Exotic Animal Petting Zoo

You stand before a force cataclysmic, devastating, and resistant to all modes of being and reflection, challenging the very sovereignty of the Self…yet it is beautiful and inspiring, leaving only the imagination and the infinite possibility of alterity. It is the music of Exotic Animal Petting Zoo.

Exotic Animal Petting Zoo: Music of Alterity

That rock died yesterday, since '69 or'77, '80, or '94 – and rock should still wander toward the meaning of its death, recollecting the pieces, giving "birth" to the tepid hybrid genres of the late 20th/early 21st century, playing with exhausted remnants – or that it has always lived knowing itself to be dying; that rock died one day, within history, or that it fed on its own agony, on the violent way, with pure, raw energy, it defied the carefully constructed illusions of permanence, freeing otherness from oppressive social taboos, which is its past, its concern, its death and source; that beyond the death, the dying nature, of rock, perhaps because of it, this music still has a future, entirely still to come – all of these are unanswerable questions. Unanswerable for a bloated genre, dragging itself forward, dressed in enumerable hyper-real fashions, inept to enact social change through threatening originality, rebellion, and angst that rejected imposed moral codes, creeds, and commandments. However, it is by these questions, static at the heart of this desert, the curse of these sands, the ever-widening wasteland, that the music of Exotic Animal Petting Zoo can make us tremble.

Philosophy debated the end of art and the end of history, and now Exotic Animal Petting Zoo debates, and then enacts the end of rock, the end of a genre, modernity's genre, expressed by a few guitars, vocals, drums, bass, etc. It is not the end as in the end of god, but a curve, a disappearance of foundations, stability, and form, an unknown birth. Before this curve of vertigo, all vision lies mundane, creatively barren, from a generation of artists paralyzed by the anxiety of influence, the experience of the Uncanny, leaving rock to become a real that is retouched and refurbished, a "hallucinatory resemblance" of itself. Within rock, there is an ideal corresponding to its every aspect, more real than real, boundaries of hyper-reality erased – music erased by stereophonic perfection. Is there any alternative to the paralysis of generic perfection and infinite repetition? Perhaps.

"Seeds," the first track from the debut album "I Have Made My Bed In Darkness," (just as easily titled "In Il y a, I've made my bed") is a title of dissemination, of germination, semen, an attempt of giving life anew, an offering, a sacrifice, to an alternative, rather than to the masses demanding paralysis, the hyper-real. The first screams heard are a Levinasian "Here I am," a declaration of Otherness, desiring excendance from a "dwelling" of "routine behavior," beginning the start of an event, altering "the proper form it should be." In the dwelling, there is only a "fixation on that dissatisfaction," an anxiety concerning influences and the archetypical framing of genre. The Exotic Animal Petting Zoo command, "Live our Other form," these seeds "breed your Other form," a promise to escape the "fixation on that dissatisfaction." It is the welcoming to a new form, desiring transcendence; "the form it should be," a form that exceeds the frame placed upon it – in this Il y a, this darkened dwelling, all senses, and predispositions, shatter, foretelling a blooming of the Sublime.

Exotic Animal Petting Zoo considers their influences, ranging from Dillinger to the Pumpkins, and, more than half way into "Hairdresser," shout, "We'll call you it," referring to all whose "fat pockets" keep their "money warm from the clammy hands" of the whored, those that are "dumb enough to buy it," duped, lining up for the show. It is a "calling out" of the commercialization and manipulation of everything beautiful, freedom of thought and being, lost by the mind-forged manacles placed by a dead god and music, desecrated by a political economy of exploitation, public opinion management, and the bands, once influences, now useless over-hyped commodities, mere objects. In the track "Moonshoes," the message turns into an angry plead, "Just stop it's all the same!" However, by "Richard Dean Anderson" Exotic Animal Petting Zoo wants the listener to now "Step inside; [after all] you've come so far." The listener will soon step into the deconstructed, strangled opening riff of "Translations," until there is a rebuilding, a new blossoming.

The track "Arendering" is the abstract representation of the mathematical Sublime, the representation of the Absolute Other. The song starts as a small wave, half way around the world, slowly building into its crescendo, picking up speed, until it bursts forth with insurmountable energy, waves now particles. There is an eye of the storm, a wall of clouds parted, and a glimpse of beauty. However, the witnessed beauty is not for appropriation, as soon as the listener clenches on the ropes of the sails, after emerging from the abysmal storm, the waves crescendo, and collapse, creating a whirlpool, putting an end to the useless passion. It is the climatic zenith:

You stand before a force cataclysmic, devastating, and resistant to all modes of being and reflection, challenging the very sovereignty of the Self…yet it is beautiful and inspiring, leaving only the imagination and the infinite possibility of alterity. It is the music of Exotic Animal Petting Zoo.