Pierre Boulez would have been 100 today, March 26th, 2025. Let's give this serialist defender some love.

Pierre Boulez doesn’t get enough street cred in today’s electronic and experimental music scenes. He doesn’t have the same cache of compositional cool as his fellow maverick of European serialism, Karlheinz Stockhausen. He doesn’t retain the respect of American noiseheads driven on the by the sound of Cage’s silence. He didn’t drone on an on and on as La Monte Young has, so the worshippers at the amplified altar of drone don’t think much about his message. Neither was he awakened to the trance reducing repetitive power of pulse as were Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Phillip Glass. His music doesn’t suck the listener in with these entranced dances of sound. His fellow Frenchmen Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry embraced technology at the expense of traditional instruments. Boulez never did away with the orchestral palette he knew so well, and combined it only in small ways with electronics to enhance the sound color of the instruments in play, even though he hung out in the world of concrète. His total dedication to total serialism kept him on the avant edge of classical composition, and often had him playing intellectual fisticuffs with its detractors, and he wasn't afraid of lambasting things he didn't like to smithereens. His stance was combative and he could come off like a total asshole. Yet the severity of his jerkiness can be tempered when it is realized that for French intellectuals, this sneering pose was in part an act, a role to play. ( His fellow Frenchmen weren’t as hurt or put off by this stance, as people in the English-speaking world were more inclined to be, because they were familiar with all the other intellectual jerks who make their national life of the mind as interesting as it is irritable. Think of Jacques Derrida, Michael Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Gilles Louis René Deleuze and Felix Guattari as similar arrogant types, and Boulez fits right in.  For us Americans, his bombast can come across as rudeness layered on top of egocentric rhetoric. Yet for the most part it seemed the European crowd was hip to this ruse, and overlooked his brusque shenanigans. 

Yet Boulez was also a conductive force. Not just through the sheer love of music that he exuded from his years as a conductor, but in this other role he took on as an ambassador of the avantgarde. His luminosity excited the minds and musical capacities of those around him, as he continually challenged the old forms and encouraged composers and musicians to take up the challenge of the new forms. 

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

So let's take a look at his life and celebrate his accomplishments. The following is an excerpt from my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Syntheis and the Birth of Electronic Music.

His devotion to music can be seen in the way the path of his life moved him through his own non-linear circuit path to a dual career as composer and conductor. Part of his perceived arrogance can be thought of as a defense mechanism against the hostility of critics opposed to the new music. He didn’t let it deter him.
Boulez was born in Montbrison, France on March 26, of 1925 to an engineer father. As a child he took piano lessons and played chamber music with local amateurs and sang in the school choir. Boulez was gifted at mathematics and his father hoped he would follow him into engineering, following an education at the École Polytechnique, but opera music intervened. He saw Boris Godunov and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and had his world rocked. When he met the celebrity soprano Ninon Vallin, the two hit it off and she asked him to play for her. She saw his inherent and talent and helped persuade his father to let him apply to the Conservatoire de Lyon. He didn’t make the cut, but this only furthered his resolve to pursue a life path in music.

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

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

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

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

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

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

While studying under Messiaen, Boulez was introduced to non-western world music. He found it very inspiring and spent a period of time hanging out in the museums where he studied Japanese and Balinese musical traditions, and African drumming.  Boulez later commented that, "I almost chose the career of an ethnomusicologist because I was so fascinated by that music. It gives a different feeling of time."
           
​ In 1946 the first public performances of Boulez’s compositions were given by pianist Yvette Grimaud. He kept himself busy living the art life, tutoring the son of his landlord in math to help make ends meet. He made further money playing the ondes Martentot, an early French electronic instrument designed by Maurice Martentot who had been inspired by the accidental sound of overlapping oscillators he had heard while working with military radios. Martentot wanted his instrument to mimic a cello and Messiaen had used it in his famous symphony Turangalîla-Symphonie, written between 1946 and 1948. Boulez got a chance to improvise on the ondes Martentot as an accompanist to radio dramas. He also would organize the musicians in the orchestra pit at the Folies Bergère cabaret music hall. 

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

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

            At the end of 1951, while on tour with the Renaud-Barrault company he visited New York for the first time, staying in Cage’s apartment. He was introduced to Igor Stravinksy and Edgard Vaèse. Cage was becoming more and more committed to chance operations in his work, and this was something Boulez could never get behind. Instead of adopting a “compose and let compose” attitude, Boulez withdrew from Cage, and later broke off their friendship completely.

In 1952 Boulez met Stockhausen who had come to study with Messiaen, and the pair hit it off, even though neither spoke the others language. Their friendship continued as both worked on pieces of musique concrète  at the GRM, with Boulez’s contribution being his Deux Études. In turn, Boulez came to Germany in July of that year for the summer courses at Darmstadt. Here he met Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, and Henri Pousseur among others.

All of his experience, training and new found connections converged to force him into a role as an acerbic ambassador for the avantgarde. 

.:. .:. .:. ​This was in part, an excerpt from my book, The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music published by Velocity Press in the UK and available from Bookshop.org and that big place named after a rainforest, and fine bookstores everywhere. 

The celebration of the Pierre Boulez centennial will continue tomorrow in an exploration of the way he fused music and poetry together.

Along the heartworn highway, a row of hawthorn
& drooping lines of electric wire
drifting away from the city, that only birds adorn

Hitchhikers flit back home, heavy, heartworn
from trials of the road they soon tire
mama welcomes in her wayward firstborn.

The dust of years leaves us all shopworn
as the passion of youth spends its aching fire
making a path through thickets of aging corn.

To cherish the rose we must water the thorn
& risk wakening the old mans arthritic ire
to become gardeners of life, in rocky soil, stubborn.

Along the heartworn highway a row of hawthorns,
whose blossoms reach up to the sun, their sire.
From the heights of midnight to the first rays of morn
traveling along this lonely road of the twice born.

.:. .:. .:.
I've been inspired to start posting some poems again, seeing how much poetic action their is over on substack, with the likes of Josh Datko at Bitpunk.fm, who has turned me on to a community of poets gathering together over at that venue.  Reading Frederick Moe's poems in the AAPA bundles is also a treat, reminding me I need to bundle some up... Noah Rymer has also given me a jolt of inspiration to start submitting poetry again. 

When I first started writing it was poetry and stories, and that's always remained, so I hope to continue putting more of my poems up here. You can grab a copy of my poetry book Underground Rivers if you like. Its a free download (and also available in print for a modest price on that shibboleth named after a rainforest). My work has also  been collected in the out-of-print chapbook Shards of Glass. 

.:. .:. .:. ​Do you like what you have read here?  The best way to support my continued work as a writer is to buy a copy of my book, The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music published by Velocity Press in the UK and available from Bookshop.org and that big place named after a rainforest, and fine bookstores everywhere.

Much has been said about America being a melting pot, as if all the cultural, spiritual and material influences that have gone into this nation will combine, congeal, and blend into one substance. I can only imagine the result as becoming some kind of bland government cheese, bright yellow queso, packaged in a can for mass consumption. How disgusting that would be. In connection with the melting pot metaphor of a whole nation on the macro scale, on the micro scale there exists this idea of the so-called blended family, an experience many of us are familiar with in the little nations under our own roofs.

            I don’t really like the idea of a blended family either. Blend is too close to bland. Yet it is an experience everyone is familiar with, even if they are one of the rare birds whose family of origin hasn’t been riddled with divorce, loss, some kind of separation. (Show me them if you know them.) Everyone is familiar with divorced people hooking up with other divorced people, or those otherwise single people hooking up with someone who has already started a family, but who are no longer with the baby daddy or baby momma of their own kids. The other partner often has some other kids of their own involved. These two units come together, and are apparently blended if the union between the people is successful. In practice, it’s much more complicated, but can also be more beautiful.

            A more useful metaphor would be that of a stew pot family. I got the idea from a friendly family therapist from Ireland named Tony Fryer who thinks a blended family isn’t all that good for the reality people actually experience. Fryer writes, “‘Blended Family’ is a term I don't like. It suggests we are all to become alike. I like to call it a ‘Stew Pot Family’ (maybe because I'm Irish). This term allows for many different looking constituents but all are surrounded by a great gravy.” His idea is that the individual ingredients that make up a family, that have come together from many different families, is more like a stew where all the people represent their own ingredients of carrots, potatoes, mushrooms, and onion, but are swimming in the same juices  made from tomato paste and hearty broth.

            This has been my own experience in a stew pot family. My two older sisters are from two different fathers. My mom had my oldest sister when she was eighteen, then got married to my other sister’s father. They ended up splitting and then when she met my dad, they had me. They stayed together for over thirty years, until she died unexpectedly at a young age. I was 28, and my mom was 56. Then my father remarried and now I have an adult step-brother, and all the relationships that come from my step-mom’s family. That’s the stew pot I was born into.

            Yet the complexity of the stew pot family is also present in my life in other ways. I have a birth daughter, born when I was sixteen. She was placed for adoption, in an open adoption, where my family remained close with hers and we saw each other all throughout her life, continuing today. That joined our families together in ways not possible in closed adoptions. That’s another stew pot.

​            Then there are all the relationships from my wife’s family. Like me, she had already had children when we met, and I have two step-daughters. My wife’s parents are divorced, so that added its own complexity to our lives, but also its own possibilities. We all have our differences, but are swimming in the same gravy, and I thank Tony Fryer for helping us to think of it as a stew pot, rather than as some bland blending.  

 (I still like this song, even if I don't love the term "blended family")

By the same token, as an American, I much rather like the idea of us being a stew pot nation. Isn’t that tastier than us all being blended together into something that can’t be differentiated? Into a bland sameness where everyone believes the same things, does the same things, watches the same things, listen to the same things, and when they bother to read, read the same things. Our differences are great though, and they should be celebrated. But we also all swim in the same soup base that gives us a common language, feeling, core symbols and cohesiveness amid all the different ingredients. Perhaps another way to think about would be is that America is a stir fry with a lot of different elements are getting heated up together, but drizzled by the same collective sauce.

