After a painfully long but beautifully reflective time hiding, thinking and writing hard, I have decided to take a huge step closer to you all this year and for the rest of my life.

This will come, initially, in the form of a bi-weekly video blog which will give you a deep insight into the making of the next IAMX album and any other creative fucked-up nonsense I get up to.

My music, video making, painting, photography, sexual activity, will be on display.

There are some radical changes ahead and, because of your long lasting perverse support I think you should become a part of it. It’s about fucking time and it’s only fair.

Stay alert and connected here, stuff is coming.

All my lovin’

Chris

The video blog will start some day next week and will be posted on the IAMX youtube channel and, accompanied with written words, here.

So I started writing again. After the viruses and epiphanies of the last year I decided to take some long overdue time off to reflect and be calm. Get over the normal adrenalin-psycho-comedown of touring and get over the abnormal, seemingly endless sickness that hit me the day after the last IAMX show in Prague. Hence my temporary move to California, the sunshine state.

With the dark thoughts filed away by the weather, being in America has already filled me with so much input. The city of ‘can do’ brings, once again, the burning urge to be musical.

I bet you never thought LA would refuel this pale, anxious European.

But now I got me some ‘Out Of The Closet’ cowboy boots and a hat and I feel like a pioneer with a world of naive golden possibilities ahead of me. I even want to shoot a gun. Is that wrong?

I am haunted by deserts and smog, hummingbirds and helicopters.

Sensory overload = IAMX5 time

Cx

You can download all LA in Grey pictures in full quality and size for free or a price of your choice at iamx.eu/special.html.

All pictures have been taken by Chris during his stay in LA over the winter months. Every week, seven new pics will be posted here.

This week I arrived in LA. To spend the winter where the sun shines. To continue work with IAMX and its comrades and to catch up on the America that I have had a morbid fascination with for years.  Don*t be surprised to catch me out  jogging in the Hollywood Hills, my European red wine soaked teeth bleached white and a cynical schmoozing list in hand. This post, together with an amateur-weekly-photo-documentary attempt (after my accent elimination class this afternoon I will upload the pictures), mark the celebration of a temporary relocation to the glorious shiny plastic land and city of angels.

The following unedited collection of thoughts has been sitting on my desktop for months. Staring me out every free pre-show moment I had.

I didn*t post it as I reclaimed my personal life somewhere along the road this year. The urge to refine and make right bugs me but time is short and no longer can I carry their scrambled weight.

Happy holidays my friends (I mean it).

EARLY SUMMER

…a moment I had on stage. Enlightened manic hedonism or plain old breakdown?

Sill resonating. In a melting pot of hard drink, out-of-proportion audience feedback and the accumulation of years of touring exhaustion. Spitting and swearing and cackling, a moment similar to the ´nasty crucifix into little Linda Blairs vagina´ scene in The Exorcist.

I could have died in that moment, la XL petite mort. Found with a gargoylian stretched smile of ecstasy on my face. Ready to go to the non-place of all non-places. Move into the event horizon of our two-dimensional holographic universe. Break apart into a trillion particles and join with the swirling soup of forever. Found content with a gob full of lipstick, smashed-up microphone in one hand and a fan-made hobo crown of feathers in the other. Threatening man-made puerile eternity and hell fire whimpering behind me. Ready for Horatio Caine to inspect my confused but intriguing corpse.

The jittery process was cathartic. It seems these epiphanies appear approximately every five years or so. The metamorphosis of the old fighting ways. Ideologies giving way to compromises. Stress to smiles. Clarity to chaos.

And riding the crest of this odd energy wave, at the risk of finding out too much to bare, I decided to open up and read some of your past comments in the IAMX weblog section.

Breathe….I was overwhelmed by the warm genuine concern, really good writing and depth of analysis.

I decided to trust that your opinions are worth something. I was right.

Your comments  touched me. They were comforting and thoughtful. I felt loved, understood and not alone on this merry-go-round.

Thank you all with the utmost sincerity. Don*T stop.

MID SUMMER

…humour collapse…

..on our way to our conscious void we have options. Options to roll around in the reality of now, like pigs in a nonsense swill, or be crippled by fear.

Revere and glorify the absurd!

I read *On the heights of despair* by the philosopher Cioran. Asking for trouble. Edgy gives me the urge to jump over. Open the door of the speeding car. Self inflicted creative provocation.

His vile view of life was, at first, enough to push any normal person in a moment of weakness into the abyss. Suicidal words.

The blackness and oblivion. So much revulsion, so little hope.

I read on through the dark and detected irony. Playfulness. A glimmer of positivity. Ending the book I was laughing and sobbing along with the sadistic author. Stronger than when I went in. Cleanse by going there.

Books difficult to read often lead one to better ways of looking at life. Despair with a knowing wink.

I am half agonized romantic and half hand to mouth pragmatist. My mum and my dad gave me both respectively.

Our family was foreign in a dirty industrial Northern English town still shaking off the stench of racism. My grandad was black. They had to be numb and we kept ourselves to ourselves. My mum lived with neverending physical pain and dad worked like a dog. I adore them for keeping it together over the heavy years.

I learned early how to access great self defensive blankness. Get on with things. Natural curiosity kept me looking for knowledge rather than stone fights with the local kids. I was desperate to be educated.

My discomfort comes from agreeing with Cioran on many points. How life is easier for the closed minded and the mediocre. More dumbly pleasurable for the idiots and bigots. How often people with fizzing intellectual anxiety and education end up suffering in the attempt to change the world and themselves. How humans need to be brought to the limit of experience in order to appreciate being alive.

Only in the absurd can one express and flow and enjoy pointlessness. And immersion in random absurdity can be a perfect remedy to thinking too much. It leads to art and science. It leads to madness and inspiration. It leads to fun.

We want to see others making fools of themselves or standing for something. We want to see them paying the price. Centuries ago the witches, the heretics.. how it must have been to be hung, drawn and quartered for mixing up a few herbs or words, or eyeing up the wrong nun. How the pathetic tiny movements of everyday life were blown up into extraordinarily meaningful compasses of morality.

Should I be thankful to live a life of subtleties and relative physical comfort? Or like the angry philosopher should I face the true agony of existence by experiencing the most mental and physical pain possible?

Even out-of-control humans don’t have the stomach for everyday barbarism. Is barbarism better than hamster-wheel-supermarket slavery? Probably not.

Civilisations destroy themselves through boredom but a thousand years of barbaric violence, torture, invasion and oppression is a little more stressful than a few neighbourhood disagreements over grass borders and teenage parties.

Hotel room 4am post TV news war propaganda….

Holy crap! If I see or hear another fucking *Go beyond borders* slogan I will personally go to America and piss on

Demi Moore.

LATE SUMMER

Distraction-destruction. Disintegrating head space. Without this the artist will rot and the art will die. Noise noise noise. Creative murder.

I want to super-glue my eyes shut.  Tired of the no-sleep. The whole world burns.  Post show night bus annoyed..write to check if I am still able to entertain myself….hence still alive. Doing it for you, you public subconscious multiplicity mind virus you.

The more I  write, the more I doubt,doubt,doubt,doubt,doubt.  But you know that and you know what-  the thousands of greedy eyes are begging me. The appetite must be satisfied.

The point? Art, violence, indiscriminate fucking? Experience, amusement, buying stuff?

The point of knowing the point? We know the point we have no point.

Start somewhere and talk about people that matter.  Mix  George Carlin, Picasso and Shakespeare. Mash up the untouchable visual literature of Bergman with the saucy theatre of Greenaway. Comedy, humanity, arrogance. Big balls- hyper-awareness . Attractive mental deformity.  See what the atheist comic does with the nasty old master and then throw them into the cosmos on a ship of Picasso Guernica and into a thick sauce of murky Viking existential grime.

REACTING TO COMMENT

I am so fucking happy right now. But I don*t have perspective. A byproduct of making you *sad* is my world being bearable. I am and you too are pathetic me-creatures, because living is survival.  The eloquence of art reveals all truth without spelling it out. Whatever truth means. Selfish cunt creation from nothing. Quantum fluctuations producing mini universes of experience and consciousness.

I admit to you I am only interested in mutants. I don’t have the lust to hear procreational centric stories of beautiful babies and of fat bank accounts. Nice people doing nice things in a nice glossy world of picket fence niceness.

I am not anti-new-human per se. Like the rest, I am a sucker for a puffy wrinkled baby face, a tiny grabbing hand and begging eyes.

All  tragedies of conservative limit can suck on the cock of mediocrity forever while the 20 percent evolve. Intellect over a million years will prevail.

The next evolutionary step. The mind over THE MUSCLE. The power of proof.

…wallowing in the concept of the holographic . Everything linked, intertwined. A division of the whole and perfectly responsive chunk of random infinity. I twist that quantum particle here and its partner on the other side of the cosmos will pulse in instantaneous sympathy. How deep the concept goes. How calming.

Oh to melt into that eternal space of inanimate matter and stardust. Every quark remembers me.

I can love under these conditions – without the threat of rejection. Cosmological rejection.

entropy. energy transformed.. …let’s have a little humility when it comes to infinity

We fight against the thrust of it. Idiots.

At what point does one commit to happiness? A yes rather than a no

10 HUMILIATE SUBJECT

20 ATTACK SUBJECT

30 FEEL BETTER WHEN SUBJECT IS BROKEN

40 GOTO 10

I was big for my age as a 12 year old. Developed early. No one touched me apart from a small gang of the usual thugs that gather around your bike and poke into your life – 4 nobodies  that  will always choose the violent way. We are built to abuse or use .. bullies attack and it is a basic goto program that will repeat in the backwaters of their underdeveloped synapses.

How civlisations dissolve under lethargy. It killed the Greeks, glutany killed the Romans and unlimited opportunity will kill us. Brains and bellies expanding with input overload like big red giant suns.

Choice frying our skulls.

Google will commit genocide in the end.

Bratislava its been too long. I love you. I love my tribe. Let’s do some things to mark our togetherness.

Let’s gather and stroke each other like a Crystal cove commune.

AUTUMN

It*s rancid that most music says nothing. Insipid baby babble.

Ignorant, repetitive regurgitations. How poetical and moving popular culture could be. How freeing for the mind. Therapeutic.

I repeat my shame of being a musician.

All trapped in loops of financial chaos and media competition. Self serving 15 minute fame gods.

Trying to be aloof when we should be humble. Communicate and produce quality. How can you give reality and be useful when your priority is fame? It makes me reactionary. It makes me want to be a carpenter.

Why is a musician now just a half arsed semi talented middle class medium passioned media savvy looking for an easy ride. What the fuck is a career? why are we afraid to get raw. To be uncool and ridiculous. Fragile without whining. Funny without sarcasm.

Where are the emotional risks? Where are the hate figures?

Where are the ugly normal fascinating faces.

Why do girls follow any spotty fucker that picks up a guitar?

Why are pop stars covered in a layer of disgusting ignorance and airbrushing.

All the tricks and the make-overs. All the bloated pimp-my-ride-egos with peanut brains and piccolo dicks.

All the taudry inter-famous incestuous fake collaborations

All the puke worthy  bronzed up power people with their blank eyes and

banal lives.

Alas, I say, fuck them all. Let them bubble and boil in the stew of their borders and mediocrity. Of their unpassion. Of their half a bottle of white wine with chicken in the evening and the convenience frozen fish fingers for the kids.

A gut churning picture of demonic blackness. The world of satanic static superficial melodrama.

The turns of phrases that burgeon over silver wedding years to become a hateful cage.

on and on the droning tourbus drones. All is not calm or bright.

Alas, you say,  fuck you, grow up and get over yourself Mr Misery.

We are deeply saddened to announce that our only Polish show of the Into Asylum tour, in Krakow, has been cancelled.
The majority of promoters we work with are humble, professional, respectful and understanding of our struggle to survive as an independent band in a dirty business.
Some just don’t give a fuck about the artists they work with. This unfortunately is the case for the agent/promoter in Krakow.
Every band that plays live makes a contract with the promoter. This is a normal legal bond to make sure the band get paid and receive the basic requirements needed for life on the road.
The show has been unwillingly cancelled due to the promoter in Krakow breaking that (already signed) contract with us and now pushing us into an inevitable court case.
We try our hardest to get to all our fans. We love you and we need your support so it is painful to announce this.
Go, get your money back and complain.

With a heavy heart,

Chris

I would like to personally introduce the IAMX Noise Cabinet. I have spent
the last two weeks remixing some of the most naturally remixable IAMX songs
and I feel now, due to the insomniac programming overworked psychosis I have
fallen into, that they deserve to be heard.
It is going to be rough but something, along with other grand world
conquering plans, I am planning to spend more time with in the future.
Come and be a witness if you are interested.

I love you all.

Chris

Go here for details about the show.

Today we release Volatile Times.
I want you all to know that I am very excited and, as always, feeling somewhat sick in the knowledge that a piece of me is going out into the world to be analysed, criticised and loved.
But overall I am proud of the record despite my previous psychotic blog.

And it is sad that music these days is instantly downloadable. This will make it very difficult for us to survive. We know that. You know that. Blah blah blah.
There are always parasites that think they deserve art for free and live off other peoples energy. And I refer to the person that uploaded the album before the release. I am used to this. Ignorance does not surprise me anymore.
But I trust YOU my friends. I consider you close to my heart. That you have supported this project so intensely gives me goose pimples every time I think about it and when we receive messages like this one below I remember that I do have faith in people.

On 13 March 2011 09:14, Rowan R.  wrote:

Hi
I have guiltily downloaded the album early and already.
I don’t want to pay postage or hurt the environment with my consumption…

Can I make an honest payment by other means as I would have bought the album. If you give me bank details I will send 12 Euro today.

Fantastic work, really fantastic.

Kindest regards  Rowan

A small note to our fans in UK, US and Canada.
We are trying very hard to get a solid release in your territories and also to set up some shows. It seems harder than ever to make it happen on our indie budget. The only real way to secure this in the future is for you to buy the record. We just cannot afford it and nobody with big pockets seems to be interested in challenging music anymore. That is the reality of the situation.
We will update you as soon as there is news.

So, whiskey raised and downed,  lets all do what we can to keep the spirit alive.

Much love and respect.

chrisx

You can purchase the album at Boutique IAMX
or download the album with lyrics and artwork at the IAMX website.