​[Note this article wouldn’t have been possible without previous interviews done with members of the Tree Community by Klemen Breznikar at Psychedelic Baby Magazine, and an article by substacker Jason P. Woodbury at his Range and Basin. The quotes from the band come from these two articles.]

​Where have all the genuine freaks gone? There was a time in America when being called a freak was a badge of honor. When you got called a freak probably, it probably meant you had at least some connection to the counterculture, or were otherwise just too weird and into your own thing to care much about what the rest of society was doing or thought. The term freak is a kind of strange praise, and went back to the people who lived counter to the clockwise norms of straight society in the sideshows and carnival circuits where they were put, or put themselves, on display as a way to make a living. The hippies adopted the word freak and used it to show their allegiance to a way of being outside the normative values of the normies.

The word got its biggest boost from the “freak scene” that emerged out of hippiedom in Southern California, centered around the Laurel Canyon neighborhood in L.A and the clothing store of Suzanne  “Szou” Shaffer, who is credited with introducing hippie fashion. Szou was married to a man who had been on the east coast to Lithuanian immigrants, sent to a reformatory, did some time for various crimes, and joined the merchant marines during WWII before settling down to become a bohemian artist who gave classes in clay modeling to the bored housewives of Beverly Hills. Vito and Szou soon hooked up with a man named Carl Franzoni, who was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1934. The trio started going around to a bunch of clubs in the area with other weirdos who stylized themselves as “freaks.” Miles Barry, in his book Hippie, notes of the scene that they “lived a semi-communal life and engaged in sex orgies and free-form dancing whenever they could.” No wonder Franzoni was given the nickname Captain Fuck.
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They liked to smoke marijuana and drop LSD. The group evolved into “an acid-drenched extended family of brain-damaged cohabitants.” Sometimes these psychedelic decadents called themselves “Acid Freaks.” California denizen and godfather of the weird, Frank Zappa, was inspired by these hippies. His mind was already out there enough to not need the help of drugs to stimulate his wackadoodle imagination. His debut Mothers of Invention album “Freak Out!” centered around Vito, Szou, and Captain Fuck. They and their cohort of freakers even appeared on the last track of the album. When it hit the record stores in 1966, Zappa and his Mothers helped to spread the freak gospel to a world hungry for something different.

Another terminal weirdo, Hunter S. Thompson, had got inspired by the burgeoning freakdom, and it wasn’t just with new ideas for his gonzo journalism, but to campaign for sheriff in Pitkin County, Colorado. It’s hard to believe it now, but it should be remembered just how many people in straight society hated the hippies, and how many were incarcerated over the years for selling and smoking marijuana. The incumbent sheriff Thompson was campaigning against was a man named Carrol Whitmire, a veteran hippie hater in Colorado who sought to stomp them out through methods of intimidation, jailing, and otherwise harassing the freaks, making it hard on them so they would leave the area. Hunter S. Thompson wanted to be sheriff instead. He created the “Freak Power” party and tried to get the hippies to vote him into office. The plan didn’t work, but the power of freakdom continued to spread. 

The term freak started to evolve at this point. The word started being used for any person with a very specific kind of obsession. “Health freaks” were one kind of nut and “control freaks” another. As the brain-damaged fall out from the drug addled excesses of hippie culture started to make themselves known, some people turned to a different kind of power, to recenter themselves and orient towards a higher power. That power, as often as not, was Jesus. 

Within the hippie and back-to-the-land movement there had always been a subset who believed in the power of Jesus. They tended to focus on the aspect of Christianity that revolved around ideas of universal love, pacifism, and the notion of Jesus as a radical freethinker overturning the rules of the establishment. These types ended up earning the moniker Jesus Freaks. Sometime it was used as a pejorative, but just as often it was embraced, because like any freak, they were really into Jesus.

​Some of those Jesus Freaks were very freaky indeed and have left behind cultural artifacts and a rich legacy that deserves to be remembered, and in certain aspects, emulated. The story of the Trees Community, famous for their recordings among devoted fans of “freak folk” music, is about one such group of Jesus Freaks and is worthy of contemplation by Christians, those of other faiths, and those who follow their own eclectic philosophy. 

Much of what became the Jesus Freaks started on the west coast within the evangelical end of Protestantism starting in the 1960s.  Intermixed with this were the hippies others for whom going to regular church didn’t hold much value. Some weren’t religious at all, and others had been exploring other traditions and religions from around the world. A lot of these people had opened the doors of perception with a bit of chemical assistance leading them to become seekers. When the acid started wearing off, many converted to Christianity, and set about trying to change their lives, often while still within the hippie milieu of communes, back-to-the-land living, and the idea that Jesus was a radical who came to overturn the tables of the system.

Yet not all of the freaks settled into a settled into the evangelical side of Christianity, with its focus on the born-again experience, preaching the gospel, and the desire to bring others to Jesus and “save” them using the toolkit of the charismatic movement. Other groups were called to express their faith in music, in monasticism, and in the life of a community organized around liturgy and ritual. The Trees Community followed this latter approach through their involvement with the Episcopal Church. 
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It all started with a hippie guru named Shipen, street name William Lebzelter, and his girlfriend Ariel. Shipen was part of the scene, man, a serious seeker, and perhaps even a seeker of Sirius. Shipen had collaborated on the crazy collage album Rock and Other Four Letter Words with J Marks, an album dedicated to Karlheinz Stockhausen that came out in 1968, after all. The liner notes read, “This album is dedicated to Karlheinz Stockhausen, who destroyed our ears so we could hear.” The album was based on a book by J that in turn featured photography by Linda Eastman who would soon take on the name McCartney when she married a Beatle named Paul. All roads lead back to the Beatles and Stockhausen, after all. 

The album was produced by John McClure and features a Moog II along with the tape cut-ups of the interviews done for the book mixed in with sounds and music from a large slew of contributors. The book and album both bear the influence of Marshall McLuhan. The book features fold out pages, large and small typography in a variety of fonts, alongside the images from photographer Linda Eastman, all jumbled up together as a kind of hyperlinked pop encyclopedia. The album aims to be an audio version of the same. Though the album didn’t sell many copies by record executive standards, it remains a document of the willingness of the freaks to engage with avantgarde experimentation. That one of the people involved in this album was Shipen who was the leader of the Trees Community is interesting in how it showcases the confluence of ideas within hippiedom.

Founding members of the Trees Community Katheryn “Shishonee” Krupa told their origin story in an interviewed by Klemen Breznikar for psychedelicbabymag.com. “The Trees Community started as a commune of individuals who were all drawn to a Loft in the East Village of New York City in 1970. I had met our ‘leader’ Shipen when he came to visit my boarding school in northern Michigan in 1969. I found his knowledge of yoga, Eastern religions and his personality fascinating! He had written his own ideas down in an ‘automatic’ writing (no edits or changes) called Clear Children. While at my school, a number of us like-minded students would sit beside Lake Michigan and talk about the seven chakras, or the many mindsets of Clear Children, among other ideas like: time is a construct or we need worldwide peace.”

Shipen extended an invitation to Shishonee for her to come visit the Loft in Manhattan where he had quite the scene going on. She visited first on her spring break, and came back to stay after she had graduated. The place was almost like an ashram with Shipen as it’s dynamic, creative and intelligent leader. Krupa said he “could have easily been a guru, or an L. Ron Hubbard-type person, but he wasn’t. He was not on a power trip and was pretty humble.”

Inside the loft their brick walls, the wooden floors had been painted white, and their were tents set up inside for privacy. Fabrics and drapes the color of wine were hung from the ceiling. Painted mandalas adorned the space along with a statue of the Buddha and a lions head carving. This was wear they dropped acid and held their happenings that involved poetry readings and free form improvised music amid the glow of kerosene lamps lighting the space with the natural flicker of their dancing flames. The improvised music sessions, which were according to Krupa “beautiful and quite intense,” would go on to create the foundation for the later liturgical music of The Trees Community. Many people from New York’s creative community of artists, musicians, actors and dancers came in to the Loft at Shipen’s invitation to participate in or witness the growing scene.

The basic hippie lifestyle of subsisting on beans, rice and homemade bread in a shared space was something that would continue.

In this setting the quest for secret knowledge and mystical wisdom played a central role. As Shishonee tells it, “Eventually, as we delved more deeply into religious study, those who started showing up were seekers eager for answers to life’s questions. We took day trips to listen to Alan Watts, Ravi Shankar, or attend Avantgarde theater productions. Evenings brought mystical adventures through spontaneous, free form musical exploration. One night might take us on a camel caravan along a desert road in Egypt. Another journey might take us on an ocean voyage on an ancient ship sailing on gently rolling waves under the moonlight. Visitors picked up instruments such as Balinese pot gongs, flutes, a sitar or Indian tambura or a heavy chain and played as the Spirit moved them. By mid-summer, the Loft became a place to delve into incredible spiritual realms. LSD was essential to these early magical experiences, as was an in-depth study of Tibetan Buddhism, Hinduism, Scientology, I Ching, Christian Science and early Christian mysticism.”

One of the people who stopped by to visit the loft in 1970 was the Reverend Rodney Kirk, a bishop at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. After this various hangers on at the Loft started going to mass. “We’d walk barefoot up to mass, then slip down into the labyrinth of echoing caverns underneath the main altar to sing spontaneously,” says Shishonee.
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In the same year Shipen converted to Christianity after a fall from a black willow tree. After he hit the ground he had a vision of Christ sitting at the right hand of God. Soon they were all being called to the Christian faith, and another figure from the Cathedral, James Parks Morton, had become their mentor as they embarked on a path of communal Christianity. West would soon become their Abbot after they took formal vows and set themselves up as a monastic community.

As the Jesus Freak movement continued to unfurl, some of the original ethos that had been inherent within its DNA from the anti-establishmentarian hippies started to fade, probably around the same time they were coming down from the haze of weed and acid. At the same time there was a Jesus Freak explosion due to the virality of media exposure in the early seventies. Bad trips and harrowing drug experiences probably also contributed to people seeking another way.

Hal Lindsey’s 1970 book The Late Great Planet Earth became popular reading matter and a good portion of the believers shifted away from the idea of Jesus being primarily a prophet of universal love, healing and pacifism, and started to focus on a theology of dispensational premillennialism, or the idea of the immanent return of Jesus before the end of the world and the rapture of those who had been “saved.”  On the one hand this led believers to give up on some of the environmental ideals of the back-to-the-land movement. If the world was going to end, there wasn’t much point in focusing on trying to stop pollution or doing anything about the degradation being done to the land. What was needed was a focus on saving souls from eternal damnation. This in turn coupled with the dominionist view of biblical interpretation holding that God gave humans ultimate and total control over earth, and that it was the necessity of Christians to establish law and order across the land inside our political systems. Because the planet itself was temporary when compared to the kingdom of God and what was to come after the rapture, the resources here might as well be exploited as best befit the church going business executives.
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However, the dominionist and premillennialist theologies have never been the only theologies on offer. Ever since Mart Luther split the atom of Christianity, a process of theological diversification has been underway inside Christendom’s religious portfolio. The process started in Europe, but it accelerated in America, where all different manner of denominations nominated themselves as bearers of the truth. Most often, and to their own detriment, they often see their interpretation of cosmic reality as the “one true way,” but there have been those among them who have taken a different view of things and have proclaimed the idea that they are just “one way among many.” That specific theology has been called universalism.

In Christianity universalism can be described as the belief that all human beings will eventually be reconciled with God, that a loving deity would not condemn a soul to an infinite hell for the finite failings of momentary sin. In a more universal sense, universalism is the idea that universal truths exist beyond the specific sets of belief about spiritual matters within national, cultural and religious boundaries. I few accept that it is true that certain truths might be universal it sets the stage for acceptance and curiosity about the many different and diverse spiritual and religious traditions of the world, and the possibility of cooperation between. Universalist thinking has led to the growth of the interfaith movement.

It should be noted that universalist does not necessarily mean unitarian. Not all religions have to have the same end goal and destination in mind. Their very differences in practices and purpose are part of what adds to the beautiful mosaic and kaleidoscope of spiritual traditions.  

It is not the purpose of this article to get into the history of the universalist movement within Christianity, that had its origins with radical freethinker, minister, theologian and proto-Anarchist Gerard Winstanley in the 1600s with the diggers, or to trace the origins of the interfaith and ecumenical movements. But by the time Shipen, Shishonee, David Lynch (not that David Lynch) and the other hangers on at The Loft came around, universalism and the interfaith movement had found strong adherents within the Episcopal Church. That influence left its mark on the character of what became The Trees Community and made their music and philosophy a different color than the Jesus Freaks who were gearing up for the immanent destruction of earth, the rapture, and the return of Christ.

The interfaith and universalist approach suited The Trees. They had already been explorers in the world’s diverse traditions, from Hinduism and yoga, to Kabbalah and the early Christian mysticism of the Desert Fathers. They were intrepid psychedelic explores, and even as they came down from the drug trip following their conversion, knew intuitively that the inner realms of spirit had a lot less need for rule bound adherence to specific doctrines of theology than the humans who liked to make those rules. They were led along the path to an orthodox faith and sharing of spiritual experience through music, art and liturgy, without concerning themselves as much with the questing to save other people’s souls, which has been a typical focus of Christianity.

This tendency towards Christian universalism was nurtured by their spiritual advisors from the St. John the Divine Cathedral. It was Canon Edward Nason West, the subdean of the Cathedral, who became their spiritual advisor, and when they took formal vows, he became the Abbot of what they called The Trees Community. Canon West also happened to be the advisor to noted fantasy writer Madeline L’engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time, among many other wonderful novels. The group became very close with her as well. In a four of her books, West appears as the character Canon John Tallis. As they moved along in their journey with the church, West became their spiritual “father” and L’Engle became their spiritual “mother.”  
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West was canon sacrist and subdean. He was also a theologian, author, iconographer, and an expert in the design of church furnishings. He had a deep love for Fyodor Dostoevsky and was equally versed in Eastern Orthodox side of faith as he was to the Episcopal traditions within the overarching Anglican Communion. He liked to see himself as a starets, or what is known in Eastern Orthodoxy as a kind of spiritual guru. These weren’t people necessarily of high rank with the church, but known as wise and the person people went to for advice.

L’engle was also of the persuasion of the universalist salvation. She believed that “All will be redeemed in God's fullness of time, all, not just the small portion of the population who have been given the grace to know and accept Christ. All the strayed and stolen sheep. All the little lost ones.”

George MacDonald had a large influence on her work and she believed in a similar way as he did with regards to divine punishment. “I cannot believe that God wants punishment to go on interminably any more than does a loving parent. The entire purpose of loving punishment is to teach, and it lasts only as long as is needed for the lesson. And the lesson is always love.”

Her universalism was such that many Christian bookstores didn’t want to carry her books, because the doctrine is considered heretical by some. The evangelicals likewise banned her books from being taught in their schools, let alone carried in the libraries. One such critic stated that “Madeline L'Engle teaches universalism in her books and denigrates organised Christianity and promotes an occultic world view.”

It wasn’t the only way she was getting criticized though, the secular readers and critics thought she brought too much of her faith and spirituality into her books for them to be comfortable with either.   

The Trees Community worked closely with the priest James Parks Morton at St. John the Divine. He had grown up in Iowa, but studied theology at Cambridge, England, followed by his ordination into the episcopalian priesthood. Morton went on to become a leader in the interfaith movement. In Jersey City and Chicago, he worked with the inner-city poor. His work brought him to NYC and in 1972 he was appointed dean of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Upper Manhattan. It is the largest Gothic cathedral in the world. At the time it sat in the middle of an area of urban stagnation, and working with Bishop Paul Moore, they transformed the place into an inclusive bohemian temple.

Morton was sympathetic to the environmental movement and wanted to maintain dialogue with other religions. Later in his career he founded the Interfaith Center of New York.

​Morton was interested in using the arts as a way to bridge the energy of religion, and made the Cathedral a kind of hot spot for dance and music in the already flourishing NYC scene. As such he was the perfect kind of mentor to give spiritual guidance to the members of the Trees and their community work.

After the core group of seekers at The Loft had started converting to Christianity, the other, more casual visitors stopped dropping by. Those who remained were committed to living a life centered on Christ. The idea of taking a hippie commune and turning it into a devoted monastic community held a strong hold over them, but West advised them that they should take things a bit slower and go out and see what other denominations within Christianity had to offer before they committed and made formal vows.

This was fortuitous timing in another way. The Loft where they had their genesis was eventually transformed into a parking lot by the municipal powers of Manhattan. With the scene around that particular crash pad dissipating, and West advising them to look to other churches, they decided to take their improvised music, now incorporating the psalms of David, prayers and religious lyrics, onto the road.

As Shishonee recalls, “Eleven of us set off in May, 1971, disciples of the Lord, eager to see where He would lead us. For the next seven years, we traveled throughout America and Canada, honing our musical, theatrical presentation and sharing it in schools, churches, monasteries and Christian communities. Always, we sought God’s will. He drew us to help pick strawberries and work with Hutterites on a farm in Ontario. He led us to a monastery in Gethsemane, Kentucky where we found a spiritual retreat with gracious, Franciscan monks. He called us to live with nuns and monks in a Roman Catholic monastery along the Pecos River in New Mexico. We helped pack pecans in a community in Koinania, Georgia, then lived and worked in a family household at Church of the Redeemer in Houston. Each experience in a new community brought change, conflict, and growth, pruning members away from our core group, or sometimes adding to it. Throughout these painful often difficult experiences, the music flourished and evolved.”

