Logo #133: Con-Dom

Created by Mike Dando in 1983. Dando's noise assault unit Con-Dom has been active for almost 25 years, not so much pushing the envelope as destroying and utterly mutilating it. This logo depicts a stress position in which captives are placed so that their captors may better annihilate their wills; in his MTV/MySpace appearance on 4 December 2007, presidential candidate John McCain described this technique's use on him as a hostage of VietCong elements during 'Nam. From my review of the Con-Dom live action on 6 August 2005 in San Francisco at the San Francisco Bay Area Harsh Noise Fest: "Con-Dom employs two vocal microphones and projections of films of Martin Luther King Jr., KKK rallies and the civil rights struggle. He strips to the waist and smears white- and black-face over his body – then over the faces of aghast concert-goers. Confronting the audience directly with emotional trigger-words crawling along the more racial end of the spectrum, he's attacked by a petite girl who doesn’t want to take his shit. He keeps on going regardless, rampantly frottaging another girl as the shrieking feedback mounts and the hateful coda of N-WORD, N-WORD, N-WORD, N-WORD, N-WORD plays on in a loop. Regrettably, sound problems preclude the nuances of what he has to say, and yet it must be remembered that Con-Dom = control-domination and all the mediation, ironically enough, thereat."