​ "Your body belongs to you, and in the appropriate ritual, it has been given to you to explore the full dimensions of your being." -Fakir Musafar

Putting a sharp pointy object straight through the skin is a time honored practice among us humans. Piercings have long been a way we have sought to make ourselves beautiful. Wearing jewelry through the skin has been a part of our aesthetics of adornment dating back thousands of years.
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But why do we pierce? The answer to this question has varied depending on the time and era. Some people have gotten piercings for magical, mystical and spiritual purposes; for others it is just a way of expressing themselves. Some get piercings for sexual pleasure, such as on the nipples or genitalia. There was a time in America when getting your ear pierced as a man, was seen as an act of outright rebellion. Getting another part of the body punctured was beyond the beyond of proper decorum, for either sex. Yet in other societies being on the receiving end of a needle for a piercing is a way to conform to the norms of the culture, be a part of the group, and fit in. It is much the same with those who belong to certain subcultures, such as punk, where a piercing can signify affiliation.
Piercings started to regain prominence in western society starting in the seventies, and underpinning their revival was a strong current of magic.

ENTER THE FAKIR

The late Fakir Musafar was often called the father of the modern primitive movement, for his pioneering work in body piercing, modification, ritual and teaching. Fakir was born on August 10, 1930 as Roland Loomis on what was then the Sissiton Sioux Indian reservation in South Dakota, a baby of the Great Depression. There wasn’t a lot going on in Aberdeen, where he grew up, and by 1943, at age thirteen, he was a bored teenager, looking for something to do while the world was at war. He felt different, and knew there must be something different to discover out there in the wide world; something other than what was presented to him by straight-laced society.

Loomis took to haunting the school library, in search of anything strange. In one of the libraries dusty and forgotten corners he found what he was looking for in some old issues of National Geographic Magazine. His imagination became captivated by the pictures and articles he saw of people from other times and places. There was one issue in particular, from the 1920’s, where he saw photographs of people in India who had pierced their flesh with hooks and hung suspended from a cross arm high up in the air. The thirteen year old wondered why they were doing this. He also wondered what it felt like. The imagery called to him, touched something deep inside his soul.

A couple of years later Loomis learned that some Native American tribes also practiced piercing their flesh so they could either hang suspended from it, or be pulled for long hours against the these piercings in a ritual known as the Sun Dance. This set off an aha! moment for Loomis. The tribes who practiced these rites had been those of the Plains Indians, many of whom lived in South Dakota, his birthplace. These ceremonies had last taken place some fifty years before he was born.

There are a number of commonalities across tribal cultures that held the Sun Dance. A sacred fire, smoking and praying with the sacred pipe, and fasting from food and water were all typical. The songs and dances used were passed down over many generations. Traditional drums and drumming accompanied the song and dance, the latter of which was seen as an arduous spiritual test. Some Sun Dances involved a ceremonial piercing of the skin, a further test of bravery and physical endurance. The pain and blood were seen as part of the sacrifice involved in the ceremony, that was used for the benefit of the tribe. Some dances involved going around a pole that the men were attached to by a piece of rawhide pierced through the skin of their chest.

He also learned about the Okipa ceremony of the Mandan people of North Dakota. It was a four-day ceremony performed every year during the summer that retold their creation story. Like the Sun Dance, the Okipa involved dancing inside a lodge filled with their sacred objects, while men prayed, fasted and sought visions. The younger men demonstrated their bravery by being pierced with wooden skewers pushed the skin of their chests, and backs. These men were hung by ropes from beams in the lodge or from trees, while their legs were weighed down from other skewers sent through their thighs and calves. Crying was seen as cowardice. Those who could withstand these intense sensations the best went on to become leaders within the community.

Loomis started hunting out the places where the Sun Dance and Okipa ceremonies had taken place, and went to visit them on his bike. He found they had left behind a psychic residue and that this residue seeped into his own life as he absorbed the energies from the places where the Lakota, Arikira and Sissiton peoples had pierced their flesh, sometimes in rites where they hung from a tree. Loomis got to know some of the trees, as some were still there, holding memory on the living land. This became a tremendous inspiration to the young man.
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He was so inspired by these discoveries he had to try piercing himself. He even felt like he had done these things before -perhaps in a past life. He claims his first experience of these past lives came to him at age four. His later anthropological studies gave confirmation to his feelings. So he started modifying his body. Loomis did his first permanent body piercing, on his penis, at age fourteen, conducted his first mini Sun Dance ritual and had an out-of-body experience as the result at age seventeen, and his first self-made tattoo at age nineteen. At first it was a private thing, and he kept it private, kept it secret for thirty odd years before he went public. 

While he pursued the inner calling of exploring the outer body his destiny had born him into, he also racked up some impressive skills inside the confines of the culture at large. He worked for the U.S. Army during the Korean War between 1952 and 1954, where he was an Instructor in Demolitions and Explosives. He taught ballroom dancing at Arthur Murray’s. Loomis picked up a B.S.E in electrical engineering from the Northern State University and an M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, the city he’d moved to at age 25. His creative abilities as a writer helped him in his work in executive positions as an ad man in San Francisco. He also operated his own advertising agency in Silicon Valley for a spell.

Yet there was also isolation and shame around the things he was doing in secret, and those came from fear. Fear, that if he let people in his interests and practices, he would be deemed crazy, institutionalized, locked up and the key thrown away. Through his extensive research into other cultures, and long talks with native elders, he had learned that his interest wasn’t something that should be considered a sickness, a perversion or a mutilation of the body, but a practice that could lead into what some traditions called a “state of grace.” Rituals of piercing could be used as a way to access different modes of consciousness.
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Loomis eventually came out of the closet as piercing freak, a process that started when he met Doug Malloy in 1972, an eccentric millionaire, and ally who proved to be the alloy that bound the disparate elements of the underground piercing scene together and brought them up to the surface.

AN ECCENTRIC ALLOY

Malloy was a man who led a double life. His first life was as Richard Simonton, an aficionado of organ music, steamboats, a family man and a businessman who worked for the Muzak corporation, selling their piped in sounds to corporations in California. The side of him that was Simonton led a fascinating life in his own right, but I don’t have space to get into that aspect of his personality in this context. Simonton tended to keep his fly zipped anyway with regard to his penchant for piercing his penis, except in sympathetic company, or when he wrote about the subject as Doug Malloy. His double life was also exemplified by his bisexuality.

Of his many interests, Malloy had made a study of the New Thought movement, even going so far as to meet Ernest Holmes, author of The Science of Mind, in 1932. His interest in metaphysical and spiritual topics prompted him to traveled extensively in India and the Philippines where he explored Eastern thought-ways. His mind had always been bent towards the unusual and different. Adorning his body with bits of metal poking through the flesh wasn’t so weird. At some point he started getting pierced.

In 1975 Malloy’s fictional autobiography titled Diary of a Piercing Freak came out, released by a publisher who specialized in fetish material. It was later republished in softcover as The Art of Pierced Penises and Decorative Tattoos. Malloy had also started to cultivate a network of like minded individuals. These included Roland Loomis, Jim Ward, Sailor Sid Diller and the Londonite tattooist Alan Oversby, better known by his alias Mr. Sebastian.

Malloy had also organized the Tattoo & Piercing group (T&P) of ten to fourteen people or so who would meet once a month for a “show and tell.” Malloy had seen some photos of the experiments Loomis was doing with his body that dated back to 1944, and invited him to be a part of T&P.  This group expanded the practice of piercing and tattooing as the individuals gathered would later help each-other execute further body modifications.  Together they developed a lexicon around body piercing, what each type of piercings was called, and what the best practices and tools were to do them.
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Jim Ward, the other prong in the trifecta that catapulted the practice of piercing to what it is today in America, was a close friend of Malloy’s and co-founder of the T&P gatherings.

WARDEN OF THE BARBELL

In the course of his long time wandering, Doug Malloy had made a visit to Germany where meet Horst Streckenbach, better known as Tattoo Samy. Samy had been born in 1925 and got his first tattoo at the ripe old age of ten. By 1959 the rubble had stopped bouncing from the second world war and Samy opened a tattoo shop in Aschaffenburg. Later moved he moved it to the bigger burg of Frankfurt in 1964. There, one of Samy’s students was a guy named Manfred “Tattoo” Kohrs. Together they worked on developing some new styles of piercing jewelry, namely, the barbell. In time, Samy started to make trips to America, and on these visit’s he would come to LA to visit Malloy, who in turn introduced him to Ward and others in the T&P circle.

Ward was born in 1941 in Western Oklahoma, moved to Colorado at age elven, and by the time he was 26, was in New York city where he joined a gay S&M biker group, the New York Motorbike Club. That’s where he got on the nipple piercing tip, and started studying how to make jewelry. Ward stated, "The first barbells I recall came from Germany… On one of his [Samy’s] first visits he showed us the barbell studs that he used in some piercings. They were internally threaded, a feature that made so much sense that I immediately set out to recreate them for my own customers."

From his own studies, and from Samy’s innovations, Ward began to put his spin onto the piercing jewelry he was creating, including the fixed bead ring design. Meanwhile Malloy had encouraged Ward to start a business for piercing people and gave him the funds to do so. Ward ran this business at first ran privately, out of his own home starting in 1975. He dubbed his studio the Gauntlet. Malloy drew upon his contacts to help Ward build a clientele. Ward the placed ads for the Gauntlet in underground gay and fetish publications. 
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His business started to boom. 

BODY MODIFIERS UNITED

Next up on Malloy’s masterplan for modifying the body of the American republic was to host an International Tattoo Convention, in Reno, Nevada. He did this with the help of tattooists Sailor Jerry and Ed Hardy, and invited both Loomis and Ward to participate in the convention and show their piercings to the public. From this fixed point, 1977 on the timeline, piercings began to take off in tandem with tattooing.

Malloy asked Roland Loomis to demonstrate the various practices he had begun to adopt from other cultures, such as laying on a bed of nails or bed of swords for the convention. Malloy didn’t think the name Loomis was memorable, and he encouraged him to change his name for the event so as to receive more publicity. Loomis had revered the 12th century Sufi saint whose name was Fakir Musafar. This saint had also practiced piercing himself as a way to get closer to the divine. Loomis adopted the name for himself and it stuck.

His namesake was a mystic from Meshed, Persia (now Iran) who lived for sixteen years with six daggers embedded in his chest and back. He also had six horseshoes he kept suspended from twelve permanent piercings in his arms and shoulders. He believed, as did the man who took his name, that unseen worlds can be accessed through the body. From the unseen worlds the very source of being can be found. The stories around the original Musafar speak of how he was ridiculed and thought of as strange. He felt his message was going unheard and these rejections caused him to die of heartbreak.

At the convention Loomis “came out” as body piercer and started to go by his adopted name. Fakir Musafar became the mystical and magical pioneer around these practices in modern times laying out a metaphysical and cross-cultural groundwork for body modification. Meanwhile, Jim Ward, bolstered by the success of his private practice, took The Gauntlet public in 1978, and laid the framework for the commercial success of piercing with its first business.

All of this was synergerzied by the networking and business acumen and can-do spirit of Doug Malloy. Together these three exerted a lasting influence on the American body. As Musafar, Ward, and Malloy continued their crusade, they each also contributed further metaphysical, theoretical, and practical material to the growing scene. Malloy wrote the pamphlet Body & Genital Piercing in Brief, which continued the process of getting stories into circulation about the origins of various piercings, especially those relating to private parts. In 1977 Jim Ward started publishing Piercing Fans International Quarterly, which featured contributions from both Malloy and Musafar, as well as the coterie of metal clad pierceniks who had begun coming out of the shadows.
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Fakir Musafar continued to develop the ritual dimensions around piercing and other more extreme forms of body modification, transforming himself in the process into a contemporary shaman and father of the modern primitive movement. Along the way he racked up some impressive experiences, within the body, and while hanging from hooks, in the planes beyond out of body.  

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​We humans have been tinkering on ourselves from the get go. We have made tools to manipulate our environment as well tools to modify our bodies. Since we first donned clothes, we have looked for ways to use our coverings as expressions of individuality on the one hand, and kinship with our families, tribes, extended clans and culture on the other. These adornments extend to jewelry and piercings, and tattoos. Just as rings, bracelets and necklaces may be given to mark a stage of life or commemorate an event, so too may a permanent tattoo be used to mark a stage of life or transition in time. Examples of tattoos, piercings and body modification go back deep into ancient times of our human record. 
 
Many types of body modification are done by people without giving it a second thought, that they are doing something to their body, it is so natural and ingrained in the culture. Hair styling and dying in a salon by older suburban women is one example, as is the daily ritual of putting on makeup. To shave or not to shave, that is another question of expression. Painting nails, or even bothering to clip them are others. Expensive surgeries for breast implants and tummy tucks, and a quick nose job for leading ladies and men, not to mention teeth whitening, are all examples of what may be considered acceptable forms of body modification in a materialist minded America intent on keeping up appearances. Many contemporary life saving surgical procedures wouldn’t be possible without some extent of body modification.
 
Though there are many ways to modify the body, in the context of this article I’ll be writing mostly of those that were taken up in the punk community under the broader rubric and pan-subculturalism of “body modification” as relating to scarification, tatoos, piercings, implants, body suspension and some other techniques borrowed from traditional cultures and carnie culture. This first section deals strictly with tattoos.

​MY BODY, MY TEMPLE
 
Those raised in a Judaeo-Christian worldview, and who have stuck with the tradition, tend to view the body as a temple. This view seems to originate from a Bible verse attributed to Paul (who to be fair, could be as brilliant spiritually as he was off base, in my opinion.) He wrote in 1 Corinthians 6:20 “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own” (NIV). Yet treating the body with the respect due to a deity isn’t only found in Christianity. We can see echoes of this principle at work in Hinduism, with their highly evolved systems of yoga and Ayurveda, and other religions.
 
It was the latter-day punk of the kitchen, Anthony Bourdain who said “your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.”
 
I think both viewpoints are valid, and it is useful with any binary such as this to try and triangulate away from the extremes. What about a temple inside an amusement park, or an amusement park inside of a temple? The carnival happens before the holy season of Lent. Festivals are held on high and holy feast days, and I can see the return of the festival where the passions of the body are indulged in periodically as a necessary steam valve in our future world with more limited resources. As in the period of festival, the sacred and profane can both exist within the collective body. So too in the way we adorn and modify our individual bodies can partake of the sacred, the profane, and points in between, as it has throughout history. 

