Contagious Orgasm
The history of my encounter with Hiroshi Hashimoto, aka Contagious Orgasm, has its roots in the culture wars currently raging on American college campuses. The University of Michigan is fairly typical in that respect: Most students and faculty don’t care for politics at all, and the ones who do are usually liberal. This already bugs the few right-wing activists on campus, but what really annoys them is that nobody takes them seriously. I want to take a moment and plead for a little attention and empathy for this poor neglected minority of conservative campus jerks.
OK, enough already. The University of Michigan has no journalism school, but two student-run newspapers, the Michigan Daily and Michigan Review. Both are not very good by journalistic standards, but the Daily is still quite popular, probably because it is free and there are no alternatives. The Review calls itself conservative/libertarian and is definitely not published daily. However, since nobody reads it regularly, the exact details of its publication schedule are unknown.
In January 2002, the guys at the Review could not take it anymore and published an editorial dissing all the other campus media outlets. Under the title “Campus media worse than useless” they had the following to say about the student-run radio station WCBN:
By their own account, 88.3 WCBN, the student-run radio station of the University of Michigan, is more than just physically to the left of the dial, as their “freeform” programming entertains only but the most free thinking and progressive students on campus. It is pretentiousness with a capital “P.”
You’ll never hear Creed, Puddle of Mudd, or Nelly on WCBN. Instead, expect to hear “contagious orgasm,” “mama sissoko,” or the “antipop consortium.” Never heard of them, have you? Well neither have most students.
WCBN is not content to serve the students’ tastes; instead, it pumps out a continuous stream of alternative and indie crap. To top it off, its politics are adamantly and decidedly leftist.
Moreover, WCBN is not content with keeping its pretentious programming to just its allotted frequency. Due to its proximity to campus, many students have reported hearing WCBN broadcast over other stations from Detroit. They have a radio hegemony, with a leftist agenda—and judging by the number of people calling into their shows, a pitiful audience.
The last part about interference is just stupid, the WCBN broadcast signal is simply too weak to “broadcast over” other stations in the area. Furthermore, any radio station that does not stay within its allotted frequency and power gets their asses kicked by the FCC in no time.
The interesting part of that puerile rant is the paragraph about the music. Sure, I knew that Mama Sissoko played awesome Malian guitar music, and Antipop Consortium great underground hip-hop, but who the hell was Contagious Orgasm?
Since they had heard it on WCBN, it definitely would have to be in the WCBN music library. And so I found the CD The Flow Of Sound Without Parameter, released in 2001 on the amazing Ground Fault record label. It is a sound collage which flows in a very dark ambient way. Sometimes a beat surfaces, you can hear voice samples, piano noodling, a creaking door, bagpipes, and you always feel like something bad is going to happen very soon.
The tracks all flow into each other, so you should really get the whole CD and listen to it in a dark room. However, to get an impression of what it sounds like, here is the track Hacking The Reality Myth. It has something like a heartbeat in the background, a recurring piano motive, and bagpipes. The structure of the track is quite interesting, there are a few louder sections and even a drum’n'bass part. They all stop cold after a short time, giving way to the menacing heartbeat and piano melody, and sounds of someone out of breath.
It is amazing to realize that Contagious Orgasm has existed since 1987, and I only found out about it more than 15 years later through the Michigan Review (by way of some anonymous WCBN DJ). I wish they would regularly post lists of music they don’t like. That would give them at least one regular reader.
February 4th, 2006 at 11:51 pm
They sure picked three great acts to try to prove their inane point. They were obviously pulled from one of our weekly cmj charts without having any idea what they were. It’s especially troubling because Mama Sissoko seems to be singled out because of the vaguely foreign sounding name. It’s hilarious that they used Creed and Puddle of Mudd as examples of what WCBN should be playing.