Techno typing / Vispo: The Medium Is The Mess - / Book: Dionysos Speed - Rainer J. Hanshe

 

'Clack-thump-clack-thump-clack-thump' (the visualpoet types whilst listening to Techno)

Music always accompanies my typing. What I listen to may even influence what I produce.

It depends what I'm in the mood for.

Abstract early Electronic. Metal. Punk. Or...

Techno perfectly mirrors the movement of my fingers and the clack of the keys - repetition - its relentless momentum spurs me on. Lately I've only listened to Techno whilst typing; specifically, a playlist called 'Berlin Techno', which contains 315 'songs'.

Here's a recent piece...

RTomens, 2024

 

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'The terrifying, cataclysmic sound of over 8 billion mirrors cracking, splintering, shattering into pieces reverberates throughout ever locale on earth, a piercing, eerie sound whose decibels test the tympana. The central nervous system of most is scored; the psyche disordered; the eyes emaciated.'

So it begins. What, exactly? I cannot tell you, having only read the first three parts of Dionysos Speed by Rainer J. Hanshe, founder of Contra Mundum Press. Suffice to say that everything and everyone is changed. Every attempt to write text via iPhones or computers produces the same messages (some garbled text). All photos of the self are rendered headless. Flesh becomes outmoded, as does the concept of immortality. Hanshe depicts the hyperworld (?), a future that's one click away, in another dimension? Another few years, even. Rather than try to describe the prose style, I give a sample...

I shouldn't write a 'review' of an unfinished book but this is the most exciting thing I've read in a long time. 'Exciting'? I mean interesting. I mean fiction that looks at a future via prose which has, appropriately,  jettisoned conventional storytelling. It's Speculative Fiction which, like William Burroughs in his cut-up trilogy, utilises new ways to imagine altered states and an altered world. You can sense Bill's ghost guiding Hanshe's fingers - those dead fingers talk. What they tell you about is not a world you would like to live in and yet in a sense, we already do.