​AN ELDER FORM OF ART
 
Tattoos can rightly be considered one of the eldest forms of art. Our evidence for this goes way back. An Egyptian mummified priestess of Hathor known as Amunet was one of humanities oldest examples of a tattooed person for some time. She was doing her thing during the Middle Kingdom Period (2160–1994 BCE) and hung out with some other priestesses who got tattooed as part of a ritualistic process. In this time, tattoos were reserved for women, and may have been part of magical rites regarding fertility and rejuvenation surrounding the worship of Hathor. Egyptain menfolk started getting ink during the 3rd and 4th dynasties when the pyramids were being built. The Egyptians were influencers, being the center of civilization for some thirty odd centuries, and from there the practice of tattooing spread outwards to other cultures who came to trade and learn, going deeper into Africa, and over into Asia and Europe.
 
Egyptians weren’t the first to make permanent marks on their body and the priestesses of Hathor had to give up their OG status when Ötzi the Iceman was discovered in the Ötztal Alps in 1991. Ötzi was dated to between 3350 and 3105 BCE. The tattoos found along the preserved skin of Ötzi were line and dot patterns. Researchers noted how the placement of these lines and dots were along acupuncture points. This points to the idea that he was not just tattooed for adornment, but also for spiritual purposes.  Ötzi had a total of 61 tattoos. In 2018 tattoos were again found on Egyptian mummies using infrared that were of the same vintage as Ötzi. Numerous other ancient mummified bodies from other parts of the world have also been found with body modifications. This shows how widespread the practice was in early times.
 
The nomadic Ainu people brought tattooing into Japan around 2000 BCE. On those islands the magical aspect of the practice seems to have been downplayed in favor of simply having and enjoying them for their aesthetic beauty. Over the centuries the Japanese developed a tradition of tattooing that involved large pictures over big swathes of the body, creating what is now called a “sleeve.” This tradition was adopted by the Yakuza between 1600 and 1800 and still continues to this day. Known as irezumi in Japan, traditional tattooist will still "hand-poke" there work using ink is inserted beneath the skin with the traditional tools of sharpened needles made of bamboo or steel. Getting tatted up this way can take years to complete.
 
Starting between 1200 and 400 B.C. tattooing migrated from China and Russia to the Picts and also into the Celtic countries of Scotland, Ireland and Wales. The Celts liked the color blue and used a substance known as woad to imprint symbols from their culture onto their body. These included spirals, labyrinths, and knotwork. 
 
Native American tribes were also invested in the practice of tattooing and associating it with spiritual power. They would prick themselves with sticks and needles and then rub soot and dyes into the open sores to form their pictures. Often these pictures were made in commemoration of battles they had fought or they were of animal powers whose strengths and abilities they wished to emulate, or of traditional symbols whose magic they wished to imbue into their life.
 
At the same time tattoos were flourishing in North America they were also flourishing across the Polynesian islands. The word tattoo itself comes from “tatu” as used by Polynesians and picked up by Captain James Cook -who also helped spread the tattooing habit to sailors, and bring it back into practice among that group after his visit to the islands in 1769. The Polynesians were all about the spiritual power of a tattoo, and they believed that it made the invisible powers a person had in the spiritual world visible on their body. A rich tradition of tattooing was carried out by these peoples, and it often involved rites of passage between father and son.
 
It was in Tahiti aboard the Endeavour, in July 1769, that Cook first noted his observations about the indigenous body modification and is the first recorded use of the word tattoo to refer to the permanent marking of the skin.
 
The Captain’s log notes how, "Both sexes paint their Bodys, Tattow, as it is called in their Language. This is done by inlaying the Colour of Black under their skins, in such a manner as to be indelible... this method of Tattowing I shall now describe...As this is a painful operation, especially the Tattowing of their Buttocks, it is performed but once in their Lifetimes."
 
Sir Joseph Banks, the Science Officer and Expedition Botanist aboard the Endeavour was taken with the idea of getting a tattoo himself. Banks had first made his bones on the 1766 natural-history expedition to Newfoundland and Labrador. Then he signed up for Captain James Cook's first great voyage that lasted between 1768–1771 where he visited Brazil, Tahiti, and then spent six months in New Zealand and Australia. He came back with a tattoo upon him and heaps of fame for his voyage and work. A number of rank-and-file seamen and sailors came back with tattoos from their voyages, and this class of people began to adopt the practice further, helping to reintroduce tats to Europe, where they spread into other branches of military men, and into the criminal underworld.
 
Yet tattoos had already made some headway back in Europe among the aristocracy by another route. In 1862 Albert, the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, had a Jerusalem Cross tattooed on his arm on a visit to the Holy Land. Christian tattoo traditions can be traced back to the Holy Land, to Egypt and the Coptic tradition all the way back to the 6th and 7th century. The practice was passed on to a variety of Eastern communities including the Armenian, Ethiopian, Syriac and Maronite Churches. It is a standard practice within todays Coptic Church to get a Christian tattoo and show it as proof of faith in order to enter one of their churches. At the time of the Crusades this tradition was passed on Europeans who had come to the Holy Land where they received tattoos as part of their pilgrimage to the Holy City of Jerusalem.
 
These pilgrimage tattoos were one of the routes the practice went into the European aristocracy. Edward the VII got one after his pilgrimage, and George the V followed suit. King Frederick IX of Denmark, the King of Romania, Kaiser Wilhelm II, King Alexander of Yugoslavia and even Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, were all tatted up, often with elaborate Royal Coat of Arms and Family Crests. 

​LE FREAK
 
Meanwhile in America Martin Hildebrandt learned the art of tattooing while in the U.S. Navy, which he had joined in the 1840s. During the Civil War he fought with Union soldiers in the Army of the Potomac, and often traveled from camp to camp tattooing his fellow enlisted men. The Civil War veteran, Wilbur F. Hinman, wrote that it was common for regiments to have tattooists among them who inked their fellows with "flags, muskets, cannons, sabers and an infinite variety of patriotic emblems and warlike and grotesque devices." It was also common for the soldiers to have their names and initials marked permanently on their body to serve as a way of identification should they be killed in action.
 
After his service Hildebrandt opened up a shop in New York City where he made tattooing his full-time job. His parlor was in a tavern on Oak Street in Manhattan, and opened between 1870 and 1872 and is most likely the first shop of its kind in America. Using vermilion and India ink, he tattooed people in black and red from across the spectrum of society. Nora Hildebrandt, who became his common law wife, also became a tattooed lady inked up by Old Martin. In 1885 she left to go on tour with a sideshow and he got arrested for disorderly conduct and was taken to the Insane Asylum where he died in 1890. But don’t blame that on his profession.
 
The carnie culture surrounding circuses, sideshows, and dime stores, with their freaks and tattooed ladies were another medium through which the practice of getting marked up permanently for life started to spread throughout the United States.
 
Becoming a tattooed lady was good work at the time, especially for those who wanted to have a bit more clink in their pocket and live life on their own terms. Dime stores, freakshows, and dime museums would often put ads in the paper looking for tattooed ladies, because they had become popular attractions. In the years that closed out the 19th century and opened up the 20th, it didn’t cost a fortune to get a tattoo, and if it was used as a way to make money, could be an investment. A full body job could be completed in less than two months and only set a gal back thirty buckaroos. Yet, if a tattooed lady was popular, she could rake in a Benjamin or two a week, give or take a little. Teachers in 1900 only made about seven dollars a week with room and board. Secretarial jobs might only earn about twenty-two dollars a week. Getting tatted up and showing it off to an eager public made sense, especially for those who wanted to leave behind traditional sex roles.
 
 
By the 1940s however, the craze surrounding tattoos had again abated for a time. People who had them were often considered outcasts, less-than’s, and, of course, freaks. Yet bikers, motor cycle clubs and other greaser types kept the tradition alive in the 1950s alongside the usual suspects of sailors, military men, and underworld inhabitants.
 
The cool factor started to creep back into the practice in the 1960s when Janis Joplin and other musicians, such as those in the Grateful Dead, started getting tatted up. Starting in the 1970s, tattoos started to move further into the mainstream and to people from all walks of life. Part of this had to do with the proliferation of subcultures where tattooing was seen as an acceptable form of self-expression. Freedom loving hippies, nihilistic punks, rappers and hip-hoppers and transgressive industrial music heads were all making modifications to their bodies.
 
In the 1980s tattooing got a magical boost from Thee Temple Ov Psychic Youth (TOPY). TOPY was an artistically-oriented occult and magic group that emerged from the industrial music subculture surrounding Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV. One dimension of it was that it was like a "fan club" for Psychic TV except instead of creating followers their intention was to create leaders and get people doing their own individual creative work. Active between between 1981 and the early 1990s, the people involved were also heavily interested in piercing, body modification, tattoos and what I have taken to calling "gender blending". They did a lot of magical and occult work around these practices -and with their added influence, body piercing and tattoos went from something being done by counterculture freaks to being de rigeur. Their magic worked. The same could be true of some of their ideas about gender. TOPY is another example of a fringe group doing magic that went on to have a wider influence on the culture at large. They often included ritual elements as part of their piercing and tattooing works aligning themselves with the retro cutting edge of modern primitivism.

​CIVILIZED PRIMITIVES
 
Scholar Arnold Rubin’s had organized a symposium called "Art of the Body" at the University of California in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. He invited colleagues from the fields of anthropology, sociology, art history, archaeology, and folklore to come and share their work. There was a geographical and historical focus on body modifications from Europe and Euro- America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Pacific Basin (Asia, Oceania, and Native America). In 1988 he edited a book, “Marks of Civilization: Artistic Transformations of the Human Body” that showcased body art as a potent aesthetic and spiritual component of human behavior. The book started to circulate among the cognoscenti of the counterculture.
 
In Rubin’s book the term “Tattoo Renaissance” had been put forth to denote the 20th century moment where technology had changed tattooing practice. The tattooist went from just doing a job, often repeating the premade designs known as flash, to becoming a “Tattoo Artist” who made their own designs and fulfilled the dreams of their patrons, with a strong influence coming from Japan and Polynesian traditions of full body tattoos and sleeves.
 
Another book, "Modern Primitives: an Investigation of Contemporary Adornment & Ritual" put out by V. Vale and Re/Search publication came out a year later in 1989. V. Vale and Re/Search were stalwarts in the punk and industrial music scenes, where his zines and books of interviews always made a big splash. It ended up being another big influencer on many people in the underground music world and continued the push in this direction that was started by TOPY.  A lot of the focus of the book was on genital piercings, which had started to be practiced again in the west by the aristocracy with the story that Prince Albert had pierced his dick. The topic of piercing will be covered in detail later, so hold those thoughts.
 
By the late 90s tattooing had become pervasive among members of Generation X who had grown up in these subcultures, and the practice was passed on to their children, the millennials and zoomers for whom the question of the legitimacy around getting a tattoo is foreign.
 
In the 21st century tattoos, while in many ways, always personal, have become even more about a person’s identity. People get these most personalized forms of art to embody something about their inner life. At the same time, getting a tattoo has become much more common, so where before it had been a signifier of uniqueness and transgression, now it is seen as just another avenue for possible self expression. Where in the past just having a tattoo was enough to be a personal marker, now having a tattoo isn’t seen as such a big deal, especially among zoomers and millenials, who are more likely to have been tattooed at least once. These markings take on extreme personal significance, and may relate to family motifs, and names of loved ones, to mother-daughter tatoos (as abound in my immediate family) to those resonate with some particular core of their being.
 
As we move deeper into the Aquarian Age it will be interesting to see how Americans mark up their bodies as continued evidence of their individualism.

.:. .:. .:. 
​Read the other articles in the DOWN HOME PUNK series.

​Henry Rollins, the muscle bound, big necked front man for hardcore band Black Flag and The Rollins Band, used to get the shit beat out of him at school. He used to be weak. He used to be bullied. But he was transformed from a snot nosed punching bag into a snot nosed punk.

Rollins was full of fear and humiliation. Terrible at sports he was picked on and made fun of by those playing the games. Terrible at schoolwork, the people who should have been his educators, scoffed at him and said he had a permanent future mowing lawns. His teachers even went so far as to call him “garbage can.” And like a garbage can, he reeked, emanating self pity and rage.

Being bullied and getting picked on, and being full of rage led him to getting in fights and boxing, but he was a spastic, wild, unpredictable.

I can relate to Rollins. For some people school is a time of fun, an escape into a world populated by peers and friendly mentors. For others, those peers were the people who pounded you when walked the halls, or waited at the bus stop. The teachers and mentors who could have helped, were too busy fawning over the pretty underage girls in their class -when they weren’t fawning over you. I can relate.

At lunch time, it was often the best bet to sit at the freak table, or the loser table. Sometimes adjacent to the stoner table, the kind of smart but drug addled kids who think Rush is the best band in the world. On the inverse, these are actually the cool kids. The ones you’d want to have your back during a black swan event, because freaks have fucking skills and know how to get shit done. But that doesn’t make it any easier being part of the underclass.

In my experience the skill set of the freaks tended towards the intellectual and artistic domains. To be open to the beauty of the natural world, to alternative types of music, and to a poetic way of looking at the world requires a certain degree of sensitivity. That sensitivity, sensed and picked up on by jock meatheads who interpret it as a threat, tend to lash out. By the same token, the sensitive typed attuned to abstract intellectual thinking, and inner worlds of poetic fancy, would do well to balance out their life by taking up activities that keep them in touch with their physical body. We are made of meat and bone, muscle and mineral, and our physical presence can be cultivated. Besides the many benefits to mental clarity and to living an embodied life, remaining in touch with our physical sides also gives the down home punk a chance to fight back and defend themselves when threatened with physical violence.

The hand of fate touched Henry Rollins when the path of his life crossed the path of teacher and Viet Nam vet named Mr. Pepperman. Rollins thought Mr. Pepperman was scary, and apparently so did the other students. Mr. Pepperman maintained a strict discipline in his classes where no one dared to talk. Once somebody did talk, that student had an example made out of him when Mr. Pepperman picked him up and held him against the wall.

Weightlifting continued to teach Rollins. “It wasn’t until my late twenties that I learned that by working out I had given myself a great gift. I learned that nothing good comes without work and a certain amount of pain. When I finish a set that leaves me shaking, I know more about myself. When something gets bad, I know it can’t be as bad as that workout.”

Strength of body lends itself to strength of mind. Over the years Rollins took his training regimen, and combined it with meditation, and the power of being active in the world: fronting one of the most prominent hardcore bands in punk rock, writing, acting, doing radio, and all the things Rollins has done.

“I believe that when the body is strong, the mind thinks strong thoughts. Time spent away from the Iron makes my mind degenerate. I wallow in a thick depression. My body shuts down my mind. The Iron is the best antidepressant I have ever found. There is no better way to fight weakness than with strength. Once the mind and body have been awakened to their true potential, it’s impossible to turn back.”

For those who follow the path of the down home punk, it is critical to have some kind of discipline around physical health and the maintenance of the body. It need not be weight training, though it is an option with a venerable pedigree. Depending on the state of ones health, simple exercises ranging from gentle to stretching to casual walking can be enough. Others may start with activities around a sport such as roller derby, or revolve around transportation such as cycling and skateboarding.

