the intensifier


by techNET

the use of speed

Around 1988 the intensifier started going to illegal parties and raves. Mostly happening in lost empty factories on the edges of wastelands, people danced on burnt­up cars, tucked suspensions moving in four­four time. The intensifier climbs over scaffolding. Metal drumming against metal and fires shifting edges. Parties could go anywhere. The intensifier loses it, then realises there is nothing to lose. Lucid confusion. In night­empty cities, a generation compose with speed, thinking/ feeling; uncertainty, immensity, motion, forgetfulness, radiance, waste. Transformed by moving fast, taking it all in at high velocity. The intensifier dancing, hooded, grey, enwrapped in white smoke and light. The intensifier moves, uses speed. Each party was the end of an era. Something to take and use. Compose yourself. Move.


the rhythm versus the melody

The intensifier, grey against a dark sky, dancing, every bone and bacteria in its body moving. Some things are taken and used in devious, invisible, silent ways, uses neither determined nor captured by the military-entertainment­surveillance industries in which these things are designed, manufactured and marketed. The intensifier dances, moves and transforms itself, insinuates itself in the memories of users. The individual is a crowd, the movement of incoherent and contradictory masses of social relations, swarms of possibilities, endless immersions in space. The intensifier dancing, grey and faceless. Wandering uses create an incoherent and contradictory anti­discipline manifest in the intensifier, grey against a dark sky, dancing. The intensifier insinuates itself everywhere, moving, transforming, inspiring celebrations. The intensifier combines rhythms and melodies, rhythm becomes melody and melody becomes rhythm.


the art of deception

The intensifier has no identity, no ideology, has no cause for desire to persuade. The intensifier senses the boundaries between things, like when sound is loaded into a computer to be recoded as a graphic and manipulated, combined, played with touch. Devious and impossible to anticipate, subtle and insubstantial, the intensifier leaves no trace. Mysterious and inaudible, no­one knows where it is going. Pretending to stand still and accommodate itself to the subliminal designs of corporate machines, the intensifier knows speed and deception secretly free it from imposed values.


the space war

The intensifier uses sound as a cultural weapon, inspiring thousands of simultaneous explosions on the borders between memory and loss. Immersing bodies in unpredictable ways, sound enters in several directions at once, producing internal connections and motions, anticipating a desire to interact with others. Through this body/mind motion a building is converted into a space of social­inspiration, a space that can be changed, reversed, stretched, wasted, lost or destroyed. The intensifier, fused to this psycho­social energy, moves through a space­between.


the endless mix

The intensifier reads/writes about...the activity of listening to music is a silent production...a drift across the sounds...a metamorphosis of the music created by wandering ears...the listener insinuates into the music the ruses of pleasure, manipulation, combination, steals it, is transported into it, multiplies in it...like the reverberations of stories stirring in a memory or the internal rumblings of sounds moving through a body, this silent production is an invention of memory...music is the outlet or product of invisible histories...we listen to the landscape of our memories...music is a movement of strata, a play of spaces, the listener slips their own world into the music...like language the forms of music are stolen by transients filling them with forests of desires, metaphors of their own quests...the intensifier understands that the listener is the operator, using the friendless mix of sound in unforeseen ways...


the future of music

The intensifier moves on, keeps moving. There are no rules. Genres cross fertilise constantly, mapping the mutant subjectivities of dancers. Now half­way through another decade, the intensifier isn't waiting for the next new style to be re­discovered, only to be remembered again as inherited identity. The intensifier is not concerned with reaching an abstract audience, but chooses to operate at an immediate level, making parties and following desires. The intensifier, cut through by collective activity, which is the basis of any culture, moves against cults of the individual, attracting new vocabularies that talk about the make­shift creativity of crowds. The intensifier represents movements that anyone can use.