            Thinking of ourselves as in a collaborative stew together, all being boiled by common mounting pressures, might be an antidote to the divisions and differences of perception and focus that cause families and nations to split apart. America right now is like a couple who won’t talk to each other about the things that need to be talked about, but each side wanting to silence the other. Splintered by divorce, riddled by division, disrupted and diseased by malicious incisions within and against the national psyche, the United States is showing increasing signs of what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called schizo-culture (following in the footsteps of the great systems thinker and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson). Schizo, from the Greek word schizéin, to divide. The divided states of America.

Part of the issue and division in our lives came in with the ascendancy of the nuclear family, a fiction and myth if there ever was one. I do not deny that biologically and socially a strong commitment between two partners raising their young together is a good thing. Pair bonding is an innate urge written into the soul and DNA of humanity. Yet the two-parent family that exists in isolation, having moved away from the grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins in exchange for a new job in a new town to work for some corporation, has created an extensive culture of disconnection. The freedom of movement has caused the stewpot to swirl and spill. Some bits are now outside the pot and all alone, without the resources an extended family provides, causing the other isolated members of the nuclear unit, each doing their own career, going to their own school, and engaging in their own hobbies and extra curriculars, to now have to rely on financial systems to meet needs that were once met by family and friends. This is one of the divisionary effects of our current economic arrangements.

These very socio-economic trends are in part what have so often caused people to disconnect and break apart instead of fulfilling those bonds. The same freedom to pick up and go and start off fresh somewhere else geographically for work or other reasons has also seemed to coincide with an increase in the way people just pick up and go from a struggling relationship, leave it behind to go on to the seeming greener pastures of a new relationship. Green pastures that often turn out to be an illusion. As Erma Bombeck noted, “The grass is always greener over the septic tank.” On the other hand, watering it is a good idea. All of these factors have led to increasingly complicated family situations in a society that has been pushed through the grindstone of industrialization, empire, and now deindustrialization and the collapse of the empire we inherited from Britain after World War II.
​
The web of relationships people once knew and experienced has been shattered by these economic forces and the antisocial media of the internet. Increasingly isolated, much more stress is placed on primary relationships because the other relationships in our lives have faltered. James Hillman and Michael Ventura pointed out some of the problems that happen when we place so many of our needs for fulfillment onto fewer and fewer individuals in their 1993 book, We’ve Had 100 Years of Psychotherapy and the World Is Getting Worse. 

In their dialogue Hillman said, “Why do we need this Norman Rockwell family, this make-believe ideal, that’s so rampant now in politics and in therapy? I don’t know what it’s doing for the body politic, but I know what it’s doing for therapy. For therapy, it is keeping an ideal in place so that we can show how dysfunctional we all are. It keeps the trade going [the therapy trade].”

Ventura replied that, “But even the Norman Rockwell ideal of the happy, self-sufficient family is a distortion of what families were for thousands, probably tens of thousands, of years. During that time, no family was self-sufficient. Each family was a working unit that was part of the larger working unit, which was the community -the tribe or village. Tribes and villages were self-sufficient, not families. It’s not only that everyone worked together, everyone also played and prayed together, so that the burden of relationship, and of meaning, wasn’t confined to the family, much less to a romantic relationship, but was spread out into the community. Until the Industrial Revolution, family always existed in that context.”

            Hillman goes on to point out how therapy in part relies on the idea of the dysfunctional family. That’s often why people end up on the reclining couch to talk about their problems in the first place. Before therapy came about, a person who was having problems would talk to an older relative, an aunt, uncle, grandfather, father, someone with experience, someone deemed wise, or just a friend who was a bit more impartial, but still had the closeness they shared in their heart. Now that kind of advice is mediated through life coaches and expensive therapy sessions that themselves thrive on the broken web of extended families.

​            Norman Rockwell’s perfect nuclear family never really existed anyway. As an aspirational ideal of the suburban American dream, it was painted into our magazines. For those who compared themselves against it, failure to attain this particular ideal led to shame. Others were forever outside of this norm to begin with. What was their place? The gay uncle, the lesbian sister, the mixed couple with their mixed kids -these never found their way into Rockwell’s fantasy, yet they have their place in the world and make it a better world to be in. Stew pot families are more accommodating to different ideas of what a family is and can become. The complexity of arrangement creates a complexity of taste. Those who want to continue on with bland Rockwellian monoflavors are welcome to do so, but equal freedom should be given to those who envision different ways of being, the ancient and the new. Something transcending the individual ingredients is liable to emerge when bold flavors are merged together.

This also gives us the opportunity to not abolish the family, as some clusters of groups on the left would like to do. Nor does it have to give way to a narrow idea of what family is as certain clusters on the right would have us limit the definition. Rather, as Anthony Galluzzo has pointed to in two recent articles, “How about instead expanding the family model—reinventing premodern extended family and kinship structures—to accommodate alternative, queer, familial forms alongside traditional families?”

A return to, and celebration of extended family systems can also give the current, overtaxed, overextended, alienated individual, a resource web that does not rely exclusively on financialization in place of the relationships people once had before money was inserted and started driving wedges between them where there had once been closeness and collaboration.   

What about calling up a cousin who is a mechanic for help with redoing the brakes on a car, in exchange for something you can help him with? Business has inserted itself in place of this kind of familial network and now, as things have further eroded, a lot of those kind of relationships don't even exist for people anymore. But we’ll need them again in the face of the declining systems that have taken their place.

It’s not that I think extended families would solve all interpersonal problems, or be able to replace all financialized transactions. But they might solve some of the loneliness that comes from “bowling alone.” It’s also another way forward towards reskilling ourselves and learning from our elders. Some of the problems facing the fragmented world come from rubbing elbows less with people from different generations. This only hanging out with people your own age pattern tends to flatten notions of time and perspectives about just how different the world can be made in a span of decades.

The stew pot family also has a place for strong ties with family friends, the other families all families come in contact with. These include and are strengthened by various subcultural affiliations and mutual aid societies, volunteer groups, social clubs where we go to meeting rooms and third places to join in the kinship of those who share our tastes and interests. For too long many in the counterculture and various subcultures have used these as replacements for family. Sometimes rightly so when an individual has had to flee their family of origin and find sanctuary somewhere else. Yet when the subcultures themselves are isolated from kindred groups, tribes and familial relations, they become their own echo chamber. Rubbing up against others and having creative friction with people whose ideas and beliefs are different from our own are just as important in these subcultures as they are in families, in local communities, to the bioregion and the nation. Third places, volunteer groups, and subcultural activities are also great places for people to meet the others, especially if they are looking for romance. No need to cede love to the technocrats as well.

In the end, America isn’t really one nation anyway, but a patchwork of regional and bioregional cultures. The flavors of one area differ greatly from those in another, but are all part of the overarching stew.* The particular flavors of each region might be considered as different kinds of stew. After all, Irish Stew isn’t the only thing around. There is goulash and gumbo too. The particular ways we create family in place, allows for the sharing of local knowledge, and family knowledge. This in turn allows for ground up resource sharing, pooling, and distribution of culture, rather than the top-down bland forms of pseudoculture imposed on us by the technocratic corpocracy. Allowing the individual microcultures of our families to simmer in their various stews together, can go a long way towards the creation of true diversity, of the differences and variation that become something we are happy to encourage, rather than denounce.

So, forget about trying to blend your complex family into some homogenized goop. Instead I suggest thinking of your family as a stew pot, with the different ingredients all adding to its great taste. And as we think of the family as a stew, so too we can think of America as a stew. If people want to try to recreate their life after a Rockwell painting, that’s there business. Yet in a pluralistic society, it can also be our business to make room in the pot for the pushed aside indigenous, the immigrants threatened with being thrown out, and the old-time immigrants whose families have been here for generations. Together we can make something tasty in a spirit of unity through diversity, and encourage the boldness of our unique funky flavors.
  -- 
* I have addressed the matter of bioregions and how that relates to the idea of hyperlocal microcultures in an essay for the winter 2025 issue of New Maps. It’s beyond the scope of this article to go into detail.

Joining something called The Suicide Club might give a normal person pause as they think of the probability of diminishing returns such a dwindling social group would have. On the other hand, with a name like that, it probably did a good job of weeding out people who had no business being a member in the first place. In the end, the club wasn’t about suicide anyway, but about danger, and having what some might call peak experiences, and what others might call experiences that put you in touch with reality. Started by Gary Warne in 1977 the Suicide Club was known for its anarchic practical jokes pioneering development of what is now known as urban exploration. It’s influential tendrils also left marks on people involved in the early days of Burning Man. As such Gary Warne and the Suicide Club have left crucial marks in the collective national character because he doubled down on his own eccentric individuality and shared the spirit of adventure with his fellow travelers, leaving behind a radical legacy.

Gary Warne was a native to West Virginia, born in 1948 and brought up in Florida and Kentucky. He did a stint in the army where he was stationed in Puerto Rico, followed by a westward drift to the left coast.

​In 1968 throngs of long-haired freaky people descended on the city of San Francisco to dip their toes in or totally immerse themselves in the swinging psychedelic epicenter of the hippie counterculture that was just then reaching its peak. Gary Warne was one of those freaky people. Whether he had long hair or not is another matter. He came to the city with his friend Sutton Breiding, and he ended up living in a pad at 800 Shrader Street with several others. His domicile was not far from Golden Gate Park and the bridge that spanned above it, which would leave a lasting impression on Warne’s life. Before we go further into that life, we have to take a detour into the Free University Movement and San Francisco’s Communiversity.

The heady days of the late 1960s and early seventies saw a renewal of interest in the defense of free speech and the First Amendment. In addition to focusing on freedom of expression through words, speech, and lifestyle, the hippies endeavored to make other things free and it was inevitable the freedoms they wanted would spill over into the costly education system. An education system tied to preserving the establishment. The “Free University Movement” was one of the results of such thinking as people looked for alternatives to mainstream schooling. 

