---

Somasomatica is the formal term used to designate the style and aesthetic of Chemical Wedding. Soma/Somatic refers to body - that unruly collocation of nerve endings, affects, and percepts that is generally, in the West, opposed to the mind (psyche). Soma also connotes a psychoactive ceremonial intoxicant of some significance to both ancient Indo-Vedic cultures and Aldous Huxley alike.

(To paraphrase Barnett Newman) Somasomatica if properly experienced would mean the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism. That's shooting a bit high for repetitive rock music, though. What is clear, however, is that in an age where the modes of global capital increasingly saturate and reify every dimension of both symbolic and imaginary life, its nice that the cacophonic operation of sound itself might disrupt the regulative structures and alienating communicational patterns that anchor us to the normal, the normative and the normalizing. Just ask Dock Ellis. He'll tell you that...

...Somasomatica is dissensus and displacement through somatic warp, angling on the nerves and body through wave-attack of sound. Somasomatica entails spending hours in front of a smoking amp to get a white wall of guitar howl to shimmer correctly, like a rippling veil of electricity. It means firing overdriven fretless bass through 18 inch speakers so air moves with oceanic gesture. Above all, it means relentless polyrhythmic percussive furioso after furioso after furioso. Don't eat the daisies.