Tobacco
Sweatbox Dynasty

To tell the truth, I don't think I've ever been able to form a precise idea of what my future would be like. No. I'm not just referring to this particular period, of course, during which everything seems blurred to me, but this has always happened: I have never seen my future. I've never been able to imagine it. And consequently, in some way, it doesn't exist, it has never existed, and it might never exist in (my) life. I have always felt, as far back as I can remember, a certain anxiety pervading inside me. I've always felt uncomfortable and consequently as if I always had to hurry. I've always felt in a hurry because I wanted time—my time—to pass as quickly as possible. So I've always been much more interested in how things would end instead of how they actually go. In the meantime, I mean. This is because I don't know how to really live my life. I don't know how to truly live my life, so I want to see how my life, how life in general ends. Just a moment. Clearly, I'm not theorizing about suicide nor pretending that some kind of apocalypse will split poor Earth in two and send us all flying into absolute space. I'm simply interested in how human life and society evolve. I'm unable to grasp the present time, but I want to know everything about the past and want to see the future.

I started mulling over all these things precisely while listening to this latest album by Tobacco (aka Thomas Fec), the solo project of the synth-psych band from Pittsburgh, Black Moth Super Rainbow. 'Sweatbox Dynasty' (out via Ghostly International last August) has content I would dare to define as somewhat grotesque. Imagine being glued, tied, and somehow gagged on your living room couch watching a David Cronenberg film. Intersections of cyber technology and hallucinated visions and human fervor and passions. Objects from a cyberpunk literature setting. Philip K. Dick but even better K. W. Jeter, James Graham Ballard. What did all these authors write about? Did they speak of future time or what is (was) the present time? Does it make any difference?

When I was a child, my father was a metalworker and worked on numerically controlled machines in a large aeronautics factory. Civil, of course. My only real big dream was to grow up and work with him. I slept every night with a hammer, a pair of pliers, a screwdriver, working tools, under my pillow. However, time passed, and things changed, and now that I'm over thirty (thirty-two), I've never realized what my dream was: building airplanes together with my father. After all, what better system of looking towards the future could I have found?

I have never believed I could become an engineer or even an astronaut, but I always thought that I could and would want to 'build', build things with my hands - literally - build the future with my very own hands. But I failed.

At this point, considering myself incapable of having an active and concrete role as a builder, I tried to do my best by actively engaging within our society and with others, but it seems that I'm not particularly good at that either. The feeling of failure must have created what is an invisible wall between me and others and prevents me from having somewhat ordinary or truly meaningful relationships. I started to think of myself as invisible and then as simply different. I thought I was Jesus. Not made to live my life like others and among others but according to moral and ethical rules I have predetermined for myself and which will never let me lead a serene life. And even though this makes me suffer, I feel this is my destiny. The path I must pursue. I don't know. Somehow this makes me feel 'vainglorious' and at the same time has raised delusions of grandeur within me.

I build infinite worlds inside my head, where I'm not exactly a god, but a creator in all respects, someone who shapes things with their own hands and according to their own choices, someone who chooses how things should be. I've also done some experimenting. I bought an aquarium, built my own personal aquarium, and experimented with the fish that began to inhabit it to see how I should and could operate to create a good environment, a harmonious and functioning ecosystem.

I failed again. Big fish eat small fish. And when that didn’t happen, they nevertheless bit each other. They appeared then deformed, with their fins mutilated, and when one of them procreated, then all these little fish were immediately eaten by the others. All these tiny fish, as small as sperm drops, were swallowed in a single gulp by these bigger and monstrously deformed fish. The water began to stagnate, and everything started to smell incredibly foul. I tried in every way to remedy it, without success, so one day, having no other option, I decided to put an end to this horror. I scooped the fish from the aquarium with a net, went to the bathroom, and let them fall into the toilet. I flushed. The fish began to whirl faster and faster in the water until they disappeared. When the storm was over, the toilet was finally clean. I felt clean, if only for a moment, because I felt I no longer had any responsibilities. But my soul was damned forever.

How else could I have told you about this album? Thomas Fec has now achieved concrete fame even with his solo project, which I don't find any less interesting than Black Moth Super Rainbow, which, on the contrary, many times you can't exactly tell what direction they want to take, getting lost behind too vague experimentation and sonorities.

Preceded by the single 'Gods In Heat', released last May, the album is a complex of psychedlic and hallucinogenic electronics and experimentalism, drum breaks and overlays, sound superstructures mixed with the concrete use of synthesizers and vintage effects that at times refer to a certain tradition of late seventies and early eighties wave electronic music. I thought, for example, of Nation 12. But the content is certainly darker in this case. Surely the lyrics are not the central content of the album, they matter little in this case, but Tobacco is nonetheless skilled at conveying his feelings and letting you enter this horrific dimension and this empty and noisy space where you alone will have to face life and what is the present time without losing sight of the way to the future. Possibly, then, without putting away working tools, don't forget to always stay on guard. Maybe sleep with one eye open. You wouldn't want to miss even a single moment of your existence.