‘It’s not a band, it’s a movement’

JP Movement live performance - Shoreditch, London, 2009
The JP Movement was created as a collaboration with various musicians and artists as a performance, sound and web art piece in which a pseudo-fictional experimental rock band was created. The work operates on several levels by shifting its context, alternating between an artwork, political statement, ironic joke and a genuine band.
Rejecting the 20th cent. conventions of the 'band' and 'album' as established by outdated socio-economic models, The JP Movement is a new force in the phenomenon of cultural production.
Born at a very early age, some say the Triassic, it has been speculated that the 'movement' consist of hundreds of musical geniuses working discover the relationship between musical tone and fossils. Others have suggested its in fact an advanced computer project designed to produce 'the perfect sound'. One or two even say it's the side project of a certain well-known musical prodigy.
In fact the 'movement' grew up from the problematic concepts surrounding the production of music under the shadow of late capitalism. The Movement's work draws upon the classic British cultural studies tradition and covers issues of hegemony in culture. Taking a post-Gramscian stance they regard language-use as operating within a framework of power relations, institutions and politics/economics. They operate within the false distinction of audience/participant, viewing people as simultaneous producers and consumers of culture.
They draw upon deconstruction and reception theory, focusing on the scope for negotiation and opposition on the part of the audience. The audience negotiates the meaning of the work and lies somewhere between the producer and the reader.
Through dialouges of domination and resistance, commodity and authenticity the JP Movement take the socio-economic models of the new era, ideas of the Free economy and new media and embrace the model of the Wiki. The JP Movement are celluar, networked 'Pro-sumers'. With a mix of Situationist Detournement, electro soundscapes and folk rock the Movement are as generically unrestricted as they are geographically.
So sit back and prepare yourself for what is being described as 'the new genre'. The JP Movement are shaking the music world up and they want you to be part of their adventure.
Questionnaire JP Movement
1. What does the 'JP' stand for?
Try reversing the question, I should be asking you that. It is not up to me to define what JP Movement stands for, literally or figuratively, after all it is not an auteurial or authorial projection rather a project that constitutes its constituents. Its not static, its a movement. Playing flippantly with the toys that theory threw out of the pram, eating the canopies of reception theory and getting mournfully wrecked in the wake of the Author, may they rest in pieces, I mean in that it means what you would like it to mean, or perhaps what you would dislike. Within the diktats of postmodern discourse signs are essentially - if that term is not a contraction in terms, in terms of that to which it refers - fluid and meaningless. If there is no meaning behind the hyperreal, hyperbolic symbols of hypercapitalism then there is no meaning in JP Movement. Its an empty brand, a vacant icon like the glitter and pompous circumscriptions of capital and religion. A vessel to be filled with libations to the present and the life that lives not yesterday and not tomorrow, a ship of fools, eating drinking and making merry - for tomorrow they die a little death. In the wasted days they are already dead. It might mean Jurassic Park, Japan, Jouissance Provocateur, Jerk Pop, Joint Project, Jet Propulsion, Just Playing, JP Morgan financial services, Jesus Piss, Jackdaw Pie, Jobcentre Plus, Jail Paedos, Judas Priest, Jizz Punk, Jean-Pierre, Jyllands-Posten or Jewish Princess. It is unlikely that it means Jimmy Page, Pope John Paul II, Justice of the Peace, Jamaica Plain, Journal of Physiology, Jakarta Project, Japanese Pharmacopoeia, John Petrucci, Jack Pot, Joint Publication, Jam Provocation, Jayaprakash, Jet Pack, Juvenile Polyposis, Jatiya Party. It almost certainly does not mean Justice Process, Johnston Press, Journal of Paleolimnology, Jet Propellant, Junior Professional, Jeans Profusion, Jefferson Plaza, Jealous Police, Joke Petrol, Jönköpingsposten, Junge Pioniere, Jnana Prabodhini, Joining Peptide, Jerusalem Patriarchate, Jumper Port, Jump Positive, Jedi Praxium, Jaga Pintu, Janata Pary or Jeremy's Prophecy. Take the mean of those and you'll still be nowhere close.
2. Is the JP Movement a political movement?
In that it moves and its political. The connotations of political are antithetical to the moving target that JP presents, side-stepping left and right, drifting underground through the empty tunnels at the heart of a dialectical diatribe of dire and trite banality that constitutes the imperialist impositions of politicians. Life is political, the JP Movement is life, therefore the JP Movement is political, the politics of life and not political because that is hierarchical.
