Semiotek is a recording and performance collective whose efforts focus on the creation of electronic digital music, imagery and spectacle which are the reflections on and expressions of an intimate aural relationship with everyday existence articulated to the mass mediating presence of current technologies.
Everything we hear, from the most mundane noises of everyday existence to the highly constructed or aleatory soundscapes of post-contemporary experimental music can be understood as aural signs and messages pregnant with potential meaning, often cryptic communications which bear witness to the world we live in, informing us and inscribing our subjective presence into a matrix of sonic sensitivities which, for all intent and purpose, never cease to surround and condition the very fabric of our being.
“The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.”
Marshall McLuhan”
The word semiotek is a hybrid construction, much like what it stands for, derived in part from the greek semeion,meaning sign, and the suffix tekwhich refers to the intense technological imperative which gives rises to these musical acts.
Imagined in the late 1990s by Pierre Ouellet and Jim MacDonald, the Semiotek project has sought to collapse innovative and interesting musical ideas, grooves and performances into discourses and commentaries on issues of social and existential relevance, such as the politics and practices of institutional power (B-Rave the New World) the limits of subjectivity (Dream-Less) and the ethical obligations and constraints of communal existence (Time is the Machine).
“Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.” Jean Baufrillard
It is easy, and unfortunately most often the norm, to reject any aspiration towards complexity or ambiguity in popular music in favor of the well- worn tropes of repetition and redundancy, both at the level of the ideas expressed and of the material deployed. In this sense, therefore, popular music has become the practice of copying and duplicating the “already popular” in the hopes of endlessly gratifying corporate greed and individual narcissism while supporting an economic and social structure which, in the end, can only be considered obscene, in the most debased sense of the term.
Such an attitude is grounded, primarily, we believe, in a fundamental hatred for human nature itself, an attitude which finds expression in the violent desire to construct the listening other, for whom all musical expression ultimately exists, into a docile and obedient partner, stripped of all that would make her unique, privileged and worthy of consideration and respect, a process, effectively aimed at silencing our most basic individual aspirations to autonomy, self-expression and the possibility of emancipatory differences.
Rather than conceive of those who will hear us in such a manner, we propose that the musical act is truly a moment of endless communion through which the intangible and ineffable come into being in the intimate relation which appears through the work of incantation and evocation, a summoning of elective community forever destined to quietly dissolve as the last sounds fades into silence.
In this sense, we trust that those who listen to our efforts will be rewarded by the almost endless possibilities of interpretation that the music seeks to offer while, at the same time, enjoying the immediacy of our encounter and the community which emerges from this celebration of life, a moment which enjoins us all to truly hear the world we live as a reflection not only of who we are and what we have been, but as the expression of what we might still dream of becoming.
If there is, in the final analysis, any avowed intent or purpose to our music, it is that you, the listener, will experience our efforts as these have transformed our own relation to the world, opening once more our ears, our hearts and our minds to the always magical rhythms which constitute the very fabric of our common existence.