Their music had been informed by their wide ranging interests. It could be said to mirror the interfaithful example of their universalist teachers. Sitars, zither, harp, cello, koto, gongs, Balinese instruments and African hand drums all joined together in a symphony of souls. They continued to improvise, even while using the structure of the psalms and other material as a focus. The influence of world music can be thought of as their exploration of different religious traditions, while their dedication to improvisation, something not as common at all in other Christian music, can be seen as an expression of the individual freedom of the adherent.
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When came back to New York City form their initial travels and eventually did take their vows. An article in Time Magazine from 1973 reports on their experience that “The five men and three women, ranging in age from 20 to 30, went through a virtual catalogue of religious experiences before undergoing their Christian conversions. Now known as the Trees Group, they live in an apartment near the church, regularly give concerts at the cathedral and also perform tasks like guiding cathedral visitors. This fall they will take preliminary vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.”

As they honed their music, they continued to tour and give concerts at churches and in other spaces around the United States. In 1975 they recorded their sole/soul album The Christ Tree.
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‘The Christ Tree’ was compiled as a musical meditation – our concert – that we performed in late 1974 and early 1975 while on tour. The concerts were not just a “show” but rather was a form of worship, a musical journey for those who came to experience it. For the album, we left out a few songs that were in the full concert, yet still it is representative of what we were playing at that time,” Shishonee said. “ The Christ Tree was not just a concert, but also a theatrical event, designed to draw people into a life-changing experience. Imagine the dramatic impact of hearing strangely discordant, far off voices singing “Holy, Holy” (called ‘Holy Seed’ on the album) approaching from distant corners of a dimly lit church, then seeing nine men and women wearing flowing white robes and swinging incense as they move slowly through the audience…”

Yet he life of the monastic bohemian started to take its toll, and the group was starting to disband by the late seventies. The experiment was over in 1978. The vows of chastity were hard to maintain, and people partnered up and started having families. They loved what they had done, but it was getting harder to maintain. Harder in the financial sense as well, with money for the arts drying up at the church and New York City where they were based deep into its years of abasement. The Trees had grown from a seed, flourished and spread its roots and branches, then shed its leaves.

The original pressing of the album became legendary among aficinados of strange ethereal music for its combination of weird folk and world sounds coupled with its earnest and deep spirituality. The vinyl commanded high prices in the collectors market. Then in 2004 Timothy Renner of Dark Holler Arts remastered the album for release on CD. It was rereleased again by Old Bear Records in 2020, fifty years after The Trees Community had first formed at Shipen’s Loft.

The entire album is worth listening to on repeat, but it is their versions of Psalm 42 and Psalm 45 that I keep coming back to over and over again, year after year.

The music remains timeless, ancient sounding, experimental and utterly contemporary. My hope is that new musical and spiritual seekers who find the music will continue to be inspired by their example, by the freedom to improvise within a spiritual context, by the freedom to choose instruments from around the world and combine them eclectically.

It seems clear that people in the United States and Europe are leaving behind the trappings of secularity in favor of a return to religion, what historian Oswald Spengler called a second religiosity. People are finding safety in religion from the collapse and decline of the institutions and systems previous thought to be stable. Many young people are flocking to both evangelical denominations and seeking out the Traditionalist movement within the Roman Catholic Church or joining various Eastern Orthodox churches. Teachers like Canon West, Madeline L’Engle, and James Parks Morton, and their disciples in the Trees show that matters of the spirit and can be viewed from a universalist lens, and that faith can be celebratory of differences in religion within and beyond Chrisitanity. Hopefully too, they will allow themselves to get their freak on.  
.:. .:. .:.
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The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music if you want to support me.

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Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

My immersion into the world of punk rock music was coupled with my love for graphic novels and comics. I started collecting them in junior high, though I would say I have never become a serious collector. That ended up being reserved for books and music, of which, I am probably still a lightweight compared to many others who spend their paychecks at record shops and used book stores. Still, comic books and graphic novels have remained something I am always drawn back into, sort of like the music of punk rock. I go on to become interested in other things, but I always feel the need to read some graphic novels and comics ever year, just as I always feel the need to listen to some punk music.

The comics I liked as a kid were shaped by a tendency I still have today: seeking out the weird and strange. It was for this reason that I never really got into any superhero comics. Some of them were kind of weird. Some of them were kind of strange. Yet they were never weird and strange. The closest thing that came to finding a superhero comic that called to me was Reid Fleming: The Worlds Toughest Milkman. I suppose Tank Girl with her Jet Girl and Sub Girl companions, and mutant kangaroo boyfriend, was kind of superhero, only, not really. More on my fanboy obsession with her below.

Doctor Who isn’t a superhero either, and these days he doesn’t really count much as being weird or different. When I was a teen in the early nineties however, Doctor Who was only the domain of card-carrying nerds, and I qualified. Nerds didn’t have the cache of cool back then. There was no Big Bang Theory TV show celebrating geekedom. Going to the comic book store and watching science fiction was one of the things that put me on the road to get my ass kicked by neighborhood toughs even as my music of choice was heavy metal. Reading books on the bus didn’t help much either.

​I had been a fan of Doctor Who since I was about ten or eleven when I first saw a Peter Davison era serial being run on the Saturday night 10 PM time slot on our local PBS station. The episode was Four to Doomsday, and I was hooked thereafter. It wasn’t the typical thing for an American kid of my era to get hooked on. 

It wasn’t long after that when I started seeing advertisements for Comic Book World, a local comics shop on the local UHF station, which I watched especially on Sunday afternoons for the movie specials for films like John Carpenter’s Christine and They Live. In the Comic Book World commercial an flashed an image of Doctor Who with its logo and I started begging my dad to take me there. He reluctantly gave in, or I just wore him down. My dad was never into comic books at all, and he could have been a prime collector. My grandpa made a living first as a newspaper boy starting at age 14, then he had his own newspaper and magazine stand which he raised his family of five. My dad was the youngest and by the time he was a kid my grandpa’s business was bustling and my dad said he had all kinds of comics and things he also sold, and brought home the remainders, but he was never interested. Perhaps in the same way I was never interested in cars the same way my dad loves those machines.
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The first time he took me to Comic Book World I went straight for the Doctor Who comics. Digging through those boxes would later become familiar to the way I dug for CDs and records. He started taking me to the store every once in awhile as a treat. At one point they got in a Doctor Who role playing game by FASA. My dad spent some of his hard-earned money that he made as a welder fixing industrial machinery on that for me. The guy at the comics shop thought I was a bit young to understand it, and I was, but it stimulated my imagination very much and it wasn’t much longer before I was playing other role-playing games.

Role playing games and comic book shops of course go hand and hand. When I started skateboarding, and getting into the alternative and grunge music I was hearing on the radio, and then punk, I also started finding some comic books that had a real punk edge.

Two titles in particular sent my mind into widening spirals of appreciation, obsession and investigation. Later I found two more series that have kept the passion for inky punk filled pages going. Finding this kind of material was a quest, and when you hit pay dirt on something good you felt really lucky. When I first discovered Tank Girl I felt very lucky indeed.

TANK GIRL

​The year was 1993, and by this time the Riot Grrrl movement that put women and feminism on the stage and at the forefront of a scene that, at least in hardcore, was something of a boys club. To be honest, female fronted punk bands have been and remain favorites. I also like the bands where male and female vocalists share equal time at the mic. Groups like X, Crass, Chumbawamba, and Beat Happening all excelled at this. That tradition has been a standard in the many offshoots from punk and its bastard children. Sonic Youth made it a standard operating procedure, as did groups like Low and Yo La Tengo. Newer post-punk bands like Shopping continue in the spirit.

When I saw the cover of Tank Girl I was immediately smitten, and I went on to start collecting the issues whenever they came out. This is how the comic book stores get you hooked on the medium, and buying other stuff in the meantime. It was the first issue of four in the second series, so I had no idea what was going, but it hardly mattered, because the story itself was seriously fucked up. Tank Girl wakes up in a kind of bedlam or insane asylum called Bell’s End, the Rest Home for the Socially Retarded. What followed was an introduction to a world of pickle and cheese sandwiches, mutant kangaroo boyfriends, and irreverent humor. I kept coming back for more and more. The idea of putting unruly women away in such homes perhaps struck a chord with me, as I had experienced the same happening with people I was very close to, at an institution called Kids Helping Kids. Yet she won’t be held down, and makes her escape to go on an epic road trip, with lots of beer swilled and cigarettes smoked along the way.

The series was created by Alan Martin, writer, and Jamie Hewlett, artist and writer, and remains my all-time favorite comic, for its art, for its humor, its punk attitude, and surreal scifi concepts. Mutant kangaroos are escaping out of mental institutions, what could be better?

Tank Girl wasn’t strong on narrative cohesion, but it made up for that by ever shifting scenarios that grew ever wilder with each block of drawing and humorous dialogue. The art by Jamie Hewlett was the other part of the charm. His imagery went on to have a huge impact in popular music with the band Gorillaz for who he is the illustrator and artist for the characters. I don’t dislike Gorillaz, but to be honest, I just never got into them, despite Hewlett being involved.

A few years after I got into comics, the film came out. It remains a cult classic of a film. Still pretty good when watched again thirty years later, and what can I say, it will always remain a pleasure to see Naomi Watts play the character of Jet Girl. Lori Petty does a pretty good Tank Girl but it is the illustrations I will always see in my mind when I think of her.   

The Tank Girl comics have remained an underground classic hit and remained in print in various editions, along with new series having come out periodically. If you want to check out the classic years your best bet now is to get the Tank Girl Colour Classics. I gave my original set to one of my daughters who had become a fan. Now I am thinking of getting this set again myself so I can reread them yet again.

BAKER STREET: HONOUR AMONG PUNKS & CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT

The Baker Street comics by Guy Davis and Gary Reed were another revelation. The style of drawing was completely different, and all in black and white, whereas Tank Girl had been at least partly in color. This one was all story, all intrigue, grit, and dark gothic rain clouds. The story follows a series of ripper like murders and a group of punks known as the Irregulars who follow around a lady named Harlequin who is a female version of Sherlock Holmes. She used to be a detective, but liked life among the punks instead.

In this version of England war World War II had never taken place and dirigibles float in the sky. An American student named Sharon Ford studying from abroad comes over to stay, and Harlequin offers her a room to let, which irritates her girlfriend. The lesbian relationship is an eye opener for the student, as is the entire world of the punk underground, but not everything is as it seems.

It's a solid mystery story in an of itself, but its British punk realism, complete with heroin use and the first serious depiction of cross-dressing and gender bending I’d ever come across made a deep impression on my impressionable mind.

The first story arc of five issues was combined in the Honour Among Punks trade paperback. Guy Davis continued the story and most of the art in Children of the Night. Both are well worth seeking out. I’m not sure how many times I read those books, but it was a lot. Soon it will be time again. The artwork and lettering are all fantastic.

​The late Gary Reed had a storied career in comics as the publisher of the Caliber Comics imprint and for relaunching Deadworld, among many other achievements. Guy Davis remains well known for his creature designs for Guillermo del Toro, and the illustration work he did for Mike Mignola’s Hellboy spinoff B.R.P.D. and his own later series The Marquis. 

PUNK ROCK AND TRAILER PARKS

I never lost my love of punk rock even as I got older and interested in electronica, industrial, the fleeting freak folk moment, psychedelic folk, and timeless folk music, among other things noise and free improvisation. The vagaries of the avantgarde. Punk remained a touchstone with its DIY ethic and sordid tales. Returning to it is like dipping a cup into a well of clean water on a hot day. Which is part of why I am writing this. Maybe some other people need to take a drink now and then.

But maybe that water isn’t really clear, but murky. Somehow its still refreshing. Mud just means its fortified with minerals. Punk Rock and Trailer Parks by the great Ohioan comic artist and writer Derf was one I read as an adult.

These Derf, or to give his given name Derf Backderf, has come to wider renown among the general public through the film adaptation of his graphic memoir My Friend Dahmer. Derf went to school with Dahmer and befriended the infamous serial killer, because he was one of the odd and weird ones.
Derf grew up in Richfield, Ohio which is halfway between Cleveland and Akron. And while London, New York, LA and San Francisco get a lot of the credit for the birth of punk, Akron, Ohio is as much to blame as the more storied cities. Derf sets that right with his tale of the burgeoning punk scene in Akron that makes Punk Rock & Trailer Parks.

The story works on many levels. As a coming of age story of a kid growing up in a trailer park, as a history of Ohio’s creative acumen, as a paean to the music of the place and time. Derf was in the right place and right time, in the seventies to hear all the great Ohio bands like The Dead Boys and  Rocket from the Tombs, among others. In the story Otto ‘The Baron’ Pizcock meets his destiny when goes from his home in the trailer park to the real-life Akron punk club the Bank. As with many other people whose life was transformed after going to a show, Otto loses all the awkwardness he once hand and finds his power. The power of punk. He meets The Ramones, The Cramps, Stiv Bator, Klaus Nomi, Lester Bangs and The Clash and other luminaries who found their way to Akron.

​It’s also a drunk, stoned, sexed up bit of slice of life. I wonder what happened to Otto when he became an adult. Hopefully he kept the spirit alive. 

LOVE AND ROCKETS

Working at the library has helped me keep up with the desire to read comics and graphic novels. Last year I enjoyed reading Black Hole by Charles Burns for the first time, and I also enjoyed several noir crime comics by Ed Brubaker. Anytime I have seen a Love & Rockets collection at work, I’ve always looked through them and been intrigued, wanting to read them, but somehow, never making the time to do so until late last year and early this year.

Part of the interest was in the name. I wondered if there was a connection to the band Love and Rockets. Apparently there was because the group took their name from the comic. That is a good enough recommendation to read them as any. Apparently there were also other groups that named themselves after the series. Gilbert Hernandez chronicled these in Love and Rockets X graphic novel, but I haven’t read that one yet.

The story of this series is a story of brothers and of a mother who had a love for the medium. The Hernandez brothers, Mario, Jaime and Gilbert came from a family of six and everyone in the house read comics, as their mother was a huge fan. Comics were all over the place in that house and everyone read and talked about them.

Jaime Hernandez notes how in this environment he “wanted to draw comics my whole life.” Love and Rockets started off as a sibling endeavor with Jaimie, Gilbert and Mario all working on the first issue together. They worked on quite a number together after that as well, with Mario eventually falling out of it for the most part, but still contributing occasionally, and Jaimie and Gilbert continuing the intertwined and ongoing stories from the series together and on their own. In true punk spirit the first issue was self-published in 1981. This is another tie in between the world of underground comics and underground music: the DIY ethic. 
The series has gone on for so long, and their were all these different threads which was part of what kept me from jumping in to begin with. But I eventually decided to just grab some and start reading. There is a slice-of-life quality to them that allows for this jumping in wherever you can.

One of the story lines is called Hoppers 13 or Locas, and this one came from the mind of Jaime who brought his love of punk into the mix. It literally follows the Locas or crazy women and a group of primarily chicano characters from their teenage years in the fictional California city of Heurta, based on the Hernandez’s hometown of Oxnard. These kids, are all involved in the punk scene, but it dials in on two lovely and crazy women, Margarita “Maggie” Luisa Chascarrillo and Esperanza “Hopey” Leticia Glass who have an on-again off-again romance and friendship with plenty of drama. For this reason this storyline is also sometimes referred to as the Maggie and Hopey Tales.

On the alternate thread from these is Gilbert’s take on Love and Rockets which contains fantastical explosions of magical realism in the fictional Latin American village of Palomar. This sequence is sometimes called Heartbreak Soup after the first story set in the town.

I started off reading some of the Hoppers 13 stories from the beginning, but now I have jumped to more current story lines that also include the story of teenager Tonta.

​One of the books I read Is This How You See Me Now, is poignant to any of us who have grown up in punk rock and sees Maggie and Hopey going to a reunion show. As they look back on their life in the late seventies and early eighties, and where they are now, in the late 2010s when it was written, they get to see how they have changed, and how they haven’t. Complete with the addition of kids and new partners in their own lives and the lives of their friends, it’s a touching look at why we keep coming back to see our old friends and reconnect over the passions of youth, even as new generations pick up the torch of the punk ethos and continue to carry it onwards.

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The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

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Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

1 https://www.arcaneborders.com/post/border-reiving-an-iron-age-relic
2Fred Bartenstein and Curtis W. Ellison, eds. Champaign, Ill.: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2021.
3https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/19/us/springfield-ohio-haitians-immigration-cec/index.html
4https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/07/vodou-haiti-endangered-faith-soul-of-haitian-people
1 https://www.honest-broker.com/p/14-warning-signs-that-you-are-living
2 https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-remains-trend-low.aspx

RE/SOURCES:

Fischer, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York, NY.: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Garreau, Joel. The Nine Nations of North America. Boston, MA .: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

Gioia, Ted. “In 2024, the Tension Between Macroculture and Microculture Will Turn into War.” < https://www.honest-broker.com/p/in-2024-the-tension-between-macroculture>

“14 Warning Signs That You Are Living in a Society Without a Counterculture” < https://www.honest-broker.com/p/14-warning-signs-that-you-are-living>

Greer, John Michael. The Twilight of Pluto: Astrology and the Rise and Fall of Planetary Influences. Rochester, VT.: Inner Traditions, 2022.

