox of Big Black is that they immerse us, deluge us in defilement and desecration, and yet produce sacred feelings. I feel small before the scale of the experiences they deal in, small and religious in the face of the beauty of terror, the terror of beauty.

Live, when Steve Albini plays guitar with his teeth, I think I see God.