Get with the programmed

>> Jon Asencio’s Electronic Humans Guild brokers the pax robotica

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Some of you may remember that, a few years back, local musician Jon Asencio was something of a techno-punk Raël. UFOs and little green men were very real to him. So real that, when Pest 5000, the local indie champs he played guitar with, slowed down to crawl, he veered off into bubbly, rocktronic celebrations of those occupants of interplanetary craft.

With Starbean, a bass-free trio anchored by Miss Kim’s hypnotic keyboard motifs, Asencio spread theword that we were not alone. Then, with the loose and conceptual UFO Research Group, he went a step further and created lo-fi, art-damaged rituals to summon the saucer-folk.

“The UFOs never landed,” Asencio says despondently, as though those deep-space deadbeats were ever supposed to be reliable. “And it became ultra-mainstream. That’s when I said, ‘enough.’ You started seeing alien-head keychains at the dollar store, alien T-shirts, the X-Files started to suck—I lost faith, I have to say it’s true.”
Such soul-shattering devastation could never last long, not for a personality like the excruciatingly cheerful and optimistic Asencio. He found a new sci-fi source of inspiration, and promptly adopted the street tag J Robot. Remember the Robot Rock nights at Jingxi? That was him in the foam-rubber service droid get-up. Danger, Will Robinson! Danger! Danger!

Guild trip

Even the most superficial sensibilty of robo-cool is a goldmine of material for a generation of pop artists spoonfed the antics of R2-D2 and C-3P0, 7-Zark-7 and Twiki, V.I.N. Cent and KITT (true, KITT was a car, but a robo-car, okay?). Asencio, however, has always been one to dig a little deeper into the history of the millennial mythologies that so obsess him. The UFO Research Group saw him poring over those dusty French OVNI encyclopedias and obscure Roswell tracts, and so his latest project, the Electronic Humans Guild, started at the very roots of robot culture.

“The main influence on this new way of thinking for me was R.U.R.—Rossum’s Universal Robots, the 1920s play by the Czech writer Karel Capek. That was the first literary reference to robots. I was helping a friend work on a video she was making, a very abstract adaptation of that play. She got me into R.U.R., and in that play, robots are organic. They’re machines, but they’re created organically, almost like they’re grown. It ties in nicely with what’s happening now with cloning and genetic technology. So then, I got into this idea of this organic technological movement—humans acknowledging that we are the robots. Just like Kraftwerk always said.”

While taking the Krautronic komedy of Florian Schneider and co. at face value might seem rather naïve, Asencio might just be onto something with this. Where does the organic end and the artificial begin? To what degree is our behaviour instinctive, unconscious, and therefore robotic? And most importantly, how can we have loads of goofy fun addressing these grand philosophical issues?

The EHG exists to uncover, and illustrate, the answers to these questions. Assertively, too—stand too close and you may find yourself buzzing, beeping and talking like a Speak & Spell. The EHG, you see, is more than a band, more than an art collective, more than a movement. It’s a lifestyle—or is that an imitation-of-life style?
“It’s a guild, I’m the guildmaster and people rotate through. There’s benefits and there’s work to be done. That’s the larger goal, to incorporate as many people as possible. So it’s kind of like a nicer, friendlier version of the Borg from Star Trek.”

Whose side are you on?

When it began, there was no “we” involved. World domination was not an issue. Quite the opposite, in fact—after tours of duty with the Doughboys, Pest 5000 and the UFO projects, Asencio wanted to fly solo.

“I was thinking of doing the J Robot record that I’ve wanted to do for a while, something very electronic. It was supposed to be a tribute to Kraftwerk or something, more purist electronic pop. It was almost more of an exercise for myself, to see if I could do it and what it would sound like. When I finished up the first incarnation of this, last year, I was really unhappy with it. It had no depth. It sounded like me—how boring! There was no mystery or magic to it, for myself anyway. That’s half the enjoyment of music for me, that mystification.”
That’s when the process of subjugation and assimilation began. As “guildmaster,” the single constant figure throughout the EHG’s self-tiled debut CD on his own Robosapien label, Asencio sought out an equal balance of local talent whose personalities fell into either the “robot” category or the “human.”

One early convert was spoken-word hellion Alexis O’Hara, followed by Pest-plus drummer Alex Macsween. The latter, between his Swiss-precision skin-thumping talents and his intense yet emotionally neutral stare (through total Joe 90 glasses, no less), is a perfect example of the robot man. “Alex definitely represents the robots, Alexis does too—she’s a fembot, more precisely. Then you have the really organic people on it, as well. You have Bruce Cawdron, who’s completely the opposite of a robot.”

