Deantoni Parks
Touch But Don't Look

We live in a world that regurgitates mechanisms.

Cold delusions, quantum diseases, automated hiccups, luminescences that devastate the corneas, predetermined movements. Institution of the immobile and repetition. If I close my eyes and imagine (when imagination is simply a reiteration of something that passed on a screen) I can see a place where all these elements live in synergy with each other and nourish the minds of human beings: New York. A huge American Moloch (not too distant from the Fritz Langian one) that devours the mind and body of those who live there. And that inspires. Whether it's the photographs of Berenice Abbott, which, in my view, paint the chrysalis of the monster in glass and concrete it will become, or whether it's the sequences of an intersection that vomits (almost literally) metal and flesh that blend together, that run, that collide, that do not see from the film "Baraka" by Ron Fricke, or the piercing cries coming from the saxophone of John Zorn, or again the electronic/rhythmic castles of the machine called Nerve led by a robotic tribal shaman from Switzerland called Jojo Mayer, it makes no difference. 

And it is precisely from the alienating constructions of this city (and, of course, Mr. Mayer) that the matter takes shape, which Deantoni Parks molds with harmony and almost feral fierceness, who, after becoming a rhythm machine for, among others, John Cale, the Mars Volta and their prolix/prolific/hallucinogenic boss Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, and madam Me'shell Ndegeocello, decides to dance alone. But it's not a mere exercise in style. It's a reconstruction of a modern mechanism that reeks of crazy and surgical drum electrogenesis at the same time. Deantoni eviscerates, synthesizes, recomposes, and tortures his drums and not just them. He breaks the bones of the downtempo and recreates it while walking under the leaden sky of an Amsterdam dotted with exposed cables, opens the synthesizers in avalanche and bombards them with broken rhythm of industrial synchronies, evokes 80s mutants and throws them into the jungle. He boxes synthetic guitars on cross-temporal constructions to straighten them within mechanisms worthy of the Swiss watchmaker mentioned above. He makes the dance floor (this is the playground whether you like it or not) an electric charnel or the bastard child of a glitch dream, gives dubstep lessons (the kind that breaks knees with the bass to be clear) to DJs who have no clue how it's really done (which today means: success and money galore). And when the mechanical monster shows its human side, it has the voice of this lady called Betty Black, nomen (w)omen, whose voice is black and seductive and dances sensually and fluidly over the rhythms of Our Man, who treats time like an elastic band, as if it didn't matter whether to go fast or not on a pop-oriented piece that's utterly disgusting (but definitely isn't).

May this mother of all monsters keep inspiring us like this. We need it. At least I do.