Out of high school, I was not much in touch with my own body. I dabbled in yoga and tai chi, practiced some light qi gong hear and there. Later I found pilates and stuck with that on basically weekly basis and have added in some light weight lifting and additional stretching, along with regular walks, and seasonal hiking and occasional biking excursions that basically round out my level of activity. Punk rock is about individual discovery and finding the right kinds of exercise for your particular body is very individual.

However, it is an important component in living your own life on your times. The alternative is increasing debilitation which lends itself to increasing inactivity, and deterioration of health. If health is to be maintained outside of the strictures of Big Medicine and Big Pharma, looking after the body is as imperative as is looking after the mind, emotions and spirit.
​
Physical health however is only one way of understanding and interacting with the punk body. Modifications to the body in the form of tattoos, piercings, and other methods have a long tradition within the punk milieu. These will be looked at next.

​

RE/SOURCES:
https://www.nerdfitness.com/iron-and-soul/
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-17/henry-rollins-on-punk-rock-and-performance-art/7247236

​Read the other articles in the DOWN HOME PUNK series.

“There has to be an alternative to the dole, do something creative.” –Steve Ignorant, interviewed in 1997.

​From the ashes and fallout surrounding Russell’s death, something new was born. The Stonehenge Festival continued on as a regular event around the Summer Solstice, attracting more and more people to the standing stones. Wally would have been proud to have seen the success of his vision. Then in 1985 it was squashed down “as part of a general offensive against working class self-organisation police roadblocks were set up to prevent the festival happening anywhere near Stonehenge,” writes Ayers. The general ban on gatherings taking place anywhere near the ancient site around the Summer Solstice continues to this day. Police roadblocks are set up in the area of Wiltshire every June to keep the rabble out.

During the next few years after Wally’s death, as the Festival was taking off, Dial House became increasingly politicized. The house now existed as a functioning community on the fringe of society. The people who made it home lived outside the system, and somewhat off the grid. For Penny Rimbaud the death of Wally precipitated a period of personal crisis as he sought to uncover a possible conspiracy surrounding the hippies death, which he concluded was murder by the state even if he hadn’t been murdered outright by being stabbed or shot. He and the others who lived there began to wonder if their idyllic rural existence was a cop out to avoid further personal and social responsibility.

During the winters Penny had taken up working on a farm, potato picking, to earn some money. One day on the job Steve Williams, later to become Steve Ignorant, turned up. He was a very angry working class youth, full of vehemence in the knowledge that there was nothing really for him out in the world of 1970s Britain. He came round to Dial House with Rimbaud and came to see that the place was a haven. At around the same time Steve was getting into the new punk music scene. The energies were a heady brew and the style of punk made it possible for anyone to start a band even those with little to no musical experience. Steve told Penny, who had been playing music with Exit and the other groups about his intention to start a band. He signed on as the drummer, and soon the other members of the band clustered around them and came into the fold, including the radical feminist Eve Libertine who contributed additional vocals and creating the back and forth, male, female vocal trade off that became a standard part of later punk music.
​
Just as Dial House had been Wally’s HQ for the Stonehenge Free Festival, it became the center of operations for Crass. Living together in a low rent space they were able to pool their resources. Having their own place to practice in allowed them to spend the money that bands living in London would have had to have spent on renting a practice space. Using cheap equipment and whatever they could scrounge up allowed them to start their own record label after their first EP put out by the Small Wonder label fell prey to censorship.

The song in question was called “Asylum”. Workers at the Irish pressing plant contracted to manufacture the disc refused to handle it due to the allegedly blasphemous content of the song, "Asylum". Later it was released with the track removed and replaced by two minutes of silence, wryly retitled "The Sound Of Free Speech". After this incident they seized the reigns of production for themselves and Crass Records was launched as in house label. They wouldn’t be silenced and to ensure their voices were heard they wanted to be in control of all aspects of their future productions. Using money from a small inheritance that had been left to one of the band, the piece was shortly afterwards re-recorded and released as a 7" single using its full title, "Reality Asylum". When The Feeding of the 5000 was re-pressed on Crass Records the missing track was restored. Gee Vaucher managed the visual aspect of the band, designing the covers and sleaves and providing artistic backdrops and videos for their performances. Their lifestyle may have been bohemian and Spartan, but by living that way they were able to produce more than they consumed.

In the section on craft I’ll get more into the operations of their record label, press and their achievements as a band. Yet all that did could not have been achieved if they hadn’t made the effort to develop a communal living space. The goals of a green wizard and deindustrial oriented down home punk house need not be the same as Crass. As individuals and as a band, and as anarchists, they never told others what to do. Yet what they did was so powerful it still resonates today.

Even as they never told anyone else how to love, through venting their frustrations with the Thatcher government and by expressing the ideals and practical philosophies they lived by, they came to have a huge influence in the areas of anarchism, pacifism, feminism, and vegetarianism.

Part of what is so admirable about Crass is that they walked their talk, and inspired countless others elsewhere to do so as well. Their influence can easily traced within the broader punk movement itself, and formed much of my own inspiration for getting on with things and doing them myself as a teenager. This is partly why I think they are a relevant model for green wizardry. The point isn’t to let their example dictate any particular aesthetic style or even political ideology, which I think the members of the band would be disappointed by, but rather to look at them and see what worked for them, how they did it, and how those actions might be creatively replicated or copied and applied to the circumstances of our times. They wanted to show by their example that other paths were possible: paths outside the dominance of an indifferent government, paths apart from a record industry that was more interested in money than communicating with listeners, living in a way that reflected their conscience, rather than numbing their conscience by succumbing to a life of inactivity and passive entertainment.
​
“Nothing has ever been done here by design. Something happens because someone’s here and it might be making bread or it might be painting a wall or it might be making a band. It’s about residence here,” Penny said in an interview.

Crass never told anyone what to do, or what to think, they just thought for themselves and took appropriate action based on the ramifications of those deep considerations. It shows in all they do. Action was a key word for them. As philosophers, poets, and punks it wasn’t ever just enough to live in an abstract world of ideals. They took measured and principled actions based on their ideas. Without these actions they wouldn’t have achieved such a cultural impact with such a long reach.

Yet Crass never wanted to become ideologues, or be anyone’s leader or guru. They had been so effective in getting their anarchist-pacifist message across the underground however that they so found themselves in a position as such.* 

All their releases had a strong political voice, but by 1982 at the time of the Falklands War the voice got louder with the release of their hit single How does it feel to be the mother of a thousand dead? that attacked Margaret Thatcher’s role in the escalation of violence.

“ You never wanted peace or solution, / From the start you lusted after war and destruction. / Your blood-soaked reason ruled out other choices, /Your mockery gagged more moderate voices. / So keen to play your bloody part, so impatient that your war be fought. Iron Lady with your stone heart so eager that the lesson be taught / That you inflicted, you determines, you created, you ordered - It was your decision to have those young boys slaughtered.”

​This little number sold enough copies to make the top ten chart in its week of release, but for some strange reason it didn't even appear in the top 100. It was a song that made the band enemies of both the political left and right. It even got discussed in the House of Commons. Alongside their benefit concert in support of striking miners and CND, Crass came under increasing scrutiny from powers of the state including MI5.

They didn’t play gigs to make money or to gain fame but as a way to raise money or awareness for various causes. In the last month of 1982, to prove "that the underground punk scene could handle itself responsibly when it had to and that music really could be enjoyed free of the restraints imposed upon it by corporate industry" they helped co-ordinate a 24-hour squat in the empty west London Zig Zag club. The following two years Crass were part of the Stop the City actions co-ordinated by London Greenpeace foreshadowing the anti-globalisation rallies of the early 21st century. At this point members of the band were starting to have doubts about their commitment to pacifism and non-violence. The lyrics found in the bands last single expressed their support for the actions and the questioning of their own values.

“Pacified. Classified / Keep in line. You're doing fine / Lost your voice? There ain't no choice Play the game. Silent and tame / Be the passive observer, sit back and look / At the world they destroyed and the peace that they took / Ask no questions, hear no lies / And you'll be living in the comfort of a fool's paradise / You're already dead, you're already dead.”

The song showcased the growing political disagreements within the group, as explained by Rimbaud; "Half the band supported the pacifist line and half supported direct and if necessary violent action. It was a confusing time for us, and I think a lot of our records show that, inadvertently". The band had become darkly introspective and was starting to lose sight of the positive stance they had started out with.

Add to this the continuing pressures from their activities. Conservative Party MP Timothy Eggar was attempting to prosecute them under the UK's Obscene Publications Act for their single, "How Does It Feel..." The band already had a hefty backload of legal expenses incurred for the obscenity prosecutions against their feminist album Penis Envy, that critiqued, among many other things, the sexual theories of Freud.

“We found ourselves in a strange and frightening arena. We had wanted to make our views public, had wanted to share them with like minded people, but now those views were being analysed by those dark shadows who inhabited the corridors of power…We had gained a form of political power, found a voice, were being treated with a slightly awed respect, but was that really what we wanted? Was that what we had set out to achieve all those years ago?”

Combined with exhaustion and the pressures of living and operating together, it all took its toll. On 7 July 1984, the band played a benefit gig at Aberdare, Wales, for striking miners, and on the return trip guitarist N. A. Palmer announced that he intended to leave the group. This confirmed Crass's previous intention to quit in the symbolically charged year of 1984. So they retired the band.
​
Yet, in spite of all that Dial House remains to this day and members of Crass have worked together on and off in various configurations over the intervening years.

1973 marked a turning point for the future trajectory of Dial House and those who made a home there. It all began when Phillip Russell arrived. Even by crazy freewheeling hippie standards, he was an eccentric. Russell went by a number of aliases, his most famous being Wally Hope. According to Nigel Ayers the use of the name ‘Wally’ by hippies “had come from an early seventies festival in-joke, when the call `Wally!' and `Where's Wally?' would go round at nightfall. It may have been the name of a lost sound engineer at the first Glastonbury festival, or a lost dog at the 1969 Isle of Wight festival. There have been other suggestions for its origins, but it was a regular shout at almost any festival event.”[i]
From what I’ve read of the man it seems that one thing Phillip Russell had was a heart full of hope, for the earth and its people. It thus seems fitting he called himself Wally Hope. Just as his heart was filled and brimming, so his head was full of ideas.
​
One of his ideas was to take back the Stonehenge monument for the people of Britain, and he planned to do it by staging a Free Festival there. Wally thought Dial House would be the perfect HQ for his nascent operation. By that time Penny Rimbaud and Wally had become fast friends and Rimbaud was quickly recruited for the project, leading him to become a co-founder of the fest.  Despite significant backlash from the authorities, whom the hippies and proto punks thumbed their noses at, Wally’s inspiration and dedication led to the first Stonehenge Free Festival in 1974.

In The Last of the Hippies, Rimbaud’s book about Russell and the events surrounding the first few years of the festival he writes of his motivation in helping Russell see his vision come to be. “We shared Phil’s disgust with ‘straight’ society, a society that puts more value on property than people, that respects wealth more than it does wisdom. We supported his vision of a world where people took back from the state what the state had stolen from the people. Squatting as a political statement has its roots in that way of thought. Why should we have to pay for what is rightfully ours? Whose world is this? Maybe squatting Stonehenge wasn’t such a bad idea.”

That first year the gathering was small, and the gathered multi-subcultural tribe lived in an improvised fort around the ancient monument. It was essentially a megalithic squat. Expecting to be turned out by the System, the squatters had all previously agreed that when the authorities tried to remove them they would only answer to the name Wally. The Department of the Environment who were the keepers of Stonehenge issued the ‘wallies’ what amounted to an eviction notice: they were told to clear off and keep off. When the London High Courts tried to bring the people who had squatted at Stonehenge to trial they were faced with the absurdity of the names on the summons papers: Willy Wally, Sid Wally, Phil Wally and more. The newspapers had a heyday with the trials, and in a mercurial manner helped to spread word of what had happened, priming the pump and setting things into motion for another, bigger,  Stonehenge Free Festival the next year. The Wallies lost the court trial against them but as Wally Hope said, they had really “won” the day.

An article from the August 13, 1974 Times has it thus, “A strange hippie cult calling themselves 'Wallies' claim God told them to camp at Stonehenge. The Wallies of Wiltshire turned up in force at the High Court today. There was Kris Wally, Alan Wally, Fritz Wally, Sir Walter Wally, Wally Egypt and a few other wandering Wallys. The sober calm of the High Court was shattered as the Wallies of Stonehenge sought justice. A lady Wally called Egypt with bare feet and bells on her ankles blew soap bubbles in the rarefied legal air and knelt to meditate. Sir Walter Wally wore a theatrical Elizabethan doublet with blue jeans and spoke of peace and equality and hot dogs. Kevin Wally chain-smoked through a grotesque mask and gave the victory sign to embarrassed pin-striped lawyers. And tartan-blanketed Kris Wally – ‘My mates built Stonehenge’ - climbed a lamp-post in the Strand outside the Law Courts and stopped bemused tourists in their tracks.

The Wallies (motto `Everyone's a Wally: Everyday's a Sun Day') - made the pilgrimage to the High Court to defend what was their squatter right to camp on Stonehenge. . . the Department of the Environment is bringing an action in the High Court to evict the Wallies from the meadow, a quarter of a mile from the sarsen circle of standing stones, which is held by the National Trust on behalf of the nation. The document, delivered by the Department to the camp is a masterpiece of po-faced humour, addressed to ‘one known as Arthur Wally, another known as Philip Wally, another known as Ron Wally and four others each known as Wally’.

For instance, paragraph seven begins resoundingly: ‘There were four male adults in the tent and I asked each one in turn his name. Each replied `I'm Wally’'. There are a soft core of about two dozen, peace-loving, sun worshipping Wallies - including Wally Woof the mongrel dog. Hitch-hikers thumbing their way through Wiltshire from Israel, North America, France, Germany and Scotland have swollen their numbers. Egypt Wally wouldn't say exactly where she was from - only that she was born 12,870 years ago in the cosmic sun and had a certain affinity with white negative. Last night they were squatting on the grass and meditating on the news.”


[i] See: WHERE'S WALLY? a personal account of a multiple-use-name entanglement
by Nigel Ayers https://www.earthlydelights.co.uk/netnews/wally.html Nigel Ayers was a regular attendee at the Stonehenge Free Festival. He later went on to found the influential, multiple-genre band, Nocturnal Emissions. Nigel’s explorations of Britain’s sacred and mythic landscape, and megalithic sites, can see and heard throughout his body of work. 

If the druid hippie punks were the winners in the eyes of the public, the forces and people at play within the State were sore from the egg thrown on their face by the media. Someone had to be taught a lesson.  

