Datawhore is a sound poet based in the UK and creating solo or collaborating with a number of other artists. Datawhore's sounds cover a wide spectrum, from the outrightly ironic and satirical to the very serious and intense.
I don't believe in having band members; they are expensive to maintain, and argue. I have a computer instead.
I live, I don't have to play at it ;)
God. Tons. Many. From trad to bad to mad.
My mind.
Datawhore: A Definition
"An operative or employee who is so low on the corporate rung he has to make a living by jacking in or interfacing, and experienced the result of personality automation. Nevertheless most lower-eschelon corporates at times need to interface with large information devices. Being jacked or -interfaces will have effects on the subjects psychology; after being jacked in more than 4 hours per day on average the interface or 'face' bleeds over in off-hours , causing employees to become dullwitted."
Get to know Datawhore ;)
1. A) Datawhore has been circulating the experimental-techno
underground for some time now. How long have you been producing music?
The Datawhore experiment began in about 1998. Idly surfing, I misread the word 'datawarehouse' for 'datawhorehouse' and was so taken with the latter term that it became a focus for all my word and sound experiments of that time. At that time I was in collaboration with a UK sound poet and composer named Binda23 and had created a cutup text, Surrendered To My Function, that we were making into an album. On my humble 486 I began to create lo-fi chunks of sound to show him the direction I considered likely. Having been a lyricist and singer for many years but never a composer, I found the sudden ability to solely compose very exciting and liberating. My capacities on the machine improved and little by little I became more and more ambitious with my compositions.
B) In a paragraph or two, how would you sum up the sound/genre that you've created for Datawhore?
It really created me. Given the name Datawhore, it had to be justified. So began the years of lonely tinkering. Fascinated by the dynamics and skewed spirit of cyberspace, DW uses PC audio tools to create lateral mutant sound collages that aspire to capture the energy of cyberspace. Chat rooms, cheesy religion, Microsoft and whatever else he can find pieces of floating around online sound file archives, plus his own cut up texts, are juxtaposed over abused generic dance music.
2. A) Musically speaking, what are your primary influences?
My primary musical influences are actually quite orthodox and tend not to fall into the more predictable categories. This is because my work as Datawhore expresses a part of myself that I live with but not always from. I grew up with rock music and with rock music I remain, especially Paul Westerberg. I adore The Beach Boys, The Who, The Stooges, early Bowie, The Smiths and Morrissey. I love cheesy country and trucking music, but also Blue Oyster Cult and The Beatles. However, I enjoy electronic music, usually ambient, and also primo American punk, such as Husker Du and Ramones. I could say I influence myself, but that would be too honest and anal. I listen to very little music like my own. One is only so strong...in fact, I once was mixing a DW track for hours on headphones and at the end of it found myself totally disassociated and neurally damaged. So that mix was a success.
B) And literary influences?
Burroughs, Kafka, Steinbeck, Orwell, Greene, Ishiguro.
C) How evident, would you say, these influences are to the avegrage listener?
Not very, although obviously my adoration of the cutup technique heavily determines my approach to how I use samples and text and characterises my quest for 'unlanguage'.
3. Evidently Datawhore is not for the casual top-40 hits radio
listener. What audience(s) are you aiming for?
The undead.
4. Is there any messege that you try to portray through your art, or is Datawhore more "art-for-art's-sake"?
It's more 'let others suffer for your art', or 'art-for-fuck's-sake'.
5. Why "Datawhore" as your chosen project moniker? is there a story behind that?
See above.
6. What compels you to create?
Now, this is interesting. Once, in meditation and prayer, I asked the Creator, Why all this? This Creation? And a clear, quiet voice said, into my ear, I create because it pleases me. As an artist by nature and vocation, I related to this answer utterly: I create because it pleases me. I do what I am. And I AM.
7. Would you share with us any of your music background?
Probably not.
8. Any interesting or frustrating artistic experiences in the past?
Yes and yes. Part of my motivation for living online from 1995 was, after many reversals offline, the fact that I could control and create without limitation, with no middlemen and no editing. I have operated in the offline recording and publishing worlds with minor success, but annoyance with the offline valuation of creative work - ie how much money it makes - pissed me off. I love the virtual arena because it is less concerned with that orientation. Having said which, I have had some satisfactions working offline and do value physical product, be it a book, CD, or written article.
9. From what i understand, you have fairly strong socio-political
beliefs. would you mind sharing a little bit about those with us?
