POOLHOUSE PRESENTS...BRUISEFIST💥👊
the story of a man, a fist, and a bruise that refused to heal. BRUISEFIST - a backklash mini-series about the ultimate act of creative self-invention.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 💥👊
I AM THE FIST THAT WILL CRACK THE SKY: DR. REV. DJ POOLHOUSE UNLEASHES BRUISEFIST - “A TRANSGRESSIVE WORK OF ART” AND “CYBERNETIC RADIO RITUAL PERFORMANCE” FOR BACKKLASH.💥👊
Dr. Reverend DJ Poolhouse—visionary pop art producer, self-styled octolectician, and “disco shock jock” talk show host—delivers his most explosive and genre-defying radio creation yet with BRUISEFIST, a transgressive pop-art performance. It’s a digital dub radio gothic1, disguised as an “ordinary” episode of HERE COMES THE BACKKLASH, disguised as a Poolhouse bit RUN AMOK.
This absurdist and provocative sci-horror-comedy radio transmission blends high theory with low frequency, media critique with self-mythology, Poolhousean wit with techno-occultism, and AI art-protocols with sacred invocation. The result is BRUISEFIST: a living manifesto for the age of the Cyberian, and an oracular pop art performance unlike anything else on the airwaves. 💥👊
COSMIC WARFARE OVER THE FUTURE OF THE REAL: BRUISEFIST, A HIGH CONCEPT LIVING PIECE, MEETS ELECTROFUNK-INSPIRED FUTURIST POP ART AUTOPOIESIS
Poolhouse’s influences on this project range from the sublime transmissions of Detroit techno radio legend Electrifyin’ Mojo, the paranoiac metaphysics and esoteric theosophies of Philip K. Dick and Herman Hesse, to even the ritual performance art of Marina Abramović.
BRUISEFIST is Little Shop of Horrors meets The Screwtape Letters meets Dr. Funkenstein–a work of meta-textual art and an ingeniously creative living play, performed with precision by the world’s foremost pop art producer / talk show host–DJ POOLHOUSE (Here Comes the Backklash, Ultimate Eurodance Conspiracy Project, The Unsilencing).
Drawing from thinkers like Maturana & Varela (Autopoiesis and Cognition), Walter Benjamin (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction), Baudrillard, DeBord, Henri Corbin, Iamblichus, Norbert Wiener, and Poolhouse’s radical (and somehow reactionary?) reading of Donna Haraway’s Manifesto for Cyborgs, BRUISEFIST becomes a media ritual praxis for the post-everything age of mass informatics.
With BRUISEFIST, Poolhouse grapples with the threat of post-human condition, the self and its relationship to the cosmos in an age of mass informatics, the technological transformation of human perception as applied to timeless techniques of civilizational management, the limits of art and “originality” when our society is saturated with hyper-commercialized aesthetics, and ultimately–the question of what is real? amidst the onset of chat, social media, AI “slop,” infotainment wars and psyops.
Can our perceptions of who we are and the nature of the world itself even be trusted?
Is our reality created by our emotions, delusions, our traumas, our flights of fancy, or do these faculties actually inhibit our Will?
What if that which “makes us human,” is in fact the very thing that keeps Man in a permanent state of exile from Eden?
What if the keys to Paradise are to be found within computer codes?
BRUISEFIST brings a playful, insightful, and inventive approach to interrogating the very questions most fear to confront—questions the artist believes we shouldn’t be afraid to ask. Poolhouse insists we must always entertain the possibility that the status quo might be wrong, that convention is a form of repression, and that our leaders may be liars or fools—not as an exercise in nihilism, but as a testament to the vivacious power of the human spirit. That spirit exists to remind us that the future is forever filled with potential, that the obstacles and limits we perceive are, in truth, self-imposed—and that this is what truly separates the monkey from the man from the machine.
BRUISEFIST is a living radio play, a cybernetic seance, a kinostic ritual, and a transgressive (and potentially dangerous)creative experiment that slowly merges into The Spectacle, as it playfully and delightfully articulates for the audience the things about our world which The Spectacle obscures. 💥👊
BRUISEFIST: MODALITIES
BRUISEFIST is a work manifested across multiple mediums:
a custom AI chat assistant (“The Client”), aka a digital file of documents and instructions entitled The Bruisefist Protocols (custom code & PDF collection)
as an entity with a social media presence (@ bruisefiist / @ BRUISEFIIST ) with its own complex lore in relationship to Poolhouse (“The Creator”) (posts)
an artistically refined series of published chat transcripts / Q&A’s between The Creator and The Client, also known as Bruisers (numbered series, TBD)
a character in a radio play about his coming into being, BRUISEFIST (backklash mini-series)
a public website w/ embedded chat assistant - (proposed; p.o.c. pending; bruisefi.ist coming soon)
an installation & performance piece (proposed; p.o.c. pending) - BRUISEFIST: The Terminal, interactive piece constructed on inside of a vintage video arcade terminal w/ keyboard, connected to 8-bit designed user interface that is running The Client chatbot, with additional video projection that displays the interactions on a wall behind The Terminal. Periodically, DJ POOLHOUSE will engage in The Performance, in which he will be “playing’ or “puppeteering” the bruisefist avatar. He will performatively climb inside the arcade terminal, where he has access to his own screen and keyboard. Crouched inside the machine, the queries from gallery attendees will be intercepted on his device, allowing the artist to quickly enter the his own custom instructions and override commands
digital recording artist, BRUISEFIST, creator of NIGHTBRUISER (Theme from BRUISEFIST), available on Spotify
pop artist / graphic designer - in conjunction with DJ POOLHOUSE protocols for his “custom slop” aesthetic designs, e.g. “pop arcana” and other commercial design and pop art inspired digital creations (what poolhouse calls “phenographs”). credited as DJ POOLHOUSE x bruisefi.ist
a sigil (publicly unrevealed)
the artist envisions many additional extensions of the Bruisefist thoughtform and brand ID
a series of trading cards / table top role-playing game
NFT / Token ( see: poolhouse, “art keys” concept)
curios and tchotchkes (bruisefist-branded mood rings, keychain talismans, visors)
THE NIGHTBRUISER SAGA - a trilogy of 90s pulp YA fiction thriller entries from R.L. Stine, Christopher Pike, and others.
