We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

A Great Variety of Morbid Symptoms

by ...But the Shadows Have Foes

/
  • Streaming + Download

    Includes high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. Paying supporters also get unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app.
    Purchasable with gift card

      name your price

     

1.
XXXVIII 01:27
2.
XXXIX 07:08
The "freedom" we endlessly and naively claim to cherish- already reduced to little more than imperceptible consumer preferences- has long been a lie. It’s merely a forced choice between equally bleak dystopias. Do you want gun-branded coffee to sip while you deliriously cheer reality show fascism, an endless parade of grifters and clowns filling the airwaves with commodified resentment for a population drunk on their own hatred? Or the numb comfort of a stunningly ineffective bureaucracy of aggressively mediocre technocrats, comfortably whittling time away debating nothing at long tables while the world burns? Engage in any way, show the slightest glimmer of hope, and you’re subjected to a gauntlet of abuse, forced to endure a never-ending torrent of threats and judgement and intrusions in the digital panopticon we've imprisoned ourselves in. Withdraw, give up, admit defeat, and you’ll be rewarded with endless bread and circuits as your leisure is turned into labor for a thousand cruel bosses, betting on your gullibility and feasting on your disengagement, their barely concealed contempt for you manifest in the dross they sell. We've built this inhuman world, this empire of cruelty and degradation, where we have so thoroughly shrunk what it means to be “free” that millions seem unable to differentiate between liberty and their own death as they joyfully volunteer to be sacrificed upon the altar to the grinding gears of unabating profit (forever may they turn).
3.
XL 08:17
A relentless apparatus of control turned upon each of us- every movement, every keystroke, every utterance, tracked by someone, somewhere, to whom we are just an assemblage of behaviors and preferences to catalog and manipulate. Our lives, a string of ones and zeroes, numbers to crunch and data to code, so as best to manage us from behind screens, behind doors, behind desks, and the behind barrels of guns. They’re hiding from us, these liars, cowards, and thieves, whose whims shape our desires and whose lifestyles demand our blood. They’ve convinced us to offer up our faces, voices, bodies, minds, and lives to become the component parts of their machine. Their reckless engine, so frictionless in its brutal efficiency, that we barely notice as it burns us for its fuel, its pillars spewing out our sanity, our solidarity, our souls, as so much billowing, black smoke. Everything we are, reduced to ash as we’re fed to its fires to line the pockets and fill the stomachs of liars, cowards, and thieves.
4.
XLI 09:12
Propaganda is permission, not persuasion, so when they call you a monster don’t expect them to produce evidence to support that claim. Because they call you “divisive” to ban your history, label you “suspicious” to imprison you, claim you're a “criminal” to strip you of your rights, say that you're “violent” to necessitate harming you. Always, in every case, the undergirding logic is to make you into something beneath contempt- to justify what they already want and plan to do to you. If you're not human, they can scream about exterminating you free of guilt and free of shame. In fact, even more than that: they can pretend that they're a hero. So recognize their hated of you isn't irrational bigotry, but a real and strategic pretext for the cruelty that they dream of visiting upon you, a calculated and premeditated symbolic annihilation, designed as a vindication of the most brutal fantasies they project onto you. Yet, remember, you’re not their only victim. For their hatred of you is a mass-produced commodity that relies upon multitudes of scared and angry people, looking for someone to blame for the inhuman world we live in, to whom they can sell easy answers. Their business model thus rests upon an atomized population, lacking power to control their lives, and seeking outlets for their rage.
5.
XLII 07:08
The utopias that we have endlessly been promised ever fail to materialize. Each time, anew, we’re sold a story that technology, at last, can quell our growing alienation, always asked not to notice that it’s they who create new problems then sell us solutions. Each time they promise freedom and fulfillment. They grow new desires deeply within us, whatever keeps us begging for more. Even as our most human needs- connection and solidarity- remain forever out of reach. Commodified and hoarded, they become yet another currency, bought and sold by the brokers who who speculate on our misery, invest in our ignorance, buy our attention, and sell us hope. They would happily burn the world to a charred and barren husk, steal away all that we hold dear, if it means they can fill their coffers. And, ask yourself: did you want this? Or was this whole world imposed on you? Does it in any way edify or feed you? Or is it designed to enrich those who create new problems then sell us solutions? Each time they promise freedom and fulfillment. Who grow new desires deeply within us, whatever keeps us begging for more. The fraudulent utopias that they promised to us are, to a one, nothing but lies designed to pacify us while they rob us blind and then abscond to the fortresses in which they wall themselves away from those that they’ve exploited. On islands, or behind gated walls, even on rockets, leaving the earth. And isn’t that their fantasy? To take everything from us, sucking this world dry, and then escape its gravitational bonds. Maybe we could leave them up there?
6.
XLIII 12:00
When does it end? This hateful oroboros, this perpetual motion machine, with gears grinding in perfectly efficient brutality, leaving us all numb to death and indifferent to suffering? We built a cathedral of vengeful algorithms, a blood-soaked, sacrificial altar made of gold and silicon, upon which we cast everything that ever made us human, so that we could, willingly and faithfully, beg the favor of our digital gods who bless us with endless ways to watch each other die. Purified in the sacred light of screens, we are ritually born again as statistics, demographics, data, a mixture of impotent rage and quiet resignation, to be manipulated for money, for votes, for attention, for anything they need from us, towards hatred, towards misery, towards anything they need us to feel, towards whatever means we will let each other die. And yet, this madness, this inhumanity, has not broken the fever. Cowed and demoralized we pray for consecration. Unto sickness, give addiction! Unto anger, give violence! Unto poverty, give apathy! Unto depression, give delusion! Give us that which allows us to treat the symptoms of our pain, while refusing to address their underlying causes. And so the sickness festered, laying dormant, under a veneer of market fluctuations, frothing pundits, and politicians vying to be celebrities. First slowly, then all at once, it burst, in a thousand ways in a hundred places: videos of killer cops and the funerary aftermaths, endless stories of cruel men terrorizing women, politicians targeting kids and teachers, fascists parading, openly plotting violence, drunk on their heroic fantasies, while bodies pile up due to a steady stream of lies. How do you forget three, or ten, or four hundred years? How do you forgive one, a thousand, a million gone? There's no real redress for lifetimes of atrocity, just the ache of knowing how different it all could have been. And so we watch the world burn, knowing that it was never ours to begin with. So, If they want this rotting husk of a nation, they can have it.