In 1975 preparations for the next iteration of the Festival began and the counterculture rallied around the cause. Word of mouth spread it around the underground and handbills and flyers had been printed up in the Dial House studio for further dissemination. Things were shaping up for it to be a success. In May before the second festival was to be launched Russel went off on a jaunt to Cornwall to rest for a spell in his tepee before it began. He left in good spirits and high health. These activities weren’t going unnoticed by the State and the people involved in them unwatched.

Only a few days later he had gotten arrested, sectioned and incarcerated in the psyche ward for possession of three tabs of LSD. It just so happened that the police mounted a raid on a squat he had been staying in for the night. The cops claimed they were looking for an army deserter. Wally somewhat fit the description of “the deserter” because he had taken to wearing an eclectic mixture of middle-eastern military uniforms and Scottish tartans. When they searched his coat they found the contraband substance and nabbed him. Of course no one had really been trailing him, no one knew who it really was: the guy who’d made the British courts look like fools when prosecuting the hippies who had staged the Stonehenge coup. Upon his arrest Wally was refused bail, kept in prison, given no access to phone or the ability to write letters to his friends. His father was dead and his sister and mother had cut ties with him.

Held against his will in a psychiatric hospital, no one in Dial House saw him until a month later when they finally learned of his predicament. When they did manage to visit him he was a changed man. He had lost weight, was nervous and hesitant in his speech, and was always on the lookout for authorities. After their first visit they attempted to secure his release looking first to do so in a way that was legal. When they hit the blockades set in place by the System they hatched an escape plan but the psychiatric drugs Wally was being fed and injected with had taken a toll on all aspects of his health. To execute their plan would have caused him more damage. Rimbaud and the other plotters weren’t sure if he could physically and psychologically cope with an escape that would place him under further strain and demands. So they had to let it go, and leave he was, even though their hearts were tortured by this decision. 

Meanwhile the second Stonehenge festival went on whilst the visionary who had instigated it was suffering the side effects of modecate injections. This time thousands of people had turned up for it, whereas the first year estimates were in the realm of a few hundred to five hundred attendees. This time the authorities were powerless to stop the gathering.

Eventually Wally Hope was let go, but the prescription drug treatment the authorities had forced him to take while on the inside had taken their toll. He was in a bad way, incapacitated, zombie zonked on government sanctioned psych meds. Three weeks later he was dead. The official verdict was suicide from sleeping pills, but Rimbaud disputed this, and delved into his own investigation of the matter over the next year. Later he wrote about his friend and the case and concluded that Russel had been assassinated by the state.[i]

Other’s aren’t quite so sure and see his death as existing more in the grey area of the acid casualty. Certainly the System pumping him full of drugs had done him no good. It is hard to know how his own previous and pre-prison profligate experimentation with psychedelics precipitated his decline.  

Nigel Ayers who attended the festival in the years ’74, ‘75, ’76 witnessed the buildup of the legend surrounding Wally Hope. He writes of him, “I last saw Russell, seeming rather subdued, in 1975, at the Watchfield Free Festival.[ii] A few weeks later I saw a report in the local paper that he had died in mysterious circumstances. The next year at the Stonehenge festival, a whisper went round that someone had turned up with the ashes from Wally's cremation. At midday, within the sarsen circle, Sid Rawle said a few mystical words over a small wooden box and a bunch of us scattered Wally's mortal remains over the stones. I took a handful of ashes out to sprinkle on the Heel stone, and as I did so, a breeze blew up and I got a bit of Wally in my eye.”

[i] Footnote: All of this is detailed in Rimbaud’s book The Last of the Hippies: an Hysterical Romance. It was first published in 1982 in conjunction with the Crass record Christ: The Album.
[ii] This would have been shortly after his release from psychiatric confinement.

Punks weren’t the first subculture to cram a bunch of bodies into a house to share chores, living expenses and cut costs while working on projects they loved and do things they needed to do to survive. While various quasi-communal living arrangements have been enjoyed down the centuries in various forms, we only have to travel back in time to the late 1930’s and early 40’s to see the dream of a shared house established among the first nerds of science fiction fandom. Yes, I’m talking about Slan Shacks.

But what the heck is a Slan Shack anyway? The name Slan came from the novel of the same name by A.E. van Vogt, first serialized in Astounding Science Fiction in 1940 and later published as a hardcover by Arkham House in 1946.[i] In the story Slans are super intelligent evolved humans in possession of psychic abilities, a high degree of stamina, strength, speed and “nerves of steel”. Named after their alleged creator, Samuel Lann, when a Slan gets ill or injured they go into an automatic healing trance until their powers are recovered.

SF heads came up with the slogan “Fans are Slans” after Vogt’s book came out as a way of expressing their perceived superiority, greater intelligence and imaginative ability over non-science fiction readers, so called “mundanes”.  Though some considered this to be elitist, others just thought it was a natural reaction against the derogatory way science fiction and its fans were often treated by those who thought the pulps were trash literature. Later, when groups of fans and aspiring SF writers started living together as a way to share expenses, the homes were named Slan Shacks.

 According to the science fiction Fancyclopedia its “a tongue-in-cheek reference to Deglerism, which came to mean any household with two or more unrelated fans (or, provided three or more fans were involved, could include married couples).” The Fancyclopedia goes on to say, “Although many early New York fans, attempting to economize while seeking a pro career, shared apartments in the Big Apple, the first Slan Shack so dubbed came into being in late 1943 in Battle Creek, Michigan; it lasted only two years, breaking up in September 1945 when its occupants moved to California, but gave its name to the practice. The best known fans of the ‘original’ Slan Shack included E. E. Evans, Walt Liebscher, Jack Wiedenbeck and Al & Abby Lu Ashley.”[ii]

The Slan Shack or the idea of it if not the name, had actually been around a bit earlier than this, since 1938. One such group was the Galactic Roomers, a pun from the name of SF club the Galactic Roamers based in Michigan and centered around the work of writer E. E. “Doc” Smith. The idea was basically the same as a punk house, a place where science fiction fans could share the costs and loads of living, bum around and off each other, store their collections of books and pulp magazines, and decorate the place as they pleased. Other shacks group up out of fandom as well and these included, the Flat in London, England, then the Futurian House and in 1943 the Slan Shack itself. The name stuck for these dens of high geekdom.

The punk movement evolved out of and in retaliation to the hippie subculture, and the punk house is similar to the crash pads of the 1960’s. Andy Warhol’s Factory was a foundational precursor and model for the punk house as it developed in New York City.  Across the pond in Essex the Dial House formed in the late 60’s later to become the birthplace and home of the band Crass. I consider Dial House even more than the Factory to be one of the foundational templates of the punk house. It still exists today. The Positive Force house in Arlington, Virginia served as a locus for the Washington D.C. hardcore and straight edge scene of the mid-80’s. The alternative art and collaborative space ABC No Rio grew out of the squatter scene taking place in New York’s Lower East. Taking a detailed look at each of these places will give insights into what has been done, and what is possible. Let’s start with Dial House.
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[i] Slan by A.E. van Vogt, 1946: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slan

[ii] See Fancyclopedia 3: http://fancyclopedia.org/slan-shack

Though the punk house is especially suited for urban areas, especially when groups of individuals take over an abandoned building or spaces to homestead, the principal may also be applied to a home on a piece of property in the country. The rambling farm cottage that became Dial House was originally built in the 16th century. Set on the idyllic land of Epping Forest in south-west Essex, England, one could easily imagine it as a haven for hippies and others in the back to earth crowd. But punks? Dial house was launched in 1967 and had been heavily influenced by the hippie subculture. In the book Teenage: the Creation of Youth Culture, Jon Savage described punk as bricolage, combing and mixing and blending together elements from all the previous youth culture in the industrialized West going back to WWII, and as he says, it was all “stuck together with safety pins.”[i] Various philosophies and artistic styles that could more broadly be described as bohemian were all collaged together by the nascent punk rockers. Anything that wasn’t nailed to the floor was taken and glued to something that had been dumpster dived from somewhere else.

Dial House was an alembic for this yeasty form of cultural fermentation and a variety of influences were baked into its foundation when they first started launching artistic spores out into the world in 1967. The building itself was the former home of Primrose McConnell, a tenant farmer and the author of The Agricultural Notebook (1883), a standard reference work for the European farming industry. By the late 60s the property had sat derelict, its gardens overgrown with brambles, and was ripe to be taken over by some starving artists who needed a place to set up shop.

It began with resident Penny “Lapsang” Rimbaud. Penny is a writer, artist, philosopher, musician and jazz aficionado who at the time was working as a lecturer in an art school. Two other teachers joined him on the property and they started working on making improvements, making the cottage livable and the land workable. They were able to sublet the property from an adjacent farm with minimal rent due to the amount of sweat equity they were putting in to make a perfect domicile for the wayward. 

By 1970 Dial House had become something of a bohemian salon. Creative thinkers of various stripes were attracted by the atmosphere Rimbaud and his cohorts had started to create. Seeing the possibilities afforded by low rent and collaboration Penny decided to quit his job in order to expand on the further potentials for developing a self-sufficient lifestyle free from the time constraints the cramping day job. He also wanted the place to be a free space open to anyone and everyone. Rimbaud said that Dial House would operate with an “open door, open heart” policy. To that end all the locks were removed from all of the doors. Anyone who wants to drop in and stay may do so, and is welcomed, though they are encouraged to help out with the chores.

Penny writes of his motivations, “I was fortunate enough to have found a large country house at very low rent, and felt I wanted to share my luck. I had wanted to create a place where people could get together to work and live in a creative atmosphere rather than the stifling, inward looking family environments in which most of us had been brought up. Within weeks of opening the doors, people started turning up out of nowhere. Pretty soon we were a functioning community.  

            … I had opened up the house to all-comers at a time when many others were doing the same. The so-called ‘Commune Movement’ was the natural result of people like myself wishing to create lives of cooperation, understanding and sharing. Individual housing is one of the most obvious causes for the desperate shortage of homes. Communal living is a practical solution to the problem. If we could learn to share our homes, maybe we could learn to share our world. That is the first step towards a state of sanity.”[ii]

The visual artist, print maker and skilled gardener Gee Vaucher soon joined the household to become its most long-term resident besides Rimbaud himself. The ground floor of Dial House transformed into a shared studio space while the upper rooms were reserved for accommodations. Later a couple of trailers were added to the grounds to accommodate the constant influx of visitors. At this point the house became an ever-shifting interzone populated by artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers who spent their time working on projects and helping to run the house and garden. The garden itself was run on organic principles, guided by Vaucher’s green thumb and intuition about plants. Under her guidance they were also able to set up a cottage industry producing small batch herbal remedies. The place was beginning to develop its own home economy.

With all of the life force bubbling up in the garden, and the creative passions of the visitors and long term residents stewing in the studio, it wasn’t long before new collaborative projects were created. Vaucher and Rimbaud had already been working together as members of the Stanford Rivers Quartet, where they explored the relationship between sound and imagery. The group found its inspiration from the Bauhaus art school, jazz and classical composers such as Lucio Berio and Edgar Varese.[iii]

In 1971 the Stanford Rivers Quartet expanded into an ensemble that sometimes consisted of up to a dozen players and changed their name to Exit. Even more artists and filmmakers got involved to put together “happenings" as was the spirit of the day, and these spawned into circus like proportions. The operational strategy of Exit was guerilla. Unannounced they would turn up at venues to play their music. How this fared for the audience, I’m not sure, but it was a strategy for getting their material out into the world without relying on traditional booking methods.

Around this time Dial House members became involved with various festivals including ICES 72.  Exit played at the fest and several related events were held at the House itself. Vaucher, Rimbaud and the other residents proved critical to its success and organization, producing and printing flyers in their print room, and helping the founder Harvey Matusow with the programming. One of the connections they made via ICES was with filmmaker Anthony McCall with whom they would continue to work. The print shop at Dial House became an integral part of their home economy and out of it was born Exitstencil Press.

A collective home with a print shop is potentially a viable way to earn an income, or at least print the kind of things you would like to view and read yourself and to circulate within the subculture. Other homespun efforts may be more or less viable as part of the home economy. Enterprising punks and science fiction freaks will find a way to get it done.

[i] Teenage: the Creation of Youth Culture by Jon Savage, Viking, New York, 2007

[ii] The Last of the Hippies: an Hysterical Romance by Penny Rimbaud, PM Press, 2015.

[iii] The Story of Crass by George Berger, PM Press, 2009.

​Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music
Back in 1966 Boulez had proposed a total reorganization of French musical life to André Malraux, the Minister of Culture. Malraux rebuffed Boulez when he appointed Marcel Landowski, who was much more conservative in his tastes and programs, as head of music at the Ministry of Culture. Boulez, who had been known for his tendency to express himself as an epic jerk, was outraged. In an article he wrote for the Nouvel Observateur he announced that he was "going on strike with regard to any aspect of official music in France."
As author John Michael Greer has noted, in French intellectual life, the pose of the philosopher, artist or thinker who dismisses the work of everyone else with a sneer is a familiar pose, and Boulez was accustomed to playing out this role, in his voluminous writings, talks, artistic rivalries with his contemporaries and barbed wire criticisms designed to prick at the flesh of the musicians he worked with. The French knew not to take this game too seriously, whereas Americans tended to be put off him and have their feelings hurt.
When confronted about this aspect of his reputation later in life Boulez said, "Certainly I was a bully. I'm not ashamed of it at all. The hostility of the establishment to what you were able to do in the Forties and Fifties was very strong. Sometimes you have to fight against your society."
So when Boulez was asked by the current French president Georges Pompidou to set up an institute dedicated to researching acoustics, music, and computer technology, he was quick to recant his strike with regards to official music in France, accept the offer, and get busy with work. This was the beginning of the Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique, IRCAM. The space was built next to, and linked institutionally to the Centre George Pomidou, official work started in 1973.
Boulez took inspiration from the Bauhaus and used them as a model for the institute. The Bauhaus had been an interdisciplinary art school that provided a meeting ground for artists and scientists, and this was the aspect he sought to emulate. His vision for the institute was to bring together musicians, composers, scientists and developers of technology.
In a publicity piece for IRCAM he wrote, “The creator’s intuition alone is powerless to provide a comprehensive translation of musical invention. It is thus necessary for him to collaborate with the scientific research worker… The musician must assimilate a certain scientific knowledge, making it an integral part of his creative imagination...at educational meetings scientists and musician’s will become familiar with one another’s point of view and approach. In this way we hope to forge a kind of common language that hardly exists at present.”
To bring his vision into reality he needed the help of those at the forefront of computer music. To that end he brought Max Mathews on board as a scientific advisor to the IRCAM project, and he served in that capacity for six years between 1974 and 1980. Mathews old friend Jean-Claude Risset was hired to direct IRCAM’s computer department, which he did between 1975 and 1979. The work that their colleague John Chowning was doing back in California was crucial to the success of the institute and he was tapped as a further resource.

