Cucumber Farmer became a unit producing rock music under the usual circumstances: with neither the talent nor the skills to actually make music.
The mere passive consumption of popular culture was no longer satisfactory. New thrills were needed. As the band was afraid to take serious drugs, there was only one way left: to see what playing rock music feels like. In retrospect, the group stepped into the bodily stage of their art. They became part of that art.
Many social and especially historical imperatives can be located inside this move. All sorts of “band activity” was at the time quite typical for what was known as generation X. Many people had less serious-minded, often downright comical side projects alongside their main bands. Everyone was in a band….or two.
Soon enough the group was faced with inner dilemmas about the meaning of doing all this. What did they want to do? To become a solid “performer” of music, an easy product in the entertainment industry? What is the responsibility of an artist to the listener, i.e. the rock audience? There was a clear desire to do something fresh. Fresh things were tried. Some of them fared better, some worse. The evaluation of new experiments caused mixed feelings inside the group as well as among the audience. Stunningly, the point of view of evaluation remained at all times inside the sphere of so called alternative rock. And alternative rock, as is well known, is a very conservative circle, in many ways a closed one.
The group wanted to distance themselves from the rock scene in many ways: by dressing up in work uniforms, releasing essays, declaring themselves as serious artists, playing in museums, picking up interest in cinematic montage, printing political pamphlets, making lecture tours etc.
We recognise the effect the surrounding culture has on our works. We fight against it, we re-work it to our own benefit, we take it in our command and rule it. We do not measure the end product at the context given to it by that culture (this refers to the usual popular culture criteria such as “a good song” or “air play potential”)
Our aim is to forget word like “good” or “bad” and to replace with something new. Those two words we wish to transfer to the process itself. We want a listener as prone to reflection and to broadening the listening experience, as ourselves. On the other hand we demand fast thrills, the superlative feedback produced by a superlative moment.
We don..t actually want to know, what it is that we are doing. But we know we are doing something right.
The truest form of music is not in words. Words are a form of singing. Singing is not music at the deepest sense. Singing is words put together, bringing forth numerous semantic and cognitive meanings inside our culture. Words operate on intellect. Emotional reactions to words take shape retrospectively, through a process of understanding and making sense - much like humour does.
We are not humorists. Music has to take back the spot that singing stole from it. Music is full-on abstraction, it is multi-layered, unexplainable. It supplies the most direct route to emotion, to flesh, to experience.
The aim of this band is to work all this inside a pop structure, to defeat The Intellect at its own game, to be familiar and unexpectable at once.
Above all, to research the possibility. With no result. Empirically.
Moi! Seuraavat Psychotropic Zone -klubit 20.3. Hyvinkään Bar Zoomissa ja 21.3. Helsingin Club Libertessä:
Øresund Space Collective (DEN/SWE) ja Taipuva Luotisuora!
Online Now!
