Safety Propagandist #6: CIA Debutante
Adam Lehrer corresponds with a pair of righteous Safety Propagandists, an Aussie named Nathan and a frog named Paul who together are the experimental music duo CIA Debutante.
Nathan Roche is an Australian writer who has also for many years kicked in and around the Australian underground punk and rock scenes. Paul Bonnet is a visual artist and identity confused Frenchie. Both artists are new recruits in the counter-agency of the avant-garde, injecting much needed contra-narratives into the spheres of experimental music, literature, and contemporary art. But together, these two men are CIA DEBUTANTE.
CIA Debutante plays a mostly improvised combination of both electronic and rockist musical techniques that evokes an aesthetic of paranoia, hypnosis, and delirium. Critics often point to the Shadow Ring (a noted influence) and early Cabaret Voltaire (less of an influence), but critics are largely gay losers who have lost any sense of imagination or criticality in their thoughts. What do they know? This is a unique group with an undeniably contemporary sound. It’s a psychological operation gone awry, a microcosm of the world we live in made manifest through rocking sounds.
I first became aware of the group after its LP The Landlord was published by iconic American underground label Siltbreeze. Paul and Nathan’s latest outing will also be released soon by the label, its title being Dust.
To learn more about the group and the new record, I waged psychological warfare on its members Nathan and Paul by sending them long-winded questions over email. It appears I underestimated them, because they waged psychological warfare right back at me, in the form of responses over email. Checkmate.
Adam Lehrer: CIA Debutante is about to release its second album on the iconic American underground rock label Siltbreeze. Tom Lax barely releases anything anymore, and has wildly slowed down the label's output since its brief renaissance around 2007 with bands like Pink Reason, Eat Skull and Sic Alps. This means he believes that you guys are the real fucking deal, and being on his label immediately puts you in a lineage of artists like The Shadow Ring, Harry Pussy, and Temple of Bon Matin. What does this feel like? Is it exciting? Is it conflicting? Tell me about it bros.
Nathan Roche: Well, look the importance of the label on us both as individuals has been super important since we were both teenagers and it was obviously a reference point when we met several years ago. I guess for most alienated youths at that age Sonic Youth or something was like a gateway drug into that world of unorthodox weird sounds, and then Siltbreeze is like the smelly grandfather long-hippy drug dealer in the peace-out multicolored tepee at a festival offering several coat pockets lined with psychedelic produce giving audio and visual experiences you hadn't yet experienced and the idea of a “hit song” fades away into radio static hiss, you end up preferring the hiss over the pop.
BUT, Its more than the great releases Adam; it’s the mindset, and overall attitude damn it.. The attitude and obsessions of just one man.. in his house in Philly sitting on a thousands of piles of strange records put out through passion and self-indulgence rather than any kind of monetary investment and that has always remained the same…other indie labels still manage to pay the rent on huge apartment blocks in New York and Chicago etc, but Tom Lax and his mysterious Siltbreeze is a still the same lone ranger walking on harsh desert plains since the beginning, looking for a couch, any couch to sleep on. These narratives are attractive to me and give hope because the idea of music when you are young seems impossibly out of reach, well when you look at bands like Guns n’ Roses, Motley Crue or YES it seems distant and even more alien…
when you drift into the world of experimental, lo-fi, noncommercial, DIY, unmarketable music its not like you want to have a future in it, or even see a future in it. You aren't doing it for that reason.. you're doing it because you have been somehow influenced, or put under a spell by it... Siltbreeze was the express line to the weirdest witch sounds you’d heard at the time and it was distributed and in an unpretentious way, this is a key word: unpretentious. A lot of my friends in Australia like Naked on The Vague, Fabulous Diamonds, Kitchens Floor, XNoBBQx, Circle Pit, etc all had releases in the mid-2000s…and I was incredibly jealous..but in hindsight, not at all ready..
I think when Tom Lax sent us a message from what seemed like a fake Soundcloud account with three followers, I called up Paul…I told him, there was a thirty second silence and all he said was, “I want to fuck you” .. before hanging up.
CIA Debutante on Siltbreeze makes sense in both ways and since The Landlord it has given us a new sense of motivation.
Paul Bonnet: When I found that this label had done albums for *** (a band) I love years ago and now I am on it.. then I feel: “Whaaaaaaa WOAHAAHH WOWWOOOOOOOH!”
AL: Early reviews of your work focused on its influences in things like The Shadow Ring and Cabaret Voltaire, but as Tom Lax has noted, that influence seems to have been shed or at least integrated into a sound more original. There is originality here. Do you find that the more you explore your sound the further away you get from your influences?
NR: You know you probably think I am lying but I’ve never heard once single record by Cabaret Voltaire… Paul told me I’d probably like the first two records but part of me has been putting it off since we’ve been compared to them these past few years.
