Post Description

TAZ
by Hakim Bey and Bill Laswell 
Tracks 

Chaos
Poetic Terrorism
Amour Fou
Immediatism
The Tong
Boycott Cop Culture

Published by
Axiom Records
1994 

Explorations of the political, the personal, the social, and the metaphysical from writer and spoken word artist Hakim Bey. Includes Wu Man, Nicky Skopelitis, Buckethead, and Bill Laswell. 

Some bands include manifestos in their liner notes. The liner notes to this album are a manifesto. Explaining T.A.Z. is difficult, but stating that Bey's spin on the spoken-word genre is wizard mindfuckery is a good start. Chaos, anarchy, subcultures - Bey advocates nearly everything, including creating free states for like-minded cabals and collectives. He recommends marginalized groups form secret societies and concludes with a lengthy piece on boycotting cop culture. Musique concrete cloaks his words in an eerily seductive melange of avant-garde noise and ambient music. But the sounds are almost immaterial. Bey's words are the primary focus of this disc. This album truly is punk as fuck, not in the ambient-styled music, but in the message it contains. 

Sitting like a detached cyber-Buddha somewhere between the "established events" of the past and universes of the "virtual future" is Hakim Bey, author of the handbook for poetic terrorism, The Temporary Autonomous Zone. His current release, a meld with musical terrorist Bill Laswell, seems an inevitable project for the Axiom workshop. With its blurred connecting points and unification of seemingly unrelated conventions, it serves as a textbook reference and spoken counterpart to the creative muse behind the label's purely musical chunks of autonomous and, by virtue of their "immarketability," marginal grenades of artistic liberation. Here, Bey is as comfortable dropping names like Proudhon or Marx as he is an anonymous, fellow modern terrorist known as "P.M." Similarly, he unveils an ominous plot behind the distribution of propagandist television shows like Hill Street Blues while diving into other, less mediated and more "ancient" outposts, such as the 19th Century Chinese Tong, where one spends free time. The result is like a muse needle out of control, making inherent connections in things both marginal and mediated - a swirling, surreal vertigo of information and methods for "escape." Woven with the kind of airy tones and hallucinatory rhythms that Laswell has been playing with lately, Bey's voice calms and prepares the listener for an age where missing information and the icons of late capitalist high-tech correspond with an increasing alienation of this "X-generation"'s most primitive needs. Most of all, Bey doesn't come across as a cheesy, overzealous, visionary bard, but presents us with ideas point-blank, allowing us to be choosy in aiming our own forms of poetic terrorism against those forces that attempt to suppress and homogenize humility and free thought. 

Enjoy.