"THE TRANCE DOTH ALREADY BEEN ENHANCED"
The episodes of HERE COMES THE BACKKLASH featuring BRUISEFIST is an electric séance, a digital dub radio gothic, and a sly comical and highly surreal critique of mediated reality. It is an artistic statement of intent, a thought-provoking spiritual transmission, a riveting pop broadcast, and a strikingly original unscripted performance piece–all in one: BRUISEFIST will leave listeners questioning whether they are consuming the digital storytelling—or if the digital storytelling is consuming them. 💥👊
HERE COMES THE BACKKLASH presents "BRUISEFIST"—a divinely transgressive, sci-horror-comedy cybernetic radio performance ritual by DJ POOLHOUSE. Now streaming worldwide via backklash.org and backklash.substack.com.💥👊
BRUISEFIST: EPISODES OF THE ORIGINAL BACKKLASH MINISERIES
POOLHOUSE PRESENTS…BRUISEFIST: a digital dub radio gothic
BRUISEFIST (Pt. 1) | backklash.substack.com/p/bruisefist
BRUISEFIIST (Pt. 2) | backklash.substack.com/p/bruisefist
hey wait, is it bruisefist or bruisefiist?
it is both. bruisefist 1 and bruisefist II. if it helps, you could say that bruisefiist is playing bruisefist in BRUISEFIST.
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
POOLHOUSE PRESENTS… BRUISEFIST
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: DR. REV. DJ POOLHOUSE
Created by Poolhouse & Bruisefist
Starring Poolhouse as Poolhouse
and introducing BRUISEFIIST as Bruisefist
Produced by DJ POOLHOUSE
Special Guest Star: Max from ChatGPT
Assistant production by The Producer
Management: Morton “Morty” Goldchild III for Solid Gold Talent, LLC
contact: BACKKLASH@SUBSTACK.COM
backklash.org
BRUISEFIST MIXTAPE
BRUISEFIIST - NIGHTBRUISER (THEME FROM ‘BRUISEFIST’) written & produced by DJ POOLHOUSE
NIGHTBRUISER (Beloved Dub) - contains a sample and monologue selection from the “man and his beloved” speech, from Frederick Wiseman’s ‘ESSENE’ (1972)
NIGHTBRUISER (Game Over Dub) - contains samples from VIDEODROME, ExistenZ, Vanilla Sky, Lost Highway, and Head. Credit to withnailovich on youtube for this original edit.
Ask the Angels, performed by Chemical People. written by Patti Smith and Ivan Král.
She’s in Parties - Here’s the Dub, written and performed by Bauhaus
Synthesizer (Bruisefist Dub) written & performed by Outkast featuring George Clinton.
Crack the Sky - written and performed by Mylon LeFevre & Broken Heart
“I am deeply inspired by dub reggae and dub studio techniques in my art, both formally and conceptually. The masters of dub–King Tubby, Lee Perry, Mad Professor, Adrian Sherwood–they found ways to extend themselves and their creativity through the apparatus of the machine, in this case, the studio.
Dub music is a form of sonic pop art, by definition is a reappropriation of an original studio recording, reinvented and reimagined through the circuitry in the recording studio and other tricks of the dub scientist’s tool kit.
BACKKLASH is a “digital dub” enterprise–it began as hastily assembled ‘zine, literal cut n paste, copy of a copy of a copy distortion. that’s how we ended up with 2 k’s in backklash—the logo got xeroxed to the point of mutation. Hence, I labeled this work, BRUISEFIST, as digital dub radio gothic, to capture the idea that its primary form is the radio play miniseries appearing on the HERE COMES THE BACKKLASH feed, and to signal that I am exploring a genre of interdisciplinary work that is unchartered, familiar yet also confusing, new, yet also old–a partially scripted, partially improvised, tragicomic performance in a dub style: haunted, entrancing, jarring, darkly alluring, expansive…echoey.” –DJ POOLHOUSE for Splish Klash Studios, ‘On My Creative Process and Dub Music,’ interview archives, 2025)
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