the exploding Jesus Movement

• +..Ambient elektro


• +..field recordings


• +.. experimental

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As at Synanon, residents of X-Kalay played “the Game,” a no-holds-barred practice of “attack therapy” between and among residents and staff. Outside these grueling sessions, residents were encouraged to adopt a bland and neutral demeanor that, from Dick's perspective, disguised passive-aggressive feelings and led to paranoia. In a letter written that April, Dick echoed Tom Wolfe's assessment of the Me Decade. Dick perceptively noted that the ideology of encounter groups was premised on the “metaphysical” assumption that there is “a ‘real’, hidden, authentic personality” that appears once all the false layers are violently unmasked. Dick contrasted this with his own more contingent and constructivist view: a person's authentic nature is developed through, and only appears within, the shifting frameworks of interpersonal relationships. As such, the authentic personality that appears in the encounter session “is not revealed during the game; it is created during the game: the group manufactures it as they teach the person new, ‘productive’ habits and attitudes.” But the framework of relationships at X-Kalay was so hostile and impoverished that the newly adjusted personality was reduced to a “conditioned-reflex machine”—that is, a paradoxically deprogrammed android.
Davis, Erik.