3. Is the JP Movement an artistic movement?
Art as an ideal is a potential web that might be thrown across us but we do not wish to aspire or conspire its approval nor its conventions. We are living, breathing, singing people before we are artists and we are only artists in so much as we refuse any other professional definition. In the reality of our time art is dead, only a diamond encrusted corpse remains, a corpse that must be burned upon the funeral pyre of capitalism and its ashes ploughed back into the creative life of spontaneous subjectivity. The superfluous, superlative actions of our life come to supersede those of a supercilious and superficial art.
4. Is the JP Movement an expression of nihilism?
It is an expression of nothing. The spontaneous quantum happening that springs eternal ex nihilo; transgressing the boundaries towards a transformative hermeneutics of the gravity of our transformed situations whilst philosophers and artists interpret and argue over nothing.
5. Are the JP Movement's positions utopian?
Utopia is so last century, or older, it is the old news, news from nowhere. We are Atopian. The deterritorialization of the market dystopia and the postmodern hetrotopia resolves itself in the reality of a movement that flows through and overspills the porous borders of disciplinary and doctrinaire questionnaires. Subjectivity is diffuse within the liquid of life that splashes across the face of the planet in a cheap shot at the monetary manacles that motherfuck the world in bondage.
Everything we do, we do it for you and by definition of being done is already a reality.
6. Do you consider it necessary to call yourselves 'JP Movementists'?
We are not here to answer cuntish questions. For the moment, we are content to pose within our intelligently designed label of ridicule meriting a drawing of blood from the corpse of the 20th century, playing with the instruments of sharp incongruity at a new level of rigor mortis. These incisions cut out our possible definition and jumble it up into the collage of ameaningful Dada poetry and a ransom note addressed to history.
7. What is original about the JP Movement, considered as a distinct group?
Originality is so passé. The JP Movement is not a distinct group, so I suggest that you reconsider the imposition of your supposition upon the question.
8. Why don't people talk about the JP Movement?
There is no space because we spend so much time talking about ourselves. Because discourse is bought and sold amongst the chattering classes in the financial markets of media and academia whilst the people that say interesting things whisper. We are whispering in the shadows of the wings awaiting the chance to sing our hearts out and stage-dive the crowd with thought bombs. We do not wish to exhaust our discourse and have to retire early to recuperate in the bedtime story of mediocracy.
9. What support do you give to the revolutionary movement?
Unfortunately there isn't one. It is therefore not a matter of 'supporting' such a movement, but of creating it: of inseparably defining it and experimenting with it. Admitting that there is no revolutionary movement is the first precondition for developing such a movement. Anything else is a ridiculous patching up of the past.
10. Are you Marxists?
We are Marketing
11. Is there a relation between your theories and your actual way of life?
A relation only in the sense that something can relate to itself. Theory is the superego of desire. As I stated previous life is politics, it follows that life is theory and theory is life, to suggest otherwise is intellectual fetishism. Theory is neither unique nor specialised, it is merely the verbal articulation of our practice, of our everyday experience. The specialisation and compartmentalisation of experience into the abstract is simply a method of diffusing its power and repackaging it as a commodity for the convenience store of the academic industry. We support a hedonism of theory and an intelligence of living in the face of the spectacle of stupidity.
12. Are the JP Movement in the vanguard of leisure society?
Free time is an expense that we can not afford to spare. Leisure is an affront to life, labour in the negative, a concocted concept to part fools from their money and occupy minds and the space vacated in the vacation of work. It is merely a dose of gas to stoke the flames in an arms race of boredom, a race to the bottom within which work and prescribed leisure are locked. Without the proscription of a fulfilled life, perpetually locked out by the clocking in and out of capitalist production then leisure simply evaporates, it is the mirage of capital. The JP Movement is neither work nor leisure, it is life.
13. Who finances you?
The state and the capitalist system finances us without even realising the implication of its blunt instruments being rammed back up against its tender underbelly, we are a tumour growing in its bowels preparing to expel the shit from the arse-end of culture. Money is a totem token and we have broken its taboo in the incestuous enculage of philosophy.
14. How many of you are there?
We are one and we are many, simultaneously. There is no figure that may lay a finger on us and place upon us the velvet grip of definition around our throat. We encompass everyone and no one, we are a movement and not a status, we are an organism and not an organisation. You can not kill us, in reading this you have already participated in our game, you are already infected.
15. What value can you attribute to a questionnaire? To this one?
Questionnaires are stupid, they tell us nothing.