Heat-Moon, William Least. Blue Highways: A Journey into America. Boston, MA .: Little, Brown, 1982. This book was first thrust on me by a friend in high school. It captivated my mind, because I had just before run across my father’s diaries, and had read them without him knowing. They detailed his own travels across the United States from Maine to the Alaskan highway in his ’34 Ford Coupe in the year of 1976. Heat-Moon’s book takes place in 1978, just a year before I was born, so it touches on a time in America that had already started to fade as I was coming into this world, and the place my father knew as a young man.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York, NY.: The Viking Press, 1957. This classic text of the Beat generation is available in multiple editions. While it may be flawed as a novel (I like his Dharma Bums much better), it excels as a snapshot of the different regions of North America, including Mexico, in the aftermath of World War II and remains a vital countercultural document.

Savage, Jon. Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture. New York, NY.: Viking, 2007. This is a fascinating book for anyone interested in the development of the phenomenon of the teenager. It roughly covers the years 1875-1945, and focuses in on small groups and gangs now only dimly remembered as well as the influence of authors such as James M. Barrie, L. Frank Baum, Anne Frank, and Oscar Wilde.

Woodard, Colin. American Nations: The Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. New York, NY.: Viking, 2011.

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​
The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

This post continues my exploration of fifty favorite albums from the non-profit music label New World Records who celebrated their fiftieth anniversary last year. New World Records was established to put the work of non-commercial American music front-and-center. They formed at the bicentennial of the nation, and now as we enter the sesquicentennial, I’d like to draw attention to the exceptional releases in their extensive catalog. Hopefully I’ll be able to turn you on to some new composers and their music along the way.
I have another purpose in this endeavor as well. That is to celebrate the American experimental tradition as exemplified in these works. I will also be celebrating some of our popular and folk traditions as well, because these circles do intersect.

American culture, specifically our music culture, has succeeded more than any of our other exports. It also remains essential to our own identity. In this time of extreme polarization and divisiveness, it seems to me that it would be helpful to step out of the box all together and focus on those aspects of our heritage that showcase our inventiveness and ability to break new ground through resourcefulness and the skillful recombination of available resources into new forms.

This is the new world and it requires a new philosophy. Listening to experimental music is sometimes like reading philosphy. Lets dig into the philosophical sounds of the new world.
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As always, we will start with a record that was included in the original set of fifty albums that inaugurated the work of the label.

BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A DIME? AMERICAN SONG DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION

rom the original set of fifty albums first released by New World Records comes this compilation of songs from the Great Depression. You can listen to it in a way similar to how you might listen to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. But this is an anthology of American popular song from the thirties, stuff that was pressed into shellac, and played on the victrola. It’s a window into the soul of the nation during the years of steep economic hardship.

But that hardship didn’t play out for everyone in the same way, and that is reflected by these songs. For a time there seemed to be a lot of homogeneity to American popular culture. In the years following WWII radio, television and newspapers congealed to create a somewhat uniform front and this had a gluing effect on the collective mind. Now the internet and social media have atomized that collective mind, parking people into silos of thought, and media spaces like substack or youtube, that they don’t like to stray from very often.

But during the Great Depression (1929-1941) people were also a lot less homogenous. Regional cultures still prevailed across the landscape. Corporate products hadn’t yet replaced our homespun folk traditions to the degree they now. Classes were more sharply defined, and people could even talk about class differences. Now those in the professional managerial class like to pretend these don’t really exist all that much. You can see why, considering this class gets a lot of the benefits of the way our society is currently set up. But if you go an listen to the music made in the Great Depression you can get a taste of how varied and different the aspects of America were back then. These popular tunes are a good reminder that we can have great diversity within the country and still be a unified country.
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The title track was popularized by Bing Crosby, but other songs were just as big like Gene Autry’s tune “The Death of Mother Jones.” Bill Cox sang to the laborers in the sweat shops with his song “N.R.A. Blues.” It’s not a song about gun control, but about the National Recovery Association, an agency put together by FDR to help set minimum wages and maximum hours, and get the companies to stop being so ruthless in how they used and treated their workers.

On the African American side of things Big Bill Broonzy sings the “Unemployment Blues” about a law abiding citizen who just wants to find some honest work.

Writing this a time when speculative bubbles around big tech and real estate look liable to put sending their damage into the rest of the economy, this compilation is a stark reminder that there is no guarantee on the value of our dollar bills and that an economic crash can take out the elites. When the supplies to their underground bunkers run out, they’ll have to brave the streets just like the rest of us.
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History repeats itself, but differently. Time is more like a spiral than either a straight line or a circle, and when it comes down to it, we all have to change with the times.

GEORGE LEWIS - CHANGING WITH THE TIMES

George E. Lewis, trombonist, composer, musicologist, computer music pioneer and software developer, member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and for a time, musical director of The Kitchen. George Lewis, American. His music sits deeply inside the collective musical cathedral of American experimentation.

Founded by a group of jazz musicians in 1965 in the hotbed of Chicago’s South Side, the AACM has given voice to those experimentalists to often ignored by the shallow trench of the dirtbag music industry. Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, Henry Threadgill, Muhal Richard Abrams and Joseph Jarman were among its early members. Alex Ross notes that, “The A.A.C.M. tended to be categorized as avant-garde jazz, although, as Lewis’s scholarship has shown, it should have been incorporated into a canon of experimental composition that has a long history of shutting out Black artists.” It remains an integral part of the tradition that straddles improvisation and composition using new techniques. This experimental tendency also went to their scores, “that blended music, geometry, painting, and ciphers to be interpreted by the performers live.”

Lewis later wrote a history of the AACM published in 2008, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music.

Lewis himself grew up in Chicago, born to African-American Southerners who had come to the city as part of the Great Migration. He picked up the “big, shiny, and weird” trombone as a third grader at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, an institution started by John Dewey back in 1896 as a place to put new educational theories and philosophy to the test.

That education seems to have benefited Lewis who majored in philosophy at Yale, and joined the AACM while he was on a break. As an early adopter of computer music, Lewis made use of the KIM-1 computer, a favorite also of west coast music hackers such as David Behrman and the members of the League of Automatic Music Composers. He premiered his piece “The Kim and I” at the New Music New York festival in 1979. The following year he took up a position as director of The Kitchen, which he held until 1982, when he left for Paris where he would work at IRCAM.

He spent three years there working on a commission that resulted in the piece Rainbow Family for improvising musicians and programmed Apple computers that reacted to the live audio with its own responses. This work led to his later introduction of the music software he created called Voyager. Released on Carrier Records, its an essential document of machine and human interaction and should be listened to by anyone interested in “80s AI, 1950s cybernetics, and [the] sociomusical networks of free improvisation.” If you need a dose of heady philosophy regarding human creativity in the age of computer reproduction, read the liner notes Lewis wrote to Rainbow Family and you will be richly rewarded.

The work by Lewis I want to showcase here is Changing With the Times. It has just as much of a heady brew of high concept art music combined with poetry.
As the liner notes have it, “In the ontological systems of both Africa and Europe, creation begins with the word in its various oral and gestural manifestations. Music, as an expressive modality, is clearly an extension of word exemplified by ancient African griots, the communal historians whose rhythmic chants opened the path to jazz improvisation, where we witness the alchemical effect of speaking in tongues that leads to a process of creative invention.

Changing With the Times is a conversation piece, for which George Lewis has assembled a diverse collection of musicians, poets, and storytellers into an organic narrative mode to signify, in style and content, on his personal odyssey through the contradictions and ambiguities of being black in a noncontradictory social universe, America.”

Some of the voices are the musicians playing, and some are the poets reading: Quincy Troupe, Jerome Rothenberg and Bernard Mixon. The text was written by George T. Lewis, the father of George E. The music is there to give flavor and texture to words and riff off of them in its own improvisation.
​
In the section Chicago Dadagram the poet recites the words “The bridges of Chicago / are not the bridges of Paris / or Amsterdam / except they are a definition almost no one bothers to define.” That’s how this Dadaist jazz chamber suite presented on this album sounds. Indefinable. Step into it and let it carry you across the bridges of sound into experimental Chicago.

LEJAREN HILLER - A TOTAL MATRIX OF POSSIBILITIES

Computer music is once again getting a bad rep. Blame it on the AI slop, I suppose. Yet there are deeper waters in the world of computer music than just punching a few buttons, giving a basic and instruction and seeing what plops out. Those roots go back to the intersection between mathematics and music that has been a part of the western tradition since the time of Pythagoras.

Algorithm’s have been given a bad name in the culture. I’m not going to deny why they’ve been given a bad name. But to place all music made with computers, all music made using algorithms, into the same category is also bad for the culture. Because there is some real beauty, genius, heart and intellect in music that is made by humans who get off on advanced mathematics. This stuff will perk your ears up and make you think. It is music that feeds the intellect.

This midcentury modern music is a music of algorithms, but it was made when programming a computer was something of an art and a folk art at that. Punching cards, writing code, rewriting code, repunching cards. This music is also systems music. The parameters of the program first had to be decided by the human before the computer could make the choices to determine the composition. In this way, the computer coding was as much a part of the score as what the score ended up being.

Even with its high concept modernism, controversy has followed computer music from the beginning. When Lejaren Hiller Jr. wrote about his Illiac Suite in article for Scientific American, bringing it to wider renown, it set off one of the first rounds of anti-computer composition bias.

On this record we don’t hear his Illiac Suite, but his less talked about Computer Cantata from 1963 as well as various string quartets.

Like many other composers, working as a composer was a hard row to hoe, and his main job was as a chemist for DuPont where he developed a method for dying acrylic fibers. But he had been a multi-instrumentalist as a kid and the different disciplines of science and music never seemed all that different from one another different to him. While studying chemistry at Princeton he also studied music with both Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt. Babbitt was himself a mathematician as well as a musician. Making music from equations was not a foreign idea to Hiller.

In 1952 Hiller got a position at the University of Illinois teaching chemistry and in his spare time he obtained a masters degree in composition. He started working on the ILLIAC IV, an early computer. While working on the programming of the ILLIAC he saw that there was crossover between writing a program and composing a piece of music, just as Babbitt had seen the correlation between his complex math, and the complex twelve-tone music he would compose with math. In 1958 Hiller was able to transfer to the music department and he started working on building the schools Experimental Music Studio.

The Illiac Suite, a four movement string-quartet, is considered the first piece of music composed by a computer using an algorithm. He worked on this with Leonard Issacson who shared the calling card of being another chemist-composer. They wrought a strange alchemy.
​
Next Hiller created a new programming language called MUSICOMP that he wrote with Robert Baker. Computer Cantata from 1963 is one of the results of that program and can be heard on this remarkable album.

ERIC RICHARDS - THE BELLS THEMSELVES

​Some of the most interesting works in music come from composers who are not widely known. I am not sure if there is an inverse rule, that the least interesting music comes from the most widely known musicians, but there might be. It’s at least worth thinking about. The most known music will be the least challenging aesthetically for the average listener. But without challenges, how can we grow into different areas of exploration?

I’ve heard it said that putting timbre ahead of tonality in terms of compositional focus is like putting a cart before a horse. But tone is only one area of sound. It’s certainly worthy of deep creative attention, but so is playing with the parameters of timbre. Eric Richards gave full reign to his exploration of timbre.

Perhaps part of the reason some of these figures are less known is because of their introspective dispositions. In looking inwards and focusing on their own imagination, they were not so much a part of the various “scenes” in music and the arts which can give people a boost in their popularity.

Eric Richards was such a one who wasn’t really a part of any scene, even as followed in the footsteps of Henry Cowell and John Cage and operated in a similar terrain as some of the minimalists who were part of a scene.
Richard’s noted in an interview this dichotomy between the kind of outer focus some artists have, and the inner focus of others. “It is curious, many of the people whose music I like best—particularly Harley Gaber, Charlemagne Palestine, and Michael Byron—kind of dropped out for different reasons. That's a whole area of American music that I think is important, but that no one has written about or gone into—it wasn't part of "the scene," partly because of the personalities of these different people. They were not what David Riesman [in The Lonely Crowd] would call "other-directed," they were all very inner-directed people who could not really be part of a scene.”

If we look into ourselves for our own justifications, for our own validations for creating the work we do, and less to the kudos and adulations received from the crowd or a scene a body of artistic work is likely to develop that is in stark contrast to what is accepted in the marketplace, and to what is accepted in any scene. Such iconoclasm is in itself a part of the American spirit. Following inner inclinations can lead to tremendous creative insight, if low commercial potential. That is part of the plight of experimental culture in a capitalist driven country.

There is a connection between tinkering on inventions and artistic tinkering. Both kinds of tinkerers want to see what possibilities they can come up with, what can be done. When tinkering leads to a car or a lightbulb that experimentation is celebrated. When it leads to a new artistic work or breakthrough in aesthetics, it might just be ignored. Better if it is decried because then you know it is touching a nerve and that there are some live wires at play.

Richard’s used magnetic tape as a tool in his composition, but not in the way it was used by many of his contemporaries. He would use it as a tool for analysis, recording something that he wanted to listen to, to change the speed of, and then transcribe the material into his notated work.

Another technique used by Richards was to take one instrument as a sound source and multiply it exponentially, for instance using 72 clarinets or 11 oboes. This required a studio to realize his work where a single musician could multitrack the material from the score. Richards described the way it sounded as a “a sort of composed-out web of different reverberations or echo of echoes.”

Like many other American composers he looked to Charles Ives as the granddaddy and took Ives use of collage to heart. On The Bells Themselves: Jonathan Edwards and the American Songbook he uses a plethora of material collaged out of the songs from American show tunes. The piece on the recording is of a pianist playing three overdubbed piano parts. The overlapping partials from the piano chords create an effect of church bell ringing. His interest in the voice of the bell is also present on some of the either pieces on this album.

His interest in the sonority of bells is also heard on other songs from the record, such as the opening Finalbells. As it says in the liner notes, “Playing a conventional percussion instrument in a nontraditional manner—that is, by rubbing a cowbell with a rubber Super Ball—is the means by which the sound material of this piece was generated. When Richards first heard these sounds, with their unique combination of overtones, he was immediately moved by the way in which they seemed to evoke some form of ghostly cry from the underworld. He was also struck by the way in which the overtones, produced by the Super Ball rubbing the cowbell, seemed to have little or no relation to the cowbell’s original fundamental pitch.

​Limiting himself to a small number of cowbells, Richards composed short melodic fragments whose fundamental pitches produced the sounds that most interested him. Having noticed that the pitches to these melodic fragments echoed, in some mysterious way, the pitches of Schubert’s song Der Doppelgänger (The Double), he selected three additional songs from Schubert’s posthumous collection of songs, Schwanengesang (Swan Song): Liebesbotschaft (Message of Love), Der Atlas (The Atlas), and Schubert’s last composition Die Taubenpost (Pigeon Post).” The notes go on, but it is an interesting example of generating compositional material from examining the recorded sound of an instrument, and then using collage to add in material from past repertoires to create something new.

The pieces on IKON touch on the power of the poet in a similar way to that of George Lewis and his Changing with the Times. Instead of a work for instrumentalists and recitative poets, Marshall digs into the rich terrain of text-composition pieces and sound poetry.

Marshall has was born in Mount Vernon, New York into a musical family, and he sang soprano in the Boy’s Choir at the in the Boy's Choir at the Mt. Vernon Community Church. He went on to study music at Columbia University just in time to check out all the cutting edge work being done at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Then he went over to the other coast and was an assistant to Morton Subotnick at Cal Arts.

A lot of his really interesting pieces involve electroacoustics or electronics in some way. In keeping with the American experimental tradition, he was also captivated by the sound world coming out of Bali and gamelan music in general. The influence can be heard in various parts of his body of work.

Marshall notes the text-sound approach on a few of the works here: "Cortez, Weather Report, and The Emperor's BirthThe pieces on IKON touch on the power of the poet in a similar way to that of George Lewis and his Changing with the Times. Instead of a work for instrumentalists and recitative poets, Marshall digs into the rich terrain of text-composition pieces and sound poetry.

Marshall has was born in Mount Vernon, New York into a musical family, and he sang soprano in the Boy’s Choir at the in the Boy's Choir at the Mt. Vernon Community Church. He went on to study music at Columbia University just in time to check out all the cutting edge work being done at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Then he went over to the other coast and was an assistant to Morton Subotnick at Cal Arts.

A lot of his really interesting pieces involve electroacoustics or electronics in some way. In keeping with the American experimental tradition, he was also captivated by the sound world coming out of Bali and gamelan music in general. The influence can be heard in various parts of his body of work.day form a kind of trilogy representing my work with "text-sound" in the early seventies. The techniques used to generate musical fabrics and structures out of spoken text are similar in all three works, but the source materials are all quite different. I used tape loops to create repetitive patterns from words or phrases; musical structures were developed out of the resulting fabric. It is not the original utterance or sound bit that is the building block, but the whole cloth created from it."

My favorite piece on this album is a kind of kurzwellen, or shortwave work, called Sibelius in His Radio Corner. This was “inspired by a photograph of the Finnish composer during his forty years of silence, sitting in an armchair and listening to his own work being performed on the radio. In his old age Sibelius enjoyed pulling in distant broadcasts of his music off the short-wave. I imagined that with all the static and signal drift, some of these listening experiences might have been proleptically like a modern-day electronically processed kurzwellen piece.”

It’s a perfect piece of music to drift off into the aether listening to late at night.

