Telekom Electronic Beats

Audioccult Vol. 43: Hath Orgasm, Non-Goth

Light a candle. Draw the required sigils. Now, raise your arms above your head and slowly, gently, exhale your soul. You won’t need it here. This is Audioccult, and it’s time to get low. Illustration: SHALTMIRA

Last week I went to a goth club for the first time in years. It was a proper one too, almost exactly like a crypt. The whole place was packed front-to-back with decrepit skeletons and ghoulish, bloated fiends, which on closer inspection turned out to just be goths. I won’t lie and say that I didn’t get a bit excited hearing New Model Army and Bauhaus, but I don’t think it’s really fair to call what went on in the technical booth DJing. I’d like to posit that the awkward and silence-filled transitions that goth DJs favor is an allegory for their own subcultural dead end. Extended versions of tracks (each of which is always played from the very beginning to the very end) represent struggle and a lack of social awareness, while tracks performed by German goth bands signify the vampiric gestalt of their shameful hygiene. Just another reason why the ’80s are no longer cool. Liking things from 30 years ago is so ridiculous. Liking things from 20 years ago, though? Good shit.

 

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Don’t get me wrong, I got no shame for my old goth game. I look back on the days of big hair and Birthday Party bootlegs with nothing but fondness and a lingering urge to make out with Siouxsie Sioux. But clinging desperately to nostalgia like a bewigged spider monkey just seems unbearably dire as well as clichéd-out. In a time when so many influences are bursting forth from so many different places and fresh, orgasm-inducing takes on these old dark sounds are being injected into the main, an old crypt is exactly where this sort of boxed-genre ideology belongs. Goth has come full-circle in a way, reborn without the need of goths… but that’s an article in the works…

 

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Published February 18, 2013. Words by Daniel Jones.