ST 37’s “Ballardesque”: A Typology of Disaster
“I’ve always thought of the whole of life as a kind of disaster area.”
Charles Ransom in The Drought
INTRO: The last time I saw ST 37 was in Tampa, Florida in 2023. They played in a pavilion constructed from assorted pieces of chromium and enameled metal—the radiator grilles of cars, reflectors of electric heaters, radio cabinets and so on—fitted together with remarkable ingenuity to form what appeared at a distance to be a bejewelled temple.
That tour they workshopped the songs you hear on this album. Even in the embryonic form I heard that night, there was no mistaking the blistering psychedelic wall-of-sound DNA that permeates ST 37’s work. A sound that is a derangement of the senses and a roar of the alien and alienated fueled by a brutal Texas sun.
Ballardesque feels to me like a work of amplified grief. A rage against the modernist myth of the future.
Mid-20th century science fiction sounded a chord of optimism about the future. Humans traveled to the stars and cracked the mysteries of immortality. It reflected the growing numbers embracing technology as their new faith. The perfectibility of machines and medicine supplanted the perfectibility of man as their holy aspiration.
J.G. Ballard isn’t falling for that bullshit, and neither is ST 37.
Ballard learned about the promises of technology while living his formative years in a prisoner-of-war camp surrounded by the wrecked and wretched engines of cruelty conjured up by the devotees of technology and worshipers of the erotic carnage it spreads.
There, he witnessed the mendacity of the modernist myth of the future. His early novels challenged the rosy pictures of the future by charting global cataclysms of worldwide drought, of a drowning world, of world-ending cyclonic winds. His stories raise the specters of overcrowding, technological collapse, the human experience deadened by media saturation. And weaving in it all together are the neon-colored filaments of art, of poetry, of dada.
Just as Ballard’s short story “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race” is a reimagining of Alfred Jarry’s “The Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race,” ST 37’s Ballardesque is a reimagining of the themes cultivated by Ballard. Ballard draws on the surreal works of the past to inform his work, just as ST draws on the hallucinatory qualities of Ballard to inform their art. ST-37 and Ballard share a love of the surreal. (A quick tour through the cover art of ST works on Bandcamp provides ample delirious evidence.)
Ballard exposed this modernist myth of the future with unflinching hyperlucidity and ST channels the same critique with hallucinatory clarity.
THE DROUGHT: This is my favorite song on the album and the one in heaviest rotation. It is not the job of science fiction writers to predict the future. Science fiction is a lens to better perceive the present. That said, Ballard’s apocalypse novels, like The Drought, are eerily prescient.
“The Drought” opens with an ST-esque wall-of-noise and concludes with a blunt assessment. There’s no more water left. Ballard had to conjure up an extraordinary, nearly magical reason for lack of water. The current reality is much more prosaic. We are driven by the most suicidal of our species and part of ST’s amplified grief stems from the desire to resist this particular death drive.
“The Drought” kicks off with a signature Scott Telles bass line. When the record is finally written on the gargantuan output of ST 37 the bass line that runs through all the work will be the leading chapter.
Crutcher’s guitar bleeds in like an intrusion from another dimension, then Cameron’s drums kick in, followed by the metal scratch of Baker’s guitar, and a guitar line from Matt Turner, as articulate as the sunrise, weaves it all together. When Bechtol’s dimension-warping synth kicks in your warp and weft is now completely ST 37, sunbaked for the 21st century.
The wall-of sound effect relies completely on the foundation of Lisa Cameron’s masterful work, providing stunning depth and texture to each song.
SINGING STATUES: Androids snoozing on a still summer porch, peacefully dreaming amidst the ambient electric barnyard, lost in a million memories. The dream grows, culminating in waves of horns washing over the idyllic blasted landscape. The conceit of sonic sculptures is an unforgettable concept. Sound captured in a physical, tangible structure. Statues that sing. I imagine an immense hill country garden, a little overgrown and labyrinthine, strewn with the sonic statues manifesting the mythology built by ST 37 over the decades.
RUNNING WILD: This song creeps me out.
CONCENTRATION CITY & BILLENNIUM: The population of earth stood at just over 8 billion when I watched ST perform on a stage in Tampa, Florida in 2023. It stood at 5 billion when ST started playing gigs in Austin, Texas. It was around 3 billion people when Ballard wrote his stories about overpopulation.
The deep anxiety about overpopulation that saturated the latter half of the 20th century has faded away. The future to fear is now just the normal present. There are too many of us.
“Concentration City” is the ST 37 version of a 21st century big band song, an arena-rock anthem. KISS saturated in Owsley’s best.
CRASH!: The most overt tribute to Ballard as Telles recites passages from Ballard’s Crash. The drums and drone and noise soon overwhelm the sense of the words and the voice becomes another instrument in the mix. A transdimensional jam channeling Alvin Lucier.
BILLENNIUM: The mournful lament –
Our tools are old, they break
We bleed
LOVE: A PRINTOUT: In a parallel universe ST-37 wins all the awards for their haunting soundtracks. “Love:A Printout” is leaked from that alternate dimension. It is a soundtrack to a haunted life. James’s looped viola and Turner’s artful noise contribute to a sonic space of barely remembered nightmare.
OUTRO: Despite the pinpoint accuracy of Ballard’s vision, his utter awareness of the pitfalls of modernity, Ballard couldn’t escape his era. He anticipated the future fatigue that saturates our lives. But the antidote to future fatigue won’t be found in his work, it is there in Ballard’s quotidian existence. As much is true for the band ST 37. Ballard lived with three children and had the support of loving parents. ST 37 demonstrates the power of the found family. In Ballard’s fiction his protagonists are often isolated and rarely turn to community or family. On this point of human contact, Ballard’s clear sight failed.
ST-37 is a band, a group, a team, a sangha. ST 37 is enmeshed in a world of fans and fandom. If you’re reading this you are probably a fan of ST 37 just as they are fans of James Graham Ballard. It’s this hidden world of alliances, friendship, and camaraderie that illuminates the path through the wreckage depicted in Ballard’s worlds.
What’s truly outstanding about all of the songs on this album is how each individual, signature sound blends together into a harmonious whole.
With Ballardesque, ST 37 not only shares Ballard’s vision of the bleak postcapitalist future enveloping us but also inadvertently provides a path through the psychopathology.
Band together and create.
Create.
Create art.
Create noise.
Create music.
Create family.
Create community.
Create friendships.
Create and then re-create.
—David Davisson
Tampa, Florida, 2024
ST 37 has always loved and been inspired by the work of seminal British SF author JG Ballard. From our very first CD way back in 1992, which contains “Ghosts of Tempera Nymphs”, a song based on his novel "The Day of Creation", all the way through to our 2018 eponymous 2xLP, which opens with "War Fever", we have always found his work to be prophetic, fascinating and unique. It was with this in mind that we embarked on the "Ballardesque" project. Yes, "Ballardesque", not Ballardian, the standard adjective. We'll let you ponder that one...!
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