Death By Drone :: Complex (Labile)

Industrial rhythms and explosive beats, aggressive textures, unsettling ambient, and resonating drones create aggravated assemblages that mirror the advanced architecture of the market forces as driving as the bass drops and as savage as the distorted beats.

An antidote to the fog of war and misinformation

As America is engaged in two proxy wars, and continues to have military bases and presence all around the globe, now is as good time as any to listen to the new album Complex from Death By Drone, a name that does much to evoke the brutal realities behind our technologically advanced weapons of destruction.

The record has as its starting point President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address to Congress on January 17, 1961, now burned into the collective memory as something we should have given more credence. Now it remains as a scar, a trauma that we do not wish to touch, or else it may disturb an easy lifestyle of shopping and entertainment. The album isn’t just political commentary though, even as it mines news sources for samples spanning the speech all the way up to the atrocity of 9/11. Rather it looks on the events between Eisenhower’s unheeded warning, the assassination of JFK, to the Church Committee’s investigation of the abuses perpetrated by the CIA and beyond.

As Frank Zappa noted, “Government is the entertainment wing of the military-inustrial complex,” and with a re-elected reality TV star going back into office now is also a good time to revisit Guy Debord’s landmark book The Society of the Spectacle, first published in 1967. The latter is a work of philosophy that used some of the tools of Marxist critical theory, alongside experiences from Debord’s involvement in the Paris avant-garde, to critique consumer culture and a variety of social illnesses stemming from a life consumed by consumerism. It became the seminal text for the Situationist International, a movement of avant-garde artists, intellectuals, political thinkers and theorists. I am not a Marxist myself, but the critique of society formulated by Debord is one of the best I have come across to explain how capitalism and industrial culture have helped create a passive public who are alienated both from themselves and from each other due to pervasive and pernicious double influence of an overarching media.

There is a lot of complexity to unravel ::

Out of this spectacle comes one of our many modern neurotic complexes. In this case I’m talking about the entertainment–industrial complex which can be thought of as the confluence of government, military and corporate influence surrounding movies, television, sports, and music, while spilling into other types of media. Closely allied to the military–industrial complex, it can all be thought of as being one big complex. In other words, McGovCorp.

McGovCorp can be thought of as the half-dozen or so corporations that control the media and the government that works in tandem with them. Those six are GE/Comcast, Walt Disney Company, News Corporation, Time Warner, Viacom, and CBS. The majority of the ownership of these companies, and of other smaller news companies in America, resides in the hands of just fifteen individual billionaires. No wonder people have turned away from the mainstream media run by the plutocratic kleptocracy.

In 2017 journalist Tom Secker compiled a list of 410 movies that were sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). Secker has shown in his investigative research the deep ties between the DoD and Hollywood, as well as between the CIA and Hollywood, and between reality television programs and the Pentagon. He got a lot of his information on these things from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and sifting through deep archives. This is all part of the complex we’ve inherited in the time the United States became a global empire following World War II. That system is now fracturing as the global hegemony reaches its limits. Cracks in the spectacle are starting to spread across the smashed screen of TV’s unreality.

So where are we today? ::

But there is a lot of complexity to unravel. That’s where the album Complex from Death By Drone comes into probe the collective wound. Industrial rhythms and explosive beats, aggressive textures, unsettling ambient, and resonating drones create aggravated assemblages that mirror the advanced architecture of the market forces as driving as the bass drops and as savage as the distorted beats.

So where are we today? Are we trapped inside a nightmare of propaganda, two minute hate, and newspeak predicted by George Orwell? Or are we slumped into the loung at the feelies, high on soma, and plugged into an entertainment system that promises to help us in the process of amusing ourselves to death? Or do we have the worst of both worlds?

If you feel a bit ba humbug in the coming weeks of crass commercialism, give Complex by Death By Drone a listen and decide for yourself just where along the dystopian spectrum or society of the spectacle is situated.

This is the first album in a series and I will look forward to the other releases. It’s good to be challenged and this is challenging music on a challenging topic, an antidote to the fog of war and misinformation that blinds society to outcomes that would benefit the majority, the everyday people who wish to live in peace.

Complex is available on Labile. [Bandcamp]