DATURA 1.0: Press
Big Brother is watching you ... and these local bands
Judging by its scant extant promotional material, Welcome To Dystopia promises to be a lighthearted comedy about either a future totalitarian society or the secret U.S. government currently keeping us in line. Or both. But while the particulars of Four Humors Theater's production won't be revealed until the play opens at Bedlam Theatre this weekend, the musical lineup for its March 13 after-party is an open book. Since most of these musicians stick to basement shows where they're protected by radio wave-inhibiting concrete, The A.V. Club did some digging to introduce the five artists who best fit Dystopia Days' grim theme.
Datura 1.0
Musically active since taking the guitarist slot in ’80s MCAD noise-punk trio Duck Kicking Vulture, Matt Cisler found his true voice only after going solo early last decade. As Datura 1.0, the museum guard and martial arts enthusiast builds complex, otherworldly drones using laptop, circuit-bent devices, analog synths—sometimes even guitar. Cisler’s multileveled constructions have a way of making audiences forget their everyday cares—mainly out of fear. Nobody in town can beat him at using sound to conjure tentacled monstrosities and plagues of robot slugs.
Beseppy
Bethany Lactorin would be Dystopia Days’ odd man out even if she weren’t the only woman on the bill. As Beseppy, the violinist, singer-songwriter, and electronic musician often wallows in undiluted beauty. But beneath the juicy string harmonies, stylish, stripped-down beats, and Björk/Goldfrapp-update vocals beats the heart of an adventurer. She’s no stranger to pure abstraction, as on iridescent drone work "distPiano." Plus, Lactonin travels extensively, shuttling between Minneapolis and Prague, where she’s already gotten considerable love. Between living part-time in a former Eastern Bloc country and regularly standing in airport security lines, she's become intimately acquainted with bureaucratic excess and the headaches it creates.
Nervous Girls
Brett Bullion first gained local underground prominence while enrolled at Edina High as part of jazz-electronica fusion trio Tiki Obmar. He's since experimented relentlessly, exploring the possibilities offered by everything from the acoustic drum kit to tabletop sound modules. Nervous Girls finds the multi-instrumentalist skewing away from the dubby, cosmic funk he favors as core of Afternoon Records' Tarlton in lieu of cold, acid-tinged electro that evokes images of furtive conversations and rooftop observers.
S/M
For guitarist, cellist, and electronic musician Lorren Stafford, dystopia is old hat. Ask him if we’ll ever live in a global police state, and the 1994 McKnight Fellowship winner will almost surely explain how we’ve been doing so for 30 years. He’s not about to acquiesce, either: From the fetish wear he sometimes sports on big nights out to his rumored gun collection, the co-founder of EVOL Audio imbues his every public gesture with early industrial music’s left-libertarian politics and appetite for disruption. The likes of Throbbing Gristle inform what Stafford does in solo project S/M, too. But as with his other commitments—Richard For Cerebellum, Nautipuss, Low Orbit—Stafford folds in elements of drone, noise, metal, breakcore, action-adventure movie soundtracks, and the classical music he grew up with.
Marijuana Death Squad
Though sometimes-member P.O.S. describes Marijuana Death Squad as "really aggressive dance music," the Building Better Bombs side project draws more from noise and free jazz than from anybody's idea of mundane boogie bait. True, the loose assembly of local luminaries (including Skoal Kodiak drummer Freddy Votel) brings the funk; it's just usually enriched with a couple layers of cacophany. Easily Dystopia Days' most paranoid act judging by its almost-nonexistent online presence, the band compensates by occasionally venturing out to open for the likes of Solid Gold and Ryan Olcott's circuit-bending project, Food Team.
This dark, twisted ambient album, made possible by Matt Cisler, is hauntingly simple in its format but hides a beautifully complex message. Datura 1.0 is the only album that I can safely say that (now don't laugh) my stepdad and I both enjoy. Yeah, yeah, yeah… I know, isn't that horrible? But like he and I both say this album sounds like it could be a perfect soundtrack to a science fiction horror movie. But I would have to say that it is a perfect way to wake up the parents in the middle of the night with nightmarish images.
All one has to do is close their eyes and instantaneously they are transported to an alien world with an unknown assailant on their heels. If they ever make a remake of that horrible 1950's sci-fi flick The Forbidden Planet, Datura 1.0 would be a perfect soundtrack to play in the background. Matt's use of the computer to make this album is far superior to any artist that I have heard using Acid Pro or Fruityloops.
No one track stands out of this album. The album really shouldn't be split up into separate tracks because it takes you through out a whole journey. XTZTC reminds me of an industrial section on an alien world. This machine doing this and that machine making that, all the while, unsure of who made it, what it is making and what its final response to the visitor is.
The album cover itself is haunting in itself. Half flesh… half darkness… Is Matt trying to point out that we all share that quality? Or is he saying, "Shut up, close your eyes and listen." Or am I just missing the entire message totally?
Matt Cisler, for a first attempt at a solo album, makes his mark totally. Statistics for this album: 2 thumbs up, 2 scared parents, and a whole shit load of adult diapers for them.
