XENO:

XENO: THAT WHICH ARISES FROM THE PLACE THAT IS SOMEWHERE ELSE...
no matter WHERE YOU ARE.

PRONOUNCED ZEN-O, not ZEE-no, it is a new manifestation: that which has arisen from the ashes of mainstream-gouged "industrial" music along with the various forms of rock and disco that have been combined with it. It is drawn entirely from this current century and makes use of the new music technologies extensively, but not exclusively. It goes back to the roots of industrial in that it actually has a reason to exist besides filling dance clubs with more potentially-alcohol-consuming, buttwardly-mobile young bodies, and further, delves into the realm of psychedelia in a more profound way than that slobbering pacifier-suck that is "trance", "gabber", "goa" or any of the other forms that all sound alike and can all be classed as rave-music. ("Xeno is music that actually does sound like an acid trip instead of the mere notion of one.")

Hallmarks and Gauges:

Xeno is marked by the engagement of invisible forces as actual elements, or creators.

One could call upon one's God/dess, Animus or Anima, Incubus or Succubus, Abstract or Concrete Conceptual Entity, or anything at all one finds interest and power in, and if that thing be given Name and Form, it should be listed as a Co-Creator, as important to what you are doing as the names of the personnel creating it, included on any roster of such. (In our case this is obviously the entity CHORONZON.)

- Xeno creations often employ embedded messages, or if not, the meaning of lyrics avoids being too literal.

In the sound format "secret messages" can be either subliminal (you don't hear it consciously at all) or supraliminal (you can hear it but can't tell what it's saying, or hear something different every time.) In Word and Image we will investigate cryptography and steganography as well as the technique of "hiding things in plain sight".

- Xeno assimilates and subsumes into itself aspects of any other genre it gets hungry for.

What comes out the other end is soil for the seed of the alien plant that is Xeno. It shall always be reborn from itself, constantly, over and over; in being never the same, it will always be the same.

- Xeno maintains a dedication to the Undermining of Overcontrol.

This is done with respect for one established underground tradition it is more important now than ever before to allow to remain a tradition to which it is still worthy for one to be dedicated.

- Political/social issues are not seen as "not out-there enough" to deal with.

However, it is an aim of Xeno to abstractify these things: turn the crystal of our condition in this place and time so that the unseen facets will show through.

- In Xeno there is often integration of actual Effectuation. "Effectuation" is a modernized and demystified term meaning, more or less, the same thing as 'magick', but without the hoodoo-goo-goo associations. The Xeno work is the effectuator itself, made solid and turned to vibration, to spread into open funneled minds thirsty for discovering the life that the fear-meisters of the corporatist twenty-first century has been gnawing away, squeezing out, corroding from them. This includes the minds of its own creators. When not effectuation itself in material form, Xeno sound/image/word creation shall often be the documentation of such actions (effectuation on the outside) and operations (effectuation upon oneself) or the response to their resulting effect, answered back.

- Xeno operates as an internet and studio-based phenomena.

Its nature is not suitable for live performance. the audience chooses when and where to intake, as one would a strong drug, often wishing to be free of public influence. likewise the performer can go much farther with studio recordings and not deal with the mundane hassles of arrangements with venue owners, transporting equipment to venues and having it completely go wrong before a live audience. (However, the "performed before a live studio audience" concept of a Choronzon act done live via net-stream is being investigated.)

- A guiding philosophy of method for Xeno artists and noisicians, sound-sculpters, feedbackists and yes, musicians, as well as artist-writer types: balance between balance and imbalance.

This koan is the key to a dynamic meta-Tao that makes the concept of balance unstatic--the up/down of the chaos/order seesaw that is the engine of reality. We aim to come to the moment when we are reflecting this in music and noise as well as living. "Moderation in all things, including moderation" would be a phrase describing this condition.

- If "accessibility" is made inaccessible, what will happen?

We want to know, and will be investigating this question.

- If inaccessibility is made accessible, it weakens and dies. What could prevent this?

We will be investigating this question as well.

"Rules are Made to be Broken. The Broken are Made to Rule".

ABOUT "CRYPTOVOX"

Q. What is with all the obscure voices one keeps hearing in Choronzon tracks that you can NEVER FUCKING HEAR clearly enough to know what they are saying? Whose voices are those, and WHAT THE HELL DO THEY MEAN? Are you just being deliberately obtuse in doing this, or is there--Oh, get out of here. Do you really expect us to believe you when you say that is "CHORONZON" making that sound?

