That's Irritainment, Vol. XXVII
Jah Vengeance—No Light (2000 / Chaos Reggae)
Hello internet pals of music. Welcome to another edition of the internet’s most annoying radio station.
The world ended on September 10, 2008.
This is when, in an underground tunnel near Geneva, the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, was first powered up.
Although the first particle collisions didn’t occur until two years later, the stage was set then, and now we live in a quantum universe.
SERMONS! is reader-supported. If you’re wishing to support our work, I encourage you to become a subscriber. Otherwise, we’ll all probably forget about this thing.
Referring to the world’s largest atom smasher, I could’ve used this to introduce my favourite song by the 80’s cult heavy metal band, Cirith Ungol, literally titled, "Atom Smasher”.
But Jesus Henry Christ, do you think I’ve lived my entire pre-LHC life taking the easy route?
Instead, here’s this terrifying record—one that I can’t remember where I first heard, but it was definitely an early internet radio show that had to have been more annoying than my imaginary one, if it played this.
It may have been WFMU1. It may hav been BBC Radio One, which I used to listen to religiously for its drum and bass shows. The millennium was an exciting time for gritty electronic music.
Who knows? Who cares? I was surprised to even find this record back then and although I prefer the B-Side Versioning of it, Youtube even hosting this is the kind of archival that the internet is still good for, or should I say the quantum internet that isn’t really the true internet—which is a wonderful eden of music, cat videos and animal facts. But the LHC destroyed that. In 2012, not 2008, with proof of the existence of the Higgs Boson2. I have no understanding, at all, of particle theory and I know nothing of what I’m talking about with any of this. I understand that the Higgs Boson could help scientists determine how dark matter is transferred or something. This song, is what I imagine dark matter sounds like: the most dense, heaviest matter in the known universe.
The label Full Watts—which I believe was started by Jah Vengeance, aka NYC deejay & noise musician I-Sound, who also collaborated with Berlin’s To Roccoco Rot, if anyone remembers them—only have three releases that I know of. This one, another 45 rpm by breakcore lunatic DJ Scud, and a collaborative 45 rpm between the two called Bloodclaat Gangster Youth. All of these are excellent names, and although I-Sound is a solid reggae deejay name, adopting the title of Yabby You and The Prophets’ 1976 Reggae classic, “Jah Vengeance” is a good scholarly move, and also matches the heavy manners of this menacing song more appropriately.
Thank you, internet radio of the year 2000. Thank you, Waterloo Records for having a copy of this record for me to purchase back then. Thank you to me, for still owning it. Thank you to one unnamed reader of these emails who constantly reminds me of this song’s existence, and is the only other person I know who likes it equally.
And a big ol’ gasface to CERN and the LHC and the Higgs Boson (although science is actually cool and the LHC did nothing wrong, it was actually decades of neoliberal policy, corporate deregulation, and unbridled capitalism that destroyed the world we once thought we knew).
SERMONS! is brought to you by Musik Klub. You can also find Jamie on Twitter and Instagram, if that’s your thing. Like what you’re hearing? Help spread the word!
Musik Klub: “Everythang’s Workin”
It seems it most likely was this WFMU show: The Pounding System
It has been theorized that there may be up to five Higgs Bosons.