In the cyberdelic daze of the early 1990s, Mondo 2000 was the publication-of-record for the emerging digital counterculture. Founded by our dear pal RU Sirius, it was not just a magazine (with an expiration date), but a "strange attractor" for freaks interested in the new edge of computers, pranks, digital art, fringe culture, psychedelics, consciousness, weird science, and hacking. In fact, RU and the Mondo scene were the magnets that drew me to San Francisco in 1992. But along with crafting razor-sharp, irreverent, and intellectually subversive essays and brilliant books, RU has always punctuated his editorial projects with occasional forays into music.
In 1993, Tim Leary introduced RU and his band Mondo Vanilli to Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor who famously signed them to his Nothing Records label, paid for studio time, and ghosted them when it was time to release the record. No matter—many other independent releases followed. And now, RU and producer PizzaT (aka RU Sirius & Phriendz) have released The Smarter Kings of Deliria, a compilation of new materials, unreleased works from the last decade, and remixes of tracks dating back to 1982. It's a freaky and cracked collection of electronic-punk-industrial-pop mayhem that you can listen to above or right here.
Over at Tonearm, Lawrence Peryer interviewed RU about his "musical mindfuckery":
RU Sirius: The first thing I ever did that was public was to write for and publish an underground newspaper in Binghamton, New York, in the early 1970s. So I think my first choice was not to be a writer or musician but to be part of "the revolution"—a kind of New Left Freak utopian revolution that everyone talked about in 1970 when I turned eighteen and graduated from high school. That was my young dream—my only ambition. So, in a way, everything after that is a compromise with reality. Once the revolution collapsed, the idea that the world expects me to do anything at all seemed like an imposition. Sometime around 1973, I started writing some lyrics…
….[A lot of the lyrics across [The Smarter Kings of Deliria] sneak up close to the edge of invoking violence and class war while masking it with silliness or hair dye in a way that plays with questions of authenticity in the scary context of the political moment. Is American fascism performative? Is resistance performative? Does everything, on some level, feel performative? Are we fully in the simulacrum? What will you wear to the new civil war?
The physicality of suffering from want at scale is—and will be—really shocking in a hypermediated civilization. And the harsher it gets, it creates more—not less—of a break with reality. There's a sense that we're in a simulacrum and that physicality and its needs and pains are an imposition. We actually kind of predicted that as one of the possible outcomes of virtualization back in the Mondo 90s.