​Max/MSP

Once IRCAM got into a groove it started pushing out a steady stream of compositions, papers, and software from its many scientific and artistic residents and collaborators. Boulez’s vision of a “general school or laboratory” where scientists and sound artists mixed and mingled had come to fruition. One of its most famous outputs is the software suite Max/MSP.

Today the MUSIC I software Max wrote through many versions lives on in the software suite of Max / MSP. Named in honor of Max Mathews, the software is a powerful visual programming language that is now functional for multimedia performance that has grown out of its musical core. The program has been alive, well and growing for more than thirty years and has been used by composers, performers, software designers, researchers, and artists to create recordings, performances, and installations. The software is designed and maintained by the company Cycling ’74.

Building off the gains in musical software developed by Mathews, Miller Smith Puckette (MSP) started to work on a program originally called The Patcher at IRCAM in 1985. This first version for Macintosh had a graphical interface that allowed users to create interactive scores. It wasn’t yet powerful enough to do real time synthesis. Instead it used MIDI and similar protocols to send commands to external sound hardware.
Four years later Max/FTS (Faster Than Sound) was developed at IRCAM. This version could be ported to the IRCAM Signal Processing Workstation (ISPW) for the NeXT computer system. This time around it could do real time synthesis using an internal hardware digital signal processor (DSP) making it a forerunner to the MSP extensions that would later be added to Max. 1989 was also the year the software was licensed to Opcode who promptly launched a commercial version at the beginning of the next decade.

Opcode held onto the program until 1997. During those years a talented console jockey named David Zicarelli further extended and developed the promise of Max. Yet Opcode wanted to cancel their run with the software. Zicarelli new it had even further potential. So he acquired the rights and started his own company called Cycling ’74. Zicarelli’s timing proved to be fortuitous as Gibson Guitar ended up buying Opcode, and then after they owned it for a year, ceasing its existence. Such is the fabulous world of silicon corporate buy outs.

Miller Smith Puckette had in the meantime released the independent and open-source composition tool Pure Data (Pd). It was a fully redesigned tool that still fell within the same tradition as his earlier program for IRCAM. Zicarelli, sensing that a fruitful fusion could be made manifest, released Max/MSP in 1997, the MSP portion being derived from Puckette’s work on PureData. The two have been inseparable ever since.
The achievement meant that Max was now capable of real time manipulation of digital audio signals sans dedicated DSP hardware. The reworked version of the program was also something that could work on a home computer or laptop. Now composers could use this powerful tool to work in their home studios. The musical composition software that had begun on extensive and expensive mainframes was now available to those who were willing to pay the entry fee. You didn’t need the cultural connections it took to work at places like Bell Labs or IRCAM. And if you had a computer but couldn’t afford the commercial Max/MSP you could still download Pd for free. The same is true today.

Extension packs were now being written by other companies, contributing to the ecology around Max. In 1999 the Netochka Nezvanova collective released a suite of externals that added extensive real-time video control to Max. This made the program a great resource for multimedia artists. Various other groups and companies continued to tinker and add things on.

It got to the point where Max Mathews himself, well into his golden years, was learning how to use the program named after him. Mathews has received many accolades and appointments for his work. He was a member of the IEEE, the Audio Engineering Society, the Acoustical Society of America, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He held a Silver Medal in Musical Acoustics from the Acoustical Society of America, and the Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et Lettres, République Française.

​Max Mathews died of old age at 84 due to complications from pneumonia on April 21, 2011 in San Francisco. He was 84. He was survived by his wife, Marjorie, his three sons and six grandchildren.

Speakings

Harvey was as happy to work with traditional instruments and timbres as he was making purely electronic works or purely choral works. He was also happy to mix and match. He liked variety and drew his influences from a diverse grouping of musicians and teachers. All of these influences are present in his own diversity of work. His ability to work back and forth between modes gave him a lot of freedom, even if it made critics hard to pigeonhole his music.

Between 2005 and 2008 Jonathan Harvey was a composer in residence with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. Three major works known together as the “Glasgow Trilogy” came out of this period. The trilogy begins with Towards a Pure Land… (2005), continues with Body Mandala (2006), and finishes with the masterpiece Speakings (2008). All three pieces combine orchestral instruments with electronics, and all three are inspired by the Buddhist side of his spiritual inclinations, but it is Speakings where Harvey once again looks into the correlations between speech and song. Within that same time span Harvey wrote Sprechgesange (2007) for Oboe, Cor Anglais and Ensemble, and it is these two pieces that we will look at here.
Harvey ties his purely instrumental piece Sprechgesange to the earlier efforts of Schoenberg and Berg by using this word as its title. Harvey’s idea for Sprechgesange came from musing on the psychological roots of speech and sound and how those are so often connected to the cooing voice and talking and singing of the mother to her baby child, who experiences these first in the womb and then as a newborn and baby in the very early process of learning to speak and sing themselves. Halfway through the piece Harvey inserts a Wagner reference. He says this is a “a moment when Parsifal 'hears' the long-forgotten voice of his dead mother call the name, his own name, that he had forgotten - an action of the shamanistic Kundry. From this awakening, this healing, comes the birth of song from the meaningless chatter of endless human discourse. 'Speech' with deep meaning...”

Speakings was commissioned in part by IRCAM and Radio France who helped with the electronic side of things, again using programs to synthesize speech. He makes use of the orchestral palette to make further voicings that mimic the utterance of phonemes, building on the techniques he had used in Sprechgesange. From the slow beginning the organic and the digital merge together into a gradual towering babble of enunciation by the pieces second movement. The tracery of vocoded signals is laced into the chaos of linguistic polyphony.

Harvey writes, “The orchestral discourse, itself inflected by speech structures, is electro-acoustically shaped by the envelopes of speech taken from largely random recordings. The vowel and consonant spectra-shapes flicker in the rapid rhythms and colours of speech across the orchestral textures. A process of 'shape vocoding', taking advantage of speech's fascinating complexities, is the main idea of this work.” Different instruments had the “shape vocoding” applied to them through the judicious use of microphones.

The third and final movement begins with bell rings and horn blasts weaving between each other in a way that is reminiscent of how mantras are intoned with full vibration. The listener is now in a sacred place, a cathedral or temple, and the voices here chant an incantatory song, along single monodic lines reverberating through space. Here we return to what Harvey says is the “womb of all speech”, the Buddhist mantra OM-AH-HUM, which in the mythology of India is said to be half-song, half-speech. This is pure speech. The original tongue. In Judaeo-Christian terms it be likened to the original language spoken by Adam and Eve, and before the time of Babel when humanities tongues were shattered and split into multiplicity.

In Buddhist mythology from India there is a notion of original, pure speech, in the form of mantras - half song, half speech. The OM-AH-HUM is said to be the womb of all speech.

Read the rest of the Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis and the Birth of Electronic.

Selected Re/sources:
IRCAM, CCRMA, Intercontemporary Underground Music,
Max/MSP


Georgina, Born. Rationalizing culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avantgarde. Berkeley, CA.: University of California Press, 1995.
IRCAM. “How Well Do You Know Espro?” <https://manifeste.ircam.fr/en/article/detail/connaissez-vous-lespace-de-projection/>
Krämer, Reiner. “X: An Analytical Approach to John Chowning’s Phoné.” < https://ccrma.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/user/jc/phone_kraemer_analysis_0.pdf>
National Public Radio. “IRCAM: The Quiet House Of Sound” <https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97002999#:~:text=IRCAM%20was%20created%20more%20than,20th%20century's%20pre%2Deminent%20composers.>
Smith, Richard Langham, Potter, Caroline, ed. French Music Since Berlioz. Burlington, VT. Ashgate Publisher, Inc., 2006.
Tingen, Paul. “IRCAM: Institute For Research & Co-ordination in Acoustics & Music.” <https://www.soundonsound.com/people/ircam-institute-research-co-ordination-acoustics-music>


CHANT, Jonathan Harvey’s Ritual Melodies, Speakings


Anderson, Julie. “Jonathan Harvey Dies Aged 73.” <https://www.takte-online.de/en/portrait/article/artikel/ircam-und-kathedralchor-zum-tode-jonathan-harveys/index.htm>
Bresson, Jean, Agon, Carlos. “Temporal Control over Sound Synthesis Processes.” Sound and Music Computing (SMC’06), 2006, Marseille, France.
Chamorro, Gabriel José Bolaños Chamorro. “An Analysis of Jonathan Harvey’s Speakings For Orchestra and Electronics.” Ricercare No. 13, 2020.
Faber Music. “Jonathan Harvey's masterpiece trilogy at Edinburgh International Festival.” < https://www.fabermusic.com/news/jonathan-harveys-masterpiece-trilogy-at-edinburgh-international-festival-252>
Harvey, Jonathan. “Inner Light 1 (1973)” < https://www.wisemusicclassical.com/work/7644/Inner-Light-1--Jonathan-Harvey/>
Harvey, Jonathan. “Ritual Melodies.” <https://www.fabermusic.com/music/ritual-melodies-1504>
Harvey, Jonathan. “Sprechgesang.” < https://www.fabermusic.com/music/sprechgesang-3850>
Harvey, Jonathan. “Speakings.”< https://www.fabermusic.com/music/speakings-5282>
Harvey, Jonathan, Lorrain, Denis, Barrière, Jean-Baptiste, Haynes, Stanley. “Notes on the Realization of ‘Bhakti.” Computer Music Journal, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Autumn, 1984), pp. 74-78 (5 pages)
Holmes, Thom. Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music, and Culture. New York, NY.: Routledge, 2020.
Manning, Peter. Electronic and Computer Music. Oxford, UK.: Clarendon Press, 1993.
Rodet, Xavier, Potard, Yves, Barriere, Jean-Baptiste. “The CHANT Project: From the Synthesis of the Singing Voice to Synthesis in General.” Computer Music Journal, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Autumn, 1984), pp. 15-31)
Service, Tom. “A Guide to Jonathan Harvey’s Music.”< https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2012/sep/17/jonathan-harvey-contemporary-music-guide>

I never thought I’d get to see Skinny Puppy live. Back in 1999 when I first became a fan of the band, around the age of twenty, they had fallen into an inactive stasis. At that time their last album had been The Process. The album was marked by a number of production and recording issues that had largely been absent from the collaborative spirit felt by the members on previous albums and punctuated by the death of Dwayne Goettel. The band dissipated, but cEvin Key kept busy with his Download project. Download had been my first entry point towards Skinny Puppy anyways. The other entry point had been The Tear Garden. This group had been formed by cEvin Key with Edward Ka-Spel from the Legendary Pink Dots -still one of my favorite experiemental-psychedelic-goth bands ever. The Tear Garden featured a lot of other members from both Skinny Puppy and Legendary Pink Dots, and I was obsessed with the Dots and Tear Garden at the time. Listening to Skinny Puppy back then was part of retracing cEvin Keys first steps, and I fell in love with what I heard.
​
I lost track of Skinny Puppy’s output until Weapon came out in 2013. Later still I backed-tracked again to listen to the three albums they put out between 2004 and 2011. Of those I think hanDover may be my favorite. I still followed along with Key here and there, and was delighted a few years ago when The Tear Garden put out The Brown Acid Caveat, wonderfully lysergic, if a bit of a bum trip. Yet if it hadn’t been for the darkness and melancholy I don’t know if I would have listened in the first place.

When I first heard Skinny Puppy was going on tour I got terribly excited and made sure to get a ticket as soon as I could. The tour was slated at their 40th anniversary and Final Tour, so now was the chance to go if I was going to go. By the time the Friday of the show rolled around my anticipation was peaking. I’d done my homework over the past few weeks and gone back and relistened to some of my old favorite songs and several favorite albums, along with some of the others I’d never listened to as often. When I saw the line to get inside Bogart’s was going all the way down the short side of Short Vine, down Corry St. towards Jefferson, I realized I was going to be standing in the longest line I’d ever been in for a concert at Bogarts. The only others I can remember that were maybe as long were for my first punk show ever, Rancid with The Queers, or later, Fugazi.

Being in line for this show was similar to that first concert I went to as a young and aspiring skater punk: I felt a sense of unity being there with a bunch of misfit freaks. I felt at home, and normal for a couple hours. I was also happy to know that: Goths Not Dead.
Goth may not be in the same advanced and glorious state of gloom and decay as was when Charles Baudelaire roamed the streets Paris, or when Edgar Allan Poe rued America’s imagination, but those who love the imagery of death are very much alive. Also, I’ve never seen so many Bauhaus and Peter Murphy T-Shirts in one place.

Granted, a lot of these goths were aging goths and rusting industrial music rivetheads. A large contingent seemed to be middle-aged like me, in their forties, but others were in their fifties, sixties and a few beyond. I wasn’t sure how many newer fans Skinny Puppy had generated but there were a lot of young people too. These included the children of just-now-having-kids Gen Xers and older Millenials who had brought several 6 to 10 year olds to join in the fray. I guess that shouldn’t have been surprising to me, as I had taken my grandson, then about nine, to see Lustmord when he came to Columbus to do a set at the CoSci planetarium. Either way it was good to see that the intertwined Gothic and Industrial subcultures are not only still alive, but apparently reproducing.

The show had sold out and inside the place was packed. It seems obvious that industrial music still resonates. Even as the industrial system that inspired this type of music has long been in decline, our society still grapples with its after effects. Machines have wreaked havoc on human relations, and industrial music still grapples with our relationship troubled relationship to technology. 

            The opening band Lead Into Gold made some pretty mean electronic cuts. I liked all the instrumental aspects of the band, and they had some chest thumping bass. I’m glad I don’t need a pacemaker, because if I did I would have worried it might get jarred loose from the vibrations. This was the side project of Paul Barker, aka Hermes Pan, former bassist for Ministry, and as such I can see why it left me a bit in the middle. Ministry had reliably been a band I always felt stuck in the middle on. I didn’t much care for the vocal side of Lead Into Gold’s performance and they did little to interact with the audience. They weren’t bad, I just would have liked them better sans vocals.

During the intermission the palpable pressure continued to build until the lights dimmed, the members of Skinny Puppy came on stage, and the first strains of “VX Gas Attack” slipped out of the speakers. The song uses the sampled word “Bethlehem” among others, and I knew was in some kind of embattled holy land for the duration of the concert.

            Ogre started off behind a white screen, singing, doing shadow puppet maneuvers, as his growls and inflections pummeled the gathered masses, the drums assaulted and electronics laid everything in a thick bed. By the time the third song “Rodent” came on, Ogre was out from behind the veil, wearing a long dark cloak, face covered in shadows.