about

Written, recorded, and mastered by BTSHF between August, 2021 and April, 2022 while thinking about art's ability (or inability) to adequately capture the inhumanity of what we have, as a world and as a society, inflicted on ordinary people during the slow unraveling of neoliberal capitalism and liberal democracy (if such a thing ever truly existed).

Pedals used on this recording:
-Blackhawk Heimdall
-Wren and Cuff Hangman
-Black Arts Toneworks Witch Burner
-EQD Arrows
-EQD Tonejob
-Dunable Eidolon
-Walrus SLÖ
-Old Blood Noise Endeavors Minim
-MXR Carbon Copy
-Electro Harmonix Freeze

Samples of note include: Seymour Melman answering questions about the responsibility we bear for violence; Antonin Artaud performing "Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de dieu;" various field recordings from 1960s campus sit ins; Beth Anderson reading "The People Rumble Louder;" Lefty Dizz with his thoughts on the music industry; Derek Walcott reading "Sea Canes;" Ilya Kaminsky reading "We Lived Happily During the War;" John Turner commenting on and singing a traditional Indigenous funeral song (Turner, John, Alan Jabbour, Alan Jabbour, Alice C Fletcher, and Francis La Flesche. Commentary on Funeral Song Call Number: AFS 0 08f. 1983. Audio. www.loc.gov/item/omhbib000370).

Thank you for listening. Please be well.

2022 Revisionist Western

credits

released May 13, 2022

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

...But the Shadows Have Foes Illinois

Illinois hardcore. DIY.

revisionistwestern.blogspot.com

contact / help

Contact ...But the Shadows Have Foes

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this album or account

If you like ...But the Shadows Have Foes, you may also like: