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

Apocalyptic fiction has long been championed by those who yawn at the dreary optimism of a sanitized life out among the stars. For those writing it in the shadow of the atomic bomb, perhaps at a typewriter in their suburban fallout shelter, apocalyptic fiction was a viable option, at least for fiction. In the 1950s SciFi was reaching an apogee, consumer goods, science and chemistry were going to make living better for everyone, send us into a remarkable future, but there also hung over it all the threat of the atom bomb.

Enter the futurist thinker R. Buckminster Fuller. Automation and advances in materials science suggested a resolution to the problems humanity face. On the other hand, was the solution of mutually assured destruction. Fuller got sucked into this way of thinking and laid out his own take on this binary with just two possible options for the human species in his 1963 book Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity. While he wasn’t the first to invent that meme, he did set it further into motion as his ideas were taken up by long haired freaks and hippies, among other countercultural types who gravitated to his thought.

Certainly, science fiction, isn’t all utopian. As the SF New Wave settled into place in the sixties, and cyberpunk on its heels in the beginning of the 80s, science fiction began to grapple with the less savory aspects of technological progress. Following the 80s, SF and Fantasy got ever more watered down in the decades that followed, to the point where much of the newest stuff is unreadable. It either waffles between the hopeful tropes of infinite expansion into space where there will be enough resources for everyone, on the one hand, or to dystopian surveillance states, and deadly game show riffs following in the footsteps of George Orwell and Richard Bachman.

That has left some big cracks in speculative literature. The New Weird briefly blossomed before its bloom was just another fleur du mal. Its eldritch trace can still be discerned in some small presses (where all the best energy is anyway). Horror remains, as ever, perennial, even if, in written form, it is a more rarified taste. Fantasy, long suffering under the spell of the epic, has forgotten the short and the sweet. It too has suffered from this dystopian cast in all its grimdarkness. Meanwhile, the fledgling sprouts of climate fiction and deindustrial fiction have clambered up through those cracks in the corporate made mixing cement of the publishing industries broken sidewalk.

If hard SF presupposes our ultimate destiny on Mars, with AI driving our brutalist cyber trucks, and fusion energy at our atomic command, as utopia, then apocalyptic fiction presupposes rag and bone men crawling amidst the ashes of our fallen towers as they fight mutants and AI driven brutalist attack cyber trucks for canned peaches.

What about a life on earth, that is neither dominated by machines, or the sole hope of a plucky band of bomb hardened survivors?

Climate fiction takes the real revelation that the world will be different, and not always in ways for the better, but none-the-less finds us making useful adaptations. For sure, climate change had a place in some SF, especially in the New Wave and later cyberpunk writers. J.G. Ballard and Bruce Sterling come to mind, for starters. So called Cli-Fi, as a term, is somewhat new, but as with many other genres, gets retroactively applied. Some of the new stuff, the self-conscious Cli-Fi, is pretty darn good, but much else smacks of self-righteousness when it isn’t plain old self- flagellation. Working in a large library system I get to see a lot of new books, many of them marketed as a kind of activism. The issue I have with them is that they seem to have forgotten about the art. This tendency has made me not be able to finish many of the newer books I start, because not only is the writer flagellating themselves, but also the reader. I don’t mind at all having social issues and environmental issues or mental health issues or issues any kind front and center in a book, except when those issues, and we all have issues, take the place of the art of storytelling. If I want journalism or an opinion piece, I can read essays and non-fiction instead. It’s unfortunate that this tendency to berate the reader has been adopted in Cli-Fi, to the point where activism is listed as a prime motivating force for those promoting this kind of writing.

As Robert Anton Wilson said in the documentary Maybe Logic, “I think the joy of art is trying to convey what you perceive so that other people will perceive it more or less the same way. Art is a form of seduction. I mean, there are rapists in the intellectual world. They become politicians. The seducers become honest. We try to seduce people into our reality tunnels instead of leading them there with a gun.” Fiction that is only activism often fails to enchant and seduce.

