By Keith Walsh
DISCLAIMER: The music reviewed here features distressing sounds and subject matter. Discretion is advised.
There’s no arguing that in recent years our culture has become more aware than ever of violence in our communities. Depending on your sources, it’s getting worse or improving.
Out of Baltimore, Maryland, Josef Saint and Nahja Mora make some of the hardest hitting industrial electronic music happening today. They just released the video for the single Inside Out, and this is definitely not music from the Pixar film (which I hear is quite good).
“Inside Out” is a single from the just released EP of the same name, and it demonstrates powerfully the effects of media on violence, particularly by young men in the U.S. The song and EP features soundbites from forensic psychologist Dr. Park Dietz reinforcing the argument, and Saint, in the end credits of the video ties the phenomenon into the lack of availability of mental healthcare in communities across the United States. Libertarian leaning ‘leaders’ across the nation who view healthcare as a privilege and a reward for financial success, rather than a right, have created restricted access to an essential necessity for all human beings. We are all paying the price for their views, in the form of homelessness, crime, and violence.
I will ask Saint about these views specifically in a future interview. In the meantime, I had the chance to ask him about his daring brand of electronic music, which is loud, often chaotic, and in the case of Inside Out, distressing.
Synthbeat: Tell me how it is that so called noise music can affect us deeply in ways that more melodic music can not?
Josef Saint: How one interprets any sound has a lot to do with their own subjective view; the definition of noise and music both can shift, and often people who dislike certain music will term it noise in their spoken language. Music to me is the arrangement of sound in time. Is music theory desperately important? Maybe to some. But it is just the niche or path that they have found that works for them. Is Brutality all there is? Of course not, but feeling or expression of feeling (even lacking of feeling) is what Music I think must be. I think Music as art and entertainment is best when it uses the full catalog of sounds available, and that catalog is virtually endless. As for Noise having impacts on us… Well, You and I are both Western Peoples; our ears are attuned to particular tunings and tone colours and what not… I think what affects us in deeper ways is highly dynamic arts: there is no appreciation of light without darkness and there is no appreciation of harmony without dissonance.
Synthbeat: Is it that we’re so tired of hearing the same old chords endlessly recycled that we need something new?
Josef Saint: I cannot speak for everyone. If I had to opine though I reckon it has something to do with the rapid influx of technological interpersonal connectivity. Since the 1990s, We homo sapiens sapiens have become more and more interconnected individually through the internet and the rapidly made ubiquitous character of smartphones. Napster killing the old Industry after the Industry tried to kill mp3 dot com unfortunately made a third party enter and rip us all off over convenience and we put up with it while getting paid in exposure. What I look forward to is the greater connectivity that will come from 5G or influence that may come hopefully from some extraterrestrial/extradimensional contact.
The earth is a big place with way too many humans on it all each with their own likes and beliefs on what music should sound like, each in their own little world. In short time, we hopefully will be connected enough so that more audiences and creators find one another, just as people thinking similarly can find each other and grow works together of creativity, the social, engineering, technology, art, music. No child should grow in darkness.
Synthbeat: Pop and rock music are trite in general. True or false?
Josef Saint: False. Pop and Rock can both be very experimental and they often lead movement in subgenres. eg SOPHIE; Black Sabbath; Elvis Presley; NWA; David Bowie…. These are all artists who embraced “POP” music or “Rock” music. Both Rock and Pop music can go far further in sound than anyone could ever expect.
Rock is just a style to me; and pop is just short for “popular” to me.
what most people think of pop is just some sort of either rock music or rhythm and blues or dance music.
Both Pop and Rock can also (or used to historically) lead in part social movements. Do people underestimate the impact of music in their lives?
Nahja Mora dot com
Nahja Mora on Bandcamp
Nahja Mora on Facebook
Nahja Mora on Instagram
Precision Field on Bandcamp
AHFHAOTA on Punkrockbeat.com
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