UTSANGA REMIX RAMPAGE is on!

Utsanga.it is the Flying Dutchman of experimental lit zines. It always comes out of nowhere, gives you RKO and smacks you right in the face as if it was a final solution. You feel different after that. And i'm writing it as a reader not member of editorial staff. With every issue Utsanga.it manages to blow your mind to pieces then gather those pieces together and blow them up into even smaller pieces - up until things go down to atoms. Because that is what experimental art zines are supposed to do. It is not about being nice and cheerful. It's about total annihilation of rational thought.




UTSANGA REMIX RAMPAGE aka "my Utsanga project" finally happened. And i must be happy. But i kinda feel empty inside because of all other things going on in my life. I'm out of job and need to find a new one very fast. This means my creative endeavours are pushed aside at the moment. And that is rather painful. Anyway. UTSANGA REMIX RAMPAGE aka WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU GIVE BIL SABAB A CHANCE is finally out and it is actually good because miracle or "Bil Sabab delivers" really means something. But I still can't believe it happened.

Usually my projects fall apart at some point and all i have to do is to whine about it for a while before getting over it and moving on. This happened with "Waking" a couple of years ago. "Midget Stripper" went the same path. "Daily Shriek" is also gone. As is "Nokturno Digital Residence". This time my project was actually realized. That means i can add it to CV and every HR will ask me about it. Like if it was for real! Oh reality, timelapse thy prolapse! Down with it!

What was UTSANGA REMIX RAMPAGE? Utsanga.it is active for three years. That means there are a lot of stuff already published. I thought this must be addressed in some manner - and that is how the idea of UTSANGA REMIX RAMPAGE (i want this to be on top of Google search) came to be. UTSANGA REMIX RAMPAGE is a celebration of Utsanga.it as a source of inspiration. It always was and always will be a place where i can get some top-notch stuff and inspire myself to do something completely different.

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What UTSANGA REMIX RAMPAGE has to offer? Plenty of stuff. I'll describe some of personal favorites:

• piece by Ruggero Maggi - map that looks like it is made of fried eggs - kinda unexpected, never thought about it that way;
• distorted scan of Emilio Villa's Labirinto by Roope Laine - simple yet effective mess-up;
• Tim Gaze remixed by Nico Vassilakis - whole lotta "xxxxxxx";
• Lawrence Upton microscopic stuff - because it is adorable, ever heard of "Game of Life"?;
• this piece by Cristiano Caggiula - bad TV gif is always fun;
• John Bennett stuff. Here's the thing - John is the best. We live in the age of John Bennett. He steals the show as if it was his job (also he remixed my piece called "Sleep" - yeah, my post my rules);
• Hilda Paz remixes of Vaclav Erbrecht - because those pieces begged for marginalia;
• Stefan Brand AKA Brandstiffer take on Massimo Polello - needs more cowbell (because google search);
• Alexander Limarev remix of my piece from Color Poems Series - because now it actually looks better;

And now comes the turn of my contribution - it wasn't that big. Should've done more for my own project. But i have an excuse - whole lotta need dayjob on my mind. That is why I haven't done anything specific for the project. Just added something that was already made. 

At first i just wanted to put into the issue punctuation only version of Yuriy Tarnawskiy' "Desserts of Love". "Desserts of Love" is the piece i was testing various cypher generators on. Punctuation-only version came around the same time as i started to conceptualize Hemingway Blank Verse Project (yep). But then i thought - i have this messed up Affine cipher version of the Romtso Zdoryk Ave Genius that sounds like Black Speech and probably is unintentionally written in Black Speech - it definitely needed to be in the mix. And then I thought - it would be a good idea to turn it into QR-codes and then glitch the hell out of it. 

And then there's a remix of a poem by the phenomenal Andriy Antonovskiy (don't tell him - it makes him sad, ok?). There's one thing you have to know about his work - it is incredibly flexible. You can do whatever you want with it and still it will turn out to be something worthy. For years i had a guilty pleasure of scrambling the text of "Etc.". There are somewhere around six hundred lines of scrambled "Etc.". What you can see in UTSANGA REMIX RAMPAGE is just a glimpse of the juggernaut hidden in the deep. 

So that's UTSANGA REMIX RAMPAGE as seen by its engineer. I would like to thank every member of the Utsanga.it crew for making it possible. Francesco Aprile, Cristiano Caggiula, Bartolome Ferrando, Elisa Carella, Edigio Marullo and Nico Vassilakis - it's real because of you. Let's bring the house down the next time!