.:. .:. .:.
​
The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

​Yesterday I had the pleasure of reading a great essay, and hearing a great story, from James Hart, on his Penny Wagers newsletter. Towards the end of his piece he wrote something that really struck a chord with me. He got on the subject of how we make art, what and who for and how there is “an ethos that we’ve lost in lieu of something else. For lack of better terminology, let’s call it a ‘folk’ versus ‘commercial’ approach to art and expression.”

He then went on to give some really great examples of the folk approach to art and the commercial approach, comparing and contrasting.

Here is the rough litmus test he gives to determine whether something is folk or commercial:

“Folk is mutable. Commercial is fixed... Folk is learned in the moment, from person to person. Commercial is learned asynchronously through products…Folk is participatory. Commercial is presentational…Folk serves a social function. Commercial serves consumption… Folk is process-driven. Commercial is product-driven.”

He gives examples for each part of his test, and it really is worth a close read. I wrote some comments to Hart after I read the piece and it all really got me thinking. I had already been thinking about binaries, and how to resolve them, from a short not Hart had posted. Hart had mentioned there was a lot more nuance to his schema, and that it wasn’t a simple binary.

“I should make it clear that I’m not judging commercial art. These two have helped each other throughout the past several centuries, and thank goodness for that. It’s precisely because of the recorded nature of books that many oral traditions have even survived. And I’m not going to sit here and try to convince you that I don’t like novels, movies or Pink Floyd. This isn’t some high horse thing.”

My overstimulated cogitation got going with all this, and it started with poetry, because Hart had mentioned his experience in being “frustrated with the masses for turning their backs on poetry.” As someone who writes poetry as well, I understand the frustration. Yet I think poets themselves are partly to blame. I don't think the masses have turned their backs on poetry as much as poets, at least since the twentieth century, started to turn their back on the masses. Poetry used to be much more accessible and spoke to people who could hear its beauty. I do think that with the explosion of electronic media, it was one of the major casualties of casual entertainment.

There haven’t ever been many poets on television or radio, even in the days of variety shows.

I'm not anti-modernist, or anti-postmodernist. “Pomo” is not a dirty word to me. Ever since I was a kid I started seeking out the weird, the odd, the strange… the avantgarde. I first read T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland in the sixth grade. I didn’t make much headway with it then, but I knew that I liked it, that its mystery and strangeness compelled to return to it and seek its meaning. For casual readers it remains an obscure reading, and with the continued ascent of modernism in literature, I think poetry became too academic. Lots of writers wanted to imitate Eliot, Pound and the others. Not everyone who comes to read poetry for the joy of the language, the imagery, and the emotional connection, wants to sit down with a concordance and skeleton key to make sense of it all.

Later came the Beats and think it was necessary to break open the rigidity of form, the complete abandonment of form over the rest of the century gave little for people to hold onto, except aficionados. In the aftermath of the countercultural 50s, 60s, 70s, poetry became more academic, less the province of the people. It became too hard to interpret, alongside other kinds of art, literature and whatnot... so I think many people stopped paying attention to poetry. They got their fix of it in the lyrics of Bob Dylan and other exceptional songwriters instead.

Musing along these notions was when my own experimental predilection hit me, and I realized that one way to resolve the binary between commercial art and folk art was to include the avantgarde as a third circle.
As I mentioned, I love the weird, the strange the obscure. I seek it out. I think it even seeks me out. But for people who’ve grown accustomed to commercial art, it’s fierce independence and lack of scalability can be off putting. For those with a traditionalist mindset the experimental can appear to be a pure derangement of forms that should never be messed with or adulterated. Yet it is in the crossover zones between folk and commercial art, commercial art and the avantgarde, experimental approaches and folk that very interesting hybrids occur. In the fourth locus created when all three are combined, new hybrid forms are able to be synthesized.

The rest of this mostly off-the-cuff spontaneous essay will take an unpolished look at the places where “no commercial potential” plays nice with banjo pickin’ grannies and the mainstream material made for mass consumption. I’ll be looking across mediums as well.

For one thing, a lot of art that ends up being of great cultural value is experimental in nature, and not of much use to the publishers, galleries, and record labels for whom the bottom line is their sole reason of existence. Publishing used to be different, but that’s another story. (For those interested in a time when publishers would print culturally important books that weren’t likely to sell in huge quantities, see The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read by André Schiffrin.)

Furthermore, aspects of the avantgarde often end up in the world of the highly commercial. We need to look no further than surrealism and its use in advertising and commercials. Another example of the way experimental sound production became mainstream, was in the use of noise and record sampling. Hip-hop and rap are two of the dominant genres of music around the globe, but it all started using techniques that had first been used in the musique concrète created by Pierre Schaeffer in France starting in the 1940s, manipulating records. Now the figure of the electronic music DJ is entirely mainstream as well, with none other than the current Pope having his own DJ.

In literature we might look at this triad as the storytellers of traditional tales who represent the folk tradition, the postmodern poets and stylists who represent the avantgarde, and the pulp, romance and thriller writers who represent the commercial. Writers such as Samuel R. Delany cut his teeth in the world of pulp science fiction, became enamored with postmodern theory, and applied techniques of experimental writing to the hybrid novel Dhalgren, to great success. The novel, and later film, The Warriors, was a standard kind of pulp urban adventure plot about inner city gangs. Yet it was based on the traditional story Anabasis, from the Greek, and it also achieved a successful reception, especially the film.

All of the best early fantasy writers took their inspiration directly from world mythology. At the time fantasy was still a niche area of literature. A place for nerds. As such, there was an essential experimental aspect to it, even if it wasn’t technically avantgarde. Like science fiction it has since come to dominate much of the publishing market. To its own detriment, it has become less and less experimental, less and less connected to the mythic, and now is in complete throe to the commercial, making most of it lackluster and unfulfilling.

In visual art you have your whittlers and chainsaw sculptors making folk art, Jackson Pollock doing the avantgarde, and Bob Ross and Thomas Kincaid representing the commercial. Did you know Bob Ross apprenticed under the maverick weirdo H.R. Giger? Ross had a mental breakdown after working with him He might have been in PTSD recovery mode for the remainder of his career. I think it would have been very nice to see a synthesis between their very different aesthetics. Too bad there was never a PBS show where a man with an afro instructed people how to paint highly sexualized alien lifeforms. And yet for all of Giger’s high strangeness, he went on to have as much success as Ross, though in a different manner, with the use of his art in the Alien and Species films, seeding humanities consciousness with his otherworldly imagery.

In music you have your fiddlers and banjo players playing tunes that have been passed down, while in the commercial world Taylor Swift is raking it in with her pop, and in the avantgarde, small audiences make music for equally small audiences.

So often a creator gets stuck in one of these rings without venturing into the place of overlap. Countless are the avantgarde musicians who’ve never made a song that could have a commercial success. Countless are the pop singers who would never dream of going atonal, of using field recordings, or stochastic processes to come up with musical accompaniment. Countless are the folk singers who wouldn’t go to an experimental electronic concert, or to a free jazz improvisatory throwdown. But for those who make the venture to straddle the lines between commercial, experimental, and folk, new areas of possibility began to emerge.

Music writer Kristīne Brence talks about the blending of folk and metal. “Folklore metal is important as it captures the essence and spirit of traditional folk music while infusing it with the power and intensity of heavy metal. It serves as a means of preserving and celebrating cultural heritage, as well as connecting modern audiences with the stories, myths, and traditions of past generations. This genre also allows for artistic expression and exploration of different musical influences, creating a unique and diverse sound that resonates with listeners around the world.” 

These places of blending and crossover are where some of the most interesting material is being created. Those who do the crossing over need to have a wide variety of interests and wide-anging curiosity to become successful blenders of their own in the glass bead game of artistic synthesis. They need to be happy to experience the so-called highbrow with the so-called lowbrow, to go to the symphony on a Friday night and to a bluegrass show the following weekend, and read a cheap thriller spy novel during the week. They might pick up a copy of Mad Magazine or Cracked one day, a book by Thomas Pynchon the next, and then head over to a craft festival the next night. The next week they might take their partner out to see the latest Romcom at the theater.

Works that touch on all three can end up being adventurous in their experimentalism, accessible to the commercial world of the casual reader, listener or viewer, and rooted in the timeless traditions of folk that connect it to lineages of story and skill.

Speaking of Hollywood, they seem to have lost most of their storytelling ability by barely flirting with anything that might be deemed arthouse. It has led to a cultural bankruptcy. Yet the arthouse films can be seen as too snobby when they don’t leave anything for a viewer to hold onto in terms of plot or traditional pacing. Either can feel alienating to those who wish for traditional stories and forms.

O Brother Where Art Thou? was such a hit because it combined the traditional tale of the Odyssey, with folk music in an artsy movie that hit the recognizable plot beats of a commercial flick. Blue Velvet also took the commercial aspects of the noir thriller and detective movie and blurred them in a gently surrealist lens. There was the heart of young love, and the darkness of obsession painted with abstract impressions. David Lynch’s last movie, while celebrated by critics and fans, had less appeal to the average movie goer and is not such a cultural touchstone as Blue Velvet and some of his other works have remained.

Some areas borrow from one area and not another. Classical music, while not necessarily to be categorized as avantgarde, borrows routinely from folk motifs. Popular music borrows from classical. James Joyce borrowed from the traditional tales of classical literature, again with the Odyssey, but framed it in an experimental fiction of vast cultural importance, but with little kinship to the commercial potboiler. In the fifteen years it took him to write Finnegans Wake, a pulp novelist would have cranked out fifteen books.

The folk strains in country music and jazz, coming from ancient repositories of song in Europe and Africa, gave it their power. When those folk strains got watered down into young country and smooth jazz, the material might have been useful for background music at parties and casual listening, but it failed to touch the depths of soul reached by the other forms.

The Americana and alternative country movements that broke away from country as it was going to continue rooted work along with experimentation however have continued to touch discerning listeners in a way that the light beer version of the music does not. It isn’t just soundtrack music.

The same is true of those who’ve continued to push around the exploratory boundaries of jazz while also retaining some of the swing and other elements that keep it grounded. Of course there is extreme avantgarde jazz just as much as the easy listening variety. I contend the one that takes its root, pushes with experimentation, and remains relatable produces the most memorable and touching art. Vaporwave could be considered a mixture of the experimental approach and the commercial.

​The music of Sontag Shogun on their 2025 album Päiväkahvit is an example of a work that sits in the center of the three overlapping circles, with elements of folk music, classical piano played by Ian Temple, and field recordings, post-rock guitar fizz, and modular electronic workouts gluing it all together into a new gestalt.

For those of us who wish to see our culture flourish, our works must embrace commercial potential to reach an audience, rootedness in folk traditions to touch the heart, imagination and kindle our shared long memory, and experimentation that pushes at the boundaries of the possible.

It is in that area in-between ponderous deliberation over every word and sentence, and the slapdash approach of commercial interest, while also drawing from the primordial powers of our variety folk traditions, that could infuse contemporary art of any media with a new power.

.:. .:. .:.
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The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music if you want to support me.

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Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

TRINARY CODE painting by Melissa Shemanna 

​Having presented my argument on the affinity between emo music and its subculture, with Romanticism in my last post, I will now proceed to present just a small amount of the evidence of the shared affinity between emo lyrics and Romantic poetry. Part of the joy in doing this, is to share in the pleasure and relief these words bring to those who read and hear them. I also have a mix you can listen to above of fifteen primo emo songs for those times when you are just in a mood. I have the track list below, and as always, if you like the artists, consider picking up one of their albums. A few of the groups have some really great reissues out from Numero Group. I threw in a space-rock song and a slowcore piece for good measure.
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And as I mentioned before, I am not a big fan of trigger warnings, but here I think it is warranted. This article and the music talks about depression, cutting, self-harm and suicide so it may be distressing to listen to and read. If you find such material distressing you may want to read about something else. If you need help, you can talk to someone. Call the number 988 on your phone for the 988 lifeline. They understand that life's challenges can sometimes be difficult. Whether you're facing mental health struggles, emotional distress, alcohol or drug use concerns, or if you just need someone to talk to, their caring counselors are there for you. You are not alone.

The two songs I analyze below, by Grandview and Sorority Noise, are included in the mix.
I was inspired to make this mix and write on these themes, based on the burgeoning revival of Romanticism we see here on substack from writers like Ted Gioia and Romanticon.
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First up let us take a look at the poem by John Clare poem I Am!, perhaps his most famous, sometimes known as Witten In Northampton County Asylum, where he was remanded while it was composed:

I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows?
My friends forsake me like a memory lost.
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish, an oblivious host,
Shadows of life, whose very soul is lost.
And yet I am—I live—though I am toss’d
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dream,
Where there is neither sense of life, nor joys,
But the huge shipwreck of my own esteem
And all that’s dear. Even those I loved the best
Are strange—nay, they are stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man has never trod,
For scenes where woman never smiled or wept;
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept
Full of high thoughts, unborn. So let me lie,
The grass below; above the vaulted sky.

Clare was known as a peasant poet. He was unschooled and came to the art of poesy untrained, and brought with him his world of joy that he had experienced working as a farmhand in the English countryside. He was thus celebrated as a nature poet in his time, but also for his works that evoked the unrequited love he had for Mary Joyce, who due to class differences, remained forever unattainable to him. These feelings were shown in his poem “First Love,” but the sense of melancholy that resulted from his prolonged heartbreak at never being able to live a life with his love, contributed to the lengthening of his depression and his later descent into delusional states of mind. He had gone on and had a family with a milkmaid he married and had children with, but he was forever torn by the literary life he aspired to live with his fellow poets and patrons in London, and the realities of his work on the land needed to feed and clothe his six children. After various illnesses his bouts of depression worsened, aggravated by alcoholism, and he was eventually sent to the madhouse, where, ironically, he had the quietude and privacy to write some of his best works.

His poem “I Am!” Externalizes his bleak desperation and loneliness at having been abandoned and institutionalized. It is an evocation of deep loneliness compressed into three perfect six line stanzas, as if all the pain he had suffered and experienced in his life had been distilled. His away from his family, and his friends in the literary circles would now have nothing to do with him. What little faith he had in himself has now been shipwrecked, and he longs to be taken away from the world and into a heavenly realm where at least the Creator will acknowledge his existence and worth.

It is romantic laments such as these that we find echoed in the world of emo music, such as the song “To the Sun” by the band Grandview. “It was the timing, and the bags under my eyes / It was the look on your face when you said I look tired / I’d rather watch you turn away / ‘Cause you don’t look at me the same anymore / And I don’t blame you for a second / You’re giving up on me.”

The jangly guitars chiming out in minor keys, alternating between desperation and aggravated aggression show a moment when lovers or friends betray the promise of their former selves even as they go on to acknowledge how everything they built was made up of dysfunction. It is a denouement in the underworld. For the singer of Grandview, unlike Clare, even the thought of God does not bring solace to the sense of desperation and personal failure that is also at root in bringing their personal relationships to ruin.
“I keep trying to fight and trying to run / But I hate myself for changing / Every step of the way / And I can’t help thinking / That if we’re made in his reflection / I’m curious / I’m curious / Did God drink himself to sleep the night he created me?”

As with many great things in this world, the band only put out an EP and one album, and then they disappeared. Perhaps generating and expressing such a level of emotion, and musical craftsmanship, is too much. Bands of course, are notorious for being combustible, but I do wonder what happened to these people who made great art together.

The poet Thomas Chatterton who died by suicide at the age of seventeen was another who was here and then quickly gone. The way he left the world and the poems he left behind contributed in no small way to his legend. There were many who discounted him, but the godfather of the Gothic, Horace Walpole, did much to rescue his reputation.

In Chatterton’s poem “Picture of Autumn” we get a fleeting sense of the melancholy mood that pervaded his life.

When autumn, bleak and sun-burnt, do appear,
With his gold hand gilting the falling leaf,
Bringing up winter to fulfil the year,
Bearing upon his back the riped sheaf;
When all the hills with woody seed are white,
When levying fires, and lemes, do meet from far the sight:
When the fair apple, rudde as even sky,
Do bend the tree unto the fructile ground.
When juicy pears, and berries of black dye,
Do dance in air and call the eyne around;
Then, be the even foul, or even fair,
Methinks my hearte’s joy is stained with some care.

The song “No Halo” by Sorority Noise provides a useful contrast, when considering Chatterton, his short life,
and the work he left behind.

“I’m placing bets against myself / And honestly, I’m a mess / With the car engulfed in flames / I am a wreck / Things I should have said through call or text / Just really been so busy and I regret / ‘Cause if there’s no rest for the wicked / I’m as evil as it gets (thing I should have said) / So I didn’t show up to your funeral / But I showed up to your house / And I didn’t move a muscle / I was quiet as a mouse / And I swore I saw you in there / But I was looking at myself.”

The band themselves called the album this came from, 2017’s You’re Not As _____ As You Think, “an emotional bulldozer” whose writing and composition followed the death of close friends and their own struggles with depression.

This is why I call emo musicians and romantic poets the bards of Saturn. Since classical times the planet has been associated with melancholy. Nowhere is this connection more thoroughly explored than in that mighty tome Saturn and Melancholy by Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl issued by and researched at the Warburg Institute. The book may not cover emo music, or much else from contemporary pop culture, yet even in this realm the influence of the saturnine influences is present. Sadness is a part of the human condition. Artists have long sought to treat it and express it in their own ways. This has often been at odds with the way it has been viewed by psychiatry.

