(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)
Illusion Of Safety, active since the mid-1980s, was originally an open-ended project started in Chicago by Daniel Burke. Even before incorporating a guitarist, Burke had been influenced by the avant-garde guitar of Keith Rowe in AMM.
Emblematic of the anguish the group manages to build, layer upon layer, with meticulous cruelty, is their first album, More Violence And Geography (Complacency, 1988 Die Stadt, 2002), contemporary with the cassette Fifteen (Complacency, 1988). After the arrival of the young Jim ORourke, a flood of cassettes followed: Finite Material Context (Complacency, 1988), RVE (Complacency, 1988), Finance And Ideology (Complacency, 1989), Forced Cohesion (Complacency, 1990), partly reissued years later by Functional Organisation. These works contain no vocals, dominated by the wildest electronics, like Morton Subotnick performing Throbbing Gristle scores.
Leo DiMaio writes:
The two untitled live tracks on Fifteen (Context, 1993) are cacophonies worthy of Throbbing Gristles 2nd Annual Report. The struck metals in Temple Set give the track an esoteric ritual charm, while 11/13/88, an electronic poem, and 7/21/87, with its static sound clusters, have a completely unique allure. Heavy industrial returns with New Game and 10/30/88.
Finite Material (Context, 1993) follows the same directives, refining the style. Mixed Signals and Ritual immerse the listener in Dantes lowest circles. Fondness Makes The Heart Grow Absent is a piercing and monstrous distortion worthy of early Controlled Bleeding. The most daringly experimental vein comes from Gravity, Looking Forward To Silence, and Theme, where manipulated choruses ā la Nono, Ligeti-like continuums, and live electronics ā la Stockhausen are explored. Plastic Palace People Vol. 1 (1991 Streamline, 2011) documents early experiments by ORourke and future Illusion Of Safety founder Heemann. Historical (Staalplaat, 1992), created with the experimental prodigy Jim ORourke, sold with a leather cover and a bullet to stop the record on the turntable, is typical of the second, ambient period (apart from the opening, a collage of electronics and metallic riffs), where tracks are long flows of electronics intended for trance.
Similarly, Cancer (Complacency, 1992), one of their darkest works, as well as Probe (Staalplaat, 1993) and Distraction (Odd Size, 1994), all with Jim ORourke.
Perhaps standing out from the rest is Inside Agitator (Complacency, 1992), not so much because it indulges more than others in tales of murder, torture, and assorted atrocities, set to the most direct music, but because it also offers a 22-minute suite, Recognition, one of their peaks in the ambient field, refining sound sources into a single, indistinguishable flow. The electronics remain harsh, the atmospheres claustrophobic and catastrophic. Progress is seen especially in the use of sampling, which in tracks like Wasteland is filtered until it becomes a kind of background noise brought to the forefront. ORourkes lessons are evident in the more radical experiments, pieces of piercing buzzes like Katalavox. Notably, ORourke does not play on this album.
Daniel Burke and ORourke attempted a grander path on Water Seeks Its Own Level (Silent, 1994), moving from the noisy fresco of Cancer to the menacing drive of Inside Agitator.
Fin De Sičcle (1995 Korm Plastic, 2011) was a suite for field recordings and electronics composed and performed by Daniel Burke and Kurt Griesch.
Having definitively parted ways with ORourke, Daniel Burke, with the help of singer Layna B and trumpeter Thymme Jones, attempted in Groovy (Extreme, 1996) to fuse funk and acid jazz into a predominantly electronic instrumental form for progressive dance floors. The results oscillate between the most aestheticizing Miles Davis and ambient trance less aligned with new age. If Inclimate is the manifesto of the genre, TDOL, the longest track, demonstrates its possible extensions, first overlaying the almost Renaissance soprano of the singer, then venturing into swarms of interstellar noises. The languidly ethnic cadence of Expanding and the playfully syncopated Through The Cracks explore more terrestrial spaces, though still cryptically open. The latter sinks into quagmires of guitar distortion, hinting at a psychedelic dimension. Perhaps the best definition of this program is the title of Inventing Zeros, one of the funkiest and most content-empty tracks.
For the record, Burke is also active as Fixated, Lilycrusher, and Cubensis.
Epitome of the menacing atmospheres that abound in industrial music, the sound of Illusion Of Safety has the only flaw of being rather monotonous and repetitive, inversely proportional to the quantity of records produced.
(Original English text by Piero Scaruffi)
Distraction (Odd Size, 1994), basically a Daniel Burke solo album, is
one of the best Illusion Of Safety albums, a collection of
wordless industrial soundscapes of extreme violence
(Thermonuclear War, White Zone), of lengthy post-nuclear
nightmares (Helen Your Brain, Vasectomy), with even a hint
of grooves
(History Is Written By The Winners, Fragments Of Memory).
From Nothing To Less (Complacency, 1995) documents live performances
by Burke and Thymme Jones that return to old-school white noise.
The Nature of Sand documents two lengthy live performances from 1995
featuring members of Life Garden and Voice of Eye.
The double album Of & The (Staalplaat, 1998) is, instead, devoted
to more ambient and even melodic suites.
Mort Aux Vaches (Staalplaat, 1999) is a self-indulgent 1997 performance
that runs the gamut from extreme noise to extreme new age music.
In Opposition To Our Acceleration (Die Stadt, 2001) is mainly a
collection of live performances recorded between 1996 and 2001.
Odds (2001) is a collection of unreleased tracks.
Time Remaining (Ossonossos, 2003) was the last major release before
a long period of silence.
If Jim O'Rourke's career rapidly eclipsed Daniel Burke's, the latter years have
reversed the relative importance of the two. While O'Rourke has become a
mundane composer of faux avantgarde, Burke has refined his scary, harsh,
subliminal form of musique concrete. Burke is the missing link between
Italian futurists of a century before and Andy Warhol's art of the collage.
His sonic graffitis and murals dissect ordinary life and reconstructs it
as an altered state of the mind.
Daniel Burke celebrated
the 25th anniversary of Illusion Of Safety with
The Need To Now (Experimedia, 2008), that boasted a more meditative approach,
In Session (Waystyx, 2008), that continued Burke's program of harsh power electronics,
and the EP Sedation & Quell (C.I.P., 2008), that contains two ominous
trips for drones and glitches.
Illusion Of Safety's
Bridges Intact (Waystyx, 2010) included a collaboration with
Thymme Jones of Cheer Accident for piano and noise.
Burke returned with a new project, Soundoferror, which debuted with the Buchla album Religious Sounding Noises (2021), almost a 21st century update of Morton Subotnick's Silver Apples.