Cawdron, a real earthnik type who drummed for Starbean, bangs away at scrap metal. He joins cellist Becky Foon, guitarist Sylvie Chenard and drummer Chris Olsen in repping the humans. Meanwhile, E-noise generators Magali Babin and Lesley Farley, and mouth-music maniac Monstre (who joins Asencio in Goa Gajah as well) lean to the robot side.
Appropriately, to the little-bit-of-both spirit of EHG, the lines between the camps tend to blur. “For example,” notes Asencio, “Becky Foon is playing cello, but she’s putting it through effects to transform the sound. So she’s an interesting combination. She’s got a very organic way of playing, and would certainly represent the human side, but then her playing gets transformed—sometimes, the cello becomes another electronic sound. Live, she’ll be playing an electric cello, which sounds crazy.”

Picosecond pop

The CD’s jacket art, by Billy Mavreas, furthers the contention. “I don’t think it represents the robotic element, but it does have a certain modern, technological quality to it.” The googly amoebae Mavreas so deftly renders are clearly organic, albeit the kind of life only visible with the most up-to-date X-ray technology.

“These people over here,” says Asencio, pointing to other lumpy lifeforms on the CD jacket, “are obviously otherworldly, looking at us through some interdimensional, uh, device, through which they can speak to us—I think. So there is a kind of futuristic organic quality to his work. But he does represent the humans, and I think that the humans, like the robots, need representation. This is about as balanced as I could get.”
The balance pays itself off in the diversity of the low-key numbers on the disc. The variety of moods, textures and reference points is remarkable, as is the patient understatement that informs the overall sound.

“The idea for the record is that it’s a concept album—which most people don’t know, not even those who played on it. The pieces are these soundtracks for fictitious people caught in various moments, interacting with their environments. It’s mainly electronic, but sometimes it’s outdoors. A good example is ‘Champ de Mars,’ which is literally the idea of a woman running through the metro. You just see her, you don’t know what’s going on. But then there’s this whole story that unfolds. In ‘Sur le pont des seigneurs,’ you’re caught on this bridge, hypnotized by the cars going by and the crazy sound they make. You’re frozen in that second, that nanosecond—even a picosecond, maybe.

“Then there’s nods to various electronic people. ‘Teletextual’ is an obvious homage to Kraftwerk, while more dubby tracks like ‘Quadrant’ are a nod to the Jamaican producers who helped invent electronic music, as well.”

Flowchart follies

For this Friday’s performance, a belated release party for the CD, it’s those last two aspects that get the spotlight. Rather than round up the whole collective, and risk a robot revolt at la Sala Rossa, Asencio has chosen to trigger the zoom function on one subset of the EHG. Macsween and Foon will be on hand, and Kevin Komoda and Michelle Chow, Asencio’s former Pest colleague and a Nul Setter, respectively, will be inducted to the outfit.
“I tried to structure a group for the show, as an experiment. The first time we played, we had most everyone who’s on the album, and it was pandemonium. Sonic mayhem. It was beautiful, but really crazy and incredibly loud—apparently one person fell over and passed out. For this one, I wanted to structure the group and focus on one aspect of the recording. We’re going to focus on the stuff that’s more dubby, German synth-rock pieces. So we’re doing the pieces that fit that sound, rather than make it really eclectic and try to fit everything in.”

Also on the bill are Goa Gajah, cosmic buzz merchants the Unireverse and the extendonymous “Nanobot Auxiliary Ballet presents Tylenolandadida.” That last one features good-natured Ninja cadet Luv, vivacious radio personality Patti Schmidt (also ex-Pest) and Komoda, vivacious if not a radio personality.

Beyond the actual music, the night will also be a recruitment session for the Guild. Survey questionnaires will be distributed, and the resulting data will be processed live and projected, as graphs and flowcharts, through a shitty old ’40s overhead machine. Oh, and there’s gonna be robot costumes, too.

“This is actually also a performance group that hasn’t been unleashed on the world yet. And as always, I want to keep it holistic and all-encompassing. It can touch on different media and even become almost a lifestyle. It could be an ongoing group that people can join and become a member of, for a sense of belonging, the same thing you’d get from Boy Scouts or curling. You join it and it becomes a social thing as well. That’s coupled with the exploration of technology—the ultimate idea would be to get people to reflect on how we’re being affected by technology, how it affects us and how we can direct it more. The term I like for the overall production is the thought tank—everybody puts their ideas in, and me and others in the guild are processing them and spitting them back out for people to reassimilate. It’s an ongoing, cyclical process.” :

Electronic Humans Guild CD launch, with Goa Gajah, the Unireverse and this Nanobot business, at la Sala Rossa on Friday, Jan. 25, 9pm, $6