Justin Harmon: synthesizers, programming, vocals, loops, jew's harp, trumpet, bass, samples, video editing; Captain Hiss: guitars, bass, programming; J. Travis Ross: synthesizers, vocals, electric piano, vocoder, loops, guitar, harmonica, recorder, programming, samples, video editing.
Influences
HARMON: Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Luigi Russolo, NON, Herbie Hancock, Beach Boys, Throbbing Gristle, Merzbow, Front 242, France Gall, Thomas Mann, Death in June, DAF, Kraftwerk, Laibach, Mark Rothko, Lesley Gore, Yukio Mishima, Umberto Boccioni, Chris Burden.
HISS: The Cranes, Mogwai.
ROSS: Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, John Cage, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Coltrane, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, the Birthday Party, SPK (not the disco shit), Cabaret Voltaire (ditto), Chrome, (early) Butthole Surfers, Virgin Prunes, Black Flag, Coil, Johnny Ace, Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Muddy Waters.
Art, concretely considered, is a seamless subjective construal and objective positing. It is thus a human activity peculiar in its power to transcend the subject-object split of traditional Western metaphysics and to reveal such to be an inadequate framework through which to view the world. We are interested in exploring the relationship between the so-called “private” and “public” domains of experience. We reject the notion that there exists an internal, autonomous, and utterly impenetrable realm of individual “feeling” that asserts itself and passes judgment with a call for neither justification, nor responsibility.
What does this have to do with noise? The efforts of bruitism, the elements of organic noise, natural sound, raw synthesis; all of these open up the most opportune space in which to examine—with an ironically clinical playfulness—the coalescence of “private” and “public.” The brute physicality of the aural is necessarily more oppressive and immediate than anything that can be experienced through the eyes alone. The desensitization so often maligned of the modern world has yet to draw a path to the eardrums—so childlike and vulnerable to the grating violence of white noise, the explosive pomposity of mortar fire. With neither presupposition nor expectation you are given a blanket of noise. Whether you, with “good reason,” recoil at the “inane” dissonance of the cacophony as "they" do, pass it over as indifferent happening as "they" do, or with an “open mind” observe, as "they" do, “hmm…that sounds interesting,” you are already implicated.
Hello The They ! Many thanks for your friendship and support ! Stay tuned for more info about NL in the next few months.... All the best ! NEUTRAL LIES.