            Then the cloak came down to reveal Ogre as an alien with green lit up eyes that pulsed down on the audience. Another player prowled the stage with him, brandishing a kind of cattle prod or taser. Whatever little sanity was left in the crowd disappeared. The alien wasn’t here to torture us earthlings, but had come and gotten tortured as an alien. The alien hadn’t come to earth to abduct, torture or experiment on any in the crowd, but had come down and was now subject to being prodded, probed, manipulated, and perhaps even vivisected at the hands of humans. I saw this aspect of the performance as a perfect metaphor for our own state of affairs at this time within the larger culture; this time where we are more alienated from each other than we have ever been before, at least in my memory as a tail end Gen Xer. We live in a time of massive projection, of what Carl Jung called “the shadow”. These are the blind spots of our psyches, the places where all the things we refuse to acknowledge got to live. In our society, with all the things we repress and suppress, the contents of the shadow are bound to bubble up as a kind of crude oil used to fuel both sides of the forever culture wars.  Since we refuse to look in the mirror at our own shadows, at the alien inside of us, we must find that alien other, prod, tase, torture and beat them down.

            I had expected to see a montage of horror movie clips projected behind the band, the kind of stuff that might traumatize me for the rest of my life. That wasn’t part of the show, but it didn’t need to be. They did use abstract imagery behind them, but the interaction between ogre and the cattle prodder on stage was more than engaging.

            Now I love Ogre’s vocals, but the main draw for me as a Skinny Puppy fan has always been the electronic wizardry of cEvin Key. It was fun to watch Key playing, but as I got jostled about in the slew of people, I at first couldn’t see him so well. I was finally able to get into a spot where I could see all the players doing their thing. This leads me to the drummer. I hadn’t expected to see one there. Previous accounts of their live shows noted the use of drum machines. The live drummer was a real plus to the overall experience of the event. He beat the hell out of those drums and the sound was great, matching up expertly to all the songs.

            Eventually as the music at the show built to the first climax a giant brain was brought out on stage, and the player with taser or cattle prod went straight at it, hitting the brain in rhythm, just like the electrical pulses from the music pulsed my own head. As the concert wound down they took the music all the way back to the beginning with “Dig It,” the last song before the first encore.

            When they came back on stage, it was just Key and the guitarist Matthew Setzer, engaging in an electronic jam or “Brap.” This could have gone on a lot longer in my opinion. These extended freakout sessions were some of my favorite output of material from their archives.

            Then Ogre came back out without his costume and ripped into “Gods Gift (Maggot)” before launching into “Assimilate.” A second encore brought them back with another oldie “Smothered Hope” and they ended the whole thing with their more recent song “Candle.”

            There is something about Skinny Puppy that is tribal. It’s like they were able to draw something out of the terroir of the land they grew up and lived on, and infused that Cascadian vibe into the music. Last year I listened to an interview done by cEvin Key with his fellow Vancouver friends Bill Leeb and Rhys Fulber (of Front Line Assembly, Delerium). They were talking about the scene in the early days, as the Canadian iteration of industrial music developed with the birth of Skinny Puppy. Key talked about being able to walk to anything that was happening, and not needing a car, and how that was an advantage of those early days in the late 70s and early 80s.

It got me thinking, as they bantered back and forth about taking drugs, walking around with big poofed up hair, kind of like a gothed out version of glam, of how tribalistic that scene must have been for them. The creativity that was coming to them seemed to come not only from the music they were listening to that was inspiring them (Nocturnal Emissions, Throbbing Gristle, early electronics, lots of punk) but also the energy of the land itself. The kind of industrial music that came out of Vancouver had its own particular flavor. It only could have come from there, as the consciousness of the land spilled into the people making the music. This idea about the terroir of music was later born out by another interview I listened to on Key’s YouTube channel, about the making of the album Too Dark Park -and one of the Vancouver parks the members of the band spent a lot of time hanging out at, and the ancient Native American burial sites within the park.

            I was grateful to be able to share this tribal experience with the band on stage, and feel the sense of camaraderie with the others in the crowd. All these weeks later I am still going back and forth over it in my head, assimilating the download of their specific style of industrial sound, born in Vancouver and spread around the world. 

Pierre Boulez was of the opinion that music is like a labyrinth, a network of possibilities, that can be traversed by many different paths. Music need not have a clearly defined beginning, middle and end. Like the music he wrote, the life of Boulez did not follow a single track, but shifted according to the choices available. Not all of life is predetermined, even if the path of fate has already been cast. Choices remain open. Boulez held that music is an exploration of these choices. In an avantgarde composition a piece might be tied together by rhythms, tone rows, and timbre. A life might be tied together by relationships, jobs and careers, works made and things done. The choices Boulez made take him through his own labyrinth of life.

            As Boulez wrote, “A composition is no longer a consciously directed construction moving from a ‘beginning’ to an ‘end’ and passing from one to another. Frontiers have been deliberately ‘anaesthetized’, listening time is no longer directional but time-bubbles, as it were…A work thought of as a circuit, neither closed nor resolved, needs a corresponding non-homogenous time that can expand or condense”.

            Boulez was born in Montbrison, France on March 26, of 1925 to an engineer father. As a child he took piano lessons and played chamber music with local amateurs and sang in the school choir. Boulez was gifted at mathematics and his father hoped he would follow him into engineering, following an education at the École Polytechnique, but opera music intervened. He saw Boris Godunov and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and had his world rocked. Then he met the celebrity soprano Ninon Vallin, the two hit it off and she asked him to play for her. She saw his inherent and talent and helped persuade his father to let him apply to the Conservatoire de Lyon. He didn’t make the cut, but this only furthered his resolve to pursue a life path in music.

            His older sister Jeanne, with whom he remained close the rest of his life, supported his aspirations, and helped him receive private instruction on the piano and lessons in harmony from Lionel de Pachmann. His father remained opposed to these endeavors, but with his sister as his champion he held strong. In October of 1943 he again auditioned for the Conservatoire and was struck down. Yet a door opened when he was admitted to the prepatory harmony class of Georges Dandelot. Following this his further ascension in the world of music was swift. 

            Two of the choices Boulez made that was to have a long-lasting impact on his career was his choice of teacher, Olivier Messiaen, who he approached in June of 1944. Messiaen taught harmony outside the bounds of traditional notions, and embraced the new music of Schoenberg, Webern, Bartok, Debussy and Stravinsky.

            In February of 1945 Boulez got to attend a private performance of Schoenberg’s Wind Quartet and the event left him breathless, and led him to his second influential teacher. The piece was conducted by René Leibowitz and Boulez organized a group of students to take lessons from him for a time. Leibowitz had studied with Schoenberg and Anton Webern and was a friend of Jean Paul Sartre. His performances of music from the Second Viennese School made him something of a rock star in avant-garde circles of the time. Under the tutelage of Leibowitz, Boulez was able to drink from the font of twelve tone theory and practice.

            Boulez later told Opera News that this music “was a revelation — a music for our time, a language with unlimited possibilities. No other language was possible. It was the most radical revolution since Monteverdi. Suddenly, all our familiar notions were abolished. Music moved out of the world of Newton and into the world of Einstein.”

The work of Leibowitz helped the young composer to make his initial contributions to integral serialism, the total artistic control of all parameters of sound, including duration, pitch, and dynamics according to serial procedures. Messiaen’s ideas about modal rhythms also contributed to his development in this area and his future work.

            Milton Babbitt had been first in developing has own system of integral serialism, independently of his French counterpart, having published his book on set theory and music in 1946.  At this point the two were not aware of each others work. Boulez’s first works to use integral serialism are both from 1947: Three Compositions for Piano and Compositions for Four Instruments.

            While studying under Messiaen Boulez was introduced to non-western world music. He found it very inspiring and spent a period of time hanging out in the museums where he studied Japanese and Balinese musical traditions, and African drumming.  Boulez later commented that, "I almost chose the career of an ethnomusicologist because I was so fascinated by that music. It gives a different feeling of time."

             In 1946 the first public performances of Boulez’s compositions were given by pianist Yvette Grimaud. He kept himself busy living the art life, tutoring the son of his landlord in math to help make ends meet. He made further money playing the ondes Martentot, an early French electronic instrument designed by Maurice Martentot who had been inspired by the accidental sound of overlapping oscillators he had heard while working with military radios. Martentot wanted his instrument to mimic a cello and Messiaen had used it in his famous symphony Turangalîla-Symphonie, written between 1946 and 1948. Boulez got a chance to improvise on the ondes Martentot as an accompanist to radio dramas. He also would organize the musicians in the orchestra pit at the Folies Bergère cabaret music hall.

            His experience as a conductor was furthered when actor Jean-Louis Barrault asked him to play the ondes for the production of Hamlet he was making with his wife, Madeline Reanud for their new company at the Théâtre Marigny. A strong working relationship was formed and he became the music director for their Compagnie Renaud-Barrault. A lot of the music he had to play for their productions was not to his taste, but it put some francs in his wallet and gave him the opportunity to compose in the evening. He got to write some of his own incidental music for the productions, tour South America and North America several times each, in addition to dates with the company around Europe. These experiences stood him well in stead when he embarked on the path of conductor as part of his musical life.

            In 1949 Boulez met John Cage when he came to Paris and helped arrange a private concert of the Americans Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano. Afterwards the two began an intense correspondence that lasted for six-years. In 1951 Pierre Schaeffer hoste the first musique concrète workshop. Boulez, Jean Barraqué, Yvette Grimaud, André Hodeir and Monique Rollin all attended. Olivier Messiaen was assisted by Pierre Henry in creating a rhythmical work Timbres-durè es that was mad from a collection percussive sounds and short snippets.

            At  the end of 1951, while on tour with the Renaud-Barrault company he visited New York for the first time, staying in Cage’s apartment. He was introduced to Igor Stravinksy and Edgard Vaèse. Cage was becoming more and more committed to chance operations in his work, and this was something Boulez could never get behind. Instead of adopting a “compose and let compose” attitude, Boulez withdrew from Cage, and later broke off their friendship completely.
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In 1952 Boulez met Stockhausen who had come to study with Messiaen, and the pair hit it off, even though neither spoke the others language. Their friendship continued as both worked on pieces of musique concrète  at the GRM, with Boulez’s contribution being his Deux Études. In turn, Boulez came to Germany in July of that year for the summer courses at Darmstadt. Here he met Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, and Henri Pousseur among others, and found himself moving into a role as an acerbic ambassador for the avantgarde. 

Sound, Word, Synthesis
        
    As Boulez got his bearings as a young composer, the connections between music and poetry came to capture his attention, as it had Schoenberg. Poetry became integral to Boulez’s orientation towards music, and his teacher Messiaen would say that the work of his student was best understood as that of a poet.
Sprechgesang, or speech song, a kind of vocal technique half between speaking and singing, was first used in formal music by Engelbert Humperdink in his 1897 melodrama Königskinder. In some ways sprechgesang is a German synonym for the already established practice of the recitative in operas as found in Wagner’s compositions. Arnold Schoenberg used the related term Sprechstimme as a technique in his song cycle Pierrot lunaire (1912) where he employed a special notation to indicate the parts that should be sung-spoke. Schoenberg’s disciple Alban Berg used the technique in his opera Wozzeck (1924). Schoenberg employed it again in his Moses and Aron opera (1932).

In Boulez’s explorations of the relationship between poetry and music he questioned "whether it is actually possible to speak according to a notation devised for singing. This was the real problem at the root of all the controversies. Schoenberg's own remarks on the subject are not in fact clear."

            Pierre Boulez wrote three settings of René Char's poetry, Le Soleil des eaux, Le Visage nuptial, and Le Marteau sans maître. Char had been involved with Surrealist movement, was active in the French Resistance, and mixed freely with other Parisian artists and intellectuals. Le Visage Nuptial (The Nuptial Face) from 1946 was an early attempt at reuniting poetry and music across the gap they had taken so long ago. He took five of Chars erotic texts and wrote the piece for two voices, two ondes Martenot, piano and percussion. In the score there are instructions for “Modifications de l’intonation vocale.”
          
  His next attempt in this vein was Le Marteau sans maître  (The Hammer without a Master, 1953-57) and it remains one of Boulez’s most regarded works, a personal artistic breakthrough. He brought his studies of Asian and African music to bear on the serialist vortex that had sucked him in, and he spat out one of the stars of his own universe. The work is made up of four interwoven cycles with vocals, each based on a setting of three poems by Char taken from his collection of the same name, and five of purely instrumental music. The wordless sections act as commentaries to the parts employing Sprechstimme. First written in 1953 and 1954, Boulez revised the order of the movements in 1955, while infusing it newly composed parts. This version was premiered that year at the Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Baden-Baden. Boulez had a hard time letting his compositions, once finished, just be, and tinkered with it some more, creating another version in 1957.
           
Le Marteau sans maître is often compared with Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. By using Sprechstimme as one of the components of the piece, Boulez is able to emulate his idol Schoenberg, while contrasting his own music from that of the originator of the twelve tone system. As with much music of the era written by his friends Cage and Stockhausen, the work is challenging to the players, and here most of the challenges are directed at the vocalist.  Humming, glissandi and jumps over wide ranges of notes are common in this piece. 
            The work takes Char’s idea of a “verbal archipelago” where the images conjured by the words are like islands that float in an ocean of relation, but with spaces between them. The islands share similarities and are connected to one another, but each is also distinct and of itself. Boulez took this concept and created his work where the poetic sections act as islands within the musical ocean. 
       
     A few years later, he worked with material written by the symbolist and hermetic poet Stéphane Mallarme, when he wrote Pli selon pli in (1962). Mallarme’s work A Throw of the Dice is of particular influence. In that poem the words are placed in various configurations across the page, with changes of size, and instances of italics or all capital letters. Boulez took these and made them correspond to changes to the pitch and volume of the poetic text. The title comes from a different work by Mallarme, and is translated as  “fold according to fold.” In his poem Remémoration d'amis belges, he describes how a mist gradually covers the city of Bruges until it disappears.

            Subtitled A Portrait of Mallarme Boulez uses five of his poems in chronological order, starting with "Don du poème" from 1865 for the first movement finishing with "Tombeau" from 1897 for the last. Some consider the last word of the piece, mort, death, to be the only intelligible word in the work. The voice is used more for its timbral qualities, and to weave in as part of the course of the music, than as something to be focused on alone.
         
​   Later still Boulez took e.e. cummings poems and used them as inspiration for his work  Cummings Ist der Dichter in 1970. Boulez worked hard to relate poetry and music together in his work. It is no surprise, then, that the institute he founded would go far in giving machines the ability to sing, and foster the work of other artists who were interested in the relationships between speech and song. 

