Hakim Bey & Bill Laswell: T.A.Z. (1994)

T.A.Z. [Temporary Autonomous Zone] Anti-Copyright 1992

Explorations of the political, the personal, the social, and the metaphysical from writer and spoken word artist Hakim Bey. A meld with musical terrorist Bill Laswell.

Bey advocates nearly everything, including creating free states for like-minded cabals and collectives. He recommends marginalized groups form secret societies and concludes with a lengthy piece on boycotting cop culture. Musique concrete cloaks his words in an eerily seductive melange of avant-garde noise and ambient music. But the sounds are almost immaterial. Bey's words are the primary focus of this disc.

A swirling, surreal vertigo of information and methods for "escape", woven with the kind of airy tones and hallucinatory rhythms that Laswell has been playing with lately, Bey's voice calms and prepares the listener for an age where missing information and the icons of late capitalist high-tech correspond with an increasing alienation of this "X-generation"'s most primitive needs. Most of all, Bey doesn't come across as a cheesy, overzealous, visionary bard, but presents us with ideas point-blank, allowing us to be choosy in aiming our own forms of poetic terrorism against those forces that attempt to suppress and homogenize humility and free thought. 

01 Chaos

02 Poetic Terrorism

03 Amour Fou

04 Immediatism

05 The Tong

06 Boycott Cop Culture

Published by Axiom Records 1994