In particular the idea that spurred the Free University Movement can be traced to the New Left of the sixties and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In 1962 the SDS released their manifesto named the Port Huron Statement. It’s a strange name for such a political document, but it is called that because of the place it was written at, a United Auto Workers retreat outside Port Huron, Michigan, where the SDS had their first national convention.

Among the many calls for reform within the manifesto was a section on the importance of higher education and it’s “permanent position of social influence.” The SDS called out the many ways that the intellectual ability cultivated at these institutions was put into use for the service of the military-industrial complex, as opposed to their own aims for cultivating a culture of civil rights and peace. Amid the issues addressed about universities was the call to action to “wrest control from the administrative bureaucracy.” There was also the notion that an “ideal university” is a “community of controversy, within itself and in its effects on communities beyond.”

As the boomers came of age, more and more of them were going into the university system and getting educated. Yet the educations they were getting weren’t making the world a better place. In fact, wars continued to proliferated, people were still treated unjustly and were discriminated against, and pollution and the treatment of our ecological systems continued to worsen even as more and more of the people who wished for a more equitable society got university degrees. The intellectuals within the hippie movement took note. None of this was producing the ideal world so many of them had dreamed of. Yet they knew from psychology that there is more potential within each person than ever fully gets awakened and realized.

In opposition to this a call was made within the counterculture for citizens to make allies outside the university system. This seed of thought led to the eventual rise of the Free University Movement which flourished briefly and then faded like so many other dreams of the hippies as they sold out their ideals in exchange for a paycheck and a job at the bank.

Gary Warne wasn’t a sellout though, and during its height (or is that haight?) he was one who got involved in the Free University Movement. His entry was when San Francisco State University (SFSU) affiliated Communiversity had started to sponsor a series of free classes. In the meantime, in April of 1974 Warne decided to give his own unaffiliated class on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. The other people who studied Poe with him met in the confines of his bedroom.

One of the attendees was William M. Breiding. He recalls the heady days reading America’s early master of the macabre, “Each week we piled into Gary’s romantically decorated garret to discuss a previously read Poe story or poem. The Poe group was diverse and interesting. Our range of activities went far beyond Edgar Allan to dinners and outings throughout San Francisco, including each other’s homes. Carter was a poet who organised readings. I met John Fugazzi there, fresh from Cincinnati, who was to become a lifelong friend. … John R., Gary’s old friend and roommate, was also a part of the class, and brought a vibrancy and humour to the class that might have otherwise been missing.”

Eventually Gary was on the roster at the SFSU Communiversity and given a teaching stipend. Part of the university experience in America has been the tradition of the practical joke and the Communiversity was not immune from the impulse. Far from it, Warne and his circle had the bright idea to not just do practical jokes, but give a class on practical jokes.  

“This event was to signal a new era for Communiversity, the Free University Movement and many of us individually. As soon as it hit the streets we were told [by the SFSU that the class] was ‘not educational, in poor taste and probably illegal from the sound of it.’ Preliminary discussions went on among the top brass at State about withdrawing our pay checks until threats and coercion failed. At the end of the year we withdrew the school from State forming a non-profit. A hundred people signed up for the practical jokes class, making it the most popular class in the history of the school….”

With Communiversity out of the control of SFSU, the people involved were free to go their own way and do their own thing.

​A Communiversity catalog from 1982, celebrating their tenth anniversary noted that, “Communiversity has been doing it for a long time. In 1971 Gary Warne took Communiversity out of San Francisco State University; Communiversity has been trading junk for free classes and events ever since. This has added, in a real way, to the exchange of information from one person to another. This exercise has been enlightening to the thousands of students, teachers, and volunteers who have participated.”

As the seventies continued on, Warne ended up with a new hobby. He had become a book hound and had amassed a library of some 16,000 volumes through his scouring of second-hand stores, garage sales, flea markets. On these excursions he also picked up weird stuff, material for costumes, any items with a whiff of the recherche.

All of this material went into his next project: Circus of the Soul, a used bookstore and community center that became a focal point for the further burgeoning of freakdom between 1975 and 1980. It was a happening place. From hosting the Fantasy Film Festival to musical meetups, and a bizarre range of other events, it became the locus operandi out of which the Suicide Club evolved.

On the dark and stormy night of January 2, 1977 Warne and three friends ventured to Fort Point, the Castillo de San Joaquín, a brick fortification built on a spur at the entrance to the San Francisco Bay in 1861. The Golden Gate bridge towers above this point. When the weather turns stormy waves will crash over the wall near the point where there is a large chain just before the large rocks that go down to the water. Adrienne Burk, Nancy Prussia, Warne, and David Warren each took turns holding that chain and letting the waves of the ocean violently crash onto them. Those waves, if they didn’t hold tight, would have been powerful enough to pull them into the bay where the risk of drowning was quite real. In this moment of dangerous living, with cold water exhilaration and close calls with death, the Suicide Club was born.

The name came from the title of a collection of three linked stories by Robert Louis Stevenson where Prince Florizel of Bohemia and his sidekick Colonel Geraldine look for adventure and thrills, starting by infiltrating a secret society where the goal of its members is losing their lives, each member selected one by one on the night of their meetings to die.

Warne and the others who had held onto the chain wanted to repeat this experience of survival, and later in the year opened it up to other people, starting by offering a class in the Communiversity from February through May. 

The announcement for the Charter Member Meeting of the SF Suicide Club read as thus, “Meeting regularly but at odd times.  Members must agree to set their worldly affairs in order, to enter into the REAL world of chaos, cacaphony and dark saturnalia, and they must further agree to live each day as though it were their last, for it may BE.  The club will explore untravelled, exotic, dismal and exhilarating experiences of life:  deserted cemeteries, storms, caving, haunted houses, Nazi bars, fanatical movements, hot air ballooning, stunts, expose, impersonation.  The Club will be ongoing for the rest of our lives.” The charter was signed, “Nancy Prussia, Gary Warne, Adrienne Burk, David Warren, R.J. Mololepozy, The Phantom, The Crimson Pirate, Nancy Drew & The Hardy Boys.”

This penchant for probing the underbelly of the city led the Suicide Club to becoming the first group dedicated to urban exploration, often in extremis. Expeditions generally began an ended at Circus of the Soul, leading it to become the birthplace for a genuine American psychogeography. 

To this end they planned escapades into the sewers beneath the streets, other tunnels they weren’t supposed to be in, abandoned industrial buildings, and climbed onto the terrifying heights of the Golden Gate Bridge. Doing these stunts helped the members face their fears and start living life beyond their fears. They also liked to play games inside of the cemeteries and inside the financial district. One of their most-daring do’s as far as physicality, was when they got thirty people on top of the cable cars in San Francisco, and did so while naked. Commemorative post cards were made for that expedition.

Club member John Law touches on how Warne wanted the experiences of doing an activity with the club to be a kind of initiation into super-reality. “The Suicide Club could create an other-worldly, surreal environment. Getting naked on the cable cars was a surreal experience. He wanted a disconnect with 'reality' and a connection with 'super-reality.' 'Cuz knowing you could fall off the bridge and die is a super-real feeling.”

Like their namesakes in the Robert Louis Stevenson story, they also engaged in daring infiltrations of strange groups. They penetrated the Unification Church, aka the Moonies and the American Nazi Party, exposing themselves to the literal danger of being exposed as infiltrators (and potentially brainwashed).

Another form of infiltration was when they started going to meetings for the National Speleological Society (NSS) at the local Paolo Alto Grotto. The NSS is a group dedicated to exploring and gaining knowledge about caves. The NSS members were a bit skeptical about the strangeness of all the sudden new members from the Suicide Club, but they ended up joining forces and working together to explore the Cave of the Swallows, or Sótano de las Golondrinas, the largest known cave shaft in the world and a favorite of vertical cave spelunkers who have to rappel down into its depths.

Being in San Francisco the spirit of the Diggers certainly lived on. One of the activities listed on a flyer for Suicide Club events listed “Ringolevio IV.” I don’t know if that was a reading of Emmet Grogan’s book Ringolevio, or a meet up for playing the game the book was named after. Warne liked games and I could see the suicide club playing ringolevio all around the city. Grogan had written about this old game of expanded tag, played on the streets of New York and other cities in America for well over a century, that “It's a game. A game played on the streets of New York, for as long as anyone can remember. It is called Ringolevio, and the rules are simple. There are two sides, each with the same number of players. There are no time limits, no intermissions, no substitutes and no weapons allowed. There are two jails. There is one objective.”

​Here in the Midwest it was played as a version of “Hunters and Hunted” when I was a kid. And it was the best outdoor game of all. Seeing adults play this game in cities across America again would certainly be welcome.

One of the things Warne liked to do was connect people. Ideas only went so far. They had to be put into action. One way of putting them into action and connecting people was his ‘zine the Answer Man Newsletter. For just a bit of money, people could write to Warne and ask him a question. He would then get back in touch with them, sending them resources, contacts to experts in the area they were asking about, and other information.

His extensive book collection and knowledge found other uses too, because in between everything else he did, Warne somehow found time to write fiction and poetry. Some of this was collected after his death into The Lord of Sensation and Other Fragments and Dreams. His articles meanwhile turned up in places like the Surrealist Exchange, SF Free and Easy, and the Bystander. Another project he was working on was the creation of a multi-media piece exploring the history of the San Francisco earthquake.

Warne’s burning energies continued to expand, and his next project was the Gorilla Grotto. It started at the very end of the 1979, and continued on for most of 1980. Located at 775 Frederick Street, it had something of the idea of the happening, and it was happening on a daily basis with just one day off to recuperate. On six out of seven nights a week the seeker of dissident revelry could go to the Grotto for a heady combination of lectures, of movies, of storytelling, readings and live music. If that wasn’t enough, a playpen had been provided that was big enough for adults, made for adults. Revelers often ended the night with a pillow fight. Warne also curated a series of social events that he called the “Museum of the Inconsequential” for the Grotto.