This leads us to Deindustrial fiction. Deindustrial fiction is the redheaded step-child of Science Fiction, because it is future centered, it’s the redheaded step-child of Apocalyptic Fiction, because it imagines a world during or after the fall or collapse of our current civilization, and it is the uncouth cousin to Cli-Fi, because it shares the knowledge with Cli-Fi that much of our future world is shaped by the ravages of climate change and environmental chaos. Deindustrial Fiction remains at odds with Solarpunk and Hopepunk, because so much of what gets put into those categories amounts to having our cake and eating it too. Hopepunk was conceived as opposite of the grimdark tendency in so much speculative fiction. I get that the grimdark scene gets old. I don’t read much of it myself. But the sickeningly sweet stories of hopepunk are themselves a kind of artificial saccharine disguising a sinister strychnine. Having become the opposite of grimdark, it provides just another polarized worldview on the opposite end of a spectrum. Hopepunk and Grimdark are just two sides of the same Utopia or Oblivion coin.

In reality, empires do come and go, just as the Romans and the Mayans are now gone from our past. When we study history from the point of view of our Oswald Spengler's and Arnold Toynbee's, we see that the fall of civilizations and empires actually happens as a ragged, uneven decline, punctuated by periods of crisis and calamity. SF writers of the past weren’t afraid of grappling with these writers, and incorporating the consequences of such a view of history into their prose, grim, dark, hopeful, or at the twilight or dawn times when there is more of a mix of both hope and grimness. Anyone who has been paying attention to current events should know that the United States days are numbered as a global hegemony. That will unspool all kinds of issues, many of them good, but many also challenging. Beyond that, the greater technological civilization the US is a part of is itself only here for a limited time, just based on the fact that fossil fuels, by their very nature, are a limited resource. Deindustrial fiction takes these themes, and the limits imposed on us by nature, as starting points.

As such, it has things in common with apocalyptic fiction, sci-fi, and cli-fi. It differs from either grimdark or hopepunk, in imagining a middle ground, though individual authors may be more optimistic or pessimistic. It does not believe in infinite human expansion, on our own planet or to the stars, and as such seeks to look at retrovation and low-tech solutions to the predicaments faced by humanity.

​So where to start with reading any of this? Perhaps a round-up of the best of the genres discussed is in order.
Since much of the original era of Apocalyptic fiction is concerned what happens after a nuclear Armageddon I’ll look first at a few of the best books along those lines.   

Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank is the Cold War standard text, and the book had a huge impact on me when I read it in high school. Perhaps I related to it so well because I had been brought in an end-times church (some say cult - The World Wide Church of God for those who are keeping score). I heard so many end-times sermons by the time I was 14 and dropped out of the church that I can even still microwave scavenged tins of Dinty Moore Beef Stew just by radiation exposure. Let’s just hope the metal in those cans hasn’t been exposed to radiation. The title of the book is even lifted from a verse in the Book of Revelation and the tale concerns the survival efforts of a town in Florida after a nuclear attack on the U.S. The town gets cut off and they are thrown upon their own resources. As a legitimately post-nuclear attack novel, it remains quite good.

For shear literary prowess however, look no further than Riddley Walker by Russel Hoban. Hoban does here with language something similar to what Anthony Burgess did in A Clockwork Orange. In Hoban’s vision of life in England after the bomb, most people no longer know how to read and everything in the book is spelled out phonetically by the main character who has had a bit of lerning and tells his tale as a scribe. The style takes some getting used to, but it is not to be missed. I read it during my initial heavy obsession phase with the music of Current 93, and it is a favorite of David Tibet’s books. I enjoyed how the Punch and Judy shows became a kind of gnostic religion in the future. There is also a lot of hash smoking and packs of wild dogs.

The Wild Shore by Kim Stanley Robinson is the first book in his Three California's trilogy where he gives us three different futures set in Orange County. This volume takes place after a neutron bomb goes off in the U.S. America has been quarantined following this attack and people have had to reskill with a quickness, living off the land, off the ocean, preserving knowledge. Into this is a story of ships coming around from who knows where -at first and reinitiating first contact with the outside world in some time, all built on top of a coming-of-age story. The second book in the sequence, The Gold Coast, remains my favorite of them, and it is set in an extremely hypercapitalistic consumer driven society (quite like the one we seem to be living in) but not cyberpunk. The last book, Pacific Edge, has made itself over to live ecologically. It is something of a utopia, but not quite. The characters still have problems in this last one, and there are a lot of conflicts over water, a precursor to the first book on the Cli-Fi list. The characters in Three Californias all feature in three very different future scenarios making this one of the most unique trilogies ever.

