Onto-historical World

Onto-historical worlds:

“New Millennium Cyanide Christ” has to do with the paradoxes of our technologically saturated society.  The primary discrepancy (or unsettling theme) is of technology obscuring or obsolescing the natural (“darkened forms”).  The music reflects this in the struggle implied by electronic based music (clearly this music could not exist in its current form without the technological developments that comprise its sound) with the potential to extract meaning or humanity.  The human emotional level (the primal, raw aspect of the music) is somehow paradoxical and inseparable from the technological processes used for expression, and the technical voracity which implies machinistic aspirations in the manipulation of patterns—Meshuggah demonstrates the duality of technology; the creation of meaningful art through technology, while simultaneously revealing its contradictory component of self-destruction.  Religious elements are incorporated in the technological extinguishing of nature, a quantification of the feeling of divinity associated with man and learned through the processes of our post-industrial complex world.  The ideas expressed are those established within a 19^th century industrial society that implies the domination of man over nature (and the right to rule); our perspective of man as an evolutionary arrival in our capability for higher levels of consciousness and thought, and the balance of physical ability to extend ourselves.  The humanistic urge to resist decadent natural processes (which as we may see is perhaps the inherent point of our society) is illuminated but paradoxically related to a ritualistic process of self-destruction not only of the personal biological form but of the surrounding environment, because obviously the human body is a natural thing—the concept of becoming divine is “flipped” to the process of suicide through the abolishment of natural processes.  Religion is perceived as a separation of the divine and the decadence of natural processes, but the implication is not just religion but rather the prevalent role that religion continues to play in modern society; it is not a critique of religion but rather a summative metaphor of the whole process of civilization.  Meshuggah turns McLuhan’s assertion of a global village on its head, revealing that civilization leads humanity through a ritualistic process of horrific self-destruction.  

On further contemplation, however, it seems that my former interpretation was incomplete: the implications of “New Millennium” do not assert that civilization itself is self-destructive, but rather that the 19^th century, classical view or philosophical perspective is obsolete in the age of technological connectedness.  The 19^th century classical view, influenced by Descartes, the implications of Darwin’s theories, and others, proclaims that men are like machines cast out into a harsh, lonely world in a harsh, lonely universe, where we must essentially beat nature into submitting to our divine, unnatural will.  There is a mental division of man and nature, and this is precisely what the song illustrates.  As Marshall McLuhan knew, however, and many other artists in the early 20^th century (i.e. James Joyce, Picasso), we have come into a stage of new tribalism brought by the inclusion of new technological mediums (such as the telephone, television), which transform the isolated, Gutenberg-ian perspective, to a constantly connected, instantaneous, informational one (Marhsall McLuhan here makes the point that a vast amount of information is available at all times like never before in human history: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ph6zqr3y4QE). 

What Meshuggah has channeled artistically is the absurdity of hanging onto an obsolete 19^th century perspective given the technological, physical, philosophical, and biological advancements in the 20^th century, which have the potential to change our perspective of the world.  To blindly believe that we are still “Incandescent revelations in a world of darkened forms” is self-destructive and ignorant, given the developments made in scientific and psychological fields which point us to a greater understanding of our nature,  and the developments in technology which give us access to this information all the time.  “New Millennium Cyanide Christ” has essentially embodied the great turmoil of the transfer from an age of isolationism (print, linear, logical) into an age of connectedness (energy, instantaneous, resonant).  This has been the root of all problems in most recent generations—the unwillingness to sacrifice obsolete procedures and perspectives, and the self-destructive effects of this, in an age where the previous understanding of human nature cannot be sustained.