He even found the time for traditional volunteer work. His efforts took him into the hospital to hang out with the elderly in his capacity as a volunteer pet therapist. He buddied up to the police and begin working as a trainee officer with the S.F.P.D. towards the end of his life, when he wasn’t busy slinging books with the Friends of the S.F. Public Library.
Warne didn’t stop until death stopped him. A heart attack ended his life on Thanksgiving Day, 1983. His friends took his cremains up on one last daring climb of the Golden Gate Bridge and dropped his ashes into the bay. His friend John Law even painted some of those ashes onto the bridge. Warne would remain part of that vast golden expanse that had so inspired him. Some remaining ashes were given in small vials to his friends.
​
John Law, who had been a member of the Suicide Club, would go on to start the Cacophony Society and co-found Burning Man.

.:. .:. .:. ​Do you like what you have read here? Unlike substackers, I don't ask for a subscription fee to read my blog. The best way to support my continued work as a writer is to buy a copy of my book, The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music published by Velocity Press in the UK and available from Bookshop.org and that big place named after a rainforest, and fine bookstores everywhere.

FIND THE OTHERS: READ THE REST OF THE AMERICAN ICONOCLASTS & NATIONAL CHARACTERS SERIES:

The Sacred Music of Mary Lou Williams
Fakir Musafar, Richard Simonton, and Jim Ward
Going Native In America
David Wills: The Weatherman
Jim Tully: Writer, Circus Man, Boxer, Hobo
Harlan Hubbard: The Man Who Lived on the Fringe
Tiny Tim: The Goodhearted Troubadour of Popular Song
Raymond Thundersky: The Construction Clown
Joy Bubbles and the Church of Eternal Childhood
Peace Pilgrim
The Long Memory of Utah Phillips
Anti-Art and Hillbilly Tape Music with Henry Flynt

Remember, think for yourself, question authority, and let it rip!

Anyone trying to work out what they think about decelerationism, better hold their horses, take a deep breath, and slow the fuck down. The nature of decelerationism is to put on the brakes. It’s whole point is to disentangle itself from the trend towards speeding the collapse, towards a facile transhumanism, towards the linear conception of the future represented by the failed imagination that gave us limitless progress. Things may seem to be speeding up, but it is only because of the energy dissipating from the unravelment of empires decline. In other words, entropy, that will in time also slow down.

Continued decelerationism will break and brake in waves on the times terminal beach. Each time we move to slow down and decelerate it will be a little less urgent, we will already be going slower, because the big skyscrapers will have already fallen by then, and the rubble will have stopped bouncing. Even so there will still be plenty to sift through and we can make mosaics out of the wreckage. On the ragged staircase of decline, a variety of possible futures are already presenting themselves, but none of them are distributed evenly. The futures aren’t one thing and they have never been distributed evenly. That doesn’t mean dealing with the winding down of things will be easy, or coherent. But if you take a deep breath, it can be dealt with in ways that won’t add to the chaos, but instead bring aesthetic harmony into various parcels of the disrupted field.     
The pressure of time can be eased by taking a decelerationist view. It is okay to take some time to think. Time to think can’t be taken away from those who are willing to think. It’s one of those things that can never be taken away, but it has to be chosen. The hurried pace of haste that results in further reactionary decision making to deal with the rapidity of change during the unravelment may require, at times, quick reflexes. Yet decompression from the systemic forces is a viable strategy for coping with these temporal processes, and allows instead for responsive decision making. So is renouncing the need to pay explicit attention to the play-by-play grind of one exceptional detail after another. The late David Lynch reminded us that we shouldn’t  “worry about the world going by.” Instead, we should do our work. Hurried slapdash and slipshod work may very well have to be redone. All it leads to is slop. 

 So we might as well slow down and think about the work that is needed, not be compressed into further busywork and band aids. These are the exact kind of things the too-late capitalist system excels at and that we would do our best to bypass anyhow.

Philosophically, deceleration gives us access to the transcendental. Without absolute horizons, when the big crunch gives rise to another big bang, we realize that expansion and collapse are just part of the oscillating waveform of history. Shown in human life it is the child who is born, matures, declines, and dies only to be reborn. In terms of civilizations, it is the family that becomes a tribe or clan, who in turn give rises to a larger nation, perhaps even an empire, that then in turn, begins the process of disintegration, leading back to clans, tribes, and family. Seeds from one empire get replanted in the birth of new nations. The problem with our contemporary dilemma is that so many are stuck on the through line of thinking that suggests the arc of history bends towards a single inevitable singularity. Like phallic rockets penetrating the depths of space, this remains a fever dream fantasy for those who want to believe in heaven without the religion. 

A viewpoint of multiple lives and multiple civilizations that arise and fall in their own vast cycles of spiraling time that involutes as much as evolutes, allows for periods of deceleration, of slowing down. These allow us to take a longer view in the outward world, and a deeper view within the depths of our own psyches.

The fond suspicion arises that the public conversation of deceleration and slowing down in all things, from slow food to slow productivity is still just beginning. Long views allow us to think slowly, to take in details that otherwise might pass us by. Small remains beautiful. Those small details get ignored in the hyper-compression of time. Doing anything good, can take a long time, so we might as well start now. Events will just happen anyway. They punctuate the long spectrum of time that is our shared lives. If things seem out of control, even traumatic, its because we have forgotten how to listen to the memories of the past. They had their traumas too. It’s okay to take a break from the news, from the noose that cuts off circulation to the head, and instead contemplate the things that have already happened. They have much to teach regarding how to cope with and even thrive as the problems delivered by the failed promise of the new meet the rubber of reality.

The blast waves of the H-Bomb continue to haunt our memory, just as the promise of cheap limitless energy continues to radiate our frenzied dreams. One can’t have one without the other, and these dead ends are better left abandoned. Nuclear power subsidizes nuclear weapons, and as Sun Ra intoned, nuclear war is a motherfucker. Better to place our hopes in the natural nuclear reactions of the sun, and learn to live with less and within limits then the dual explosions that destroy the land, its creatures, its people. Plutonium nightmares with a long shelf life really do require us to slow down and think it over, rather than speed up and do things faster. Let the new clear dawn fade.

Even so, cybernetics will continue to have a lot to teach us. Each individual is a system containing smaller systems and embedded within larger systems. For decelerationism, the idea of the negative feeback loop continues to teach crucial lessons.

Deceleration doesn’t give one hoot about Karl Marx because it recognizes both communism and capitalism as both flawed. Both have led to techno-managerial elitism and the siphoning off of resources from the rest of the world and people by the 1%. Therefore we can just get on with our lives without having deal with Marx or his predecessor Hegel’s brain farts any further. They’ve stunk up the room for long enough as it is.

“Decelerate the progress” is an apt decelerationist motto. Progress hasn’t been everything it was hyperpresently hyped up to be.

Accelerationism, as such, was critically and theoretically formulated by Benjamin Noys. Let me repeat once again what he said about this idea of giving in to the fast flow of the future, and market forces, that has driven so much accelerationist thought:

 “… which is the revolutionary path? Is there one?—To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist ‘economic solution’? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to ‘accelerate the process,’ as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.”

This is like the idea of “changing the system from within” that so many people seem to wish to do, but have such a hard time doing, as the hippies who became yuppies might tell, if they remember at this point. This could be said to be part of the social aspect of recuperation. Recuperation is the process where the ideas of a counterculture get reabsorbed back into the dominant culture, spun back into the media spectacle in a way that can be considered as neutered or spayed, in other words, without any kind of life affirming fertility outside of feeding the corporate beast.

Accelerationism seems to accept all the flaws of capitalism, and relish in the idea of continuing to participate with all its consumerist perks, in order to “speed the collapse.”

Opting out on the other hand allows a person to tune in to other signals not being broadcast on approved portions of the social media spectrum. Or just tune into nature. Decelerationists are much more about the everyday terroir of ones own turf (i.e. bioregion) than territorialization, deterritorialization, or reterritorialization.

Another aspect of decelerationist thought that makes its adoption easier, is the ability for it to be put into practice by individuals. No one needs to rely on an institution to slow down, especially in their personal lives. The personal is political after all, is it not? Not adopting the latest platform or technology is a choice. The Amish have much to teach here, even if becoming Amish isn’t the goal. Learning to be a producer of things, rather than just a consumer, a user of things, is one way to not get used by the systems that have accelerated to a point beyond our liking.

With the accelerationists, it can be agreed that “there is no distinction to be made between the destruction of capitalism and its intensification. The auto-destruction of capitalism is what capitalism is,” according to author Nick Land. This realization however does nothing to help those caught in the throes of “capitalist realism” or what Mark Fisher thought of as the “pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.”

Breaking through that barrier does not require accelerating beyond the speed of sound, or light, or capitalism, but does require the ability to creatively opt-out, so that other economies and possibilities might once again be dreamed.

At the time of writing accelerationism is once again making the rounds among readers of a certain pomo crit lit tendency. The torch has been given to a new generation of thinkers who are seeking to resurrect it once again and see what use it might be put to, and this happening on both the left-channel, and the right-channel of the stereocentric bird brain of political ideation. They are spurred on by the promise, any day now, of space/time shattering quantum computers, virtual reality, AI, biohacking, cheap to free energy for all, and other bespectacled pipe dreams from the ongoing bromance with Silicon Valley. Decelerationism waits in the wings for those who think maybe things are speeding along just too much. A hand on the brakes isn’t a bad thing when you can’t see the scenery in the world that you live in.

As the false promises of cryptocurrency, quantum everything, better living through genetics and AI set in, as people grow bored of the metaverse and the ultimate Spectacle / Simulacra of virtual unreality set in, people will have to turn around and look to what came before, to tradition, to simpler technologies whose development we could have chosen, but didn’t. To walk away from this fetishization of techbrology and see what else we might do as a species is inevitable. 

As the process of winding down unfurls, any attempt to recover the lost sense of quality, craftsmanship and pride in the work of making things that last will find its own rewards. Quality is the greatest enemy to automatized AI machine creation. On the social level this means the renunciation of the cult of personal branding. The pleasures of private life are best enjoyed in private, not with the world watching through the filtered lens of social media. In the realm of culture this means a return from streaming television and the internet to the newspaper, radio, and the book. Most of all it means, moving from the feverish pace of ever accelerating change and fragmentation, to coherence and concentration, from wasteful extravagance, to simplicity and moderation.

