Fan Club

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 2008-06

Label: Sex Tags Amfibia

Tracks A and B1 recorded live at Fan Club, Moss, Norway 2003. B2 recorded live at Blinken, Moss, Norway 1. May 2003.

This record was released as part of the exhibition "Deliberate-Surplus-Productions" by Sex Tags at Galleri F15, Moss, Norway (28. June - 24. August 2008).

Text for exhibition and about Fan Club by Michael Baers:
In Moss, a suburb outside Oslo, Tage Johan Isaksen and Idar Gunerus Engvall Halvorsen rented a decrepit night club above a print shop from a man named Coates, who owned a lot of property in the area. They turned it into a studio and performance space with the ironic name, “Fan Club”. Active musically, each played in several different hardcore bands, and for a period, together in the band Smorgasboard, depicted in a semi-fictitious band photo included in the exhibition now on view. From 2002 to spring of 2004, the pair hosted events at Fan Club for those undeterred by its (undeservedly) scurrilous reputation. Then the building was razed and a shopping mall was erected in its place.

Small towns and suburbs, whether in Norway or Nebraska, breed the same response in a certain percentage of youth. Dissatisfied with the fare in the local video store or mall, they start bands, record labels, squat abandoned buildings, and so on. With the advent of the Internet, it would appear their net cultural effect has increased. One might conceptualize their output as rhizomatic—a web or chain of cultural producers crisscrossing countries and continents, intersecting with, affecting, and influencing one another. Deleuze and Guattari, anticipating these developments thirty years ago, wrote: “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other and must be.” That is a succinct way of describing the potentiality of the Internet. Some of their efforts remain strictly amateur; some carve out a career within the narrow disciplinary field of, say, Techno music. Only a very few conceptualize this process of cross-germination that takes place outside the sanctioned arenas of high culture to the extent the conceptualization itself becomes art, which means formalizing the relationships and filiations (which slowly accretes, over time, like the rings of a tree) comprising this semiotic chain. Again, Deleuze and Guattari: “A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only lingustic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive: there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages.” This last point is important, because slangs and specialized languages are Sex Tags’ stock-and-trade. They have developed a special relationship to the musical and representational subcultures they employ: in it, but not of it; with it, but not necessarily for it. They maintain an ironic distance and at the same time can be considered part of the fan club. It’s a more difficult negotiation then would first appear to be the case. A certain species of orchid developed in symbiosis with a certain species of wasp by coming to resemble the wasp so that the unwitting insect aids the orchid’s propagation efforts by carrying its pollen about.

So what are Sex Tags—wasp or orchid? The answer might lie in the canny balance between availability and distance they maintain. Why present a room full of records and posters—merchandise that is explicitly consumable, there for the taking, even—and then bar the door, rendering these goods unavailable. Why, again, supply drills and other implements so that the door can be unbolted, the goods consumed? What does this say about the DIY ethos with which Sex Tags began, and which appears to be their strongest ideological affinity? Possibly the choice has to do with the degree to which this term has been emptied out by Ikea, Obi, Apple, and all the other purveyors of kits for creating your own identity. Sex Tags’ barred door stands like an injunction against this kind of pandering. If they evince a certain degree of coolness, it is not because they are overly concerned with striking the right pose so much as encouraging everyone else to make the necessary sacrifices, to become their own idols. Thus time and again they actively decenter their own practice, reconfigure their identity, becoming DJ’s, becoming artists, music producers, record label entrepreneurs.

What is the meaning of this ceaseless drive to collaborate, to fold production in on itself, create more multiplicities? One answer might be, to paraphrase the writer Paul Bowles, because in the desert of suburbia there are no friends, only collaborators. Or perhaps because in all the suburbia’s and small towns of the world, the more lines of flight that are created outside the readymade garbage producing apparatus others have called the “Culture Industry”. “The wisdom of the plants: even when they have roots, there is always an outside where they form a rhizome with something else—with the wind, an animal, human beings (and there is also an aspect under which animals themselves form rhizomes, as do people, etc.).”

More Pictures