MSR

Feel free to ignore accepted norms when it comes to music.
Don’t worry about playing other people’s music, create your own, the weirder the better!

I created Master/Slave Relationship (MSR) in Autumn of 1984 as an  industrial noise music and photographic project to explore my own interests in elements of emotional domination and submission, sex, and my obsessions. For more than twenty years I have self-produced a unique brand of industrial music and art. In that time I’ve released more than ten cassettes, one vinyl LP, five CDs and one CD-ROM. MSR has never performed live and has no intention of ever doing so. MSR was conceived primarily to express and explore my interests in extreme behaviour and thought.

From 1982 to 1988 I created experimental avantgarde music as Viscera with Hal McGee and together we created Cause And Effect which was a cassette-only music mailorder outlet in the Midwest. During that time we sold over 10,000 cassettes via mailorder before the days of the internet (yeah you had to write for a catalog through the postal mail and wait a week or two to receive it then send a check in the mail to place your order, no internet, imagine that).

I’m an artist, musician, photographer, graphic designer, and webmistress – completely self-taught in Photoshop and html/css code. I design and manage everything you see on this website (http://masterslaverelationship.com/). I’m a geek.

My interests are more varied and wide-ranging than anyone could imagine and include a keen interest in mid century modern art and style, performance art, Dada, Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, Man Ray, abstract expressionism, the infinite power of the subconscious mind, all forms of music, all things Apple including the iPhone and iMac. I’m always learning, exploring, reading about new things and ideas. I’m currently studying french. I also co-founded blackmetal.com in 1996.

In a fit of partial insanity I landed on the concept of MSR and so far (30+ years) it’s sticking. I am pleased with what it has become and feel reasonably confident of it’s future direction. The idea of personal themes blended with music and dark abstract expressionist art in this way is appealing to me. The decision to put all my inner thoughts and emotional grief and experiences into music was a natural one for me. This decision led me down a strange and interesting path of typical and not-so-typical experiences.

In San Francisco, where I lived for 8 years, there was an atmosphere of edgy sexual tension. I tried to forget how narrow minded the rest of the country was. Growing up in the midwest (Indiana and Iowa) I knew all too well how stifled the attitudes were with regard to anything unusual or provocative, not necessarily sexual. When you live in San Francisco, at some point eventually, you tend to start thinking that the entire United States of America is just like San Francisco – open minded anything goes.

I had my own arguments with myself. I always have arguments with myself. I wrestled with the idea of not continuing to do MSR, or drastically changing it’s focus away from fetish themes and imagery. Yes, I’ve wrestled with myself on this subject.

Emotion wins out over reason. It always does.

I moved to Los Angeles in April 2009. I’m concentrating on visual art and music and running my businesses. I also am writing lyrics and recording music, scheduled for release sometime in the future, as well as several abstract film ideas, not to mention a separate website devoted to all of my other art (writings, photography, ideas, inventions) that are not related to MSR specifically – chanceprocess.com. I was also the original webmistress for the website for Stephen Holman.

Q What have been your most important musical or artistic discoveries?

By far, Dada made the biggest impact on me. I discovered it when I was in my teens and it changed the way I looked at life, art, and music. I found it listening to Talking Head’s Fear of Music. The first song on Side One being I Zimbra with lyrics by Hugo Ball. I became intrigued why they would choose to start the album out with someone else’s lyrics and did some research and found out who Ball was. After that my life was different.

Q Is music a good choice of vocations, or is it a compulsion, or something else?

It certainly was never a vocation for me, and I never looked at it as that. I was realistic enough to know I wouldn’t make a living doing such weird underground music. I did it because I was inspired and compelled to do it.

Q Does the album cover come about during or after the music has been imagined?

Usually I would create the music first, then start to get a feel for the cover graphics and titles. I taught myself to do graphic design and photography, so those elements were (and still are) important to me. Back then I burnished letters with Letraset for cassette cover, catalogs, flyers, etc. It was painstaking tedious work but I love design. It’s a lot of what I do now. Put me in front of Photoshop with something special to design and I’m happy.

Oh -- here is my URL:   http://masterslaverelationship.com/

Footlinks

Master/Slave Relationship on Bandcamp

Hal McGee

Cause and Effect

Black Metal

Chance Process

Stephen Holman Art

International Dada Archive

Hugo Ball Performances

I Zimbra (Lyrics by Hugo Ball, performed by David Byrne in 1998)

Gadji beri bimba clandridi
Lauli lonni cadori gadjam
A bim beri glassala glandride
E glassala tuffm I zimbra
Bim blassa galassasa zimbrabim
Blassa glallassasa zimbrabim
A bim beri glassala grandrid
E glassala tuffm I zimbra
Gadji beri bimba glandridi
Lauli lonni cadora gadjam
A bim beri glassasa glandrid
E glassala tuffm I zimbra

(there is no translation, thus it means the same to everyone)