DJ Panic
Destroy Your Music
The saw will free us from the death culture. Using the saw, I cut out death music from the aural diet. (Death music is that which kills you.) I take control of sounds hardened into plastic by cutting through the commercial. I make material worthless; I silence the music. The silence of this music has a sound of its own: that sound is the Music of Eros. Because destroying the by-products of death culture generates Love.DJ Panic plays his records with a hand-held hacksaw, mic-ing the vinyl to create of a new soundthe sound of freedom. The sound of your mind being released from the pain of oppression. No more passive entertainment. No more blind music--no more music that refuses to reflect the minimization of individual human power; no more music which reflects only the maximization of corporate power.
Cut out the corporate material from our lives.
Cut out corporate materialism.
Save yourself.
No more passive entertainment.
Cut Eros into your life.
Listen to the sounds of death culture cut out of your life.
Listen to the sounds of Eros cut into the world we inhabit.
This is the sound of love.
Destroy your music to hear the sound of love.
I know I've liberated the world from a travesty of corporate material death culture when I look back on a record Ive played and its cracked, a piece is missing, a notch has been cut into it, or there's a wail of scratches across its surface. The wounds are signs--abrasions, lacerations, gouges, cuts--blasphemies against property. Under these circumstances, I know I've played that record. I've liberated the material and the human ear from that death culture that defies play. I've made room in that record for the play of Eros. Under these conditions, I know I have done my work.
DJ Panic doesn't just recycle music; he recycles the material on which the music is preserved. He circumvents the propaganda of the music, going directly to the material itself, the product--the basis of capitalist culture--to create new music. DJ Panic destroys the material underpinning the corrupt music/media/corporate industry. This destruction yields a beautiful music--the music of liberation. The music of play. The music of Eros. The music of active love.
This is a dead record.
There is no music on this record.
Do not play this record.
There is no music on this record.
[This manifesto is included with the DJ Panic "Dead Record" double 12".]
DJ Panic, performing at the Living Music Festival, Accokeek, MD,
October 6, 2001.
Photo: Rebecca Henry.