On one point we can perhaps all agree: leaving it to fester does no good for anyone. Probing the inner wound to expunge its poison is as legitimate a treatment as Prozac, and far more sane than the barbaric and frankly sadomasochist techniques used by psychiatrists in the past. The world of beauty and art may most often be ascribed to the influence of Venus, who is rightly praised for her youth, charm and grace, but old man Saturn, dry and desiccated as he is, also has his vessels in the world of the arts, who sing of melancholy and the bitter fruits born of harsh experience, and the wisdom it breeds as the flowers of youth wither in old age.

DOWSING THE DOUR MIDWEST MOOD MIX

1. Northstar - Cinderella

​2. idialedyournumber - I Found A Pulse

3. Microwave - Keep Up

4. American Football - Uncomfortably Numb

5. Jejune - Regrets Are Unanswered Dreams

6. Joi de Vivre - Magnet

7. Everyone Asked About You - Letters Never Sent

8. ​The Appleseed Cast - Forever Longing the Golden Sunsets

9. Siverstein - Giving Up

10. Trophy Eyes - Sean

11. Grandview - To the Sun

12. Dowsing - Midwest Living

13. Duster - Feel No Joy

14. Hum - Why I Like the Robins

15. Sorority Noise - No Halo

I am an eclectic listener, and for the past few months one of the genres of music I've been getting into was emo music. I'd always been a fan of it in a small way, but never investigated it beyond the surface. One of the reasons I caught the emo bug was because I'd become a fan of this group from Halifax, Nova Scotia, idialedyournumber, that I discovered on YouTube and Bandcamp. There music was pure ear worms for me. Then I read an article in America's only newspaper, County Highwway, about the band American Football, and I started listening to them. Being a midwesterner, I related to the story of "midwest emo" told in the article, and how the fusion of math rock, indie charm, and emo sensibility all fused together in an era, time and place where affordable rent and small homes made playing music in basements and garages the place where a new hybrid of rock music could percolate up out of the underground and infect anxious listeners. 

I also got into emo because it is so blatantly emotional and irrational. It wears its heart on its sleeve and is a perfect antidote to the coldly logical world of the technocracy. I also like emo because it is something of an underdog in terms of genre. It's not something many people seem to want to cop to liking. I always root for the underdog, and so this got me to liking the genre even more. If it ever was cool, its not so cool anymore. I've also been following along with the idea of the New Romanticism being written about by critics and thinkers such as Ted Gioia, and the crew of writers on the Romanticon substack. 

As all these things swirled in my mind, I got the idea that emo songwriters were quite similar to the depressive poets of the Romantic era. I thought that notion was worth exploring, and that's how I came to throw my own hat into the New Romanticist ring. Emo music has a place in this revival, and its focus on human emotion is a sure antidote to the unfeeling tendencies and lack of empathy at large in the digital age.  

I am not really a big fan of trigger warnings, but here I think it is warranted. This article talks about cutting, self-harm and suicide so it may be distressing for some readers. If you find such material distressing you may want to read about something else. If you need help, you can talk to someone. Call the number 988 on your phone for the 988 lifeline. They understand that life's challenges can sometimes be difficult. Whether you're facing mental health struggles, emotional distress, alcohol or drug use concerns, or if you just need someone to talk to, their caring counselors are there for you. You are not alone.

​

Emo musicians and Romantic poets are the bards of Saturn. Since classical times the planet has been associated with melancholy, dreariness, dark oppressive clouds, and hunchbacked intellectuals withering in cold dryness at their paper strewn desks. Many of the poets of the Romantic era inherited the melancholic disposition from father Saturn and imbued their words with the sadness of their sensitivity. Emo kids became the latter day inheritors of this tradition as they struggled to get out of their depressive bedrooms in borderline suburbia.

Nowhere has the connection between Saturn and the malignant temperament of melancholia been more thoroughly explored than in that mighty tome Saturn and Melancholy. The book was researched and written by Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl over a period of thirty years in association with the storied Warburg Institute. First published in 1964, we can forgive the authors for leaving out the goth music subculture and emo music as subsequent heirs of Saturn’s pernicious moods, and of the Romantic tradition that helped translate those feelings into expressive lyricism.

The connections between the goth subculture, and Romanticism are well documented in books exploring the subculture, such as Lol Tolhurst’s somber reflections in Goth: A History. Goths themselves often revel in these connections, clutching their tattered volumes poetry as they go off to the cemetery to drink wine and smoke clove cigarettes. The connections between the emo music scene and Romanticism are not as well documented, if they are even thought of at all by fans or artists involved. Those tracing the afterflash of the Romantic moment in the hopes of once again stoking its fervent flames have also overlooked emo as a repository of the Romantic impulse.​

Whatever else may be said of emo, no one can deny that it caught the imagination of at least two generations of teenagers and young adults looking to express themselves fully. At the core of the commonality between emo and Romanticism is how they both reveled in the wild landscapes of our inner emotional nature. The Romantics rebelled against the original onslaught against nature at the dawn of industrialization, and at the vagaries of the Enlightenment as reason, rationality, and science gained ascendance to dominate culture at the expense of being in touch with our emotions and souls. Emo kids rebelled against a sick society who would have their darker emotions medicated and subdued while the country at large continued a way of life destructive to the environment at home, while they dropped bombs and interfere with the destiny of foreign nations abroad. Medicine, and the products advertised in magazines, were supposed to keep them happy while they went to school and prepared for a life in corporate America. Except they were courageous enough to not have it, and in the process of bared their souls and inner lives. In showing their vulnerability, they found the kind of strength needed to survive life in the too-late capitalism of an overspent Empire on its way into ruin.
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The confessional mode of emo is one of its defining characteristics. Instead of needing to go to the confessional booth at a church, to some intermediary given the power to absolve a person of feelings of guilt and shame, emo singers shared their shame and guilt with the community. In the process of sharing, they wrestled with their issues and made them known, and found they weren’t alone. In baring themselves in front of their peers, they found they could bare the pressures of the modern world in a healthier way than the official ways of coping offered by the establishment.

As a style of music emo came out the D.C. hardcore punk scene, following the lead of Rites of Spring, whose lyrics were more personal in their anguish, than the usual political turmoil expressed in punk. As the style was adopted and spread, it gave voices to lonely teens bored with life in faceless tract houses. The original phase 1980s and 1990s the confessions of doomed poets like Thomas Chatterton and John Clare, and the distorted sound of the music can be heard as corollary to what the Romantic painters were doing with blackened canvases and gray skies. Both the poets and the singers let their words boil over from the writhing cauldron of their inner lives in a focused exorcism of darkness. What had been pent up in times of keeping a stiff upper lip could now be released like dynamite set to a dam. Emo and Romanticism allowed those mining its veins to acknowledge the world in its sorrow and sadness. They became bards of Saturn, poets and musicians who could allow the current of melancholy to flow without suppression.

Sadness is a part of the human condition. Artists have long sought to treat it and express it in their own ways, ways at odds with what has been deemed correct by the brutal and sadist field of psychiatry. With its past penchant for lobotomizing and other dubious means of torture, er, therapy, the track record of psychiatry is questionable. In our time it has long been in league with the pharmaceutical industry who push the chemical imbalance theory of depression while ignoring the inner lives of those patients they rely on to line their pockets. On one point we can perhaps all agree, that leaving depression to fester does no good for anyone. Probing the inner wound to expunge its poison is as legitimate a treatment as Prozac, and saner than the barbarism employed by psychiatrists in the past. The world of beauty and art may most often be ascribed to the influence of Venus, who is rightly praised for her youth, charm and grace, but old man Saturn, dry and desiccated as he is, also has his vessels in the world of the arts, who sing of melancholy and the bitter fruits born of harsh experience. These bards of Saturn have their own wisdom to share.

Our understand nothing of the mutual affection between Romanticism will remain impaired if our cultures continued obsession with rationality is not addressed. These days it seems like every other bro on the street wants to optimize their every experience. Influencers and techies alike would have us think we are all just machines, who if programmed correctly could operate without a glitch. It we just used the right product, took the right pill, or followed the correct routine, would never have a bad day or get down in the dumps. If we followed these people, there would be no moments for quiet introspection, but only to grind away at work, or in a losing struggle to go viral, or in an all-consuming effort to live your best life, no matter who it hurts, or what gets lost along the way. Emo and Romanticism both reject an ethos that places almighty reason and its bottom line above feeling and intuition. It rejects impersonal science and the industry who became its master, and emphasizes the felt experience of individual lives. Romanticism and emo are both predicated on profound reactions against the overly organized life of a technocracy just being born at the time of industrialization, and its later after as the factories lose their bloom and slip into further decay. Humanity and our fellow living creatures in the world have all suffered the cost of this efficient, expedient, and optimized industry.

Just as happened with its immediate predecessor in punk, the first wave of emo gave kids permission to start something on their own, and do something together when they were bored without thoughts of making it big or commercial success. Singing and playing the kind of songs they wanted to write in the kind of band they wanted to be in, perhaps playing some shows around town, to a group of appreciative listeners. Emo music bears the traces of this antagonism between something you do in your basement or garage with your friends for fun, and this wallowing in extreme emotions and then wearing those emotions on the sleeve, of singing to strangers about deep secrets and dark inner plight on the public stage.

For many people emo might have just been “a stage.” For many of the people making it, the music never made it big. In the same way, there were plenty of lesser known and unknown romantics who painted their pictures and penned their poems in private, who were in it just for the fleeting energy of the moment. There were posers too, people whose lives were less lived according to Romantic ideals, but who wore a mask of anarchy that appealed to them only during the flower of their own youth. Those personas were then abandoned when it became time to “get real.”

This emotionalism had great commercial potential. There were lots of teens out there who had a desire to cut themselves and to self-harm. These emotions could then be exploited by what Douglas Rushkoff the “merchants of cool” to orchestrate the rise of certain bands whose inverted sentimentality could then be used to milk the cash cows of the teenage population from their parents hard earned money. Marketing all of this stuff back to the slightly younger teenagers who had been excited by what the people a half a generation ahead were doing was a clever strategy on the part of the music business. Prefab emo kids became caricatures of themselves alongside the mall goths who they rubbed elbows with when buying their My Chemical Romance shirts at Hot Topic.
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People worked themselves up into a frenzy over kids cutting themselves as they wallowed in darkness while listening to Fallout Boy. Centuries before, Goethe had unwittingly unleashed an epidemic of suicides after The Sorrows of Young Werther was published, hitting a nerve in European culture. The suicidal contagion brought on by the novel even earned it a name for itself, the “Werther effect.”

All that said, for those who didn’t succumb to their dark emotions in such extreme way, the music itself can be heard as a kind of catharsis that leads to healing. Their inner life, skewered by the compromises of the typical American family under the conflicting projected shadows of capitalism, was heard and reflected in the voices, distorted guitars, and aching melodies and pulsing rhythms of the collective emo. Other people who were its fans felt this way too, and the relational alienation at the heart of the suburbs could then be endured a little easier.

These genuine feelings continued to energize the genre. For every band who sold out and made it in the corporate music industry, there were dozens of other bands who continued to do it for the sheer pleasure and catharsis of expression. Most of them remained local or regional in the stamp of their influence, with minimal recorded documentation. At a time when the internet wasn’t the sole arbiter of whether or not something actually happened or not, these moments can be considered pure and unadulterated, because of that very lack of documentation. Yet traces do remain. In listening to the music now, and in the contemporary emo it still inspires, an authentic aestheticism can be heard. The sound is one where our emotional lives and emotional intelligence are placed at the foreground, and concerns for getting ahead on the board game of life were set aside, when they weren’t thrown off the table altogether.

There was a spirit moving in emo, and that spirit made all the whining, all the intense confessionals, and all the navel gazing into dark subjective moods, not only tolerable, but a beautiful release valve that in its greatest moments achieved rare beauty and could be elevated into high art. It took elements of math rock and made them serve the irrationality of human passion, and not just the masturbatory tendency of virtuoso guitar noodlers. Strange time signatures disoriented and defamiliarized standard rock rhythms. Distortion and fuzz on soft and loud guitars and bass gave the proceedings an impressionistic sonic palette. When emo broke into screamo it could work itself up to the point of nihilistic destruction, but there were often redemptive qualities at work as well, as self esteem was rebuilt from the ashes.

Romanticism allowed minds under the yoke of Enlightenment rationality to get in touch with their darker drives and the troubling things they found when staring into their own minds. Thomas Chatterton wound up dead, his poetry torn up and littered around the room where he was found. John Clare arguably wrote some of his best poetry while he was locked up inside an insane asylum, sadistic as places were. Likewise, the taste for mascara, the interest in childhood trauma, the probing of wounds and emotional hurts and the subconscious associations produced by the same remain part and parcel of the of the appeal of emo. Many teens who have been abandoned by the adults in their lives, whether emotionally abandoned or otherwise, by parents or by teachers, also ended up dead or institutionalized.

Emo and the Romantic revival offer a different path. Our feelings don’t have to be shut up, turned off, or locked away. They can be explored or transformed into a medium of meaning, offering a light to others who are also struggling in darkness looking for a way out.

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In my next post on Friday this week I will have a mix and playlist of some essential emo tunes. In the meantime I will leave you with two songs as a jumping off point for your own further explorations.

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The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

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Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

“I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.” ― Marcel Duchamp

Art as it is known today is not art as it was known in the past. It can be safely surmised that while, in our futures, painting, music, sculpture and other modes of expression will continue to exist, how they are thought about and what their purpose is will have changed. They have not remained static any more than other activities have, even if a thread runs through them in the form of basic and common shared practices.

            Going back to ancient times, it would seem that every type of  art was fused with magic. Cave paintings of animals may have aided tribal peoples in their hunts. Songs were used by the first healers to cure the sick[1]. Poetry was fused with music, and these were chanted to enchant. The dance that accompanied those songs invited the spirits to come and participate. Masks were crafted to let the wearer don certain personas or deities in ritual, and the work of certain artisans was associated with various beings of power. Weavers and weaving were related to the Fates, for example, and blacksmiths were associated with the Magyar god Hadúr and the Irish goddess Brigid, among many, many other associations. Magic, which can often be thought of as dealing with the unseen, is made visible through the creation of images and objects, enactment, and the use of utterance and the voice. It’s hard to find an art that can’t be traced back to the practice of magic. This even includes fields that are now considered sciences, but were considered arts in times gone.

            The professor of art history Simon Shaw-Miller noted in his book Visible Deeds of Music  how the classical Greek word mousike, which comes down to us as music, was related directly to the “art of the Muses,” and how this word “was first a concept signifying any art form over which the Muses presided: poetry, song, dance, astronomy.”[2] It did not have the same categorical use for just one type of creative expression that it does now. Shaw-Miller goes on to write about how sculpture, painting and architecture were not considered to be a unified group based around what we now call aesthetics until the fifth century A.D.. All culture that we now consider specifically visual was, for centuries, just considered to be part of craftsmanship.

            Plato and Aristotle worked on classifying the arts, but mostly focused on the age-old relationship between music and speech. In medieval times up through the Renaissance there were considered to be seven liberal arts: the trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric, and the quadrivium of music, geometry, astronomy and arithmetic. All of these except music have now lost their identity as arts and are instead thought of as relating to science or language. In those times scientia meant something closer to the body of knowledge around a specific area of study.

            The word art itself wasn’t even really used for what it is now used for until the early nineteenth century, when it was separated from craft, and artisans started to be thought of as different from the artiste.

            Even these brief remarks have been confined to just how art has been thought of from a Western point of view, not even scratching the surface of how other cultures think or thought about the broad umbrella of the arts and their history. All this is to say that what is considered an art now may not be considered so in our futures, and things that are kept separate now may join together (as some did in the past) to become something new in the myriad cultures of our futures. It is, however, with this brief and limited historical perspective in mind that I wish to devote this iteration of Cheap Thrills to an exploration of possible roles for the artist in deindustrial society when art and the artist might become something else altogether.

THE ARTIST AS PRANKSTER AND CONCEPTUALIST

This edition of Cheap Thrills started off as an article on pranks and the spirit of the trickster, but the more I tried to work on it, the trickier it became. Perhaps my subconscious was trying to pull one over on me as I drafted my notes, because I only made headway when I abandoned the idea in frustration and started working on something else. I was soon led back to the enigmatic world of Marcel Duchamp, who like a trickster, seems to turn up when least expected.  So, in one sense, this article might be considered as a rumination on one of the great pranks played on the art world of the twentieth century. I am of course talking about Duchamp’s masterstroke of sheisty shenanigans when he signed the name R. Mutt on a common urinal, gave it the title “Fountain,” and installed it in art gallery.

            This act of taking the piss  out of the art scene can alternatively be looked at as a kind of logistical chess move that liberated painters and sculptors from the prison of the canvas and marble block to make a then-new kind of work out of concepts and ideas. Another name for the trickster is the changer, and Duchamp’s antics changed the way art was viewed as he called into question whether or not a manufactured object could be considered worthy of the same kind of aesthetic respect typically given to creators of traditional works.

            Duchamp had grown up in a family devoted to culture and was himself a skilled painter and chess player. But he was quick to become bored with painting and what he called “retinal art.” Instead, he conceived putting industrially made objects to use as a way of stimulating the intellect and not just making pleasant shapes for the eye. The term readymade had already been in use in the United States at the time to refer to products made by manufacturing, as opposed to handmade goods created by artisans. Duchamp adopted the term for a class of objects, like his urinal, taken out of context, and designated as art. This move ushered in the idea of concept art, which owes as much to philosophy as it does to aesthetics. Duchamp later pretended that he abandoned making art altogether in favor of playing chess, which he did on a world-class level, while for twenty years, in secret, he worked on his mysterious sculptural masterpiece the “Étant donnés,” only revealed towards the end of his life.