​And if you are only now just putting on the brake, decelerationism won’t laugh, or say, it’s about time you slowed down. No one will even give you a ticket. It isn’t about policing the speed of degrowth after all, but settling into the natural rhythm, cadence and pace of its cycles.

Scarcity can be good for the human soul. Fully Automated Luxury Communism / Capitalism makes the muscles of body and mind atrophy. In absence of gravitas everything becomes trivia, fodder for game shows when so much that could be saved is in jeopardy. The grindstone sharpens individuals and society giving them a precise edge. Freedom requires this sharpness. Dullness prevails when no work of our own is required, when there is no block to thrust against.

Boredom with the way things are becomes an asset. Boredom was a gift to Generation X. Combined with feral free time it gave us an era of analog creativity: zines, scenes, bands, music you could hear, people you could touch, words printed on paper to be found like treasures. The absence of the ease of the internet search meant that finding the others was valuable. While there is nothing wrong with copying off the successful innovations of the past, Star Trek replicators will only lead us further down the path of replication crisis.

Growing bored again can be a form of salvation, because boredom will lead to daydreams and other forms of active imagination that require us to think of alternate ways of doing, being, relating.

So much criticism of new music criticism from the late Mark Fisher (Ghosts of My Life) and Simon Reynolds (Retromania) has focused on how in love with the past it is, we must remember, not only that pop will eat itself, but that these previous eras todays regeneration of musicians feel called to, lived in a quieter media environment where there mind had more freedom to roam. Because of this freedom the imagination was sharp, because it had been whetted against the grindstone of boredom. Now we have what music historian Tim Mohr called “too much future” in his book Burning Down the Haus. While we aren’t living behind the Berlin wall with the stasi following our every move, we are living in a world of extensive digital surveillance, where the digistasi are collecting our data to readvertise at us in service to an algorithmic propriety that flattens the contours our imaginations might otherwise give in absence to this spectacle.

The “too much future” of the youth behind the berlin wall was in response to the way everything was preplanned for them. Meanwhile the punk rockers in Thatcher’s England had declared “no future” because it had all been eaten up and what was left was getting fed to the wolves of neoliberal economics. Todays youth and the Gen X parents who gave birth to them, have a different set of problems and predicaments. The force feeding of predicted tastes as channeled by cool merchants recuperating any vital signs of autonomy and putting them into an endlessly scrolling tube that drips content, not creations. Putting firm limits onto these feeds that create positive feedback loops of reinforced artificial idiocy is one way to curb escalating brain drain.

The imaginative dissonance of negative feedback is needed to put the brakes on these severed signifiers. The sign of the times are all there, but we would do well to tune into layer of symbols that exists beyond what W.B. Yeats called our “daily trivial minds.”

Passive imagination is the dead end in a space station become tomb, that fully automated luxury capitalism / communism leads to. This is the “Tomb of the Cybermen” prophesied by Doctor Who (Season 5, 1967). A living culture, while informed by cybernetics as systems, can be resurrected from this imaginative stasi stasis, by seeking out contact with the microrganisms of the living soil, and macroorganisms of winter starlight. Enjoyed down here on earth, the light from those stars does not have to be filtered through the protective lenses and glass on the space station tomb.

Other tomes are available if we would read them. We can check them out from the akashic ark-hives, from the library on the dream plane in the upper, from the library on the inner, where you don’t need to know morse code or computer code to make contact. When our nervous system gets touched by beings of intelligence from these other planes of there, and when we develop the disciplines needed to translate those flashes into works of active imagination, we will began to see the rise of new transcendental mentalities. The old faith of staunch materiality will be replaced as the seeds for new perceptive organs root and grow like upside down trees rooted in aether.

After the harvest of past culture made by the eminently copy-able nature of the internet has reached its past pull date, those souls born with a cellphone in their hand will enter a winter of deep hibernation. Deep listening, deep dreaming, deep sleep in the womb of earth, embraced and suckled at the teat of the bear mother as the light from midnight stars begin to trace out new songlines, faint tracks in space to be explored and walked down by others who receive the seed transmissions.

Listen, in the wake of internet noise music of talking heads analyzed conundrum.

Listen in the boredom, the radio chatter of banal algo-arithmetic of supervised society, turned down.

Listen, and the distant sound of Sirius. It can still be heard.

We don’t have enough Dada in this world of too much data. Something is needed to break-through the over-curated simulacrum that is the online world in order to let in a bit of non-artificial light. One way to make a break is through the deliberate cultivation of the glitch.

The exact etymology of the word glitch is not known, though it may derive from the Yiddish “glitsh” which means a “slippery place”. In the mid-twentieth century the word first started showing up in technical texts and related to sudden surges of voltage within an electrical circuit causing it to overload. Today a glitch is any kind of malfunction in hardware or error in software.

​In the 1990’s glitch music became a kind of subgenre of electronic music found at the meeting points of the avant-garde, noise, and more popular forms. This type of music, and the methods surrounding it, including circuit-bending, can provide a window, cracked as it is, for looking out at adjacent electronic worlds, including the internet.
​

Bending Circuits

Circuit-bending is the art of recycling, reusing and repurposing old consumer electronics, sound making toys, drum machines and synthesizers. The item to be bent needs to be low voltage, because the art involves opening these castaways up, and tinkering on the exposed circuit board while turned on, making connections that weren’t originally part of the design to see what new sounds might be created. If a person bends higher voltage electronics they run the serious risk of electrocution. In addition to de-soldering, and re-soldering pathways that weren’t originally connected, new elements can also be added. These often include sensors, controllers, potentiometers, switches and the like slipped into existing circuit paths. 

Sometimes a metallic surface is added to a spot on the bent instrument that allows a human’s natural electricity to create voltage changes within the instrument, making an electrical loop with the player. They become part of the circuit. 

Circuit-bent instruments emphasize the aleatory, and can be seen as an extension of the fascination with randomness that started gaining prominence in Western music in the 20th century under the influence of Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, and others who followed in their footsteps. With regrards to Cage, circuit-bending can be seen as an extension of a “prepared” instruments. Like Cage’s prepared pianos, circuit-bent instruments alter devices in ways that make it sound different than before the intervention, although something of their original voice remains present.

The process of circuit-bending was discovered and developed by Cincinnatian Q. Reed Ghazala. Ghazala cultivated a whole suite of instrument types from the detritus of junk he found in thrift shops and other places, and has also written and taught others how to make their own alien instruments. His work, legacy and example are well worth exploring for anyone who wants to lift up the hood on the development and evolution of the practice. 

Bending existing circuits offers the electronic musician and tinkerer a chance to play with chance, creating artful errors that allow the unknown to slip in what was previously predetermined.

  Digital natives need chance like a body needs water. Algorithms have taken the fun out of what was once unplanned and unstructured; internet surfing has been made accident proof, as if it were run by insurance agents and safety specialists. Spots of possible slippage are mopped up in favor of putting forth pre-chewed opinions and junk food clickbait. A similar environment prevails for electronic musicians. The hardware and software being made more often than not makes it difficult to fail. Sound libraries, instrument and effect presets, samplers pre-loaded with perfect pulsing patterns, make it hard to even play in the wrong pitch. 

These fully loaded tools make it a possible to become a producer of music in a matter of minutes. 
Preconfigured musical gear may make it easier to get grooving right off the bat, but the gift of instant gratification steals the sense of accomplishment and intimacy that comes from knowing every inch and crevice of an instrument. And while on first meeting, a run in with a run of the mill modular set up might cause sparks to fly, the slow burn of excitable electrons grows even further from long association. The nuance and subtlety available to those who explore in depth comes across in the very sounds. Circuit-bending is one way to go into those depths, down to the wire. 

Prefab music is low risk music. Something might be made from it that could be used as a backdrop to a car commercial or fit into a DJ set at a dance club, as filler, but without investigating the underlying assumptions of a piece of gear, or software, the things that come out of it will tend to not have the rewards associated with riskier behavior.  Disfigured musical gear gives the gift of decomposition and recomposition to electronic composers. With their materials mangled and mutilated, the gear becomes a mutt, with all the natural advantages over thoroughbred, store bought, off-the-shelf kit.  The system may be less predictable, but that is the point. 

​There are stories that tell of how Richard D. James of Aphex Twin modifies nearly all of his gear, with special regard given to changing the tunings. He gives his gear a personal workover. This accounts for his music’s longevity over the decades since the first songs and albums came out to the public. Kim Cascone has written (after Roland Barthes “The Grain of the Voice”) of a sense of hearing the “grain” inside certain musical works. In his view this grain is in part unconscious material bubbling up as expressed through the imagination, and the grain is what makes music that can touch a listener in their core, beyond mere intellect. Circuit-bending dosen’t necessarily create grain on its own; any technique can sound cold and uninspired when it is used as just another part of checklist for cultural production. What circuit bending can do, is make room for the glitch, slippage, an error where something other than the pre-programmed is liable to mainfest.

Worship the Glitch

In 1994 post-industrial giants Coil made a series of recordings that included the use of the moniker of ElPh. These releases reveled in malfunction, and started their life unplanned. While working on material that would eventually become the Black Light District release, A Thousand Lights In A Darkened Room, they were plagued by difficulties with their equipment. Tape machines messed up, digital media was mangled, mechanical issues crept into the workflow. Lucky for us, the recording machines were on when many of these errors happened. 

John Balance and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson were both at home with things metaphysical, and to them it felt like some kind of extradimensional entity was manifesting through the glitches. The band called these unintended transmissions from their equipment “ElpH” a being they conceptualized as part equipment, part something reaching out from another realm. Often snatches of random composition came from the gear and other accidents occurred. As they rolled with the obstacles being thrown at them, they realized it was better to accept these errors and mistakes. So they shelved the Black Light District project for the time being to focus on the new energies that were slipping through their defective gear.  It is interesting to note that the word gremlin is sometimes used as a synonym for malfunction.

