Illusion Of Safety
More Violence And Geography

Illusion Of Safety is the isolationist project set up in the late '80s by Dan Burke (an avant-garde artist with a background in collaborations on experimental concrete music) around which various members have alternated from time to time (including Jim O’Rourke for the trilogy of works from 1990 to 1992), usually not exceeding three members at a time.

In this “More Violence And Geography” (1988), Burke meticulously explores the sonic depths that can be obtained from industrial music without being noisy or violent (despite the misleading title) like the albums of other bands of the genre from the same period, such as Nine Inch Nails, just to name one. The journey begins with “Get In That Room Eliam,” which is the sonic translation of the materialization of hyperspace as a physical entity at the edge of the galaxy… a parallel dimension that becomes real, inhabited by robot elves and humanoid drones. But the spaceship we embarked on malfunctions at the remote boundaries of the mind in “Techmort,” and the dark and deep sound of space echoes ominously in “Pain Event,” while indecipherable alien signals arrive from the onboard instruments with “Heal.” We venture into the void to attempt to repair the malfunction, and the radio instructions reach us confused in “Dead Girl And The Man,” but something doesn’t work, and we progressively drift away… into nothingness. Nothingness that is ravaged by echoes of a splendid past, which seem to come from a deranged radio device right inside our brain, “Haydin And The Jets.” With “We Can Now Tell You Two Things,” we reestablish a difficult contact with the spaceship, but distressing sounds of implosions progressively cause us to lose the faint contact and control over the nervous system. An apparent loss of senses is the dreamlike journey of “A Tragic Age – Your Fifteen Minutes Are Up,” with distant echoes of intergalactic wars, explosions, laser beams, and wails of bio-mechanical sirens. The sound of our android heart is pierced by alien voices that seem to argue vigorously amongst themselves, and an obsessive and unsettling mantra recited by a computerized amazon is bewildering in “Fade’N’Die,” with the progressive psycho-physical drift sublimated in the finale “3-20-88.” The reissue by Germany's Die Stadt (2002) that I have in my hands includes the bonus track “Unknown Quantity,” an unreleased live performance from 1991, where in just over eleven minutes, Burke and his associates synthesize the entire output of the band into an introspective journey on the boundaries of reality. The only flaw of this fantastic re-edition is the change of the original artwork, including the cover.

In this first long-distance work, Burke elevates technology applied to music to an art form, with a massive use of synthesizers and computers (and laptops did not yet exist), without disdaining the incursion of real instruments or bizarre samples of symphonic orchestras… here, the journey of Illusion Of Safety has just begun.