Datura 1.0 - No! Evil Dog God, Live On! (2004)
Mike Hallenbeck (2004)
My first reaction to this collection was to christen it a soundtrack to butter sculpture... it sounded to me like Leatherface zizzing through a mass of dairy to get to that cream filling deep inside. Which is an impression that lingered, though deep listening reveals layer upon layer of subtle and slowly morphing developments below the abrasive surfaces of these tracks. Lovely stuff.
Laptop drone artist Datura 1.0 hacks in through the doors of perception
Log On, Tune in, Drop Out
by Rod Smith
July 2, 2003
None of the bohemians at Eli's Bar and Grill in Minneapolis are likely to look at Matt Cisler and think: "Shaved head, black T-shirt and jeans, five o'clock shadow--he must have stopped in from Billy Graham headquarters for a quick nonalcoholic brew." If anything, they'd probably take him for a cross between the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland and the leader of a peyote cult. And they wouldn't be too far off in that assumption.
Sending elegant smoke rings ceiling-ward, Cisler props himself against the bar, discussing the metaphysics of his various obsessions. "I'm a complete bass junkie," the local dronemeister and part-time Minneapolis Institute of Arts guard declares, perhaps giving the more casual eavesdroppers along the rail the impression that he's bragging about his fender-rattling car stereo or massive dub 12-inch collection. But as the force behind the solo electronic outfit Datura 1.0, he's far more interested in hotwiring synaptic connections than turning chicks' heads with his expansive low end.
His love of bass frequencies goes far deeper than mere product fetishism. "It might be because it's so physical, like thunderstorms and earthquakes," Cisler, a graduate of the MCAD punk-rock scene of the '80s, observes. "And that goes back to shamanism and to Gnosticism, where physical experience is as important as what goes on in your head."
As his fondness for both isms might tell you, Cisler has spent so much time tumbling down different rabbit holes that he could probably lend Alice and Neo a few fistfuls of frequent faller miles. Which might explain why the seasoned psychonaut's two new self-released discs, Morphium/The Pataloop and Happy Hell, explore what legendary Beat renaissance dude Alexander Trocchi referred to as "unexplored psychic territory"--the sprawling reality that squirms behind the facade of everyday life. Still, he wants to conduct his investigations with his head screwed all the way on (albeit not too tightly).
Cisler works in the realm of the senses, even when he's asleep. He created "Morphium," the first of the two long titular tracks on Morphium/The Pataloop, as an aid to lucid dreaming--and, as you may have already guessed, the piece is not something you're likely to encounter at your next new-age fun fair. It opens with a few unintelligible, computer-generated syllables that sound as if they were intoned by something that had once been human, then oozes into nearly 17 minutes of undulating moans, hums, buzzes, and rumbles that evoke super-intelligent giant squids going about their squidly business in the eternal twilight of some undersea metropolis.
Cisler admits that "Morphium" is an extension of the "haunted house tapes" he and a few friends made for their own amusement back in their junior high days. "I had this open-reel tape deck that you could slow way down," he recalls. "I'd stick a mic in a vacuum tube, record the results, then slow it down until I got this incredible cavernous sound." Nowadays, though, his principal weapon of choice in Datura 1.0 is a laptop, the ideal tool for his music (though, as rock bands from the Velvet Underground through Spacemen 3 and Kinski have illustrated, the guitar is no slouch in the drone department, either). Instead of accumulating traditional dronemaking instruments like didgeridoos (the godpappy) and sitars, he uses a variety of software tools, particularly AudioMulch, a powerful (and inexpensive) program that allows him to use the computer for synthesis, composition, processing, and recording--all at the same time, if he chooses.
That's exactly what Cisler did on Happy Hell, a succession of six tracks that range from sublime susurrations to infernal sucking and grinding noises that would have made a nice soundtrack to Fritz Lang's industrial classic Metropolis if that film hadn't been so damn silent. If Morphium conjures up a submarine realm, its sister evokes the Earth's interior, where giant toads, perched solemnly on even more monstrous fungi, oversee the peregrinations of silver humanoids in chambers lit by noxious green and purple mists. Or maybe, as Cisler suggests, it's just the sound of Joe Cubicle's average denial-infested workday.
Despite the album's darkness and near-glacial stillness at times, it makes for a pleasurable ride--equal parts thrill and lull. Happy Hell seems so meticulously orchestrated, you'd never guess it's a one-take real-time improvisation, recorded directly from Cisler's laptop to the hard drive of another computer. The process was an anomaly for Cisler, who usually composes scrupulously for long stretches of time, often starting a track in the early evening and finishing just as the sun comes up. "Like many digital artists," he notes, "once I start a piece, I want to get it done."
He attributes his stamina to yet another discipline, tai chi, which, like lucid dreaming, he's been studying for a more than a decade. "All these practices feed one another and the music," he explains. "But my primary spiritual practice is shamanism. To me, shamanism is maintaining the awareness that you're creating reality. What I'm trying for, if I can go that far, is sort of a visionary thing. If I can make you see things, even only in your head..."
He trails off, gazing intently at the shot of Jägermeister he's holding, then drains it in one swallow. You can only guess at what kinds of things he'll be seeing in his head later tonight.