Drew McDowall, who had played with the band before, but was now a vested member, furthered the notion, “It really felt like we were channeling something. Or at least that’s the idea we allowed ourselves to play with.”

​Balance said of these experiences, “For a week it really felt like something opened up above and poured into us. We were constantly inspired and then, just as abruptly, it finished transmission. We felt it go.”

One album and one EP came out of these sessions. The album was Worship the Glitch by ELpH vs. Coil, and the Born Again Pagans EP was billed as Coil vs. ElpH. Even across a discography as varied as Coil’s there is something very different about these two releases, compared to their other works. They tend towards the sparse and minimalist, the failures given their due and showcased as portals to something beyond.  

 After these Coil records came out in the mid-90’s a new electronic genre started to erupt on the scene. As progenitors of new styles, this wasn’t unusual for Coil. Others had followed their pioneering steps before. They certainly weren’t the only ones in that time frame who had used the errors of technology to shape a new aesthetic, but their album helped give it a name, and a style or subgenre called glitch began to emerge. Glitch had its home on the outskirts of more popular electronica, with underpinning strategies borrowed from the techniques and obsessions of 20th century art music masters.

Glitch exploed for a time. What had once been heard in the most outré and underground of cultural settings was now being mixed on dance floors, in chill rooms and played as a background for late night trips all across a conceptual black light district. 

​One signature technique of glitch music from the time was using scratched or beat up CDs to make them purposefully skip or stutter. Circuit-bending was another. Accessible computer software for making music was also reaching more artists at the time and digital artifacts from heavily altered sound files came to be incorporated into the style. A standard practice was to sample these artifacts in short cuts, which became the basis for building up beats, rhythms and textures. This latter template became the defacto sound of “glitch” as a genre. The Clicks and Cuts compilation released on the Mille Plateaux label in 2000 remains a high point watermark of the genre, with contributions from many of the leading artists involved during its hey-day.  

Yet after it had evolved it became easily copy-able, just as many other musical styles that preceded it had been, and just as easy to be co-opted by market forces and musicians who wanted to try to cash on this next big thing.

Kim Cascone pointed this out in his inspired essay The Aesthetics of Failure that glitch as just the latest way of investigating the creative misuse of technology. Yet as the internet grew, the process by which those techniques spread happened much faster than in previous decades. In sharing technique of glitch, some of the imaginative grain within the music was lost as it became just another commodity. With the widespread availability of digital music software, “the medium is no longer the message in glitch music: the tool has become the message.”

​Failure had reached a point of failure. 

Logic Circuits and Automatism

If our own thinking can be glitched than perhaps it is still possible to create systems that embrace the slippage. If we don’t want the “tool to become the message” than a third element beyond the digital must be added into the mix. 

The technopoly runs on data. Is there a way to make it more Dada? The artists of the Dada movement rejected many things, but logic and reason were chief among them. Where was the logic in the atrocities of World War I?  The founders of the movement had lived through the war and in reaction against it, sought to elevate nonsense and the irrational above cruel, cold logic.

In our own time reason and logic have failed to deliver the utopia of technology as promised and promoted by Big Techs advertisers and PR specialists. It can seem that humanities dystopian nightmares are what are actually manifesting. Perhaps part of technologies failure is due to the fact that the digital world is built on binaries. 

Logic circuits or gates are the brick and mortar of digital systems. They are electronic circuits that have one or more than one input, but only one output. Logic gates are the switches that turn ON or OFF depending on what the user does. A logic gates turn ON when a certain condition is true, and OFF when the condition is false. A logic gate is able to check whether or not the information they get follows a certain rule, and the output is thus determined. . 

There are several types of logic gates, but the three most common are the NOT gate, the AND gate, and the OR gate. The NOT gate is the simplest. It’s sole function is to take an input that is either ON or OFF and give it back as the opposite, what the original signal is NOT. 

The AND circuit requires two inputs. It can only turn on when both inputs are ON. If only one input is on it turns OFF, and when both inputs are off, it turns OFF. 

The OR circuit also requires two inputs. It needs one input to be on for it be ON, and is also still ON when both inputs are ON, and it is only OFF when both inputs are OFF.

While variations from these basic circuits have been used to build complex systems, they still have at their core, the binary which undergirds the entire techonosphere. It is rather difficult for the unknown to break through when only two outcomes are possible.  A third position between ON and OFF is never arrived at. This would require ternary logic, and as far as I know, a ternary computer has yet to be built.

In lieu of a ternary computer, a third element needs to be added to digital systems: that is the human component. This is also where I think modes of artistic creation in the spirit of Dada can help. By moving away from pure logic and reason, by letting a bit of nonsense or irrationality slip through, the human tendency to also think in binaries can be glitched. 

​So much of the creative process is automated when working with digital tools, but it has little in common with the methods of automatism that came out of the Surrealist milieu. The various methods of automatism developed by the Surrealists put a person in touch with the unknown, whether it be the unconscious or from beyond the fragile borders of this world. Bringing these techniques back into play could give back a sense of humanity to the sounds of dead electric emitted from programmed machines. 

Automatism came in part from the method of automatic writing or spirit writing, when mediums and others of their psychic ilk were said to be in touch with disembodied spirits. The writing came through them from the other side. For the Surrealists tapping into these forces became a source of creativity. The results were often startling as they bypassed logic and reason.

To the point of this essay, in artistic creation, logic is rarely the principle that needs to be abided. Automation needs to be bypassed in favor of automatism. In electronic music strategies and interventions need to be used to work around and supplant the built-in binary biases of the tools, otherwise the music being made on them ends up just sounding like a commercial for the tool.

Circuit-bending is one way to bring a sense of automatism back into the studio. Musical dice games, musikalisches würfelspiel, are another. These go back to the eighteenth century, and exist in a variety of forms.  Today there exists a set of Musicians Dice, that look like they were stolen off a D&D table. They are handsome 12-sided dice that have the chromatic scale engraved on them in silver. They allow composers to easily work at writing 12-tone music and as a basis for improvising in jam sessions. While a computer is capable of generating random numbers in various sets, using something outside of the digital workstation for composition creates a new zone for creative insights to occur.

Guitarist Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance developed what he calls the Hexadic system, using common playing cards. Chasny developed and used his system to break a creative funk he had felt he was in. The cards are related to the notes on a guitar and through playing games with the cards, players can arrive at new tonal territories they might not have come up with on their own. Chasny has put out three albums worth of Hexadic material, and other musicians are also using the system. 

 The painter Max Ernst used the technique of decalcomania, where a texture or pattern is transferred from one surface to another. Ink, paint or other medium is applied to the final surface, and while still wet, other materials such as glass, leaves, patches of cloth, aluminum foil or pottery are pressed or rubbed against it. Musical decalcomania can be achieved by incorporating found sounds into the texture of a piece. These could be samples, field recordings, or the use of unconventional acoustic material. 
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Whatever the source may be, if we are to glitch the circuit, we need to open ourselves up to the slippage that comes in from the unknown. Otherwise people might as well just let AIs design the music for them. And while generative music systems can be built that produce startling beauty, such as Wotja and Brian Eno’s Bloom, they leave too little for unintended influences from outside the confines of the system. For that a human really does have to put themselves into line with the flow of the circuit path. To create something new, we need to become conduits, connect and plug into to an outside source. 

Born a little late for post-punk, these post-post punk albums were my jam. (Much to the annoyance and concern of my parents.) 

I first became aware of punk rock sometime in the 1980s before I hit ten years old. I mean, I’d seen that punk rocker destroyed in the worst Star Trek movie ever, The Voyage Home, and I’d seen the Terminator rip the clothes off a bunch of street punks in the namesake film. I probably even saw some occasional weirdos in real life. But I was primed for punk because I was already amped on heavy metal. By the time I was skateboarding in the sixth grade I was ready for an explosion of sounds from the past, and I was lucky enough to meet an older skater punk when he moved on the street introduce me to both the classic and then current punk sounds. This was the early nineties, in the Midwest. Post punk had already happened in England so I suppose most of this stuff is not really post-post-punk, but post-hardcore, skater punk and pop punk. But Post-post punk just sounds better.

So lets take a look at some of the albums that shaped me as a teenager.

Our story starts in California, the birthplace of skateboarding, and home to some of the best punk bands on the planet. First up is Bad Relgion.

​Bad Religion hit my brain and body like a heretical gnostic revelation. I was raised in the “end times” fundamentalist Christian church, some say cult, The World Wide Church of God. I stopped attending around age fourteen. My exposure to punk and bands like this played no small part in my quitting the church I'd been brought up in. Songs like “Turn on the Light” burned with exquisite energy. The lyrics to Bad Religion’s music was always smart and sharp, but listening back I feel differently about some things now. I don’t share the same animosity towards religion as lead singer and lyricist Greg Graffin, though I’m not a big fan of conventional religion, and certainly not fundamentalism. Yet there are alternative streams of spirituality that have given me just as much juice as the alternative streams of music. Punk music has always been political, and the political message in Bad Religion was always front and center. The resonance within the songs “Heaven is Falling” from Generator and “You are the Government” from Suffer are perennial in their message. Others seem to have lost some of their bite, or I just got older, and lost some of my bite. With that in mind, perhaps the song “When?” is more appropriate now.  Quick short pounding songs like “Blenderhead” with its abrupt stop caused my head to spin in a good way, and there is no denying how fun Bad Religion is. I got the opportunity to see them live at least once and the energy they brought to the stage was just as palpable.

Second on this listicle is another band from Southern California, NOFX. Like Bad Religion they helped define the sound of the time. And like Bad Religion, their lyrics could be equally astute and intelligent, but unlike them, they didn’t always take everything so damn serious. They could be funny as fuck, and irreverent as hell. That was part of their long-lasting charm.