(I’ll put in A Boy and His Dog as an honorable mention in the nuclear wasteland category. It remains a favorite. It’s hard to beat the prose of Harlan Ellison, and he is a master of pulp adventure.)

Now let us turn to Cli-Fi. Despite my somewhat harsh words above, I still like a lot of what I’ve read from authors who have consciously set out to write this “Eco Fiction” which it is sometimes also called. I don’t want to retroactively assign the genre works that otherwise would have just have been classified as apocalyptic SF in the past, so here are some that grappled with the issue of climate change just as the term Cli-Fi was starting to get bandied about.

The Water Knife by Paolo Baciagalupi. In an American Southwest crippled by drought, Nevada and Arizona get into it over the meager supplies of water left in the Colorado River. California watches, deciding if it should just take the whole river all for itself. One of the things I liked so much about it, was his use of arcologies, a term developed by architect Paolo Soleri and put into action at his famed desert community Arcosanti. The battle for water creates the conflict in this highly readable thriller. Apparently writing this kind of thing mentally and emotionally exhausted Baciagalupi. I hadn’t heard of anything new from him since this book, and but when I looked him up just now, see he has a new one out just this past summer, a fantasy called Navola. 

Kim Stanley Robinson is the giant in terms of spreading the concept of Cli-Fi, so there is no getting around listing another of his books. I have to recommend, New York 2140. The best writers not only bring their readers new ways of envisioning the world, but new vocabularies for talking about the world. Sometimes the neologisms and words they coin break out and become part of the larger culture. Robert Heinlein gave us the word grok and aging hippies still bandy it about at outdoor music festivals to show how deeply they understand one another. George Orwell's term newspeak about the propagandistic use of language by Big Brother is now a subject for newspaper op-ed pieces. Writing this, the word repaleolithization comes to mind. It's from Kim Stanley Robinson's earlier book on climate change, Fifty Degrees Below. It is something I could have used a bit of today as it refers to a lifestyle shift used to reestablish sanity for the human body and mind, and consists mainly of activities mostly abandoned by the urban denizens of late industrial capitalism. As I sit here typing I think about how nice it will be to take some time off soon, and walk out on the land with family and friends, talking and cooking under the stars, staring at a fire instead of a screen. These are some of the things repaleolithization consists of. Kim says it can be thought of as a form of "landscape restoration for the brain” and the landscape, both inner and outer, is something he returns to again and again throughout the arc of his novels, New York 2140 being his eighteenth. It features a Manhattan that has become a kind of Venice, with canals instead of streets. It’s hopeful in that sense, but deals with some crazy economics. 

Stormland by John Shirley takes things in a grittier direction. That’s because Shirley is a cyberpunk veteran (they get a pass on using the word punk). Stormland is a sprawling, largely abandoned region of the southeastern coast of the USA, where a more or less permanent hurricane continues to churn and stew. Into this nasty vortex of rain and trash a former US Marshal and a stone cold serial killer head into Charleston, South Carolina where only squatters and the mad continue to live. There is a cult subplot here, which I like. Cults are an abiding interest. See book one in the apocalyptic section above.

Now on to Deindustrial Fiction. There aren’t a ton of novels that qualify as such as yet. It was John Michael Greer who coined the term, and his work is the best place to start.

It got started with a novel he wrote called Stars Reach. “More than four centuries have passed since industrial civilization stumbled to its ruin under the self-inflicted blows of climate change and resource depletion. Now, in the ruins of a deserted city, a young man mining metal risks his life to win a priceless clue. That discovery will send him, and an unlikely band of seekers, on a quest for a place out of legend, where human beings might once have communicated with distant worlds…to a place called Star's Reach…” It’s back in print in a new edition from Sphinx Books this November.

Greer’s other novels have the cast of Deindustrial. In his vast seven part fantasy with tentacles, the essential Weird of Hali, the deindustrializing world is part of the backdrop, but its not the foreground. His latest novel Hall of Homeless Gods, is set closer to the present but still Deindustrial. I’m looking forward to getting my copy. Here is the blurb:

“a tough, two-fisted fixer who works for the boss of Habitat Four, one of five Japanese refugee communities built on abandoned oil platforms off the coast of the United States in a hard-edged dystopian future of technological decline and climate chaos. His beat is Shoreside, the bustling, brawling, anything-goes temporary port on the beach two miles from the Habitats.