Ambassador of the Avantgarde
           
At the end of the 1950s Boulez had left Paris for Baden-Baden where he had scored a gig as composer in residence with the South-West German Radio Orchestra. Part of his work consisted of conducting smaller concerts. He also had access to an electronic studio where he set to work on a new piece, Poesie Pour Pouvoir, for tape and three orchestras. Baden-Baden would become his home, and he eventually bought a villa there, a place of refuge to return to after his various engagements that took him around the world and on extended stays in London and New York. His experience conducting for the Théâtre Marigny, had sharpened his skills in this area, making it all possible.

            Boulez had gained some experience as a conductor in his early days as a pit boss at the Folies Bergère. He gained further experience when he conducted the Venezuela Symphony Orchestra when he was on tour with his friend Jean-Louis Barrault. In 1959 he was able to get further out of the mold of conducting incidental music for theater and get down to the business he was about: the promotion of avantgarde music.

            The break came when he replaced the conductor Hans Rosbaud who was sick, and a replacement was needed in short notice for a program of contemprary music at the Aix-en-Provence and Donaueschingen Festivals. Four years later he had the opportunity to conduct Orchestre National de France for their fiftieth anniversary performance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, where the piece had been first been premiered to the shock of the audience. Conducting suited Boulez as an activity for his energies and he went on to lead performances of Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck. This was followed by him conducting Wagner’s Parsifal and Tristan and Isolde.

            In the 1970s Boulez had a triple coup in his career. The first part of his tripartite attack for avantgarde domination involved his becoming conductor and musical director the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Then second part came after Leonard Bernstein’s tenure as conductor of the New York Philharmonic was over, and Boulez was offered the opportunity to replace him.  He felt that through innovative programming, he would be able to remold the minds of music goers in both London and New York.

            Boulez was also fond of getting people out of stuffy concert halls to experience classical and contemporary music in unusual places. In London he gave a concert at the Roundhouse which was a former railway turntable shed, and in Greenwich Village he gave more informal performances during a series called “Prospective Encounters.”  When getting out of the hall wasn’t possible he did what he could to transform the experience inside the established venue. At Avery Fisher Hall in New York he started a series of “Rug Concerts” where the seats were removed and the audience was allowed to sprawl out on the floor. Boulez wanted "to create a feeling that we are all, audience, players and myself, taking part in an act of exploration".

            The third prong came when he was asked back by the President of France to come back to his home country and set up a musical research center.  

Read the rest of the Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis and the Birth of Electronic.

Selected Re/sources:

Benjamin, George. “George Benjamin on Pierre Boulez: 'He was simply a poet.'” < https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/mar/20/george-benjamin-in-praise-of-pierre-boulez-at-90>
Boulez, Pierre. Orientations: Collected Writings. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1986.
Glock, William. Notes in Advance: An Autobiography in Muisc. Oxford, UK.: Oxford University Press. 1991.
Greer, John Michael. “The Reign of Quantity.” < https://www.ecosophia.net/the-reign-of-quantity/>
Griffiths, Paul. “Pierre Boulez, Composer and Conductor Who Pushed Modernism’s Boundaries, Dies at 90.” < https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/07/arts/music/pierre-boulez-french-composer-dies-90.html>
Jameux, Dominique. Pierre Boulez. London, UK.: Faber & Faber, 1991.
Peyser, Joan. To Boulez and Beyond: Music in Europe Since the Rite of Spring. Lanham, MD.: Scarecrow Press, 2008
Ross, Alex. “The Godfather.” <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/04/10/the-godfather>
Sitsky, Larry, ed. Music of the 20th Century Avant-Garde: A Biocritical Sourcebook. Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 2002.
 

Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Studies in Electronics
 
            Stockhausen was born on August 22nd 1928 in a large manor house, called by locals the “castle” in the village of Mödrath, Germany. His father Simon was a school teacher, and his mother Gertrud had been born into a family of prosperous farmers. His sister Katherina was born the following year, and a brother Hermann-Josef the next. He experience music in the house growing up, with his mother playing piano and singing, but when she suffered a mental breakdown, she was quick to be institutionalized in 1932. His borther died the following year, and she was later murdered in a gas chamber by the Nazi regime in 1941. She had been deemed what the fascists called a “useless eater,” and part of the mass murder they carried out on those they deemed socially or physically defective.

A version of this episode was later dramatized in his first opera Donnerstag aus LICHT. 
            In 1935 Stockhausen began the early stages of his musical training with piano lessons from the organist at the Altenberger Dom, or Abbey Church of Altenberg where they now lived. Around age ten his father married the family housekeeper. After his two half-sisters were born he left home and became a boarder in 1942 while continuing to learn music, adding oboe and violin to his studies. In 1944 Stockhausen was forced to join the armed forces as a stretcher bearer, working for the hospital in Bedburg. During this time he played piano for the wounded on both sides. In February of 1945 he saw his father for the last time, who was sent to the Eastern Front to fight, and is thought to have been killed in action in Hungary.

            His father had been a Nazi fanatic, and the death of his mother at the hands of those whom his father adored, and all the horrors and carnage he had seen during the war, left Stockhausen with a strong aversion to war and its atrocities. When he had been living with his father, he had liked to blast the militaristic marches and patriotic music of the fascist regime on the radio. Stockhausen hated these sounds thereafter, and felt that such strict types of rhythms had been used to goad people into complacence and compliance. He sought solace in the rituals and music of the Catholic Church. As he matured his sense of spirituality expanded to encompass the teaching from other world traditions, but his native Christian was always a touchstone, albeit one that he took to more as a mystic rather than a fundamentalist. In  a similar way, he left behind the comforts of traditional music to explore the fringes of the avantgarde. 
            After the war, between 1947 and 1951, Stockhausen studied music at the Hochschule für Musik Köln (Cologne Conservatory of Music) and musicology, philosophy, and German studies at the University of Cologne. It was also in this time period when he traveled with the stage magician Alexander Adrion, accompanying his performances on piano. Towards the end of this period of study he met Herbert Eimert and Werner-Meyer Eppler. 

            Stockhausen had often thought of being a writer. He had a passion for the novels of Herman Hesse and Thomas Mann. The Glass Bead Game by Hesse and Dr. Faustus by Mann, both of which deal with music, touched him on many levels. Yet it was the mystical philosophy of music, and how it could be related to other bodies of knowledge in Hesse’s novel that became a model for the work he would go on to produce, providing a lasting influence.

 In 1951 Stockhausen went to the avant-garde version of summer school, the annual courses held in that season at Darmstadt. It was here where he first encountered the music of Olivier Messiaen. Inspired he began studying and composing serial music, and wrote his early pieces Kreuzspiel and Formel.  In Januray of 1952 he went to Paris to study under Messiaen he had the chance to meet his contemporary Pierre Boulez, and see firsthand what Pierre Schaeffer was getting up to with musique concrète.

While hanging about with Boulez in Paris he also met composers Jean Barraqué, and Michel Philippot, all of who were investing their time and efforts to create works of musique concrète at GRM. As his year in France progressed Stockhausen was finally given permission to work in the studio, but on the limited basis of recording natural sounds and percussion instruments for their tape library. In December Stockhausen was given the go-ahead to make a piece of his own, the first non-French composer to use their resources. The source sounds came from a prepared piano that were cut into fragments and spliced back together, then transposed using the phonogène. It took him twelve days to make something the length of pop song, at three minutes and ten seconds, though there is nothing pop about the result. The process caused him to become disenchanted with musique concrète. The piece was only released with his approval in 1992 as part of a collection of his early work, the rest of which was realized in the WDR Electronic Music Studios.

As 1953 rolled around, Eimert invited Stockhausen to become his assistant in the WDR studio. Soon after his arrival in March of 1953 he determined that the Monochord and Melochord were useless when it came to his ambition to totally organize all aspects of sound, including the timbre. Only the humble sine-wave generator or beat-frequency oscillator would be able to do with sound what he envisioned. He asked for these from Fritz Enkel who was the head of the calibration and testing department. Enkel brought him the gear, but was beside himself. The station had spent a pretty penny, 120,000 Marks, on their two showpiece instruments. Enkel was also skeptical of Stockhausen’s ability to accomplish his task with just this limited kit, saying, “it will never work!” This was to become a refrain throughout his career, when people didn’t think he’s be able to finish his ambitious projects. His reply stood him well for the rest of his career, "Maybe you're right, but I want to try it all the same".

When it came time for Stockhausen to create his first piece of pure electronic music in the studio in 1953, he did not go in for the use of the Monochord or the Melochord, but went straight for the sine tone oscillators. His idea was to build a piece totally from scratch, following a plan of the serial organization of sounds, with added reverb to give a sense of spatialized sound. The devices he used to create what became Studie I, were all originally used for the calibration of radio equipment. Here they were put into the service of art.

These pieces were as much an exploration of musical mathematics and acoustic science as they were novel pieces of new music made on tape with lab equipment. Behind these works is the work of Hermann Helmhotz, and behind him that of George Simon Ohm, and behind him Joseph Fourier, all of who provided the intellectual additives necessary to synthesize Stockhausen’s new music.

Studie I can be heard as a musical-scientific exploration of Joseph Fourier’s ideas about sine waves and how they correspond to the harmonic of a common fundamental. It can also be heard as a further exploration of Ohm’s Acoustic Law which states that a musical sound is perceived by the ear as a set of a number of constituent pure harmonic tones.
He began his musical study with a question.  "The wave-constitution of instrumental notes and the most diverse noises are amenable to analysis with the aid of electro-acoustic apparatus: is it then possible to reverse the process and thus to synthesize wave-forms according analytic data? To do so one would ... have to take and combine simple waves into various forms..."

A sine tones made with electronics contains no overtones, since it is able to be made with just a single frequency. In this respect, the sine tone can be considered to the prima materia, or first matter in the radiophonic laboratory, the basic building block required to create the magnum opus. Using the tape machines he recorded different frequency sine waves at different volumes, and mixed them together to build up new synthesized timbres, in a process of manual additive synthesis. Studie I became the first composed piece of music using this laborious additive synthesis method.

Stockhausen said the piece was “the first composition with sine tones.” In this respect this first piece of pure electronic music showed his devotion to the electron as a kind of musical unit unto itself. Looking at it another way, he chose this method to differentiate himself from what Schaeffer and Henry were doing with recorded sounds, what Cage was doing with prepared pianos, what others were doing with the proto-synthesizers.

Stockhausen had cut some teeth cutting tape at the RTF studios when he created his Konkrete Etude, and now got to use the tool kit of musique concrete, by doing such things as running tapes backwards, speeding them up, slowing them down, fading them in and out. The idea behind the piece was to start at the center of the human auditory range and move outwards in both directions to the limits of perceptible pitch. It was further organized around justly intoned ratios taken from the partials of the overtone series.

In Studie II, Stockhausen explored the serial treatment of timbre. He again uses sine tones, and chose a combination of five, whose frequencies are all related to each other by being the 25th root of different powers of 515. This amounts to a close approximation of the Golden Section or Proportion, and it is hard to think he came to those numbers and powers just by chance. (He later used the Fibonacci sequence as a time signature in his piece Klavierstucke IX, and his use of other mathematics and magic squares in his compositions shows his familiarity with these subject.) The method of combining these tones differs from Studie I. Here he plays them back-to-back in a reverb chamber and records the result.
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The Konkrete Etude and the Studies comprise a masterful warm up act as Stockhausen got comfortable working in the studio. 

Gesang der Jünglinge

There is a mystery in the sounds of the vowels. There is a mystery in the sound of the human voice as it is uttered from the mouth and born into the air. And there is a mystery in the way electrons, interacting inside an oscillating circuit, can be synthesized and made to sing. Karlheinz Stockhausen set out to investigate these mysteries of human speech and circuitry as a scientist of sound, using the newly available radiophonic equipment at the WDR’s Studio for Electronic Music. The end result of his research was bridged into the vessel of music, giving the ideas behind his inquiries an aesthetic and spiritual form. In doing so he unleashed his electroacoustic masterpiece Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths) into the world.

Part of his inspiration for Gesang der Jünglinge came from his studies of linguistics,  phonetics and information-theory with Meyer-Eppler at the Bonn between 1954 and 1956. The other part came from his spiritual inclinations. At the time of its composition Stockhausen was a devout Catholic. His original conception for the piece was for it to be a sacred electronic Mass born from his personal conviction. According to the official biography, he had asked Eimert, his other mentor, to write to the Diocesan office of the Archbishop for permission to have the proposed work performed in the Cologne Cathedral, the largest Gothic church in northern Europe. The request was refused on grounds that loudspeakers had no place inside a church. No records of this request have been uncovered, so this story is now considered apocryphal. There are doubts that Eimert, who was a Protestant, ever actually brought up the subject with Johannes Overath, the man at the Archdiocese responsible for granting or denying such requests. In March of 1955 Overath had become a member of the Broadcasting Council and it is likely he was an associate with Eimert.  What we can substantiate is that Stockhausen did have ambitions to create an electronic Mass and that he experienced frustrations and setbacks in his search for a suitable sacred venue for its performance, one that would be sanctioned by the authorities at the church.

These frustrations did not stop Stockhausen from realizing his sound-vision. The lectures given by Meyer-Eppler had seeded inspiration in his mind, and those seeds were in the form of syllables, vowels, phonemes, and fricatives. Stockhausen set to work creating music where voices merged in a sublime continuum with synthetic tones that he built from scratch in the studio. To achieve the desired effect of mixing human voice with electronics he needed pure speech timbres. He decided to use the talents of Josef Protschka, a 12-year old boy chorister who sang fragments derived and permutated from the “Song of the Three Youths in the Fiery Furnace” in the 3rd book of Daniel. In the story three youths are tossed into the furnace by King Nebuchadnezzar. They are rescued from the devouring flames by an angel who hears them singing a song of their faith. This story resonated strongly with Stockhausen at the time who considered himself to be a fiery youth. Still in his twenties he was full of energy, but was under verbal fire and critical attack from the classical music establishment who lambasted him for his earlier works. Gesang der Jünglinge showed his devotion to the divine through song despite this persecution.

The electronic bedrock of the piece was made from generated sine tones, pulses, and filtered white noise. The recordings of the boy soprano’s voice were made to mimic the electronic sounds: vowels are harmonic spectra which may be conceived as based on sine tones; fricatives and sibilants are like filtered white noise; and the plosives resemble the pulses. Each part of the score was composed along a scale that ran from discrete events to statistically structured massed "complexes" of sound. The composition is now over sixty years old, yet the mixture of synthetic and organic textures Stockhausen created are still fresh. They speak of something new, and angelic.
Stockhausen eventually triumphed over his persecution when he won the prestigious Polar Music Prize (often considered the "Nobel Prize of music") in 2001. At the ceremony he controlled the sound projection of Gesang der Jünglinge through the four loudspeakers surrounding the audience.
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These breakthroughs in 20th century composition practice wouldn’t have been possible without the foresight of the WDR in creating an Electronic Music Studio and promoting new music on their stations.

