Adam Parfrey
A Sordid Evening Of Sonic Sorrows

S.W.A.T. / SOUNDTRACK FOR THE NEW POLICE STATE.
I Came I Saw I Declared Martial Law 'cause I'm The Marshal in this City.

DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE. TRUST THE MEDIA.
Adam Parfrey Is Dead. He descended into Hell on May 10, 2018. American publisher and journalist - catabasis in Seattle, appearance in New York. His cities were Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland. The whitest city in the whitest state in the United States. Son of Woodrow Parfrey, actor in Dirty Harry and Naked City, and Rosa Ellovich, a Jewish-origin theater director, his parents met in the leftist circles of the New School for Social Research during the '40s. Adam was born in 1957. He died at 61, at the same age as his father. Parfrey never practiced Judaism or any other religion but believed in Karma. He was part of Exit Magazine and Amok Press, and in 1989 he founded FERAL HOUSE with offices in Silver Lake and Port Townsend. A small cult publishing house that publishes eight to ten books a year on unusual and bizarre worlds with personality disorders.
Parfrey was a boundary intellectual, a truck driver, a pizzaman, a research consultant, a screenwriter, a Dialogue Coach. A dark and complex character, fascinated by the world of parafascism, not for the ideas, but because the Nazi Regime boasted exceptional tailoring. He had water on the brain. He made theater and history. In 1983 he wrote and acted in The Wickedest Man In The World centered on Gilles de Rais, a ritualistic child ripper in 15th Century France. Then he played Oberon in Midsummer Night's Dream. He visited second-hand bookstores and trashed bins where he found texts like Why Suicide, experimented with viewpoints, and learned strange things he would never have found at school or on TV, acquiring his peripheral vision from the cheapest hotels. His books are montages, and he was the kind of guy who didn't do regular drugs; instead, he embraced the consciousness that plants had some intelligence, knowledge, and connection with the human experience, this was revealed to him by Ibogaine. Those who had the chance to meet him assure that he was nonetheless a blast of a nice fella with the vice of social deviance.

He was the obscene publisher who refused to be domesticated by publishable and socially acceptable literature. A rare manager of rare books and out-of-catalog discs, he documented politically and aesthetically problematic subcultures where the antis were libertarians, anarchists, Alt-Right exponents, and Neonazis of the Atomwaffen Division. Parfrey's associates have always flirted more with the Far Right than with the Far Left. In 1986, with Amok Press, he published Michael, a translation of the only novel written in 1929 by Joseph Goebbels before he became Minister of Propaganda. During those years, he promoted inquiries into necrophilia and the Third Reich. His work has always dealt with unusual, extreme, and interdicted areas of knowledge with publications dissecting marginal aspects of culture, shining light on subjects society prefers to leave unexplored. It was Parfrey's obsession with the secret and most degenerate sides of life. Vile and perverse, a Maelström of Grand Guignol: Theatre Of Fear And Terror. Murderers, satanic cults, and demonic possessions, original pieces on eugenics, Nuclear War Theologies, Unabomber, cannibals, necrophiles, pedophiles, coprophiles - people who eat shit, cultists, paranoids, mentally ill people pushed aside, bestialists - people who screw goats, conspiracy theorists, sociopaths, Aztlan, torture, masturbatory fantasies to chew on, overproductions of radioactivity, insight-porn, jihadism, self-castrations, a reserved project to clone Jesus Christ using his foreskin preserved among the relics of his blood and body around the world, from which to extract DNA to artificially inseminate a young woman and thus instigate the Second Coming, leather whips, dull putrefaction, organic remains, strange, hateful, and niche subculture. All documentation for potential scopophiles to consume in protected environments. Material that traditional publishers did not even want to touch. Not all ideas were good, many were bad, but bringing them to light was often the best disinfectant for the worst intentions.
Parfrey had guts, anyway. Parfrey had a front-row seat in the Culture of the Apocalypse.