The first album I heard from NOFX was Ribbed, from 1991. At twenty-eight minutes long, each moment is packed with feral ferocity. Some of the lyrics are rather juvenile, but the music is so good its rather simple to overlook the juvenilia of it and get besotted with its powerful vibrations and sarcastic whimsy. The fact that they could rip, riff and write a catchy hook all while keeping the adrenaline flowing guaranteed their ascendancy. It’s all on full display in the song “Nowhere.” The follow up albums, White Trash, Two Heebs and A Bean, and Punk in Drublic continued the fun. 

Staying in California we’ll move along to check in briefly with Operation Ivy and their one album Energy, still a favorite. Members of the band went on to form the more famous and commercially successful Rancid. I like a few Rancid songs, but they didn’t really have anything on Op Ivy.
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Operation Ivy was part of the force that kickstarted a wave of suburban American ska, for better or worse. The fast snotty delivery of the lyrics wound up over top of the tightly syncopated, yet still slightly sloppy playing, as if they are just managing to keep it all together, without it falling apart. These bass and guitar rhythms hit a lovely sweet spot. Songs like “Artificial Life” have only proved too prescient of the way binge watching TV would become even more acceptable with streaming services.

Next up is The Queers. I first saw The Queers at my first real concert experience, when they opened up for Rancid at Bogart’s. The Queers would continue to play Bogarts regularly for the next several years and it was always a good time. I liked them better than Rancid, and still like them better than Rancid. Anyway, enough Rancid dissing. They have their place.
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Their album Love Songs for the Retarded remains a go-to classic. By today’s standards this album title would even offend the punk rockers themselves. Don’t let that stop you from listening. All most all of its cues are taken from the Ramones, with just a bit more distortion and a lot more beer. Songs like “Teenage Bonehead” and “Fuck the World I’m Hanging Out with You Tonight” showcase what they are all about: fun rock and roll, drinking beer, and having fun. One of the great things about The Queers is the backing vocal harmonies recalling fifties rock and pop, you know, the same stuff the Ramones were inspired by. At the bottom, they are fun, irreverent, uncouth, all the things you expect in punk. With great riffs, heaps of distortion, songs you can sing and shout along to, nodding your head with many shared experiences. This is the kind of music that could take you to the imaginary land of Riverdale, and hang out with Archie and the gang, if they guzzled forty ouncers and cough syrup.

Now I need to turn my attention to Fugazi. I still have a signed ticket stub from Ian Mackaye somewhere in a ziplock bag of teenage memorabilia. That was from a show at Bogarts where I saw them for $5. Can you imagine seeing a band of their caliber for five dollars today? It’s hard to imagine but that was the case back then, and many of the other shows I went to weren’t much more expensive, allowing teenagers and threadbare bohemian types to get in on the culture. Because that is what it was about, the culture, the music. By all accounts, Fugazi made a tolerable living as a band that toured quite a bit. They just didn’t need to live like Taylor Swift lives. They also didn’t want to screw over their fans. Hence five dollar concerts. I think this DIY business model could easily be done again today. (It is for sparsely attended noise and other underground shows.) Bigger groups with larger followings could still do so. At a lower cost, they are also more likely to sell out the show. The Fugazi show I went to was certainly packed to the gills. And the band was kind enough to hang out with everyone afterwards in the alley behind the venue. That is the kind of approachability we need to see more of these days.
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Their second album, 1991’s Steady Diet of Nothing was the one I had on tape that fueled so many bus trips on my headphones to various skateboarding destinations around Cincinnati. Listening back, it sounds killer as fuck and as fresh as Friday. No surprise there. Fugazi;s music has aged extremely well. That’s why it remains a favorite, and continues to garner new listeners. The opening bits of “Reclamation” bring on waves vitriolic adrenaline. I’m ready to go take on the world again. “Nice New Outfit” with its shouted backing vocals over exacting rhythms makes me smile and want to go climb a telephone poll and scream at the top of my lungs. It just continues to get stacked on up from there. It’s really hard to turn this album off once you hit play, but why would you want to put a pause to such an unrelenting pulse? 

Moving on to the band Screeching Weasel, for a rather different kind of sound again. Here the pop and the punk fuse together again. Frontman Ben Weasel had helped write some of the songs on The Queers album Love Songs for the Retarded. Perhaps that’s why My Brain Hurts shares such a stylistic similarity. The tracks are catchy. The lyrics are juvenile and touching. Songs like “Veronica Hates Me” glow with angst and unrequited love. “Teenage Freakshow” with the light vocal harmonies in the background and simple organ pouncing recall some lost times in Riverdale again. Hanging out with Veronica.
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What interests me now about  Ben Weasel is the time he spent at the Élan School in Poland, Maine, where he was sent after being expelled from his previous school in Illinois. These boarding schools that were all part of the “troubled teen industry” are a special interest of mine, having known several people sent to such places (some family). Some of those people and punks I never heard from again. But that’s another story for another time.

Another favorite group of mine from the era was Blatz. I only had one copied tape from them, and it was their Shit Split album with the group Filth. I didn’t really care for the Filth side as much. What I loved about Blatz was the coupled male and female vocals, hearkening back to the anarcho punk tradition started by Crass and their ilk, where dual male and female vocalists were de rigeur. Blatz also weren’t afraid of using phasers and flangers on their guitars which was unusual for punk bands. Blatz came out of the same 924 Gilman Street Project scene as Op Ivy, but their sound was decidedly more feral and hedonistic. Songs like “Homemade Speed” and “Fuck Shit Up” were fun favorites, and they mined noir territory in the lyrics to “Lullabye” and “Berkely is My Baby (And I Want to Kill It).” Actually, nihilism is good word to describe the style of Blatz. The working class anger they espouse at people going to school and anomie at hypocritical hippie’s drips with rawness even now. The whole thing sounds like it was recorded live, which adds to the menace.
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I wonder if they’ve mellowed at all with age. But if they had, I’m not sure I’d want to listen to the kind of music they may make now. So if you feel like perhaps you are mellowing too much in middle age, put one of these albums on and let it rip.

My memories of radio are tangled up with the shenanigans I pulled playing around on phone lines and my love for the original Doctor Who series. I first saw Doctor Who when I was ten years old and I was mesmerized by the stories and the sounds.

            All those sounds in the show were the product of the Radiophonic Workshop at the BBC. In 1958 an inspired woman named Daphne Oram helped to found this early electronic music studio under the auspices of the British Broadcasting Corporation. She had been inspired to explore electronics when she heard about experiments taking place at the Radiodiffusion Television Francois by Pierre Schaeffer with musique concrète, that is the manipulation of prerecorded sounds on lathe cut records and magnetic tape. But Oram had also been inspired by a prophetic book written by Francis Bacon in 1626 called The New Atlantis and had tacked a passage from it onto the wall of the music studio as a kind of mission statement for the work they would pursue.

            Hands down, the most famous musical creation from the Radiophonic Workshop is the theme song for Doctor Who. Delia Derbyshire was the electronic musician who realized the score for this innovative song, recording sounds made on audio oscillators onto tape, and editing those tapes and layering them up to build the memorable song. Doctor Who gave me my first taste of electronic music and I fell in love for life.

​            I became so obsessed with Doctor Who as a young kid, that if my family was invited out to dinner at another family’s house on a Saturday night, I would try to connive a way for us to get home by 10 PM so I could tune into the show. Doctor Who aired on Channel 48 WCET, a PBS station, and when they had their periodic pledge drive they would put the telephone number out on the TV and have people call in to pledge their support. I was so obsessed, I would get irritated with the announcers when they cut the show off in the middle to stop and ask for money. 

I called the pledge drive number, just to see what would happen, even though, as a ten year old I had no money. The phone rang and a few seconds later and I could hear it ring over the television.

            This gave me a thrill like no other, hearing something I did cause a sound to be heard on our TV set. So, I called it again and again on multiple pledge drives. I did start feeling guilty about doing that, especially when the announcer on the TV would say, “and we have another call, a pledge of support for Doctor Who!”

            I kept on doing this on every pledge drive until I got old enough to fear getting caught in my early teens.

​That time period, in the late 80s and into the early 90s, was also the last golden era for making prank phone calls. Caller ID wasn’t yet prominent, and many people still didn’t know you could dial *69 to see who called last. Playing on the phone was a good way to pass the time, and it became a bit more intense for me in the seventh grade after I read a book by cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling called The Hacker Crackdown. It introduced me to the concept of phone phreaking. Before hackers learned to infiltrate computer systems with their modems over the phone lines, phone phreaks figured out ways to make free calls and otherwise explore Ma Bell’s network of wires. I found the prospect of being able to do this very inspiring and tried to learn how to do it myself, though resources were scant, and I had missed the heyday of phone phreaking by over a decade.

​As a thirteen year old most of my attempts at phone phreaking were actually just phone pranking. I’m surprised I didn’t get in more trouble from my exploits than I did. But I did get in trouble, and I probably should have gotten in more trouble than I did. One weekend when I was skateboarding with a cousin in his neighborhood of Green Hills, I spotted a phone lineman’s handset, near one of those green phone boxes you see in the burbs. It had been left behind and there was no one in sight, no van from Cincinnati Bell anywhere nearby. So I took it, and justified my taking it by saying I had found, which I had. Finders keepers and all of that. It turned out the case not only had a linemans phone with wire clippers for testing the lines, but it also had a little computer in it that you could hook up to a phone jack and use to make calls. For some reason I thought you would be able to get free calls using this because it belonged to the phone company, and who would charge them?  I was spending the night at my cousins that weekend, and his parents left on a date after ordering us some pizza. I convinced him that we should call up some of these 1-800 numbers I had seen on late night TV for something called “Chat lines.” Apparently, if you called these numbers, and yes, they really were 1-800 numbers, there would be an eager young woman eager to talk to you on the other end. I convinced my cousin that because we were using the handset from Cincinnati Bell, we wouldn’t get charged. I was wrong, and needless to say, when his parents got the phone bill, they weren’t too happy. 

