Safety Propagandist #15 Cyess Afxzs
Noise musician and artist Cyess Afxzs on post-industrial cliché and modernism
Stuart McCune is an Irish visual artist and maker of noise music that currently lives in Switzerland. He’s been showing his art work — typically abstract paintings that exploit various fabrics and materials somewhat aligning with the proto-arte povera of Lucio Fontana and Antonio Tápies (a favorite of McCune) — at galleries for decades, just as long as he’s had a foot in various scenes of experimental music.
But, in this interview we will primarily be focusing on McCune’s noise project Cyess Afxzs that he started putting out releases beneath the banner of in 2021. Before even hearing the project, I was taken with the aesthetic and content of Cyess Afxzs. Firstly, McCune adorns his album releases in his own art, which feels like a modernist repreieve from the post-industrial underground’s insistence on sticking with the same xerox collages of porn and corpses that have been popular to use since the 1980s. Secondly, were the album titles themselves: references to the aforementioned Tápies, French surrealist painter Max Ernst, Austrian symbolist printmaker Alfred Kubin, and most recently (on his new CD with White Centipede Noise) the German contemporary artist Daniel Richter. Given that I’m a fan of all these guys, it only made sense that Cyess Afxzs would get on my radar. Alas, I made further inquiries and actually put the music on. Yes it was noise: harsh, loud, and atonal. But I was also struck by something, dare I say, contemplative about this noise. It was noise for dreaming, perhaps, more than it was noise for self-abasement. During our conversation, McCune disagreed with my conception of noise as a formless genre of music. I still probably disagree with his disagreement, since atonal sound is the very essence of the “formlessness” described by Bataille, and indeed Brassier celebrated noise as a form of music that is inherently genreless, which can only be, really, a kind of formlessness. But, McCune challenges my limited conception because his sound is highly considered, structured, and even a bit musical. Hell, the guy includes fucking notations in his liner notes! Is this an evolution of atonal music? Is this the future of noise? Don’t know, don’t even know if I care. I’m excited about Cyess Afxzs though.
Please welcome Stuart McCune to the Counter-Agency of the Avant-Garde.