HEALTH / FOOD / HOUSING / EDUCATION - WATCH MORE TV.
Camera got them images, T.V.'s got them all - It's Not Shocking! Jane's Addiction said. Unveiling inconsistencies and hypocrisies of the Western Belief System, especially those of the USA, a closed, nauseating, stupid, evasive, protected nation. The best and most interesting work to do was simply to tell the truth and do it in the best ways possible. The latent trends of the American Way Of Life that continued to eat its vitamins and say its prayers, with people behaving as if there was still a future. Parfrey observed Corporate Confessions spreading, advertising inducing a state of trance and consent, hallucinations that were mass, all things that were and are, like persuaders that were and are occult, as informed by Vance Packard. Language is a virus, media and memetics are a virus, an End of Time situation. If the average American wanted to know what a White Supremacist really was, they should have turned not to the news and dramatizations of the CNN Effect, but to Parfrey's books, who never said the right things or kissed the right asses to receive the glory of mass media and never shot himself in the head for it. No book he published was ever reviewed in the New York Times, he only pushed freedom of speech and expression to its limits and never apologized. For literary qualities expressed and truly interesting content, someone like Lester Bangs by comparison was just any little jerk, alias a poor bastard. Parfrey did Social Realism and Aesthetic Terrorism.

With Feral House, the most famous publication was Lords Of Chaos, on the events of Varg Vikernes and Norwegian Black Metal. Then titles and authors like The Gates Of Janus, Thee Psychick Bible, Anton Szandor LaVey of the Church of Satan (Speak Of The Devil), Genesis P-Orridge, Transumanesimo, an alchemy orders grimoire, The X-Rated Bible, Cult Rapture, Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth, a book on the Red Brigades. Additional namedropping: The Despair Of Monkeys And Other Trifles, a memoir by Françoise Hardy, Orgasmatron, Free Speech Sucks, Speed-Speed-Speedfreak, a fast history of amphetamines, Ye-Ye!, girls of 60s French music, Psychic Blues. Feral House is also one of the funniest publishing houses ever: coloring books, about Muhammad Ali and Lemmy Kilmister for example, music volumes like Lexicon Devil on the fast times and short life of Darby Crash and the Germs, another on Moondog. Parfrey hung portraits of Stalin that made people uncomfortable in his studios and insinuated boudoir photos and mischievous lust into the head and In Utero of Asia Argento.

The mainstream tasted him without knowing it was him on several occasions.
Two films by Tim Burton are inspired by works published by Feral House: the excellent Ed Wood based on Nightmare Of Ecstasy from 1991 dealing with the life of the director of Plan 9 From Outer Space, and that Hollywood hackwork or shitty movie that is Big Eyes, taken from the 2014 publication Citizen Keane: The Big Lies Behind The Big Eyes.
The general public could not understand him. Respected in the UK, less in the USA, people never knew how to recognize his profound dark humor, his counterculture, which was a Plaza Of The Mind, an eye-opening experience. Ignored by the same self-reproduced counterinformation that in the '60s remained indifferent to the quick realism of The Velvet Underground & Nico. His autograph works like Extreme Islam or Apocalypse Culture from 1987 were banned in many countries. Some unsold copies of his books were destroyed, he was investigated by the second most powerful man in the FBI, one of the last official acts of Steve Jobs was to ban two Feral House titles from the Apple distribution network. Parfrey, however, continued to write: Ritual America (2012) on the American fetish for Masonic societies, Pills-A-Go-Go, an exploration of America's obsession with pharmacology. His books were raw, light-years ahead of anything else, demassified, and therefore unorthodox in thought, but there was no anger in what he did, out came a refined and literary writer.
Of Culture of the Apocalypse J.G. Ballard said: An obligatory read for anyone dealing with the crisis of the times, these are the terminal documents of the 20th Century.
A book drafted with the Millennium in mind, and what Oswald Spengler said about the Decline of the West.

