Black Paper

Human Greed’s PILGRIM was recently reviewed by “cult cyberpunk writer” Kenji Siratori for Gaze into a Gloom. He sent me a very nice email asking if we would consider collaborating with him. At first, I balked at the idea of being associated with any kind of “cyberpunk” and, frankly, i don’t pretend to understand what drives that kind of writing. But I gave it some thought and listened to the mp3 files he sent and, remembering that HG has no agenda to be tyranised by, I thought ok, why not?
I figured that I brought HG into being because of a growing disaffection with language and words. Words, in this time, are too easily compromised, interpreted, debated. In the flurry of iterative dialogue and personal interpretation the strength of the single statement has been all but lost. i had to turn to sound in the broader sense to get an accurate representation of a pure emotional response.
I wrote back to Siratori mentioning this and how it may be worth exploring this disaffection and how it may align with his own reactionary approach to abusing language. His response was to send back a further selection of mp3s with the simple instruction to deconstruct the text. So, no dialogue, no real collaboration. Just an instrucion to deconstruct what, to my eyes, looks pretty well fucking deconstructed as it is!
It is only now that I type this that i realise it is the perfect collaboration given what I said at the outset about compromise. One of the pieces he sent was called Black Paper and I will do something with it on account fo nothing more than an emotional response to the title. He has provided an English translation in text form to accompany his own reading, in Japanese, of the text. I am not sure what I am going to do with it yet; if it will become part of the new HG album, or will surface – like most of Siratori’s work – in a wholly virtual form – that is, with no physical artefact to represent it.
I’ll see how the idea shapes up over time…

Leave a Reply