            Some people might think of conceptual art as a joke in itself, made at the expense of the audience. It’s an understandable view. Art in the twentieth century was dominated by people who often preened themselves on their supposed intellectual superiority while making things that people who hadn’t spent a small fortune going to art school couldn’t give two hoots about. Beauty was absent, abstraction was in, much of it abhorrent to the masses, but praised by a small and self-satisfied elite. Yet the chain of events Duchamp set in motion with his “Fountain” and other readymades led to later flowerings of concept art, manifesting in the “anti-movement” of Fluxus, and many stunts, pranks and hoaxes that wouldn’t have been called art at all in previous centuries.

            Duchamp prized the intellectual exactitude developed by playing chess, and he wanted to bring that same rousing rigor of the mind to bear in the art world. Concepts might seem of vague use in a future dark age, yet they are incredibly mighty. If the material resources needed to make art become scarce, concepts can still be played with when there is little else. A concept, by not being fixed to the material plane (though often embodied in pieces of art) is more fluid and able to permeate into the background radiation of life itself. When concepts become infused with symbols, they may take on even more life. Becoming a conceptual artist, then, could prove to have vast implications across the ragged slope of decline, especially if the concepts themselves spread and are adopted by others.

Granted, paper, ink, paint, and some dyes,  are all well within the realm of possibility to produce locally and low-tech. There will also be a plethora of discarded readymades readily available just by combing through the ruins. But what is more low-tech than a concept itself? It seems to me that concept art can continue to exist and inform our futures alongside the resurgence of traditional ateliers where the mastery of skills needed to make great retinal art are being taught and revived.

             When the new and the old are brought into sympathetic symbiosis amidst the camaraderie of survival, something else will be born.

THE ARTIST AS SYNTHESIST

In the grand scope of history, Oswald Spengler  thought that an "age of synthesis" follows the dark age after the fall of a civilization. During a time of synthesis anything still of value that remains from the fallen civilization gets woven together into new strands of meaning, connection and invention to be passed on to those who follow.  As society retroverts back towards modes adapted for living on a lower resource base, the boundaries between the specialized arts that emerged roughly during the Enlightenment, as discussed above, may now once again overlap and merge to create a synthesis of activities previously held as separate. However, those with the inclination to synthesize don’t need to wait for the current stage of decline to finish running its course, but can help carry things along by practicing my new slogan “Synthesis Now.”

            Synthesis is a healthy reaction to the pervasive influence of post-modernist deconstruction. Tearing things down can only go so far before all that is left is a bunch of shattered and disconnected pieces. It may yet be possible to create a beautiful mosaic that expresses truth and transmits useful knowledge to the future out of the shards in this scrap heap, merging them together and blending their influences. The artist as synthesist looks to what worked in the past and what is still useful in the present, and brings them together. They rake through the coals of a variety of burned-out disciplines whose less useful features have already been self-cannibalized as dirty fuel for today’s culture wars.  The things that get saved and synthesized will be those things each individual artist is drawn to from their own love and interest of that particular concept, object, subject, practice or philosophy. Others with different interests will be drawn to different materials to save and synthesize. In this manner, certainty will be de-prioritized in favor of serendipity. Polarization and dogmatism can be checked at the door to make way for pragmatism and the putting together of an eclectic mix of tools that produce results. 

            Another way to think about synthesis is as an absence of specialism and a re-embrace of a generalist mindset. Synthesizers become jacks of all trades and are helpful to their communities because they have made a habit of becoming comfortable looking at things from many perspectives, and like a magpie, hang on tight to useful bits and bobs of lore. The results of synthesis are like a thick mulligan stew where many different ingredients are all swimming in the same collective gravy, made tasty by their skillful combination. The artist in this respect is playing the role of a penny-pinching alchemist, separating some things and bringing others together.
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            Related to artistic synthesis is the concept of intermedia. The word was first used by Samuel Taylor Coleridge back in 1812. The term didn’t really catch on, but it got resurrected by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins in his essay on the subject first published by him in 1966 in a newsletter for his Something Else Press. According to Higgins both he and Coleridge used it as a way to “define works which fall conceptually between media that are already known.”
           
Higgins was keen to point out the way the arts had become specialized in the Renaissance, writing, “The concept of the separation of media arose in the Renaissance. The idea that a painting could be made of paint on canvas or that a sculpture should not be painted seems characteristic of the kind of social thought, categorizing and dividing society.”[1] Not only did this division of media lead to greater specialization, it also further contributed to the division of the senses. The arts in the West, and perhaps in general around the world, have long been predisposed towards the visual and the auditory. Paintings are for the eye, as is the written word, whereas music, stories and recited poetry are for the ear. The senses of touch, taste and smell tend to get sidelined in most art. Intermedia occupies the liminal spaces between media, and often in the zones where two or more senses overlap. Our current culture has fragmented in part because we have fragmented ourselves through the neglect of touch, smell and taste.
            “Happenings” were the prime vehicle for intermedia works, as well as Fluxus art in general.  With roots in the deep soil of Dada and Surrealism, the Happenings involved a heady mixture of sound, light, slides or projected film, and sculptural elements, with audience participation that brought a tactile element to the proceedings. Sometimes these Happenings were called an Event.          

 Writer and art historian Hannah Higgins[2] writes on the intermingling of senses in intermedia that:
           
            Far from being limited to the traditional realms of painting and sculpture, the  categorising             behaviour of the modern era established the hierarchy of the senses in the modern period, at least in the cultural mainstream. Perhaps for this reason, hierarchies both in the fine arts and relating to the sensory system run roughly parallel to each other: from the visual as painting and as the sensory basis for the literary arts (as read),  through sound as music to the baser art forms of movement (dance), taste (gourmet         cooking) and scent (perfumery). Intermedia work, it could be said, occurs between media  categories and perceptual categories. Understanding the power of intermedia work in  general, and the Event in particular, calls for a cross-modal aesthetics of all senses as   based in the interactions of hearing, touch, smell, taste and sight. The consideration of intermedial (and therefore intersensory) art therefore requires a simultaneously   physiological and cultural framework for each sense as a cross-modal perceptual  system.[3]

 To me the locus of ritual suggests such a cultural framework. Movement, sound, visualization, and smell are all brought together in ritual. Ritual also links us to the distant past and will be practiced by humans well into the future. Industrial society does not lack ritual, even if, for some, the rituals themselves have changed. The potential to create new rituals around emergent symbols exists, and one way people might enjoy them in non-dogmatic, no-particular-belief-required modes, might first be on an aesthetic level, through a revival of Happenings and Events which are their own kind of ritual.

            Another avenue to approach artistic synthesis is the gesamtkunstwerk or “total art work” of Richard Wagner. This is perhaps a more useful line of inquiry to those with a traditionalist mindset with regards to the arts. For Wagner the art of the future was to be based on the art of the  distant past, helped along with a healthy dose of philosophical underpinning from the work of Arthur Schopenhauer. Wagner’s mind had cast back to a time when poetry, dance and music were all a part of drama and were closely akin to religious celebrations. The two key essays that lay out his theoretical position are “Art and Revolution” and “The Artwork of the Future” both from 1849. Later the term  gesamtkunstwerk was used to describe the many modes of activity engaged by William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, another vein rich for the mining by artistic synthesizers.
          
  Through a greater experience of our entire sensorium, we may come to feel less separated from the natural world in all its vast richness.            

THE ARTIST AS ECOLOGIST

The great anthropologist and systems theory thinker Gregory Bateson thought that all of nature was permeated by mind. Mind and nature are inseparable. Thus, the products of the human mind, our concepts and theories, are just as much a part of nature as anything else. By that same token, the products of culture, our artworks, even our machines, make up parts of the vast number of interconnected systems we all are a part of, all of them infused with mind. The artist is as much a part of these ecologies as anyone or anything else. Yet those who create with the imagination, and inject their creations into the stream of culture, can in some cases have greater effects on the larger systems they are a part of when their work gets amplified and transmitted through information feedback loops.

            In this sense, one of the roles for the artists of our futures may be that of an ecologist. This theme was picked up by Gene Youngblood (who also used the term intermedia) in his book Expanded Cinema. He writes, “For some years now the activity of the artist in our society has been trending more toward the function of the ecologist: one who deals with environmental relationships. Ecology is defined as the totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment. Thus the act of creation for the new artist is not so much the invention of new objects as the revelation of previously unrecognized relationships between existing phenomena, both physical and metaphysical. So we find that ecology is art in the most fundamental and pragmatic sense, expanding our apprehension of reality.”[1]

            Highlighting our interconnected relationships seems to me to be especially useful in the hours, days, weeks, months and years ahead. Highlighting the way things interact in complex systems could go a long way to fostering a greater understanding of systems thinking among the general public.

            Kim Stanley Robinson picked up on the idea of the artist as ecologist in his novel 2312. Granted, this work of SF is set within the same worlds as his Mars trilogy that focus on the colonization and terraforming of Mars and other planets in our solar system. But for the deindustrial reader who is skeptical of such promises, this does not mean Robinson is any less of a storyteller, or that certain of his ideas are not welcome, and might even be adapted to a world of less high technology. If nothing else his strong imagination rivals the banal wet dreams of Elon Musk. The main character in 2312 is Swan Er Hong, who has made a life for herself designing asteroid terrariums. These are basically hollowed out asteroids that have been terraformed to have different earth-like biomes. Er Hong is also an artist who works on the landscape scale creating what are called Goldsworthies in the book, named after the real-life artist Andy Goldsworthy, one of the more well-known practitioners of land art. These landscape art pieces are touched on throughout his book.[2]

            Land art started off in the 1960s as a corollary to the back-to-the-land and environmental movements then having their day. Land artists decided to ditch the galleries and museums and work directly with the natural materials as their palette. These artists were, paradoxically, also drawing inspiration from conceptual art and certain aspects of minimalism. Another form of inspiration was the ancient land art created by cultures in the distant past, monuments like Stonehenge, Serpent Mound, the Nazca Lines and the Liffington White Horse.[1] . Much of the material for land art is gathered on site in the form of rocks, soil, trees, and branches. There is a tendency for land art to change and shift over time with the landscape, subject to the same elements as any other part of the land. Wind, rain, rising waters and the growth of new plant life, and the activity of animals all cause land art to be engulfed by the nature out of which it was made. Sometimes these works are only documented by photographs, especially those created in remote locations. 

            Andy Goldsworthy has been part of this movement as a sculptor and photographer, creating stunning works that involve minimal intervention in the land, using materials that are able to be moved around, rather than things he would have to destroy to make a work out of. He said that, “I am reluctant to carve into or break off solid living rock…I feel a difference between large, deep rooted stones and the debris lying at the foot of a cliff, pebbles on a beach…These are loose and unsettled, as if on a journey, and I can work with them in ways I couldn’t with a long resting stone.”[3] Using mostly his hands and body, Goldsworthy works with the materials at a site to create pieces of flitting and evanescent beauty that he then documents with his camera.

            Pieces of land art and sculpture modeled on his work are certainly within the realm of the achievable for those working with a lower resource base, and they’re another fertile area for future artists to continue working. Goldsworthy is only one of a number of artists who have been involved in making this kind of work, which itself is not well defined, and is only one of many possible ways the artist may take on the role of ecologist. 

             Land art was created as part of the feedback loop generated by the entire concept of concept art. If the artist is a part of the ecology, their actions, their ideas, and the concepts they put into circulation will go on to become part of the world, creating ripples, small or large, and information feedback loops within the system.

ALL TOGETHER SOMETHING ELSE 

To summarize, the artist as prankster, conceptualist, synthesist and ecologist may continue to have a role in the societies of our futures. Changers are needed when things become locked into rigid patterns of calcified mentality. In these times the trickster steps in to shake things up, to question what it is we are doing and what exactly it is we might become. Subtle concepts might be created that leak into the culture, small actions giving way to large transformations. These concepts might be in any medium, or fall in the cracks between media, expanding our senses, and in doing so, highlight the interconnected relationships we might otherwise take for granted.
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Of course the artist might just become something else altogether.

FOR MY OTHER CHEAP THRILLS ARTICLES FOLLOW THE LINKS BELOW:

A COMPLEXITY OF SPECTACLES

DREAM FORAGING

STREAM FORAGING

THE DOWNWARDLY MOBILE DANDY AND THE TRAILER PARK QUAINTRELLE

THE POWER OF THREE: TERNARY LOGIC, TRIOLECTICS AND THREE SIDED FOOTBALL

LEGEND TRIPPING, THE DEINDUSTRIAL GOTHIC, AND A WORLD FULL OF MONSTERS

RADIOS NEXT GOLDEN AGE

THE ART AND PLEASURE OF LETTER WRITING

CULTS OF MUSIC

IN SEARCH OF LOST SLACK

NOTES:

[1]Gioia, Ted. Healing Songs. Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 2006.

[2] Shaw-Miller, Simon. Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage. New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 2002.
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[1] Higgins, Dick. Intermedia Newsletter 1, https://dickhiggins.org/newsletters-vol-1-%26-2

[2]The daughter of Dick Higgins and Fluxist artist Alison Knowles.

[3]  Higgins, Hannah. Intermedial Perception or Fluxing Across the Sensory. <https://www.on-curating.org/issue-51-reader/intermedial-perception-or-fluxing-across-the-sensory.html>
[1] Youngblood, Gene. Expanded Cinema. New York, NY.: Dutton, 1970.

[2]Another interesting aspect of 2312 that New Maps readers may enjoy is the way Robinson modeled the economy of his future worlds on the cooperative Mondragon corporation.

[3] Hatley, James D. (2005). "Techne and Phusis: Wilderness and the Aesthetics of the Trace in Andrew Goldsworthy". Environmental Philosophy, Vol. 2, No. 2. Fall 2005.

​RE/SOURCES:

Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York, NY.: Dutton, 1979.

Friedman, Ken, ed. The Fluxus Reader. New York, NY.  Academy Editions, 1998.

Goldsworthy, Andy. Ephemeral Works: 2004-2014. New York, NY.: Abrams, 2015.

Goldsworthy, Andy. Hand to earth: Andy Goldsworthy Sculpture, 1976-1990. New York, NY.:|Abrams, 1993.

Hatley, James D. (2005). "Techne and Phusis: Wilderness and the Aesthetics of the Trace in Andrew
Goldsworthy". Environmental Philosophy, Vol. 2, No. 2. Fall 2005.

Higgins, Dick. Intermedia, Fluxus, and The Something Else Press: Selected Writings of Dick Higgins. Siglio, Los Angeles, CA.: 2018.

Higgins, Hannah B. “Intermedial Perception or Fluxing Across the Sensory.” <https://www.on-curating.org/issue-51-reader/intermedial-perception-or-fluxing-across-the-sensory.html>
Moffitt, John F. Alchemist of the Avant-Garde: the Case of Marcel Duchamp. Albany, NY. : State University of New York Press, 2003.

Robinson, Kim Stanley. 2312. New York, NY.: Orbit. 2012.

Sanouillet, Michel, and Elmer Peterson, eds. Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp. Oxford, England: Oxford Univ. Press, 2023.

Shaw-Miller, Simon. Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage. Yale University. New Haven, CT.: 2002

Youngblood, Gene. Expanded Cinema. New York, NY.: Dutton, 1970.

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​
The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

As 2026 gets underway, I want to celebrate American culture. Because of the very nature of America, “celebrating American culture” can mean a lot of quite different things to a lot of different people. At the present time of writing there are a lot of mixed feelings and hard feelings about culture in this country. America is still engaged in what journalists have called “forever wars” abroad and we are also just as engaged at home in what I call the seemingly interminable “forever culture wars.” I hope we can put an end to the forever wars and unwind our empire, and that these forever culture wars don’t erupt into a hot civil war serving none of us here at home. Democracy, is, among other things, a system that can help assuage such an atrocity from erupting, though as we know from the past, it isn't an absolute protection. I admit it seems pretty touch and go at times.

Yet I think the experiment of democracy and of America is worth continuing, and it is in divisive times such as these when experimental music can come to the rescue. How so? I think one of the core guiding lights in America is a willingness to experiment.  American culture is very experimental. Focusing on experimental culture can help us live the other parts of our life, personally and collectively, in a more experimental vein.

When Ben Metcalf, author of the novel Against the Country, was interviewed for the newspaper County Highway, he put his feelings about the nation in a way that I think many of us can understand. “People who just love this country or who just hate this country make no sense to me,” he said. “Loving it and hating it at the same time -that makes sense to me.”

It makes sense to me as well. There are so many things that I do love about America, but they are leavened by all the bitter feelings and animosity I feel for the very harsh aspects of the American experience. In place of the love and the hate, though, I’d like to focus on Americas experimental nature, the fact that we have barely even begun, that we are searching blindly in the dark for our own national identity and what it might become. Even as we search, there has been major foreshadowing, presentiments of destiny,  glimmers and waypoints to those things we might collectively sense as being part of our character. The music released on the label New World Records can be listened to as a guide to some of those possible directions. Along with listening to the music, you'll be sure to meet many national characters. 

The label is dedicated to American music and is representative of many styles. It has also focused on a huge swathe of experimental recordings. Listening to these records is a way to tap into the experimental side of the American character.  It is with this spirit in mind that I wish to showcase my favorite 50 albums from the record label New World Records. The label was started just over fifty years ago in 1975 in preparation of celebrating the bicentennial of the USA. Their aim then, and their continuing aim, has been to preserve the music of Americas composers and musicians.