Gunsmoke Music for ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES.
Parfrey also dealt with music. Initially with the musician Boyd Rice aka ИOИ, Social Darwinist, he was part of a band called The Tards, then collaborated on another album, Hatesville, under the name The Boyd Rice Experience. The idea behind The Tards was that retarded people were more interesting to watch, revolutionary in their own way. Screwed individuals from the start, extinguished in the name of eugenic programs, The Tards designated the High IQ as their enemy because intelligent people made bombs and created in labs the germs that killed people and the animals that destroyed the environment, and signed their own personal Manifesto SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Mensas).
In 1994, Amphetamine Reptile released the LP Deep Inside A Cop's Mind. Under the pseudonym S.W.A.T. Parfrey made a sort of police concept album of covers where he lined up Ennio Morricone, Isaac Hayes, Phil Spector, and a corrupted version of In The Ghetto, where the victim is no longer the African American kid from cold gray Chicago on his first heist gone wrong, the oppressed here is the cop - practically a sulfurous insult. And his mama cries.
The police were becoming militarized, celebrating domestic abuse, another cop had become a Serial Killer, Fear of the Road, Bad Lieutenants harassed prostitutes to have their batons worked for orgasmization, there was the feeling that both Democrats and Republicans had many interests in building the new Police State. An off-business LP of impertinent Disco Funk, Blues, Rockabilly, Psychobilly, Country, Spoken Words, Western produced as if recorded by bad, angry, tired cops who eat barbed wire and piss Napalm of the so-called violent Special Weapons Assault Team, in neighborhoods where neither the Deep State nor the off-shore count for anything. An album to have the Blues sucked away with a piece of flesh and muscle in the mouth.
Suck Away my Blues, Baby. Happiness is a Warm Gun.
DOWN JONES & JUNK FOOD & COLD DRINKS & FUNKY KITCHEN.

Adam Parfrey Presents... A Sordid Evening Of Sonic Sorrows is from 1997, released by the alternative label Man's Ruin Records. Recorded at Smegma. A Sordid Evening changes personality, it is hard, heavy, exacerbated, it is a marble tool shoved in the ass, a slaughterhouse. POLIZEIT & Hardcore Industry, Parfrey on records wasn't trivial like other colleagues who did something else and then became musicians, Parfrey had class, behind his stuff there was a taste for aesthetics and saturation, he was always more Punk Rock than Punk Rock, he was Gothic before the stereotype became vogue, and Hardcore was always music in its own technological way, perfect for a dystopian, complex, and complicated society, Goldstein could have affirmed from a Sprawl in 1984. Sonic Sorrows is a record of originals and such elaborate covers with finely modified lyrics that the authors of the tracks become all his Ghost Writers. Those pieces become Parfrey's. With him, a band of mostly unknown musicians with improbable names, Thee Slayer Hippy, Mondo, Pig Champion, all people from Poison Idea.