​He's trying to bust a robbery ring that's preying on Shoreside gambling money when he encounters a mysterious woman with strange mental abilities. Before long he's having to dodge hoods sent after him by Shoreside's crime lord, agents of the US government, and spies from its archrival, the European Union. Does all this have anything to do with rumors of a secret supercomputer project in the now-abandoned country inland from Shoreside -- a project that once left a string of corpses behind it, and now might yield a fabulous trove of old world technology? Jerry's going to find out...if he can survive long enough.”

Where Deindustrial fiction has so far flourished is in anthologies and two magazines, one the successor to the other. The anthologies started with the After Oil series, focusing in on fiction that was able to wrap its head around the fact that 1) we are running out, and 2) fusion power isn’t going to come online to “save us” by allowing us to keep up business as usual and our current energy intensive lifestyles. Four came out from Founders House publishing. They were followed by another anthology (in which I had a short story) Love In the Ruins, applying similar logic to the much maligned genre of romance fiction. Sadly, there were some snafus in the way Founders House operated, and those anthologies are no longer available new. While Greer has taken his fiction over to Aeon Publishing and their fiction imprint Sphinx Books, who are doing a fine job, the anthologies haven’t followed.

The short stories spawned by the first four anthologies spawned the quarterly journal Into the Ruins. When the editor closed up shop after four years, he gave some advice to Nathanael Bonnell who started New Maps. I had written some book reviews for Into the Ruins and one short story. Now I am writing a column for New Maps, called Cheap Thrills, and two of my stories have been published so far in its pages. New Maps focuses on the kind of futures we are actually to get as the decline of industrial civilization continues. It's a fine magazine in print with great stories from a slew of writers coming to you four times a year.
Bonnell sums it up:

"New Maps is a quarterly journal of short stories that take place in the Earth’s realistic future. Not a paradisiac or apocalyptic end of days, nor an easy continuation of the last few decades’ business-as-usual with somewhat different fashions, but an era in which our ecological and energy bills have come due, and we and our descendants have proceeded to do what people always do: figure out creative ways to keep doing all those things that make up life, the loving and hating and laughing and crying and all the rest, in the times we’ve been given.
 
This is fiction of real life in an age of limits—an age that, like every other, will mix the tragic and the comic and the who-knows-what-just-happened, and leave it to us to make sense of it all. This is fiction full of cobbled-together and home-brewed technology, reinvented culture with sacred cows butchered and new ones bred, and mourning and celebration of the old world’s end mixed with hope for renewed health and integrity within a homespun patchwork of new ways of life."

So if you are tired of the both utopia and oblivion, why not give the middle road of Deindustrial fiction a try?

We have a black cat named Tokie, named and given to us by our daughter. We didn’t know until a few years with this cat, and this name, that our cat shared the name with a famous banjo player, who uppicked and downpicked her taught strings in clawhammer style. As my wife and I are fans of old-time music this was a pleasant discovery. Yet, we only came to discover the music of Matokie Slaughter (known as “Tokie” to friends and family) through the work of Margaret Kilgallen, who we’d learned about in turn from reading Bill Daniel’s Moslty True: The World’s Most Popular Hobo Graffiti Magazine, sent to me as a lovely gift from our friend DJ Frederick Moe. Then we watched the documentary “Beautiful Losers” to learn a bit more about Kilgallen who features in the film with her husband Barry McGee, and a slew of other artists. Boy did watching that evoke all kinds of memories from my adolescence and young adulthood as a skateboarder, of the world of graffiti, punk music and hip hop. Memoires of watching Gummo (Harmony Korine was in the film for better or worse). I was still coming up as a teenager when all of these people were making a scene of so much that was to be an influence on me. 