I surely know every word of every Shadow Ring LP that’s for sure and I guess you could say they were an early influence, but who isn’t influenced by them if they’ve listened? I mean truly listened, like a psychopath in the night, alone with headphones next to a candle. They are like The Rolling Sones to me.
Things have changed over the years in our releases and how they sound, but its mostly to do with our confidence levels these days…we hesitate less when playing, we cringe less and just go for it and blast into the rabbit hole looking for a carrot.. We changed recording techniques sometime last year..and this made things a little clearer, and we can hear what we are doing more to the details are becoming more precise.. the ideas, less blurry.
PB: When we started recording music, which was also when I started making music at all, I would be mainly focused on material hint, this or that delay pedal placement that would evoke a sound I would have obsessed with on some record, I think just the time of playing, dealing with frustration, and also the distance from when we started recording, we've been able to forget and let go of, not influence, but superficial interests. But I don’t know if the new records are less indebted to influences, more that we've put ourselves through some kind of exhaustion, and it came away nicely, so I'd say that stuff has been integrated, because I don’t care about hiding influences or pretending to be separated from that, so I'd say we're not less influenced but more comfortable with each other.
AL: So, the new record, what's it called, and what was the process like in making it?
NR: It is called Dust … and it was a pretty similar recording process to previous ones. We just set up in Paul’s room, and just did two or three hour long sessions. When I went back to listen to the sessions, as always it was 70% rubbish, with 30% worth of promise!
I was surprised because it seems like a fully composed record, they sound like actual songs that have been rehearsed and structured as if we were getting prepared for the battle of the bands in the local school gymnasium. It boggles my mind, its beyond cosmic to me how it can all be improvised like that.. Even if we wanted to play the LP at ATP Don't Look Now in fifteen years..we couldn't.. we wouldn't know how.
In any case, without going into too many details of the process I'll leave you with this. Thomas Ligotti has been a very handy influence this year for both of us.
PB: This record was made in the middle of a breakup and as usual it was improvising, this time was in my room, I had bought a soundcard (usually it was a friend’s place with the proper equipment or on my tape player), we for the first time laid out everything we needed, pressed play, and it was made absentmindedly or through intense concentration, I don’t know, neither of us think about it when making it, even though Nathan sometimes has pre-written lyrics, but we hadn’t played for a year. I love that playing/recording with Nathan is natural, it feels like I’m looking at my table waiting for a moment to touch a button or do something, sometimes it just advances out of boredom, I think I was quite depressed, in the middle of lockdown which in France was drastic and frankly bleak, we recorded about three hours and cut what we liked, the recording was made as we figured out how to make it happen, its always in a process of figuring itself out. But this time, contrary to the last LP, there wasn’t much post-production, it's been basically untouched.... Making music is almost never an instant gratification for me, but I enjoy going back and seeing what was made.
AL: Does rock n' roll still exist, what does rock n' roll mean to you, and is CIA Debutante rock n' roll?
NR: I think Dust is as rock n’roll as it gets for CIA Debutante. It’s our “song” record. It’s pretty rock n’roll in my opinion… Which only means the next LP will have to be the complete fucking opposite in terms of accessibility, and we will need to do an ambient, or musiqué concrete record like bloody Worlds Within Worlds by Basil Kirchin or something.. to frighten people off again..and stay clear of “the end of the year” blog lists..
You’ve got to keep people on their toes, not have a sense of predictability. We have to change things up every time and have a timeline that makes little to no sense. People need to be disappointed so they know what they like and don't like. Rock n' roll means a good time, but it also means the come down into the harsh existence and the horrors of the real world once the illusion of rock has filtered away.
PB: Rock'n roll is a meeting of attitude and sound, being artificial and unnatural, a joke, yes maybe, or if it is something to do despite sanitary passes and covid QR codes, I've been to many concerts this year most of them bad but I'd rather do that instead of anything else, yeah sure, it's still what mainly interests me.
AL: There is an element in your sound and performance style that seems to capture or emphasize an inherent surrealism in digital capitalism. It's very contemporary. You seem to capture a fluidity that seems to exist now between cyberspace and the material world, is this accurate? Or am I just high?
NR: No, it sounds pretty accurate, from the beginning we've attempted to take the piss out of the modern world, but this obviously wasn't a conscious decision; it’s just a world view. I wanted to call the record Harvest Season on the Clickfarm, but it was a little too silly. I will say, the artwork aspect of the duo has always had this sort of modern technology, or baroque medieval feel and how those two battles collide or relate throughout time.
I really love that Russian film, Hard to Be A God, where the narrative is almost impossible to imagine where we are lead to believe that this is a world in the future, on another planet trapped in the dark ages.. Nothing is clear, other than the IMDB synopsis because there is no indication of that in these horrid scenes of Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Bruegel-like worlds.