A Sordid Evening is like watching Short Cuts or some other Cult Movie. Coffee, withdrawal, fried eggs, mineral water, chewing gum, Lucky Strike, Cohiba cigars, and Marlboro. Then at night, low Poker rooms with green tablecloth and billiard room lights, sticky summer sweat dollars, nine feet of smoke, Rolexes, gold chains on necks, whiskey, Boss and collectors surveying the corners. Outside on the street, vending machines for Viagra, other blue pills, not the ones to get it up, those to fight phimosis, the clap, or gonorrhea. Spaghetti in New Hollywood and Dallas in Wonderland.
God Bless America. Reality is for people who can't face drugs once said Tom Waits. No Rule by The Leather Nun, also known as Lädernunnan, opens the tracklist; then an exaggerated slowed-down version of Paranoid by Black Sabbath, made even more Doom. There's the electroshock and Blue In The Face of Lou Reed in Kill Your Sons without ever forgetting the genius that was Robert Quine, the holy strung-out exhaustion of Nation Down For The Count, the vomiting of Rubber Room as if it gushed from an album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds from mid-eighties, the hot water enema of the carillon Bubble Porn of Wind-Up Doll by Peggy March, the hard-boiled Exotica of a Martin Denny with the same Hawaiian shirt in Saint Jack by Peter Bogdanovich with Ben Gazzara. The LGBTQI drum under The Juggernaut Of Entertainment In Contemporary Life, some chilling out lounge, Parfrey's crooning who shares with the Maestro Frank Sinatra only the Mafia acquaintances, without the good suit but with the jacket of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Slayer, which is a recitative by Peter Sotos of Whitehouse with intro/outro Thrash dead Metal, enlarges the nocturnal desire to kill all hippies, embraces the oral culture lesson via megaphone of Punk-Beat/New Wave poet and lyricist John Cooper Clarke who declaims a long-awaited KILL ALL THE HIPPIES! Roxy Music also find a re-proposal with their love letter to an inflatable doll. Race Riot despite the title is of a mellifluous languor and an unsustainable romanticism. All riotous races will temporarily gather around a glowing barbecue. The definitive tour de force of the album is the interpretation of The Pusher, a trip that never ends and slaps that diarrhea attack of a cover given by an average band for an average movie. In any case, the fierce primogeniture of Hoyt Axton puts a fist in the mouth of all the others and remains the most thrilling and animal one. A Sordid Evening Of Sonic Sorrows is a disturbing rewrite, even in moments of apparent idiotic calm, it is Water Power with Jamie Gillis in TAXI DRIVER setup, it is an erotic figure by Édouard-Henri Avril or an installation by H.R. Giger slammed in the face of well-thinking or God-fearing sorts, it is a ruthless world that despairs, of an insufferable falsified sentimentality, condemned to the soil of the Interstate.
The world we know is a Dog's World, Jacopetti/Cavara/Prosperi would say.
The .44 Magnum is a Monster. The Pusher is a Monster.
I'll get you so high till the day you die 'cause I'm so fly!
God Damn, God Damn... God Damn The Pusher.

THE JUGGERNAUT OF ENTERTAINMENT IN CONTEMPORARY LIFE.
Nobody wants to talk about what they think and feel, a fertile ground for journalistic exploration. If this stimulates thought, it is perfect. To understand human character, you must first explore the depraved traits of human consciousness. The apocalypse, like everything else, is hope sold like a drug. A huge fucking lie. Commercial publishers of crime books make boring and hypocritical publications, ridiculously committed, they glorify these crimes but act as if they were against them. Pedophilia is an important contemporary taboo, a hypocritical taboo. It is a hysteria that everyone talks about and makes money promoting in mass media, but they are selling this ugly thing. There is no way a human can survive on this planet without showing some political inconsistency. I am surrounded by consumer culture. Modern West is immersed in the Culture of the Apocalypse with a click of a button. --- Culture Of The Apocalypse (Amok Press - first issue 1987)

Down underground, you meet the funniest people. Parfrey has distributed numerous precious pearls to swine while having a blast like a maniac in the subway or in urban reconnaissance in his car or on foot. He was appreciated by guys like Weird Al Yankovic who even misunderstood his ethics/anesthetics at first, was a friend of Jim Goad and Gaspar Noé, listened to Laibach, got records from Amoeba, loved classical, contemporary, mid-20th century electronics, knew Helvete, admired the work of David Lynch, the performances of Vincent Price.
Anti-Republican, Anti-Star, he dealt with censorship, experimental plastic surgery, bondage, the pathetic sadness of man, the early old age that would leave room only for blood and excrements. Bob Flanagan @ Meat District. One can imagine him as a Child of Devolution around a table with Nietzsche, Ezra Pound, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Heidegger, Max Reinhardt, Gertrude Stein, Alla Nazimova, Hegel, Orson Welles, Tony Wilson to discuss Viennese Actionism and German Expressionism. During the era of McCarthy, jails would have been full of people like him. On his tombstone, all the names of the Demons that possessed him are listed, enlisted in one name, his: Adam Parfrey, who did not sell himself to God.
Pentalpha, all the embraces of tomorrow. Outside of society they're waiting for him.
Fan Vent Blues: JESUS SAVES NO ONE SOUL & NO BODIES.

[BLACK MAIL PENTACOL : THE BIG HEAT & THE BAD THOUGHTS]