A. Short answer: No, you're not expected to believe it.
Long answer? Yes. Of course it is.

The entity Choronzon is indeed the project's third member, and honoured namesake, and that's one of the ways his sonicity manages to to get recorded. (Recently it seems he has found another means as well. He will be SOMEHOW dicker with the audiosofts occasionally to make mincemeat out of a track, which either kills it--his way of giving it a thumbs-down, it is thought--or changes it to something better than it was.)

Q. How does...a disembodied entity like CHORONZON actually go about making the cryptovox recordings?

A. That's a really good question. I wish he'd explain it sometime. Why not ask him yourself?

Q: What are the voices actually saying?

A: Whatever you think they are. Only CHORONZON knows. I suspect sometimes he spouts off in faux-noise-tonguespeech and isn't saying anything meaningful at all, and laughing as people try to figure it out.

Q: Who are the people whose voices CHORONZON uses?

A: MOST of them do not come from people at all...

This is a classic example of apophenia - the mind responding to a pattern and interpreting it as a voice because of its resonance and cadence. Apophenia is essentially false pattern recognition: it happens all the time. If you've ever seen an optical illusion you have experienced a sort of apophenia known as pareidola.

Q: What audio technique is used to generate cryptovox?

A: We told you. It just happens. Ask Choronzon, maybe he knows...

What precisely makes sound do this is a mystery, but essentially it's an artifact of audio recording akin to sympathetic vibration. There are certain tricks of phasing that can generate cryptovox, but most of the time, the best of it happens by accident. Which goes to show it's C's work, if anything does.

Q: Does Choronzon channel anyone in particular with it?

A. Choronzon does NOT "channel" anything, or anyone. Please rephrase your question. This is not the Shirley McLaine center for losers who actually think "occultism" is all about talking to dead people. That would be incredibly, unfathomably dull, corny and totally not worth it to do. We are communicating, on some level, with abstracted forms of POWER present all around us, activating all the processes that make things move - which makes what everyone commonly thinks of as "time" continue to move forward, and that's a LOT more fascinating than talking to dead grandmothers. (Or pretending to, which is what "mediums" ALL do.)

Q: What is "EVP"? Is that what this is?

Voices that show up in recordings where none were recorded originally are known as Electronic Voice Phenomenon or EVP (if you read William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, odds are you can already tell someone's been reading it here, what with the word "apophenia" and a blurb about EVP.)

EVP was latched onto by the sort of fans of paranormal phenomena who are into seances, ouija, voodoo and the like; there was a time around the beginning of the 20th century when "paranormal" was all about Speaking With Dead People's Souls. It was around this time that the newly-invented record player made recordings of any sort at all possible. Though EVP was most prominantly a thing involving vinyl and cassette tape, apparently it can also happen with digital recordings, and what's more, when showing up in digital recordings it tends to be much more clearly heard as though it were made up of voices.

And as for what puts it there, it's OBVIOUSLY from CHORONZON, and not dead relatives speaking to you from the grave, since that would be a really difficult place to speak from if you don't possess a living brain and a viable set of speech organs - vocal cords, lips and tongue don't last too long after burial, and if a voice is speaking from a disembodied entity, it is obviously going to have to find some way of getting itself into your mind. CHORONZON is simply doing exactly that...using apophenia to speak to us through a quirk of audio engineering.

Q: Sometimes it sounds like your own voices - is CHORONZON the only one that "voxes in crypto"?

A: Yes, it does happen occsionally that Thraam and/or Williams just goof with their own voices until they become word stew, or word goo, even...and then put it on high heat and bake it til it becomes even more dissipated.

Of course, sometimes one of us will use non-cryptic vox and CHORONZON will then without warning, proceed to goof with it. On some occasions there are "actual" messages that are purposefully obscured owing to their being Statements of Intent in an Effectuation (aka "magic ritual"). The cryptification is done to keep oneself from hearing the intent statement as it tends to tilt the luck-plane askew and reduce probability of Effectuation owing to that "lust for results" problem. So we will obscure it and sometimes it has the side effect of making it sound like something else is actually being said.

(Monde was once working with some of P. Emerson Williams' sounds on a track, and she heard cryptovox for the first time at the start of that sound file, and could swear it was saying "fuzzy little lugnut".)