A lot of the music they put out on the label has “no commercial potential” to use Frank Zappa’s helpful phrase. To my mind, that is one reason it needs to be preserved. Not all things that are good for the culture are predicated on the bottom line of corporate capitalism. In fact, it could be argued that corporate capitalism isn’t good for the culture. Its outsized influence pushes authentic voices to the margins, while the plastic pop rock creations of the record industry take up increasingly bought up space on the algorhythmed streaming platforms and what is left of the radio spectrum. 

The mission statement of New World Records is as follows: “We are dedicated to the documentation of American music that is largely ignored by the commercial recording companies. In an industry obsessed with million-unit sales and immediate profits, New World chooses artistic merit as its indicator of success.”

What a concept.

Now at age 51, New World Records is the oldest non-profit in the music business. It was founded by the company Anthology of Recorded Music Inc. with the help of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

The label has fulfilled on its continuing mission to seek out American music and preserve it for dedicated listeners and historians. They play a vital role in documenting the stunning diversity of American music, encompassing everything from folk, to blues, gospel, and jazz to contemporary classical, and art music in the electronic and avant-garde worlds. It is the latter three categories I have listened to the most of, from their catalog. These will find the highest representation in my list because I think by highlighting experimental music, we can show how there may be other possibilities for America that haven’t yet been fully explored by politicians. Poets, and by extension, musicians, are the real legislators of the world.

The labels first year of operation came with a mandate to produce “a 100-disc anthology of American music encompassing the broadest possible spectrum of musical genres. This set of recordings, together with their extensive liner notes, provides a core curriculum in American music and American studies. In 1978 the Anthology was completed and distributed free of charge to almost 7,000 educational and cultural institutions throughout the world. An additional 2,000 Anthologies were sold at cost to other similar institutions. Through these recordings two hundred years of music and American cultural history are brought to life.”

In my own selection of 50 favorite records from the label my plan is to explore five albums per post, across ten different posts. A strong case can be made for dedicated listening to the original 100 albums and reading the liner notes to get that core education, but here I will be picking just one of each per post so I can focus on my longtime obsession with the American tradition of experimental.

Now on to the music!
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SONGS OF LOVE, LUCK, ANIMALS AND MAGIC - MUSIC OF THE YUROK AND TOLOWA INDIANS

It seems only fitting to me that this series began with a record collecting some songs of the Native Tribes that were here before the age of exploration brought wave after wave of Europen immigrants, religious refugees, colonialist settlers and those who were forced to come here enslaved. 
 
It also seems fitting to start with “Songs of Love, Luck, Animals, & Magic” because who doesn’t need a little bit of each of these in their life to make their life full? The high keening voices singing in a language I don’t understand, and the rhythmic pulse of the drums, rattles, clinking of shells, takes me back to a time on this continent when an entirely different worldview held sway. It’s not my own native world view, but I can’t say I am not enthralled by the everyday sense of enchantment woven into these songs. I also hear community, living close to aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers, cousins, and the laughter shared in between the songs. Listening, it’s like I’ve been privileged to sit along the sidelines and witness this interconnection and exchange between the people.

​I am grateful for documents like this, because it allows me to hear a world that has disappeared, while at the same time imagining a different kind of world for our shared American futures. 

As it says in the liner notes, “The Tolowa and Yurok had little contact with non-Indians until the 1850's, when miners and settlers came in great numbers to Crescent City and Humboldt Bay. These white people found the Indians living in plank houses on the coast or inland along the rivers.The Tolowa, including the Chetco, lived on Crescent Bay, Lake Earl, and the Smith River in northwestern California, and on the Chetco River in southwestern Oregon" (Murdock; see Bibliography). The Yurok territory stretched from Trinidad, California, on the coast northeast to the junction of the Trinity and Klamath rivers. The Tolowa had no political entity greater than the village, but inhabitants of adjacent areas shared linguistic and cultural traits (Drucker; see Bibliography). The political history after white contact is one of massacres and retaliations resulting in an estimated population of 121 Tolowas in 1910.

The Yurok, according to A. L. Kroeber, were also organized into villages, which were not political units but aggregates of individuals sharing cultural affinities. Historically the Yurok fared a little better than the Tolowa, but population figures show a rapid decline after white settlement, although they recovered by 1970: in 1870 the estimated population of the Yurok was 2,700, in 1910 688, and in 1970 3,000.”

It’s these liner notes that I also love about all the New Worlds Records releases. They are often extensive and give a lot of detail about the artists, concepts and ideas behind the albums. The liner notes for this one go into more specific details about all of the songs presented here. New World Records has also helpfully made many of their liner notes available online. 

JOAN LA BARBARA - SHAMANSONG

For those of you who haven’t (yet) spent a big chunk of your allotted time in this incarnation sitting around listening to avantgarde records and the weirdest stuff you could find, let me introduce you to Joan La Barbara. Her primary instrument is her voice, which is the primal instrument itself. Voice is the breath of the wind, the word on the breath, the word that makes light. La Barbara is also a composer herself, but as virtuoso of what is termed “extended” technique in any instrument, bending that instrument to make it go further and do things differently than in normal musical training, she has become a sought after interpreter of those challenging pieces written by the American experimentalists of the 20th and early 21st centuries.

The extended technique for voice includes her bringing into art music singing inhaled tones (it’s all about the breath), sighs (it’s all about the breath), trills, whispers, cries, and as is often the case in instruments where the breath is the primary driver, multiphonics. Here we can read that as the ability to sing two or more pitches at the same time. Traditional overtone singing is in fact a form of multiphonics, but in the west overtone singing isn’t taught as such. This makes them extended techniques for those who have gone out to explore the limits of their art. As part of her exploration she developed her own “circular singing” techniques, similar to the circular breathing techniques used by people who play digeridoo, horns and other wind instruments.

​The title track, "ShamanSong", was recorded on location at Diablo Canyon in New Mexico. Filled with natural reverberating acoustics and the sounds of birds and lightning, it sets the scene for the in flow of electronics and voice that open up a shamanic portal to inner worlds. Then the percussion comes in which makes this a very driving piece, conjuring up the world of the southwest and its desert spirits. 

My favorite piece on this CD is "Rothko", from 1986. Like all of these compositions, it features La Barbara’s captivating voice and powerful singing. This one also features bowed piano, which adds to the resonant and harmonically rich material that was created for the Rothko Chapel. The interplay of these minimalist drones in a long form piece of close to 25 minutes serves the purpose of centering the mind in a channel of quietude, as one would hope to due in a chapel. This piece would certainly be in the hymnal of my own “Ambient Church.” This is a drumless slab between the two other pieces that feature percussion.

Calligraphy/Shadows is the final piece, another long one, with Chinese instruments commissioned for the Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company. The relationship between experimental music and contemporary dance is strong going back to the work of Merce Cunningham, with many companies commissioning composers to create music for new choreography. 

CHRISTIAN WOLFF - TEN EXERCISES

Christian Wolff comes from a storied line of German intellectuals. His parents where Helen and Kurt Wolff who published the works of people like Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka. They got out of Germany in 1941 and set to work with other’s who had fled Europe to start Pantheon Books.

Christian Wolff’s role in American music is not to be understated. He became an American citizen at age twelve, and by age sixteen, his piano teacher sent him to study composition with John Cage. It was a fortuitous meeting, and Wolff would go on to be a close part of the New York School, and the circle around Cage that included David Tudor, Morton Feldman, and Cage’s partner Merce Cunningham.

His parents Helen and Kurt played a large role in the subsequent development of the experimental music scene in the United States, even if that hadn’t been their intention, through one of their major publications. They had published a lot of translations, including Richard Wilhelm’s seminal translation of the I Ching into English. Christian Wolff gave a copy of the I Ching to John Cage. John Cage developed a life-long fascination with the text and used it as a way to proceed in his compositional career as a facilitator of chance operations.

​Wolff, like so many other American experimentalists of the era, would go on to tour and work with Cunningham. Later he palled around with Frederic Rzewski and Cornelius Cardew, who shared his interest in non-hierarchical relationships and possibilities. Many composers of the time were exploring the idea of writing pieces of music that did not dictate everything the player must do, but allowed room for their own improvisation and interpretation, for the musician to become a co-composer. Wolff’s Exercises, started in 1973, offer such freedom. After one performance of them John Cage quipped that they were like “the classical music of an unknown civilization” -which is exactly why they continue to be relevant and worth listening. 

Tom, Johnson speaks to the technical aspect of the music. "The ‘Exercises,’ like most of Wolff’s scores, must be done without conductor, and may be played by any combination of instruments. The scores are basically just melodies, usually divided into phrases of about three to 10 notes. All the musicians follow the same score, but since the melodies may be read in either treble or bass clef, the music usually comes out in parallel sixths. Generally the musicians begin the phrases more or less together, but they proceed in their own ways."

This is chamber music to a surreal dream. The world of our everyday familiar music is there, but has shifted into something topsy turvy and can now be heard in a new way.

JAMES TENNEY - POSTAL PIECES

​You might have heard of James Tenney if you happen to be interested in the history of plunderphonics. One of the first pieces of plunderphonics ever made used Elvis as source material. Collage # 1 (“Blue Suede”) by James Tenney from 1961. In the following years he would work extensively at Bell Labs with computer music pioneer Max Matthews. His interests encompassed noise, collage, microtonal tuning, and algorithmic composition. He studied with a number of avantgarde luminaries. It was with Lejaren Hiller whom he studied information theory, acoustics, and tape music composition. He also spent time hanging out with Harry Partch, John Cage, and Edgad Varese among other crazy cats. He was a huge booster of the works of Charles Ives, and as an accomplished pianist and interpreter, he was especially fond of Ives’ Concord Sonata. Tenney also played Cage’s music and his rendition of  sonatas and interludes are not to be missed.

Tenney was also a cracker jack theoretical writer, the kind of brainiac who liked to combine different fields of interest, looking for their commonalities and ways they could be synthesized together. His master thesis may not be on the book shelf of every musician, or even composer, but Meta (+) Hodos did the trick of applying gestalt theory, which emphasizes the wholeness of the mind or system, and cognitive science to music. One of his main interests was harmonic perception. He wrote numerous articles on music including “Temporal Gestalt Perception in Music” and “John Cage and the Theory of Harmony.” He also wrote the book The History of Consonance and Dissonance.

In the world of experimental music, Tenney was like a Merlin figure or wizard. He whispered things that not many others heard directly, but having the ear of other musicians, his ideas went on to shape the thought and practice of many others working in the experimental tradition. Later partisan of plunderphonia John Oswald studied under Tenney. During the 1960s Tenney was living in or close to New York City, and was active in the Fluxus scene there.
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On the Postal Pieces we get little snap shots, short post card length compositions that arrive as if in the mailroom of the mind. Tenney called them “scorecards” and in a way they can be thought of as similar to John Zorn’s index card pieces such as “Spillane.” As it says in the notes, “Each card contains a complete if minimally stated work to be performed by instrumentalists. These pieces elucidate to a large degree some of Tenney's bedrock compositional ideas. Each is a kind of meditation on acoustics, form, or hyper-attention to a single performance gesture.”

​Not all music is written for the heart. Some of it is written for the head. Tenney’s music is essential brain stimulation, aesthetic sounds that challenge and open up the intellect to new possibilities and permutations. These scorecards are like little seeds posted out to small groups of dedicated listeners, but whose roots, sprouts, and rhizomes extend now much further after successional plantings.

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS - EARTH AND THE GREAT WEATHER

John Luther Adams was born in 1953, in Meridian, Mississippi he played as a drummer in rock bands. Like many in his generation, Adams was a Zappahead. When he read about Frank Zappa’s admiration for Edgard Varèse he was intrigued and got sucked into that world and the adjacent streams flowing from the work of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

, and went on to study at the California Institute of the Arts where encountered the elder wizard of American experimentalism John Tenney. Adams was always deeply connected to the landscapes he found himself in and was drawn to environmental work, which he pursued as soon as he graduated. It wasn’t long before he was living in the boreal forests of Alaska. The land would go on to have enormous effects on his compositions, even as he moved away from environmental work as such to be a full-time composer.

Tom Service, writing in the Guardian noted that, “his music becomes more than a metaphor for natural forces: it is an elemental experience in its own right.”

​ The elemental nature of the work seems to me to be a gift of the land itself. Living so close to the land in deep nature, has allowed him to be a bridge for this music of the earth and its elemental forces. Through his interest in the environment, in the landscape, in the spirit of a place, he has pursued the idea of sonic geography, a kind of psychogeography of sound.

In his own words he as said that, “Through sustained listening to the subtle resonances of the northern soundscape, I hope to explore the territory of sonic geography—that region between place and culture...between environment and imagination. I hope to move beyond landscape painting in sound toward a music which, in its own way, is landscape—a music which creates its own inherently sonic presence and sense of place.”

Earth and the Great Weather started off as a commission for New American Radio, a program that was a space for artists to “pioneer new dimensions in acoustic space” through forms such as drama, documentary, the exploration of language, sonic and environmental meditation. For his piece he recorded natural arctic sounds and the music of the wind as played the stretched strings of an Aeolian harp, recorded natural sounds as well as the music of the wind on the strings of a small Aeolian harp. He also mixed in drum rhythms and the language of the Inupiat Eskimo people from the arctic coast of Alaska. He ended up with a half hour long piece for the radio program.

Yet the ideas that began with this wouldn’t settle down and he expanded on the work, and crossed “the arctic divide to encompass the boreal forest of the northern interior—the physical, cultural, and spiritual geography of the Gwich’in Athabascan people. Expanding on my work with the wind harp, the musical ground of Earth and the Great Weather is a cycle of pieces for strings and digital delay, collectively titled Aeolian Dreams. Aeolian Dreams is my most extended work to date in just intonation. Rising like the mountain ranges above the Aeolian plains of Earth and the Great Weather are three large pieces for four drummers. These quartets are constructed of asymmetrical rhythmic cells abstracted from traditional Inupiat and Gwich’in dance music, which I have admired for many years. … Indigenous peoples have long understood the extraordinary powers of certain landscapes. For those of us who have lost or forgotten our intimate connections with such places, the Arctic is a vast and enduring geography of hope. Somewhere out in that far country of imagination and desire lie the foundations of my own faith.”

People often think you need to go to some big city to make a life in the arts. John Luther Adams has shown us in this recording, and his many other works, that you also can do the opposite, and go out into the vastness of nature to hear its song and do your best to transcribe it. I am grateful to composers such as these who listen with their ears to the world, and bring back these works which we can link up to in a form of musical communion. 

.:. .:. .:.
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The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

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Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. 

“All the means we’ve been given to stay alert we use to ornament our sleep. If instead of endlessly inventing new ways to make life more comfortable we’d apply our ingenuity to fabricating instruments to jog man out of his torpor!”
​ ― René Daumal, Mount Analogue

There seems to be a growing sense within the dominant culture that there isn’t much left to do that is worthwhile; that the effort to do something and become someone doesn’t seem worth the bother; that the energy and time expended on a project won’t give a measurable return. Life coach types say things like “It’s the process, not the product” (that is important in life), but coming from their self-referential lips “the process” seems like a mere consolation prize. What’s the use in trying to carve out a path for ourselves with the whole system stacked against us,  when it is so much easier to slip into the sleep of passivity?

            In a consumerist society where so many of our wants are catered to, it is easy for the muscle of willpower to atrophy. Our own dreams, the ones we wake up to in the middle of the night, the ones that burn with a sense of urgency, slide down and have a way of becoming less important the more we acquiesce to being spectators of life, audience members at the Main Characters’ show under the big top. So many people feel stuck in service-industry jobs, mouthed off at by Kyles and Karens and snubbed by the whims of management. Others feel stuck in a Matrix–style simulation, disconnected from reality. Perhaps these feelings are behind the memes about Non-Player Characters I’ve seen circulating on the internet.[1]

            Those McGovCorp McManagers have much to gain from keeping us on the line at the fry station. A few may get promoted to assemble Happy Meals and keep the store going, but it seems only a few get to walk through the golden arches and into the gated communities beyond. In my book, having all my wants catered to by rising up the ladder of the kleptocracy is not a meaningful promotion. I’d rather have my actual needs met.  

            This is where one of the key values of the generation I was born into enters into play: slack. Generation X, the Slacker Generation, the Latchkey Kids. Though the ethic of slack doesn’t belong to one age group alone, I think Gen X has done the most to popularize the ideal in the decades since the seventies. A little extra slack may be a saving grace for those who choose to become slackers in the years to come.

            If passivity and lack of willpower are a problem, it seems strange that the idea of being a slacker is an antidote to an absence of personal agency. Slackers have been defined as people who shirk responsibility, who try to get out of work, who are disaffected, apathetic, and cynical. While I concede that these may be part of what it means to be a slacker, I deny that being a slacker means you are without ambition. The question must be: ambition for what, and for who?

            Richard Linklater, writer and director of the 1990 cult-classic indie film Slacker, talked about the word in an interview for Mondo 2000, saying that “I think the cheapest definition [of a slacker] would be someone who's just lazy, hangin’ out, doing nothing. I'd like to change that to somebody who’s not doing what’s expected of them. Somebody who's trying to live an interesting life, doing what they want to do, and if that takes time to find, so be it.”

