Chioma SuperNormal. The Dark Album

(Note: the text of this introduction that appears in the booklet was not properly edited. This is the corrected version.)

A performance inside a theatrical room that is inside the bigger locked building that is Supernormal.

' "What's the CD about?" annoys. It irritates. It opens one to ridicule. The presumption. As if can, should, arrogance allow, explain, comment; twenty odd years of fiddling. Anyway all's been before. The rediscovered or stolen. You expect guilt? "Not original", whatever that means. Your counterfeit originality. Apply, auto-hypnotising, fake exclusivity to me! Me collude in your community serving lie, that frowns upon, works against, raw Truth. Leaves me vulnerable. Rather cosy Pretend. A warm thick heaviness of fear and conformity. There's little new to be said on the subject, I stick a finger into the turgid molasses and force you take a lick. And there's, of course, a self protectiveness in obscurity. Which to many guarantees sincerity.

This disparate Band then, why want to create music that hates them? Obvious. They get something out of it. Or hope to. One, supposed to die around birth, incubated, then, into his personal, decaying, middle class, with a water filled head. Spends rest of his shortened life under threat of bursting aorta, open heart surgery, total deafness and what ever else weak connective tissue deforms to. Forever overshadowed by pseudo famous Father, who died, run down on snowy hump outside Leyton station, before became even less respectable and successful. A grimy supermarket carrier bag knocked from his hands, skids on ice into gutter. Not the same, of course, in which he handed over crumpled jumper, on Tube platform, to the birthday boy, the Encephalic, the Hydro Kid, his son, before scurrying to pressing duties on the lank haired secretary he'd abandoned Mummy for. Not his, Mr Pseudo's Mum, The Encepho, the stretchy boy's. And overthrowing The State, which nurtured Mr Pee through private Westminster and Royal College Schools. Much, much more than he ever allowed for his offspring preparing for the far better world he sought to impose, with bombs if possible. Oh how they feted the IRA. Another? Well, try the now ex, illegal-immigrant-asylum-seek from Iran. What secrets naughty as he, necessarily, sneaked and cheated across Europe, what treachery and lies for the benefit, when finally allowed employment, having proved by not having a job he wasn't economic immigrant, of paying tax to the British government? Or British taxes, benefits, paid to him, for whose benefit? Yours, who pay the taxes or, those on whose behalf you also collect them? Next. A permanent student, alone in the West since fourteen, the equally studious brother since twelve, financed from Taiwan. Are Mum and Dad awaiting The European Marriage? Insurance policy maturing when kiddies name that happy day. Ensuing passports whisk a family to safety as America and China go at it hammer and ying tang tongs. Are skeletons in that cupboard? The country reeks betrayal and exploitation, has that perfume sullied our innocent pupils? And why not, it makes sense? And sure does feel good for some. Then, ah now he's a pretty one, Mother died, he was young, Public school, inherited minor wealth. As an adult fancies thick, work-ky-classy slip-slappers. Getting back at the Mummy? That's not nice or pretty but she abandoned, by dying, yet whose insurance set him and Daddy-pooes up for life, not to mention Granny dying. She left a packet. Oh yes, bought him a little flat in London. That is nice. He watched Mummy die. They knew you see. Everyone knew. A mark, a shame, or is that sympathy, pity? See her fall apart, the body, decaying in strips. Rotting. A ripe, maternal peach, like milky, displayed breasts putrefying in their cupping bowl. Did she tell him in the night, in his or her bed, it would be alright? Got to have some effect?

And me? Well . . . Does the archetype Danny Dark loath the world around him? His life, its squashed opportunities? Probably not and that makes me despise the more. For all the crap his life is, he accepts it for how things are, and meant to be. Thinks everyone lives more or less the same life as him. In this final point he is, in a way he may not realise correct. The only thing separating these various lives is the amounts of money they have access to. In his ignorant way he recognises this. Danny Dark is scum and always will be, so are you. And when I say, if it makes you feel any better, so am I, it's not to mitigate my contempt. No. It's to highlight the deceit you think I can't see. Hence, thump, brutality in literature is frequently heavy with false feeling and confession of guilt's a technique for evading what should be done. So suffer, a satisfaction contemplating one's own evil nature, and sincere inability to say even simple things without self contradiction and opacity. Then ask, "do you see what I mean?" when it is impossible to see what "I" can mean, and obviously expect underlings to make obeisance to power by pretending to understand.

Thus this album of hate, tumours out the previous collection "Chioma Sings Tales of Danny Dark". "Danny Dark" could be considered sympathetic towards its characters, "Chioma SuperNormal" hates its inhabitants. The closest it comes to kindness is pity. Pity for the failed, useless. The pitied are not respected. But since these inhabitants are real, and of this world, it is a hatred of you the audience. I despise you all. And loath the more because I need you, one, to buy my work, and two, placate me in my lonely despair.

In SuperNormal vindictiveness is personified. He, Meesta Vindictiveness, pursues the inhabitants of SuperNormal, invites, sings, some to join him. They do. Others are born victims, any invite from him only hurts all the more. Which serves them right for being losers. It is their purpose in existence, their role in the SuperNormal world. It is acknowledged, exploited and hymned.

And these hymns of hate are bedded in songs designed for others to sing. Cohabit, copulate voices with. The sound is a heightened, expressionistic folk. It is SuperNormal, relentlessly, boringly, tragically, pretentiously dull.

