One of the most minor bands to ever emerge from the storied L.A. music scene, The Distortions is a loose and interminable multimedia indie/post-punk concept which formed in 2004, and which, by its first iteration’s dissolution in 2008, had put out two albums. In 2021, the group released a "Best Of" anthology titled Psychoactive Sound. 

“We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. ... When one looks at the all-prevailing schizophrenia of democratic societies, the lies that have to be told for vote-catching purposes, the silence about major issues, the distortions of the press, it is tempting to believe that in totalitarian countries there is less humbug, more facing of the facts. ... Actually, however, the avoidance of reality is much the same everywhere, and has much the same consequences.” George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts, 1946, p. 212.

“The wellsprings of infinitely stirring and sensitive poetry... will be transferred straight on stage but incarnated in moves, expressions and gestures, before gushing out in words... and experienced directly by the mind, without language's distortions and the pitfalls in speech and words.”  Antonin Artaud, “The Theatre of Cruelty: Second Manifesto,” 1932.

“Isn't the digital universe of cyberspace the ideal medium in which to construct such pure semblances which, although they are nothing “in themselves,” pure presuppositions, provide the coordinates of our entire experience? ... However, our ultimate lesson is that the Real is simultaneously the exact opposite of such a non-virtual, hard core: a purely virtual entity, an entity which has no positive ontological consistency—its contours can only be discerned as the absent cause of the distortions/displacements of the symbolic space.” Slavoj Žižek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway, 2000, p. 43.

Last Update: September 16, 2023