They got to that place with a fucking space ship! HOW?? WHERE IS IT? IN THE MUD?
No, its hidden like optic fibres for the internet underneath your fucking neighborhood Macdonald’s. Paul and I are obsessed with atmosphere and worlds that you can dive into, experience and become obsessed with... In rare cases there are the opportunities or desires to create your own, whether its through film, books, art or music..and this is what gets our gears going best I think... and we can be just as influenced from a painting like The Witching Hour by Andrew Wyeth, any book by László Krasznahorkai, a strange, strange tour in Eastern Europe or fucking Silent Hill 2, and those different atmospheres which constantly change have always had a huge influence on our records and keep us excited for the next one depending on what we are into at that time.
PB: Yes you are high. This is highly offensive. I've never made money from this music so how could it be related to capitalism ?
I think the forever reconfigurable state of now is a source of anxiety for me but also something that was part of our “labor” (haha) at the start, I said our band is a pop band, which for me means that it is mutant and subject to abject changes, I like to see the band as being a slave to many conduits, and that also has something to do with synthesizers, a set number of instruments, a performance under duress (lol). I like genres, I like to pervert things, start from an established set of rules and make it sick, does that mirror the contemporary malaise? This is a sick time, I'm not interested in reclaiming it, but we're close to the end, endless wind in an endless night, and perhaps this music can express a feeling of the end as much as any empty trashcan can.
AL: I must say, there is very little in music that interests me at all these days. Even the most underground of genres (noise, black metal, whatever) appear to me to be captured by the very same control systems that occupy the more mainstream art forms that those styles of sound allegedly oppose. But CIA Debutante feels thoroughly unique and untethered to the systems around it. Is there still possibility for an avant-garde in music?
NR: I know what you are saying, and that’s why I think it makes sense we are part of the odd Siltbreeze cannon.. For most of the releases in the past 30 years, there is little to no consistency other than a level of trust and belief of what is put out between Tom Lax in his bedroom to you and yours. It’s like some weird satellite, AM Radio transmission in morse code.
With the releases there is really no consistency in genre, style or artwork other than the logo and the inner-spirit.
It's true that Norwegian black metal records hold the same target-shelf appearance to that of Iron Maiden records, but you know I like that..I just wouldn't want to be part of any system or club to begin with other than the local bowling club..which is why I never fell into the christian hardcore crowd where I grew up, or the techno-trance ecstasy-lovers, or ‘60s garage heads with turtle-necks..goth scenes..sure I like em' all equally.. but I wouldn't want to restrict myself to just one club, and one place..It's better to snoop around and steal their ideas and attempted to be influenced from everywhere and then crawl back to the den.
PB: Is CIA Debutante avant-garde music ? I doubt it but maybe I'm just being cute. Yeah man don't be a buzzkill, I bloody hope there is, I mean the endless flow of corporate tulpas is never ending but my friend Jim has a pretty cool band in Paris. When I was in art school teachers would say: The avant-garde is a historical phenomenon that doesn’t exist anymore so just do what you bloody want.” Retard! This ignores the ambitions of trying to pull through the debilitating shittiness of modern life. We strive towards the divine. I choose to strive towards beauty. Thats seems avant-garde in a time that favors loneliness and death.
AL: Your music has a remarkable attention to detail, it demands deep listening. When I listen to it, I get into the kind of hypnotic aesthetic head space that I get into when I, say, read Pierre Guyotat (like in Eden Eden Eden when you stop caring about understanding a plot and just find yourself mindlessly punished and deadened by the language) and the mesmerism is only interrupted by the noticing of an aesthetic detail that is so sharp the pupils dilate. Do these moments erupt from the improvisatory nature of your practice? Or does it require much planning to achieve these?
NR: Sometimes when I rarely listen back, especially to We Will Play For Spirits double-cassette, I realize there is a lot of text, maybe too much and most inaudible...and I directly attribute this to two things, one of them being Peter Hammill (remember, his Van Der Graaf Generator bandmates always said he needed an editor) and my deranged mind that won't sit still as soon as Paul turns on his Korg MS-20.
Funny you should mention Pierre Guyotat... He was born in Bourg-Argental about fifteen minutes from where I live. I've always like the ideas of writers that attack you with language: long-winding passages that go up like spiral staircases into the clock tower, then fall out the window... Metaphoric, poetic sentences with no full stops, littered with imagery and passion... its exhausting but you can't turn away. You just have to be brainwashed by it. Usually it’s not a good idea to do it with music.... Oh well.
Someone has to make mistakes so that others learn not to, but to the curious mind maybe it will keep you listening in case you missed out on things from the last time... Or maybe you'll wind up a Manchurian Candidate or in a mental institution.