Later, another friend of mine figured out that the little computer included in the lineman’s set had a modem inside and it could be used to dial into the Bulletin Board System that were around before the internet as we know it today existed. We dialed into some Bulletin Boards and poked around and had some fun. Then one day, when I came home from school, I got scolded by my mom, before I’d even had a chance to do anything wrong. The security department from Cincinnati Bell had visited our house and had asked if anyone had a lineman’s set. My mom had seen me using it, even though I had tried to keep it hidden. Apparently every time a call was placed with this box, it sent out a trace signal back to the Bell HQ. They wanted their equipment back, and they came and got it, and that ended my fun with that bit of equipment. I’m actually glad I was at school when it happened, but that kind of ended my career as an aspiring phone phreak, though not as a phone pranker. Meanwhile my love for the stories about the phone phreaks who could whistle tones at the right frequency into the phone and enter Ma Bell through the back door never disappeared.

​Around the same time all of this was happening, I had became enamored with the community radio station WAIF 88.3 FM. In the sixth grade I started to call in to one of their summer talk-shows so I could hear my voice come back over the air. They didn’t have any way of screening their calls, so they didn’t know it was just going to be some bored kid. Hearing my voice come back over the radio, usually with feedback, because I had failed to turn down my own radio, never stopped being exciting. Then, towards the end of high school, I discovered the Art Damage program. This was a revelation in terms of audio and what can be done with sound. It turned me on to the music of Sun Ra, Nurse With Wound, John Cage, and dozens of other artists I was only just then getting a clue about. It also did the essential work of cuing me into what was going on here just below the radar in Cincinnati. Just as I had with Doctor Who, I became obsessed with Art Damage and tuned whenever I could, and taped the programs off the air so I could listen back to the cassettes later.

Eventually I got onto radio in a legitimate way, but was still quite illegal. This happened during my brief tenure as a student at Antioch College on their pirate FM station Anti-Watt. Anti-Watt covered the village of Yellow Springs and I had my own show called The Psychedelicatessin on the station with a few friends. It was a free-form radio show of live collage music inspired by the experimental group Negativland and their radio show Over The Edge. At college I was more interested in hanging out at the radio station, the recording studio, and my job there at the student library than I was in my classes, so I eventually did the smart thing and dropped out. I had always been a big reader, and a writer. The problem with college was I wanted to read lots of the books I was finding in the library that weren’t assigned to me in class, and I wanted to write about things that also weren’t part of those same assignments. The copious amounts of weed I smoked back then might have also had something to do with it.
            After I dropped out of college, I came back home, got a job at the public library, which allowed me to continue my autodidact education, and I promptly began my life as a bohemian. I started going to noise music shows, poetry readings and art openings. I made zines, wrote poetry and essays. I got involved at WAIF and became a programmer for the longstanding experimental music show Art Damage after I met some people who were involved in that scene through my job. Later I joined the team of the more eclectic On the Way to the Peak of Normal. All told I was on the air regularly between 2001 and 2014. Now I am an occasional programmer for my friend Ken Katkin on his show Trash Flow Radio, when he needs to get away for the weekend.
            When I left WAIF I thought I would use my new free time to devote to writing, but I found I actually couldn’t quit radio. I had always been interested in shortwave radio and ham radio which I’d been exposed to from my great grandpa and the Boy Scouts. I had met a ham radio operator on the bus and he told me about classes being offered by the local Oh-Ky-In Amateur Radio Society and I decided to go ahead and take the test and get my license from the Federal Communications Commission as part of my general obsession with radio and alternative forms of communication. Through the web of connections available in the friendly ham and shortwave communities I met Pete Polyank who introduced me to Frederick Moe and it has been one of my supreme delights to participate in his projects, such as Free Radio Skybird and Imaginary Stations.
             I did end up putting more time into my writing, and my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory became a way for me to explore all of these different interests, neigh, obsessions with telephony, radio and music as it explores interconnected history between radio, the phone system and how research into speech synthesis at Bell Telephone Laboratories gave rise to electronic music as a happy by-product.
            Time keeps on moving, and I still try to bring a bohemian attitude to my life. Some things are just more important than having a better paying job. Things like radio, like friendship, like literature, like family. It’s not always easy to balance interests, let alone obsessions, with the day to day duties and chores of daily life. But balance is overrated, and I’ve found, at least for me, it works better if I weave these things into my life. After all, they are not separate from who I am and what I do. As time keeps moving on, and no TARDIS in sight to help me rewind or fast forward, I hope to continue to weave my inclinations towards the three R’s -reading, writing, and radio- into a life interfused with friendship and family.

This article originally appeared in Frederick Moe's Radio e-APA.

Daniel’s father didn’t want him and his friends to play all the way in the back yard by the concrete covered well. Naturally, it was the place where Daniel and his friends wanted to play the most. So they play there they did, near the capped off old well all the way in the backyard, past the locust trees and the catalpas, in the valley between the streets, far from the world of adults. Daniel remembered it clear as a bell, the first time he heard the voice inside the well. It was a fall day, not too cold, but crisp enough that he felt vibrant and alive. The orange leaves from the trees hadn’t all fallen yet and the grass was still bright green, burning off the last of the summers fuse.
            “You need to let me out Jimmy!” the voice said, echoing with reverberant resonance.
            Daniel didn’t know who the voice was talking to. He didn’t know anyone named Jimmy.
            It sounded old, like a recording on one of those tape cassettes his dad sometimes put onto the dusty boombox when he was working on the car out in the garage, crackling and antique.
            “Come on, I didn’t do anything,” it continued, and in desperation, “I didn’t say anything to mom, I promise!”
            It wasn’t just Daniel who didn’t know who Jimmy was. His friends Billy and Sam didn’t know who Jimmy was either. There wasn’t a Jimmy on their street or on the street behind them. They didn’t know a Jimmy from their games of kill the man or their games of freeze tag or their games of baseball in the field that brushed up against the expansive woods at the end of Orland Street.
            When the voice spoke again it had the quality of something heard in a dream, and they accepted it as a dream, as a voice heard so deep in play that not one of them questioned its reality, and on subsequent days they continued to play the new game of George Down in the Well. That was the name of the kid who did the talking, George, and he was pushed their by his older brother Jimmy after George told his mom what he heard when Jimmy was out behind the garage smoking unfiltered cigarettes he’d stolen from their grandpa. His brother was making a plan as he smoked behind the garage with his friend Gary. He was planning on sneaking into the school at night to pull a prank on the history teacher Mr. Fink. That was the real reason George had been thrown in the well, because when he told his mom about the conversation he overheard between Jimmy and Gary, their mom had sent Gary back home for the night, ending the spend the night, ending the plan to sneak out after everyone went to bed, ending the plan to go in through the window of the chemistry class they had left cracked barely open at the end of seventh bell on Friday. They’d climb up onto the dumpster, push it open and let themselves inside, take the snake out of the terrarium in the biology class and put it inside Mr. Fink’s desk. That would be payback for the week of detention Mr. Fink had given them for talking smarmy talk about Nancy, to Nancy. That would show Mr. Fink.
            But now Jimmy had another revenge on his hands. Or so the voice from the well whispered. George told them how Jimmy had waited until everyone was good and asleep, just like he’d been planning before his little brother narced on him. The old sweaty sock was in his mouth before he could scream and his brother straddled him, sat on top of him like a lump of coal, wrapped him up in a blanket so he couldn’t move his arms, and forced him out of bed and down to the back of yard, past the trees to the old well. The family only kept a heavy iron grate over it at the time. That was when Gary stepped out of the shadows. With a few grunts they pulled the grate off and pushed the little loser into the well.
            It wasn’t a far drop. Unless you considered one hundred feet to be a far drop. Jimmy didn’t know nothing, and he sure didn’t know how deep a well was. George’s screams were muffled by the sock in mouth, as he fell deep into the well those many, many autumns ago.
            That was the story the kids made up when they played all the way down in the valley between the streets, past the locust trees and catalpas, in the very back of the yard where his father didn’t want him to play.
            The following year Daniel couldn’t stand not knowing who George really was anymore, because he still heard the voice in the well whenever he went into the back yard. He broke down and asked his dad, “Who are George and Jimmy?” It was Labor Day weekend and they had gone out for one last swirl cone of ice cream at the whippy dip before it closed up shop for the season.
            “George and Jimmy who?” he asked back, though he knew.
            “There’s a voice in the well from a kid named George always talking about his brother Jimmy.”
            “I told you not to go down there,” his dad said, pulling the brim of his baseball cap down further over his brow to keep the end of summer sun out of his face. Flies and sweat bees buzzed around the garbage can that smelled of chocolate dairy and unfinished foot long chili dogs next to the picnic table.
            “Why not? It’s been capped.”
            “Old concrete isn’t always safe. In fact, I should fill that whole thing in.”
            “But who are they?”
            His father could have said it was all in his imagination, but he didn’t. “That well seems to hold old memories and just won’t let them go. Jimmy was a guy my dad went to high school with, until they hauled him off to jail, for what he did to his brother George. He pushed him down that well. Things didn’t go so good for Jimmy on the inside. After a few months in the slammer he found himself on the wrong side of a shiv. His parents sold the house not long after the incident, and it sat abandoned for many years. Nobody wanted it. People used to tell stories about this place all the time, when I was a kid. After I married your mom, houses weren’t cheap, in fact, just the opposite, so when I saw this one for sale as a fixer upper, I bought it up. We wanted to start a family and it was the only place we could afford. There’d always been ghost stories about the well, but I never expected you to hear them straight from George’s mouth.”
            The next weekend Daniel’s dad bought what must have been a ton of concrete and invited some friends over and they spent the day filling up the old well altogether. His dad knew a man who was a kind of priest, but not a priest, a person who knew things, secret things. He came and said a blessing on the well and planted a hawthorn tree right next to it. The voice in the well grew quiet for the most part after that, except on early fall days when the wind grows cold but the green grass is still shining, bright and alive. 

​

.:. .:. .:. 

Read my previous Halloween pieces of ghostly flash fiction:

Fresh Cut Flowers

A Lingering Sound of Steam