            Another connotation of being a slacker is that you have the ability to achieve, but you are purposefully an underachiever, often out of protest to the blatant materialism of Western society.  Such conscientious objectors often end up being involved with some form of bohemian subculture. That’s the kind of slacker the 2020s would do well to see a resurgence of. If you’re not doing what’s expected of you now, that list might include not scrolling on your phone, not watching TV, not playing video games, not going to college; because you don’t do these things, you get to move past Go and receive a get out of jail free card. For me, the biggest of these are, first, to make the effort to avoid social media and mainstream media, and second, to not just be a consumer of literature, music, art, but also someone who engages with these ancient forms of leisure and recreation by making them myself, in some way or other. The deindustrial slacker is one who uses their time to  make more than consume and spectate.

Slacking off is a way to sidestep the rat race of meaningless work and the hamster wheel of 21st century busyness in favor of doing your own thing. It’s hard to learn new skills and make preparations for leaner times if there is no slack in the schedule, and you’re always strapped for time. 

            The slacker has time to think their own thoughts. From out of those thoughts, they have time to contemplate and think other related thoughts and develop their own takes on current events, rather than just regurgitating the AI-generated talking points of the talking heads.

            Often the slacker will have a job. What the slacker often won’t have is a career (in the narrow sense of the word, as something for which a person went out and got a degree, did some interning, and then landed with the perfect company). The job is often there to help them pay the bills (most Gen X slackers wanted to get out of the parental units’ house as soon as possible—and in their time that was still economically viable). In time, the work they do on the side might lead them into what sociologists have called a subcultural career: the ancillary work within various businesses necessary to maintain some of the larger subcultures.  Working for a skateboard company, doing live sound at a music venue, or having a gig as a tattoo artist or body piercer are just a few examples. I think subcultural careers could also be pivoted towards those endeavors that would be useful in a less high-tech world, such as cottage industries around the revival of lost arts that may be niche now, but will see wider adoption as the flood of cheap goods become less and less cheap.

            One way to develop such a skill and learn the lore surrounding a craft or hobby is by joining a club, guild or folk school. At the beginning of September my wife and I attended a “Gathering of the Guilds” held by the Weavers Guild of Greater Cincinnati. This group goes back to 1940’s and was founded as an educational non-profit to promote interest in handweaving. It has blossomed to teach everything from spinning, felting, knitting, dyeing, basketry and a wide variety of other fiber arts and techniques. As the Weaver’s Guild grew, they were able to buy a home to house their operations. This year in celebration of their 75th anniversary they hosted the gathering on their property as a way to showcase the rich variety of opportunities to be educated in a craft that are available in my city. It was also a chance for artisans to sell their wares. The other guilds in attendance included: Cincinnati Blacksmiths Guild, Cincinnati Book Arts Society, Clay Alliance, Contemporary Quilt and Fabric Arts, Greater Cincinnati Lapidary and Faceting Society, Ohio Valley Basketweaver's Guild, Ohio Valley Enameling Guild, Ohio Valley Woodturners Guild, and Tiger Lily Press. It seemed like a massive success, as the place was a packed hive that bustled with activity.

Folk schools provide similar opportunities for learning traditional skills. Notable examples in the United States include the John C. Campbell Folk School on the North Carolina side of the Smokey Mountains and the North House Folk School in Grand Marais, Minnesota.  In addition to traditional handicrafts, some folks schools also teach dancing and music as part of their celebration of passing on culture. With so many interests and things to learn and do slackers don’t have much of a problem with  boredom. Boredom is something the slacker associates with the dominant culture, because it rhymes with banality. For all their supposed inactivity, they get a lot done, and it’s nice to have a conversation with them because they tend to be readers and learners with active interests in a variety of topics. The reason for their disaffection is because of their actual devotion to helping the bohemian diaspora to flourish. This is why they will devote Saturday afternoons to hosting actual radio shows that play underground music, or keeping the lights on at an independent gallery or bookstore where they’ve stayed after to clean up the leftover wine and beer bottles after the poetry reading.

            Boredom is something they’ve even learned to cultivate and accept, because when boredom arrives it is a symptom that they haven’t been paying enough attention, and perhaps a reminder that maybe they’ve been consuming too much and not making enough. Stretches of coasting may be acceptable to any given slacker, but only while they catch their breath to prepare for another uphill climb.

             Through immersion in bohemia the slacker has come to have a heightened aesthetic sense (whether or not one slacker agrees with the tastes of another is a different matter). Through the extended contemplation of books, art, music, and film, it is easier for them to see through the mass-produced simulacrum that’s often passed off as art in the marketplace. Knowing quality is out there, they’d rather forgo tripe to focus on what truly nourishes them. As often as not this includes the creation of their own contributions to the great conversation. (And whether or not their own contributions ever get conversed about is a different matter.)  

            Thus, to be a slacker takes willpower. It’s an effort, especially when sustained. Some don’t make it. They give up in favor of entrance to the golden arches of the gated community. As Herman Hesse wrote in his novel The Journey to the East, “Once in their youth the light shone for them; they saw the light and followed the star, but then came reason and the mockery of the world; then came faint-heartedness and apparent failure; then came weariness and disillusionment, and so they lost their way again, they became blind again.”

            Finding the star again, when assailed on all sides, requires willpower, and an assuredness of a fate and destiny drawing one on to something that can’t be found in the workaday world governed by McGovCorp. As one line in Linklater’s movie has it, “Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy.”

The aspiring slacker who has managed to free up some lost time needs to remain on guard.

“Thee voluntary relinquishing ov responsibility for our lives and actions is one ov thee greatest enemies ov our time,” Genesis P-Orridge wrote in the T.O.P.Y. Manifesto. P-Orridge further wrote on the theme that “Time can be a tool, a liberator, or an oppressor. When we claim time back for ourselves we are at last learning to be free and effective. Control needs time like a junkie needs junk. To escape control we must re-embrace our given time.”

Perhaps it is just my middle age, but it seems like our collective waste of time has only gotten worse since Thee Temple ov Psychic Youth was founded in 1981. It’s become a reality crisis, and it’s related to decision fatigue, another side effect of life within the dominant culture.

Crisis. It’s a word of Greek origin rooted in the verb krinein, “to decide.” While I am all for making wise choices, I think sometimes it is better for those of us who get stuck in analysis paralysis just to choose something and start doing it, if only for the satisfaction of taking action. The inability to decide has claimed many already. The band Negativland had a saying from their album Free  that I come back to often: “Too many choices is no choice at all.” The plethora of choices supposedly offered these days is rather superficial, and they are often presented in binaries: Microsoft or Apple, Pepsi or Coke, Wendy’s or McDonald’s, Netflix or Hulu. All the choices we have to make in our day-to-day life can end up giving a person decision fatigue, and when they finally are presented with a swath of time to do as they please, they may find it is easier to turn on the tube than spend an hour practicing guitar or reading a book about ecology.

Yet, like other kinds of tiredness, decision fatigue can be shaken off. Making small decisions and taking small actions help to develop the willpower necessary for greater acts of will and purpose. Movement and activity dissipate the possibility of the early-onset rigor mortis typified by the “life” of couch potatoes.  

For those of us who wish to collapse now and avoid the rush, the time is always now. We can seek the moments in-between to apply some of the remaining oil to those parts of ourselves that may be in danger of rusting out from not being used or exercised.  There are few of us humans who ever reach the height of our inherent capacities. The potentials inside us are like a syrup that add to the sweetness of life if only they are tapped. Rest may at times be needed, but rust sets in when rest is no longer regenerative.

To direct our mental and physical abilities with consistency and effectiveness takes practice and the development of new habits and self-imposed limits that give added impetus to self-determination and direction of energy. A few simple pointers here will suffice.[1] The saying “Nothing to it, but to do it” is a good start. In other words, whatever it is you have in mind, just start doing it. As one of the characters in the movie Slacker put it, “Who's ever written a great work about the immense effort required in order not to create?” There is an irony I have seen at work over the years: the amount of time and energy spent trying not to do something could have been more easily put into getting a task done, with time at the end left over for munching on a donut and having that third cup of coffee. Waiting for the perfect time to get started is will-weakening. While I concede there is an art to good timing, waiting for perfect conditions is an exercise in futility, and excuses and distractions are liable to pile up. On the road to a dark age, adjusting expectations in acceptance of a flawed existence may be a positive mindset to adopt.

The quest for perfection can also be a danger in finishing a task. “Perfect is the enemy of done,” as another saying goes. Unfinished jobs and projects have a way of weighing down the psyche. It’s an experience I’m very familiar with, and finishing what I start has become for me as much a matter of practicality as it is a habit that gives added strength to finish the next thing that I start. This relates to the idea of not putting off things we find difficult or unpleasant. A case can be made that we are better off doing these things first, rather than last. If a reward helps us finish a task, the thought of the cold beer to be had at the end of an arduous day working outside in the sun on your urban homestead might be what you need to get you through the tedium. 

The right amount of rest, before it turns into sloth and constant napping, is equally important in the wise use of willpower. Those who are tired, irritable and discontent are liable to do whatever is the easiest activity just to escape boredom. The dominant culture encourages this kind of mindless self-indulgence. The easiest activities tend to be those that are more harmful than helpful like snacking when one isn’t hungry, and otherwise being fed empty calories that clog the imaginal system via the screen.

​One of the gifts that comes from slack is time to get real about our needs, wants and wonts in life. I think this was one of the unexpected positive outcomes of the lockdowns during the first year of Covid-19 (all other aspects surrounding that thorny issue aside). The frantic [1] race to accumulate the largest hoard of crap stopped for many, at least for a little while. Some used that opportunity to re-calibrate their lives and minds. The local parks that spring were the busiest I’ve ever seen them and people were getting outside walking and being active. For many it was an opportunity to embrace  silence, as the chatter and stress of constant overstimulation had disappeared for a spell.

For others there was panic, a feeling of flatness and even further withdrawal into isolation. They escaped the stress of the situation, not out into nature, or by taking time to work on their hobbies or personal interests, but by going deeper into the simulacra of life and community that the internet offers. As the lockdown showed, the opening up of slack time may drive some of our fellows into various forms of binge behavior.

For one teenager in Brooklyn, the use of social media during the lockdown took on a troubling turn. Logan Lane became “completely consumed” with the online personality she had created. Then one day, after getting burned out on the endless scroll, she was so sick of it all that she put her phone in a box. It was after she put her phone away that she started experiencing some of the freedoms I took for granted as a teenager: checking books out from the library and going to the park to read, meeting up with other teens and getting into graffiti, going to shows. Her newfound freedoms spurred her to write a text called the Luddite Manifesto, and spurred her parents to make her start carrying a flip phone on her jaunts around the city, after she “lost” her smart phone. When she met another teen at an all-ages punk show who also had a flip phone, the two bonded over their distaste for social media. These experiences led her to form the Luddite Club with her new friend. An actual  group of people who meet in person, and whose aim is self-liberation by excising themselves from social media and taking a skeptical view of technology. In cutting off their phones they’ve cut themselves some slack.[1] Group meetings typically take place at parks and involve playing acoustic guitar, reading books, writing, and watercolor painting.

Logan Lane has really taken to the analog life and has adopted the use of a sewing machine, typewriter, and Sony cassette player as part of the technological limits she has set for herself. As the Luddite Club organically attracted members from around New York City, the teens talked about opening other chapters based on location, and what might happen when they graduated. I hope their example inspires others to continue and  start Luddite Clubs of their own. [Note: Some time after I wrote this article originally, numerous other Luddite Club's have formed around the country.]

People like these who have taken steps to downshift and simplify their lives, will have a lot to teach those who can’t or won’t give up some of their stimulation ahead of time. These are the slackers of tomorrow who will be able to show others how to get by with less things and more time.

In these moments of slack we can delve into such pastimes as three-sided chess, mathematical theory, formal logic, and philosophical inquiry that develop the cerebral side of life. Others may get into weightlifting, jogging, skateboarding, or shooting hoops, and other activities that are largely physical. Playing and listening to music, writing and reading poetry, and the practice of empathetic listening to friends and family help develop the side of ourselves that is emotional. Soldering circuit boards, playing with vacuum tubes, or fixing bikes and keeping old machines running are all hobbies that advance abilities within the technical and mechanical . Hosting dinner parties, starting a Green Wizards meetup or Luddite Club, or getting involved within an existing order or society  all enhance our lives as animals who are social. Between these different focuses are many areas that overlap in the liminal. Neglected by many, reviled by those with a reductive materialist mindset as trivial, are those practices and activities that fall under the broad canopy of the magical. Working in any of these areas, or the many others not listed, is a useful hedge against the anomie of Western civilization in the time of its dotage and decline.

[1] All of them that I’m aware of are videos, but see, for example: https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/56692/1/are-npc-video-game-the-new-main-character-syndrome-tiktok. Think real-life people putting on the blank faces and stereotyped body movements of video game background characters.

​[1]The full story on the Luddite teens is well worth reading. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/style/teens-social-media.html

​RE/SOURCES: 
Here are some books, films, and music you might like, but you don’t have to take this slacker’s word for it. 

Atkinson, William Walker. The Will: Its Nature, Power, and Development. 1909. YogeBooks PDF, 2012. Available for free here: https://www.yogebooks.com/english/atkinson/1909will.pdf   
​This book on the development of willpower is well worth examining by those who don’t mind a little taste of occultism. These techniques can be applied as much to the practical matters of everyday living as they can to the planes beyond the physical. 

Dobbs, J.R. “Bob”. The Book of the Subgenius. New York, NY.: Simon & Schuster, 1987. The following hype from the front pages  says a lot of what you need to know. “Sometimes a book goes too far. Sometimes is... now. First—there was The Gilgamesh. Then... the Bhagavad-Gita. Then... the Torah, the New Testament, the Koran. Then... the Book of Mormon, Dianetics, I’m OK You’re OK. And now...The Book of the Subgenius (How to Prosper in the Coming Weird Times)”. Is it a religion? Is it a practical joke? Is it somewhere in between? You decide.
Folk School Alliance. < https://www.folkschoolalliance.org/> This website is a great general resource and includes a directory of folk schools around the United States.

Greer, John Michael.  “Slack! An Irreverent Proposal” <https://www.ecosophia.net/slack-an-irreverent-proposal/> This post from the spring of 2022 gets into Discordianism, The Church of the Subgenius, efficiency, resilience and the different ways slack can be used. 

Hesse, Herman. Rosner, Hilda, translator. The Journey to the East. New York, NY.: Noonday Press, 1956. In this novel, the narrator H.H. joins a group called The League, going on a pilgrimage through time and space in search of timeless wisdom. 

Hodgkinson, Tom. How To Be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto. New York, NY.: HarperCollins, 2005. Hodgkinson is also the editor of the much recommended Idler Magazine (https://www.idler.co.uk/). In this funny book he defends the good life and writes about laziness, idleness, and slack from the perspective of a lounging philosopher, taking in literature, art and history along the way.  

Linklater, Richard. Slacker. 1990; Austin, TX: Detour Film Production, 1990. Film. In general you won’t find me recommending too many movies in this column, but there will be exceptions. This film follows the life of a bunch of bohemians and misfits over the course of a single day in Austin, Texas. Their dialogues and monologues touch on all kinds of subjects from politics to daily life, through a philosophic lens.  

Moshowitz, Zvi. < https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/09/30/slack/> I found this article by way of Jeff Russel’s musings on slack (see below). Moshowitz looks at slack as “The absence of binding constraints on behavior.”
Negativland. Dispepsi. 1997, Seeland, Seeland 017. CD. Listening to this album, to me, has always been an education in advertising and binary thinking, as well as a good laugh.

O’Driscoll, Dana. “Reskilling, Rebuilding Community, and Exploring Folk Traditions at the John. C. Campbell Folk School.” < https://thedruidsgarden.com/2023/06/11/reskilling-and-folk-traditions-at-the-john-c-campbell-folk-school/> O’Driscoll’s blog is one of my go-to spots for learning about everything from Druidry to permaculture. This essay is about her experience spending a week at the John C. Campbell Folk School learning bookbinding.

Petrek, Melissa; Hines, Alan. "Withdrawing in Disgust Is Not the Same as Apathy: Cutting Some Slack with Richard Linklater". Mondo 2000 No. 9, p. 81. 1993.

P-Orridge, Genesis Breyer. Thee Psychick Bible: Thee Apocryphal Scriptures ov Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Thee Third Mind ov Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. Port Townsend, WA.: Feral House. 2010.

Russel, Jeff Powel. “A Few Thoughts On Slack.” < https://jpowellrussell.com/#a_few_thoughts_on_slack>. Jeff Russel is a frequent commenter on the blogs of John Michael Greer and his own blog focuses on the variety of topics that interest him. His post on Slack came after he spent some time reading The Book of the Subgenius. His take goes more into how “slack means you do what you want.” 

FOR MY OTHER CHEAP THRILLS ARTICLES FOLLOW THE LINKS BELOW:

A COMPLEXITY OF SPECTACLES

DREAM FORAGING

STREAM FORAGING

THE DOWNWARDLY MOBILE DANDY AND THE TRAILER PARK QUAINTRELLE

THE POWER OF THREE: TERNARY LOGIC, TRIOLECTICS AND THREE SIDED FOOTBALL

LEGEND TRIPPING, THE DEINDUSTRIAL GOTHIC, AND A WORLD FULL OF MONSTERS

RADIOS NEXT GOLDEN AGE

THE ART AND PLEASURE OF LETTER WRITING

CULTS OF MUSIC

.:. .:. .:.
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