Datawhore swarms with contradictory and unlikely perspectives. I suppose that what can come across in the 'music' is irreverence and irony, which two ingredients inform my worldview. I hate the bland acceptance of the masses. Socio-politically, I think that our species - as Krishnamurti noted repeatedly - is somehow on an aberrated evolutionary path that may or may not destroy us and that, as he said, technologically we are on the moon but psychologically in the caves. I've never felt much at home on this planet, but it can be endured. As I get older (which, as time actually runs backwards, is younger...but that's another story) I care more and more about the basics of life: my children (3), my partner, my health. What fascinates me is the vanity and stupidity of the human being, and that it assumes its version of love is more than local, which latter conviction causes havoc in personal relationships and beyond. Politics itself is largely religion for people shy of entertaining a living God: not believing in a God, they imagine they can be one themselves. Which is possible. Now, with gene jazz and the bomb, we can finally play God. But do we know the rules?
10. How does life in the UK affect you? What region are you from?
In point of fact I am American-born, Canadian-raised and British by expired marriage. I lived many years in central London, but not wishing my then small kids to grow up in the shadow of junkies and hookers, moved to south Wales. Wales is beautiful and small, although its people are generally quite parochial and in some cases hideously inbred. The UK is great, really, dragging itself into the future resenting the end of the past and sucking up to Amerika en route to giving in to its historical dual nemeses, the French and Germans.
11. Could you sum up your religious/theoligical beliefs?
I spent a quarter century in pursuit of things 'spiritual'. I have no beliefs, as beliefs are cheap. I hold dear some small and precious firsthand experiential knowledge of things mysterious and perhaps divine, and othertimes alien. Organised religion is a contradiction in terms: you cannot organise religion any more than you can organise the wind and rain. Theology is patent nonsense. It's a control system. So, I don't believe anything, unless it suits me. This is all there is, there's nothing to find out, and life ends in death: that's enough.
12. How do those affect your creative process?
In a sense, they are my creative process, hence my many tracks about religion and spirituality, albeit often ridiculing same. But this is a reflection of my serious, lifelong explorations of the unseen: I use Datawhore as a vehicle for offloading the impurities cast off from the refining of my inner life. Still, let's make one thing plain: I am not interested in enlightenment, salvation, or indeed any other sales pitch of the centuries. Everybody has to find out for themselves that there is no every and no body, no them and no selves.
13. What is your opinion of the status of the western world today?
The West is a fascinating place to live and be in the early 21st Century. I find that this culture is one that practises what I term, 'Death Culture Worship', which is to say it is in love with and catalysed with fear of death. Its collective realisation of its own degradation is driving our culture to kill itself, in order to give birth to a different one. Darkness is to be transmuted to light, as ever, but this does not automatically mean some hideous, anodyne 'new age' of endless honky sweat lodges and serial affirmations. I think that the West is still far from decline and that, overall, one is factually very fortuneate to live in it in this day and age.
14. Any opinions of the US?
I think that the US is misunderstood in the world, because Americans tend to be not so much wilfully ignorant as naive. Outside of the out-facing coasts and their conurbations, America really doesn't need the rest of the world or much know what is happening in it.
15. You are vegan, correct? could you expound on why you've chosen to be so, and if this is in any way associated with your spiritual beliefs?
Beliefs are not spiritual, firstly. Spirit is simply that which is not matter; to go further is supposition and leads to delusions of grandeur. I am no longer vegan as such, but I have been a vegetarian for almost 25 years. In 1983 I was very ill, largely due to poor self-care, and a realisation dawned that I was slowly killing myself. Over a period of months the awareness grew and one bright morning I knew that I would not drink, drug or eat meat again. And so it proved. My final meal of meat was a lamb couscous in a little room in Algiers. When I began as a vegetarian I had no unifying idea about it but interestingly this came as I continued until now, when I am quite strong in my opinions about eating flesh. The foolish thing is that some humans feel that we must act top-down, in other words first we become 'nice' to each other (don't hold your breath) and then to lower forms, but actually we must honour the lower first...does not the seed precede the flower? But we are blind to the truth, and inhabit a backward, looking glass world. So the killing continues.
16. What are your ultimate goals with Datawhore, and is there
anything that you would like to accomplish that, either, you just
haven't encountered the opportunity or just haven't gotten around to doing yet?
I assume this question is regarding only my musical activities? I would like to work with as many gifted and wild/weird people as possible. Make one or two awesome albums so that all the world know that Datawhore and Datawhore alone has talent. My ultimate goals?
17. Who is your favorite comic book character?
Dr. Strange.
18. Any last words for our readers?
These will be available at time of death.