Making Telemusik at NHK
           
Following the success of the Studio for Electronic Music in Germany, other countries started to take note. Composer Toshiro Mayuzumi had already had his mind blown in May of 1952 at a musique concrete performance at Salle de l'Ancien Conservatoire in Paris, commenting that, “the concert was such a shock that it fundamentally altered my musical life.” He had visited Schaeffer’s studio while on the trip, and when he returned to Japan began to implement the techniques for a film soundtrack. Working at the JOQR (NCB) studios in Tokyo he produced his first explicitly musique concrete piece, “CEuvre pour Musique Concrete x, y, z”. The x portion was made up of metallic sounds, the y of human, animal and water sounds and the z portion was taken from sounds of musical instruments. When it was finished it premiered over the JOQR radio network and lit Japan on fire.  In 1954 the station invited Mayuzumi to create more music in this vein. “Boxing” was the end product of this next effort and was a radio play with a script written by celebrated Japanese novelist, Yukio Mishima. For the work, Mayuzumi employed over 300 types of sounds, and it became a sensation across the island country.

That same year a group of technicians and program producers were sent some materials by their German colleagues at the WDR. This was the aptly named Technische Hausmitteilungen des NWDR's, 1954;Sonderheft tiber Electronische Musik  (Technical In-House Communications from the NWDR, 1954; Special Issue about Electronic Music). The paper explored some of the gear and techniques being used in Cologne, and the theories they had behind their use.

Enter Makoto Moroi, a prolific composer who studied everything from Gregorian chant, to renaissance and baroque music on to twelve tone composition and serialism. Alongside his love of traditional Japanese instruments was a growing interest in what could be done musically with electronics. Music was an ocean he swam in, and many different rivers contributed to his flow. This led him on a pilgrimage to Cologne in 1955 to hang out with Stockhausen and take in the state of the art at the WDR Studio over a three week visit.

In the fall of 1955 the NHK followed the course charted by WDR and began to set up their studio in Tokyo. They acquired their own Monochord and Melochord alongside a collection of other oscillators, bandpass filters, tape machines, and the other gear that enabled Japan to start charting their own course in the world of avant-garde and electronic music.

Mayuzumi was quick to get to work and produced the first completely electronic music in Japan with his trilogy Music for Sine Waves by Proportion of Prime Number, Music for Modulated Waves by Proportion of Prime Number, and Invention for Square Waves and Sawtooth Waves. These investigations were directly influenced by Stockhausen’s Studie I and II. A year later in 1956 the laboratory in NHK had distilled its second piece of pure electronic music, Variations on the Numerical Principle of 7, by Mayuzumi and Moroi. For this piece the influence of Studie II was acutely copied, though with a different numerical basis, as here it was based on a scale of 49/7, divided into 49 tones up to the seventh overtone.

After these initial inquiries and treatments in the studio where the composers followed the lead of their European counterparts things started to move off in directions more thoroughly Japanese. Mayuzumi created the thirty minute Aoi-no-Ue based on a traditional Noh play from the Muromachi period (15th century). Noh singing is combined with electronics in place of the normal instruments and drums to create a unique 20th century version of the material.

In 1959 Mayuzumi started to explore the sonorities of traditional Japanese bells in his compositions. This resulted in a series of pieces with Campanology in the title. He started this work by recording the sounds of the huge bells found at Buddhist temples all over Japan. He acoustically analyzed the sound of these bells and then made his first Campanology, a 10-minute piece synthesized from the data retrieved from his recordings. In his Nirvana Symphony he called the first, third and fifth movements by this name. Later in 1967 when the NHK equipped an 88-string piano with magnets and pickups that could be electronically modulated, he wrote the first piece for it, Campanology for Multipiano.

The NHK continued to produce a variety of works by a number of composers throughout the 1950s and into the next decade. Wataru Uenami had been the chief of the studio from its beginning and he had always wanted to invite Stockhausen over to and commission him to create works for their airwaves. He finally succeeded in this endeavor and brought him over in January of 1966, four years after Stockhausen had himself taken over as director of the WDR studio from Herbert Eimert.

When he arrived in Japan Karlheinz was severely jet lagged and disoriented. For several days he couldn’t sleep. That’s when the strange hallucinatory visions set in. Laying awake in bed one night his mind was flooded with ideas of  "technical processes, formal relationships, pictures of the notation, of human relationships, etc.—all at once and in a network too tangled up to be unraveled into one process.” These musings of the night took on a life of their own and from them he created Telemusik.

Of Stockhausen’s many ambitions, one of them was to make a unified music for the whole planet. He was able to do that in this piece, though the results sounded nothing like the “world music” or “world beat” genre often found playing in coffee houses and gift shops. In the twenty minutes of the piece he mixed in found sounds, folk songs and ritual music from all over the world including the countries Hungary, Spain, China, Japan, the Amazons, Sahara, Bali and Vietnam. He also used new electronic sounds and traditional Japanese instruments to create what he called "a higher unity…a universality of past, present, and future, of different places and spaces: TELE-MUSIK." This practice of taking and combining sound sources from all over is now widely practiced across all genres of music in the form of sampling. But for Karlheinz it wasn’t simply making audio collage or taking one sample to build a song around it. Even though he used samples from existing recordings to make something different, he also developed a new audio process that he termed intermodulation.

In his own words he speaks of the difference between collage and intermodulation. “I didn’t want a collage, I wanted to find out if I could influence the traits of an existing kind of music, a piece of characteristic music using the traits of other music. Then I found a new modulation technique, with which I could modulate the melody curve of a singing priest with electronic timbres, for example. In any case, the abstract sound material must dominate, otherwise the result is really mishmash, and the music becomes arbitrary. I don’t like that.” For example he used "the chant of monks in a Japanese temple with Shipibo music from the Amazon, and then further imposing a rhythm of Hungarian music on the melody of the monks. In this way, symbiotic things can be generated, which have never before been heard"

Stockhausen kept the pitch range of Telemusik piece deliberately high, between 6 and 12 kHz. This is so that the intermodulation can project sounds downwards occasionally. He wanted some of the sections to seem “far away because the ear cannot analyse it” and then abruptly it would enter “the normal audible range and suddenly became understandable". The title of the piece comes from Greek tele, "afar, far off", as in "telephone" or "television". The music works consistently to bring what was “distant” close up. Cultures which were once far away from each other can now be seen up close, brought together by the power of telecommunications systems, new media formats, new music. By using recordings of traditional folk and ritual music from around the world Stockhausen brought the past into the future and mixed it with electronics.

        To accomplish all this at the NHK studio he used a 6-track tape machine and a number of signal processors including high and low-pass filters, amplitude modulators and other existing equipment. Stockhausen also designed a few new circuits for use in the composition. One of these was the Gagaku Circuit named after the Japanese Gagaku orchestra music it was designed to modulate. It used 2 ring-modulators in series to create double ring-modulation mixes of the sampled sounds.12 kHz was used in both the 1st and 2nd ring-modulation, with a glissando in the 2nd ring modulation stage. Then music was frequency-filtered in different stages at 6 kHz and 5.5 kHz.

        Writer Ed Chang explains the effect of the Gagaku Circuit: “For example, in one scenario the 1st ring modulation A used a very high 12 kHz sine-wave base frequency, resulting in a very high-pitched buzzing texture (for example, a piano note of A, or 0.440 kHz, would become a high 12.440 kHz and 11.560 kHz).The 2nd ring-mod B base frequency (in this case with a slight glissando variation on the same 12 kHz base frequency) has the effect of ‘demodulating’ the signal (bringing it back down to near A).  This demodulated signal is also frequency filtered to accentuate low frequencies (dark sound).These 2 elements (high buzzing from the 1st signal and low distorted sounds from the 2nd) are intermittently mixed together with faders. By varying the 2 ring-mod base frequencies and the 3 frequency filters, different effects could be achieved.  This process of modulation and demodulation is what Stockhausen means when he says he was able to ‘reflect a few parts downwards’.”

The first public performance of Telemusik took place at the NHK studios in Tokyo on April 25th, 1966. He dedicated the score to the spirit of the Japanese people.
           
After Stockhausen’s visit the experimental music germ continued to spread, and the composers who were already in on the game challenged themselves with bolder, more technical and ambitious pieces. 

Telemusik prepared Stockhausen for his next monumental undertaking, Hymnen (Anthem) made at the WDR studio. The piece had already been started before Telemusik but he had to set it aside while in Japan. Hymnen is a mesmerizing elaboration of the studio technique of intermodulation first mastered at NHK. It is also a continuation of his quest to make a form of world music at a time when the people around the planet were becoming increasingly connected in McLuhan’s global village. To achieve this goal, he incorporated forty national anthems from around the globe into one composition.  To start, he collected 137 national anthems by writing to radio stations in those countries and asking them to send recordings to the WDR in Germany.

The piece has four sections though it was first slated for six. The last two never materialized. These anthems from around the world are intermodulated into an intricate web of sound lasting around two hours long. Thrown into the kaleidoscopic mix are all manner of other sounds produced from the entire toolkit of the WDR studio, alongside added sounds from shortwave radio. These radio sounds make the entire recording sound as if you are tuning across the bands of a world receiver radio, and hearing the anthems of different countries as interval signals, colliding with each other, and causing transformations as the two signals meet. In the audio spectrum and in the radio spectrum borders and boundaries are porous, permeable.

The point of all this is, in Stockhausen words, “to imagine the conception of modulating an African style with a Japanese style, in the process of which the styles would not be eliminated in order to arrive at a supra-style or a uniform international style - which, in my opinion, would be absurd. Rather, during this process, the original, the unique, would actually be strengthened and in addition, transformations of the one into the other, and above all two given factors in relation to a third would be composed. The point is to find compositional processes of confrontations and mixtures of style - of intermodulations - in which styles are not simply mixed together into a hodge podge, but rather in which different characters modulate each other and through this elevate each other and sharpen their originality."

As with Telemusik, his aim was to go beyond what he thought of as mere collage, or what in the early 2000s might have been called a mash-up.  The combination of the different materials is only the first step. When each of the elements interacts with another, it ends up being transformed, changed by the association, and something new is distilled from the alembic of creativity. 

Just as Hymnen mixes different anthems together, it also fuses musique concrete with electronic music. Hymnen can be heard as just this recorded tape piece, but he also wrote a symphony version where the tape is played by a sound projector (or diffusionist) with a score for the accompanying orchestra. This shows his tenacity in using all manner of music making tools, and intermodulating these with one another.

Hymnen ends with a new anthem for a utopian realm called "Hymunion," a mixture of the words Hymn and Union. Perhaps Hymunion can be reached through the shared communion that comes from truly listening to each other.

Gyorgi Ligeti was born in Transylvania, Romania in 1923 into a Hungarian Jewish family. His parents were both doctors.  He was the great-grand nephew of violinist Leopold Auer, and his second cousin with the philosopher Ágnes Heller.  In 1940 the Northern Transylvania town of Kolozsvár (Cluj) his family lived in became a part of Hungary, and the next year he began his formal musical training in the local conservatory.

The events of WWII would not leave his family untouched for long. At the time Hungary had been a part of the axis powers, relying on fascist Italy and Germany for help to pull them out of economic plight caused by bank failures that had rippled through world during the Great Depression. In 1944 he was sent to a forced labor brigade by those inside the Horthy regime. His parents and sixteen year old brother suffered a worse fate, as all three were sent to the death camps, his parents to Auschwitz, and his brother to Mauthausen-Gusen. His mother was the only one to survive.

After the war was over, Ligeti was able to return to Budapest and take what solace he could in his musical pursuits and he graduated from the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in 1949. Ligeti also spent some time doing ethnomusicological research into the folk music Hungarians in Transylvania, but eventually got a job at his alma mater teaching harmony, counterpoint and musical analysis.  

Communications with those outside Eastern Bloc had been effectively stifled in the first half of the fifties when Ligeti was teaching. Communist Hungary was already putting restrictions on what was acceptable for his creativity. In 1956 there was an uprising against the People’s Republic, but it was quickly smashed down by the Soviets. In the aftermath he fled with his wife to Vienna, Austria and then made his way to Cologne where he met Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gottfried Michael Koenig. In the summer he attended the Darmstadt courses and started working in the WDR electronic music studio.
Ligeti, like the others in the Cologne milieu came under the influence of Werner Meyer-Eppler’s ideas and decided to write a work that would address “the age old question of the relationship between music and speech.” The piece was composed to be an imaginary conversation of multiple ongoing monologues, dialogues, many voices in arguments and chatter.

He first chose different types of noise to use to create artificial phonemes out of, made recordings, and grouped them into a number of categories. Then he made a formula to determine the tape-length of each type. After this he used aleatoric methods and took the different phonemes at random and combined them into what would become the sonic articulation of words. The work was realized in 1958 with the help of Cornelius Cardew (himself an assistant of Karlheinz Stockhausen). In it Ligeti created a kind of artificial polyglot language full of strange whispers, enunciations and utterance.

Artikulation was just one of many notable works produced at the WDR, which became a kind of ground zero for the subsequent explosion of electronic music and studios modeled on its image. Gottfried Michael Koenig was one of the technicians at the studio and composer who created many key pieces there,  such as Klangfiguren II (1955), Essay (1957) and Terminus I (1962). Naim June Paik moved from Korea to Cologne in 1958 to work at the studio. While there he became interested in the use of televisions as a medium for making art, and he would go on to become a pioneer of video art. Cornelius Cardew and Holger Czukay all made use of the studio, among many others.

As the 1960s rolled into the 1970s new electronic music equipment became available and the place received a bit of an overhaul under Stockhausen’s direction. It was in this era that they obtained an EMS Synthi 100 as part of their laboratory set-up. 

Read the rest of the Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis and the Birth of Electronic.

Selected Re/sources:
​
Maconie, Robin. Other Planets: The Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen
Maconie, Robin. Stockhausen’s Electronic Studies I and II. 2015
http://stockhausenspace.blogspot.com/2014/12/opus-3-studie-i-studie-ii-and-etude.html
https://michaelkrzyzaniak.com/Research/Stockhausen_Studie_II/
The works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, by Robin Maconie, 2nd edition
A video of the 2001 performance of Gesang Der Junglinge can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmGIiBfWI0E
Music and Technology in Japan by Minao Shibata (article)
https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2014/10/stockhausen-in-japan
Telemusik CD Liner notes, Stockhausen Verlag Edition
Hymnen, Liner notes from Stockhausen edition
Holmes, Thom. Electronic and Experimental Music. Sixth Edition.
Music of the 20th Century Avant-Garde: A Biocritical Sourcebook