PB: No, I don’t think there is planning as in laying out what will happen, except mutual interests and talk perhaps, the space opened by pressing start and then stop when it seems we've had enough, but I would be laying out things as we start, and some kind of comfort sets in, then some sense of flux, friendship, then boredom, so the experience of listening would not be that different from playing, it's all chance. I think, I care more about what you describe than anything else... I've never seen music as enjoying playing... But I care about fucking ups, signs of life, anything that reminds you you have an actual life.
AL: What are the influences of CIA Debutante that aren't music-based? Books (Nathan being a writer and all), art (Paul being a painter and all), drugs (both y’all being wild boys and all), psyops, degradation, decay?
NR: It really changes all the time, and it should.. It has too. I think books, films, art, music, and places are what really keep me and Paul going, not just in creative life, but life in general. When I was talking about atmosphere, and artists creating different worlds, this is what I meant..I guess I was a big fan of theme parks as a kid, and escaping reality even if it was just to take a ride in the Wild Wild West,
and with the best art, it can allow your imagination to go to a theme park.
Just when you think you'll run out of something, another thing comes along and the fire comes back. I guess I was talking about baroque, nightmarish things, which is why Belgian painters like James Ensor or Léon Spilliaert are strong, but I could go on forever.. A Clarice Lispector novel is as much an influence as a Junji Ito manga. A can of beer, can hit you in a way that Flann O'Brien or Don Delillo does...The SMAK Museum in Ghent can smack you in the face for a week just as much as a match of beach volleyball. No, I will not talk about Lynch because every other fucking band in the world has for the past ten years and it kind of killed it for me.
I won't comment on drugs because there are enough William S Burroughs’s out there to make you want to or not want to try them based on what people read in online interviews.
PB: When we started playing we had been brought together by mutual interest in paranoia based art, for sure, i think we had been talking about Neuromancer just before which is plasticity and endless reconfiguration, before the last record I had discovered Thomas Ligotti which I recommended to Nathan and I think we had a heavy Ligotti year, i've been reading László Krasznahorkai a lot, as for the patron saints of CIA Debutante I'm not too sure, Pynchon is a good one, we both enjoy something that can jump from a formal reality to the next and set about something that seems to transform, perhaps? I also love Chris Forgues, his comics, his music projects like Kites, Mark Lord; he understood something most of us didn’t, maybe ?
AL: CIA Debutante is a fantastic name. Are you worried that perhaps I'm an intelligence operative and that you're being recruited in this interview for an operation nefarious and malevolent?
NR: think we'd be happy to have real jobs for once, I for one am ready to put on a suit.
The only problem with the name is we really want to tour Russia and China, and we will need VISAs to do this, and when the COVID-19 has reached its inevitable conclusion (my theory: WATERWORLD) then we will go and tour there.. But, I am slightly paranoid in thinking questions could be raised in the interrogation room. It doesn't help that our suitcases, are military solid, green..and that I look snappy in a dapper trench.
PB: Please do as long as you pay, seems fun. I'd be into anything that's malevolent and nefarious. What happened with the name is that I suggested “debutante” because it sounded aerial and hot, Nathan added “CIA” which made it more genre based, a silly name...
AL: Dumb question, but let's do it for the fans, what are five records (from both of you) that are powerful enough to either save or destroy the world?
NR: It's kinda impossible, I usually always say the same thing so it's even less exciting. I'll just choose the last five things I have been listening to on my turntable.
1. Mosquitoes – Reverse Drift / Reverse Charge
2. JJULIUS - VOL. 1
3. ******** the drink [weird world; 2018]
4. とても茶 - 瞳の柱 Pupil Pillar
5. Screamers – Demo Hollywood 77
PB: When I was five someone from Les Inrockuptibles came to see me and told me that from now on I would have to think about things in term of how I could make a top 5 out of them. 25 years later, here it is:
1. Maher Shalal Hash Baz – Return Visit To Rock Mass
2. Maher Shalal Hash Baz – Return Visit To Rock Mass
3. Maher Shalal Hash Baz – Return Visit To Rock Mass
4. Maher Shalal Hash Baz – Return Visit To Rock Mass
5. Maher Shalal Hash Baz – Return Visit To Rock Mass
ILLUSTRATIONS
1. CIA Debutante
2. CIA Debutante The Landlord
3. The Shadow Ring
4. Thomas Ligotti
5. Aleksei German’s Hard to be a God
6. Andrew Wyeth’s The Witching Hour
7. Pierre Guyotat Eden Eden Eden
8. Van Der Graaf Generator
9. James Ensor’s Skeletons Fighting Over a Hanged Man
10. CIA Debutante