During the course of researching The Process Church of the Final Judgement I was naturally reminded of the “other” Process: the collective founded by Ogre, Genesis P. Orridge and others. Explaining the Process is sort of difficult, but Wikipedia explains it thusly:

The Process is an art and philosophy collective formed in the early 1990s. The idea was initially birthed at the same time as, and with a subset of the same people from, the studio work for the Skinny Puppy album The Process, though the direct interrelation ends there. Some of the early contributors included Nivek Ogre, Genesis P-Orridge, William Morrison, and Loki der Quaeler.

I was a member of the Process mailing list, drawn in by the Skinny Puppy connection, starting sometime in 1996 1997, but I was pretty much only a lurker (I don’t remember ever contributing). It was an early exposure to fringe thinking (this was before I’d stumbled across Disinfo), and I loved it even though I probably didn’t understand half of what the conversations were about. Looking back now, I guess it was a pretty big influence on me.

Messages still come across the wire every once in a while, mostly “hey does anyone still read this list?” messages. I actually managed to spark some life into it a couple years ago, indirectly with this post that got picked up by Disinfo. Members saw the Disinfo post and weren’t happy with being called a cult or the claim that it was started by Ogre and GPO. Oops.

Also, syncroniciously, two active contributors to the list, JFitz and Phil Farber, were online acquaintances of Danny Chaoflux around the same time he was being introduced to occulty memes.

Oh, someone recently started a web forum called The Process Underground.

More info:

The Process web site (Perpetually under construction…)

A partial reassembly of the original site.

Phil Farber interviews with Ogre and Genesis P. Orridge.

this being 5/23 it seemed like a good day to kick back and listen to some discordian music (there’s plenty of catch-all discordian links here if you’ve yet to encounter discordian thought. or not thought. or thought that is both not & not not at the same time.)

So Madghoul’s contributions are in purple. Another friend(Lefty, aka ‘daughter of chaos’)’s comments are in salmon. (This turned out to be a bit more complex than I originally thought and I had to call in back-up)

l: so what is discordian music
l: whats one good example

w: I don’t know – anything that’s pro-discordia – like the KLF or Mr. Bungle
w: eris inspired stuff

l: skinny puppy?
l: atari teenage riot?
l: butthole surfers?
w: yeah they’re all good ones

m:What do think about throwing Skinny Puppy into the mix? They have that hard techo-industrial edge that seems Erisian inspired. I’ll leave that one up to you.

w: I’d say king missle & tism.. crash worship

l: tism for sure
l: what about uuhhh
l: you know who tism sounds like to me is ……
l: dread zepplin

What I found interesting is the first band both M & L thought of: Skinny Puppy.. Cevin Key and Nivek Ogre’s upcoming album “The Greater Wrong of the Right” has the underground salivating.

KLF is only the tip of a discordian juggernaut that most recently has manifested as Blacksmoke, whose hard industrial sounds are a far cry from classics like “Doctorin’ the Tardis” and “3 A.M. Eternal.” As “The K Foundation” these timelords published The Manual on how to get a number one hit in England, which, although dated, makes for an interesting read. Along with Negativland, they pushed at the edges of copyright law. They also burned a million quid, and filmed it.

Alternating between rock, goth, and semi-industrial, the discordian inspired band Tapping the Vein presents a mythical epic that crawls through the skin in a subtle yet tranquilizing way, before ripping you to a new reality.

Jack Off Jill, though now disbanded and often thought of as nothing more than angry chick rock, presented a meddley of Erisian, screw-the-norm, music with their cd Clear Hearts Grey Flowers, turning anger into flippant protestation against hierarchical society and a stagnant reality in true discordian fashion.

Going back a bit now, there’s the very strange sounds of Genesis P-orridge & Psychic TV, the discordian element coming through most clearly in works like “Towards Thee Infinite Beat” or the work he’s done with the industrial-tribal act Pigface. Another seriously tribal experience, certainly the most incredible concert I’ve personally attended, is Crash Worship.

Also check out the discordian hip-hop stylings of Noah 23 and the other releases out of plaguelanguage (and don’t miss the ginsberg sample in his track Magnesium Viper)

(As for me, I intend to spend the day downloading and listening to the 23 tracks of Latent Chaos , unless someone has another musical suggestion..)