Here in SuperNormal we meet women promiscuously infamous in dawning teens. Here sex is a weapon of degradation. When sex becomes instantaneous gratification of physical appetite, it's just a step, not even a hop-skip-jump, to other people as necessary instruments, increasingly tarnished machines, to achieving it. Everything in this world revolves round sex. And that illuminates a horrible truth about The Society. Begin a story, a dark story: once he gave some food to a young girl who reminded him of his daughter, and she took off her clothes with the words, "lying down . . . or what?" Degradation so readily accepted made him weep. End story. So he hated the system more than any individual in it? Maybe. Meet humans unable to distinguish between human beings, animals or inanimate objects. Women are "it" and tools are "him". But hold on; not everyone is a psychopath. No, just in an environment characterised by dehumanising degradation of violence and sexual promiscuity, in which other people are merely instrumental to personal pleasuring, produces a lot of rust. No hope repairing, fixing, things, its, objects once they rust away. A culture where "everyone is at it", so why not me?

Read this. It's not about you? But yes it is. Even that you accept. Like a freak show, increasingly porno pictures and superstar fantasy lives, you wallow in emptiness. With the bright lit appearance of very-very-reality on the outside. Gratefully filled with insults before you move to another, any titillation. Yes you, you the customer, are never satisfied. Children and adolescents are excellent props, they have what you have lost. Budding, desired, bodies and uncommitted future both rife with possibilities. Your image of the child is ambiguous, promising future but turned to past. Innocent but implying sexuality, simultaneously denying and inciting desire. Close up new-shiny. Permanently clean. They smell fresh. But we must, apparently, save the child from the rapacity of The Desiring Gaze. Use children’s presumed innate goodness to confront and oppose these, degrading, evils of adult society. Cultivate from within, the unsalted, rather than introduce to what is without; the preserved or decaying. Leave to stumble through the world on the assumption they already have perfect maps sprouting through their heads. A calamity visited on, nurtured in, them by the self-serving under the guise of care. Whose ignorance of fiscal and cultural deprivation is matched by their arrogant assumption they know what is best for the lower orders. Which they do, to the benefit of their own position. Is it a wonder that Danny Dark and his peers become ill mannered, wilfully backward academically and unable to concentrate on anything for long? In "Danny Dark" we show in every case their behaviour replicates the behaviour of their parents, and their parents' parents. Families where every child has a different father, where violence, and promiscuity are routine.

And I know too your secrets, your smalls, adulteries, little office thefts, self serving flatteries and unwanted, unsacrificing, gifts to charities. Who visits hopeless whores, the hard faced slappers? Who looks the porno filling internet? You do, and if you don't you only call it by another name; an affair or erotica. Of course you claim to care, the teachers, the social workers, the foster parents. I've seen the loathsome way they float atop those they apparently help. I've seen failure as badge of pride in Caring Professions, watched their psychodrama replace genuine work reducing dependency. Seen suspicion, paranoia, anti-intellectualism, bad faith, contempt and denial. Seen the descent of Idealists into authoritarianism, that happens so often, attention deflected from the real abuses in their child centered world. Yes who benefits from the dead end tarts the system pukes? Well they, The Carers, do, you do, and why not? Provides work, it feels nice, one is sated. How else breed cattle called sex workers? A job like any other. Young flesh is cheated, created and trained for work. Chicks told are innocent of adult faults, social evils, and sexuality. Taught they're able to get on in life, in society, to pluck success. But Society does not create burdens on itself, lost souls have a purpose in the wealth, the pleasure creating, machine that I know for certain was not created for my benefit.

Like your precious countryside, while Danny Dark's stuffed tight on a brown field site, waste from the poultry farmer is fertilizer for the milking men. The dotted beech and oak, very picturesque, is trimmed and snuffed for heating. Throw nothing away on a farm, never know when'll come in handy, bit of wire there for a fence, old length of chain for a bitch, soon to be calving. The once obscure island colony spurting oil. Did the rag-n-bone man collect bone, for bone meal? soap? in my lifetime? chiming bell past our door? I think he did. Certainly had the rags, he'd give a few pence and drag away old metal too. We all knew the horse ended at' knacker's for pet food and, to our childish minds, incomprehensible animal products. No reason, too, humans shouldn't make equally good fat and bone for beauty products.

We watch these children, paint their faces Danny Dark, lie, selfishly cheat, whilst flirtatiously pretend otherwise. We collude in this pretence. They willingly become self-deceiving hypocrites. Cementing minds from humiliating truths. They age, their dreams and claims discarded. Conspiratorially with you. An ignoble pair. Trying out on each other versions of a story that will satisfy brittle persona, until unsure where truth lies, you and they spend lives swimming ever slower, deeper, in a vicious sludge of unformed thought. A majority inarticulate to the point of being silent. And presumably deaf, but I see foolishness, or hopelessness, see children for what they are: desiring, sentient beings. They cannot be helped. They are trapped. And, don't care. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at them, Danny Dark is not going to change or, as you'd say, improve. Same as you, without the fancy clothing, pseudo exclusive taste. Not so exclusive it's incomprehensible, to you, or so blatantly sneering, can't avoid smelling, yourself, of unpleasant truth; the fact that it applies to you. I present Danny Dark; a fig leafless, version of you. And you vicariously enjoy the crudity. Guilty, you romanticise the lumpen proletariat and glorify it's violence prone way of life. But, you fools, violence subverts attempts to control, its domain is one of constant excess. So I hear a song of sin, that all humans are born in sin. The eternal state of man. A song of acceptance and redemption. A song of compassion.'

Continue to disc 1