Non-representation
The phenomenon of danger music is complex but is, in the main, divided into two positions. One is conceptual, which has been represented in the study by Fluxus, and one which refuses to exist on any other plane than the “here and now”, like the Italian Futurists or Hanatarash. My experience indicates that Danger Music is best understood when non-representative is used as a key term.
Sensed truth
In a “post-truth” world, an infinite number of truths exist on one and the same phenomenon side by side. In such an environment there are not only fertile conditions for authoritarian ideologies, but also for creating alternatives to them. When the idea about “the Truth” is destabilised, this opens up for new gateways to reality. Considering the challenges which late capitalism and the climate crisis have brought us, it is difficult to see what one owes to “The Truth” or “Reality”, but it is on the contrary easy to think – what do we have to lose? Numbed by the noise of information, it is possible to think: Rather than trying to establish truths from thought and unconnected fragments with a continiously shorter lifespan, the subject’s bodily and sensory experiences are a more stable and trustworthy source and truth.
Are we then at the stage when the perceptions of music, drugs, dance, art, danger, violence, sex and love are not a flight away from “truth” but rather a way to approach them – some of the few gateways to something true that we have available to us? Truths that you feel you have experienced loyalty towards, but which do not permit themselves to be defined as interpretative truths, and consequently do not allow themselves to be corrupted in the traitorous waters of the spirit of the age.
The sound that Honningbarna makes – that we produce a sound that hits you physically like a blow to the chest and stomach of musicians and the audience alike (like in club music), that it is tight, loud, with sing-along choruses, a quick tempo, simple and effective riffs so the audience can come up onto the stage and take part in playing (and we can be out on the floor with them), that it is mixed with noise and unexpected sound processing – the totality involves musical tricks of the trade which together create a certain aesthetic sensibility. We are musicians who are continually looking for optimal solutions. Nonetheless, during concerts the core of the Honningbarna concept is the practical use value that the various musical moves have and the chaos that they point towards is our project. For us, these musical elements are not the end point of an aesthetic project. Rather, the opposite is true – they are the beginning – music which is created to prompt a particular practice. As a result, it is not first and foremost the music itself which is on my heart when I write – it is the chaos that is leads to. And, paradoxically enough, the rare sensation of stillness or zen right in the middle of it all, which can come to me like a gift or, as Grant Kester puts it, a somatic epiphany (Kester, 2013, p. 12).
When it is the practices which play out at the venue that are the core of the project, our role as musicians comes to be first and foremost as “fire starters”. But we do not leave the audience in flames – we burn together with them. Where we start processes of chaos, risk or danger, everyone at the venue is together in them, and I am convinced that the fans know this. We are not there to present a show; we are there to contribute to a kind of community which seeks an alternative way of being together – a feeling of danger, madness, fun and unpredictability, but also a sense of belonging in an alienating and fragmented world, as well as camaraderie and bodily felt and shared truths. We play for what music does, not what it is.
To sing the love of danger
Danger and art can share many qualities. Both danger and the nature of art involve being unpredictable, physical, basal, romantic, disturbing, and cause us to “feel alive” – even transdimensional, and sources of “out of body” experiences. Both can provide access to something deeply human – another kind of primal state than the one that logic offers. Experiences with music and danger have affected me profoundly, and not just in terms of sewed stitches and broken bones. That which is bodily and sensory has create moments of clarity and truth in my, at times, confusing and uninterpretable mosaic of an existence. The absolute sense of presence that Danger Music has produced takes one past the paralysing limits of reason and provides access to truths outside the range of discourse.
It might perhaps seem stupid to consciously act in spite of, or with a lack of, reason. Usually, it is indeed stupid. Nonetheless, I have on several occasions in the course of both this investigation and my own experiences with Honningbarna’s Voldelig Lyd tour had difficulties not throwing myself into the first point of the Furutist manifesto:
We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