Margaret Kilgallen was a born again folk artist who combined graffiti with her love of traditional sign painting styles, freight train monikers, Appalachian music, and letterpress work. She grew up around bluegrass music, played banjo herself, and used the name Matokie Slaughter in many of her works. Once an artist references another artist, it always gives me a reason to explore. I have always loved the practice of listening upstream and reading upstream. When there is someone whose work I really like, I want to see what influenced them, and I will read and listen to things they say shaped them as a creative person. When I was in my twenties, that person was David Tibet. I loved, and still love, Current 93, but at the height of my obsession with Tibet’s music I went and listened to and read as many of the things he talked about loving as I could. That got me into Thomas Ligotti, Shirley Collins, the Incredible String Band and so many others, like the venerable weirdo Count Stenbock. The Nurse With Wound list is famous in a similar way for long time heads hunting down obscure music. When there is a writer who I really like, I try to do the same and see what they read, what influenced them, who they liked the best. What they touted as the crème de la crème. Following the influence of one artist to another, in whatever medium, is just a kind of standard practice for me, and it without question leads to finding the good stuff.

I’m writing about Matokie Slaughter today, one because it’s been in the back of my mind to do so since I first learned about her, and two, because she was infecting my dreams. I woke up with the name ringing through my head the morning I started this piece, and I knew it was time to hit the keyboard with her in mind. I’ll circle back around to Margaret Kilgallen in another entry.

Matokie Worrell Slaughter was born in the farming community of Pulaski, Virginia on December 21st, the day of the winter solstice. It makes sense to me because she was light bringer to a world of traditional music. She was born to a family with its ears bent towards music and she was born into a big family. Big families often have “big ears” because in that time period, people had to make their own entertainment and music was one of the cheapest and most satisfying ways to do it.

By the 1930s, as a teenager, she was playing her banjo on the local radio station, with her kin. A lot of folks who heard over the air thought she was a man, because she was bit mic shy with her voice, a lady of few words over the air. I get the feeling she just liked to hammer away at the banjo. By all accounts, Slaughter could saw a mean fiddle too.

In searching for the answer to the question “who was Matokie Slaughter?” I had to investigate the world of old-time music players, record collectors and boosters. This brought me to the work of Charles Faurot who helped the larger world discover Slaughter in the midst of the folk revival that had begun in the fifties and sixties.

Now who was Charles Faurot, you ask? He was another banjo player and music fanatic who liked to collect 78 rpm records of hillbilly music. Faurot was born on October 3, 1935 in Midlothian, Virginia but had moved to New York where he worked at a Manhattan bank. That’s the kind of work I expect makes you appreciate folk music even more, after dealing with the money of citified riffraff all day long. His obsession led him to becoming a song collector when he traveled back to Virginia to record rip roaring banjo riffs for many albums of music for the County Record label started by David Freeman.
​
Faurot recalls how he met David Freeman, who was a serious collector, booster, and historian of bluegrass and old-time sounds: “I was married, working for a major bank in Manhattan, living in Brooklyn. I was buying tapes of 78s from Dave Freeman (of County Recordings) but hadn’t met him. One nice Sunday morning I’m going for a walk, out to get the paper. As I’m walking by a rowhouse, the apartment on the first floor had its window open and I could hear someone playing the dobro. So I stopped and…I couldn’t reach the window but said; Hey in there, I hear you playing the dobro. I like that kind of music. Can we get together? And the guy comes to the window and says: We just got out of bed. Why don’t you come back in a couple of hours? So I did and that guy was Bill Vernon.”

Now who is Bill Vernon, you ask? He was the New York son of a corporate tax attorney. He also happened to share the love for this style of music. His father had a career as a lawyer all planned out for his son, who he wanted to follow in his footsteps. Who knows? It might have happened if his son had never turned on the radio and had a chance encounter, a fated encounter, with the music of Flatt & Scruggs. He scrounged his way through a bit of college, and ended up working as a clerk on Wall Street, somewhat in the shadow of his daddy’s line of work, but it was only to support his habit of collecting hillbilly 78s. Record collecting sure is habit forming, a kind of sickness that hardly sleeps and never stops.
Music is a gateway drug, and Vernon soon moved on from just collecting, to writing about bluegrass for the British rag Country News and Views. It didn’t stop there. Music needs to be shared like it’s the gospel, and he got himself a radio gig on the Pacifica station WBAI (home to other great programs like the hacker stalwarts of Off the Hook). It was a great place for him to showcase his growing collection of music. This set him up to get yet another gig writing for Billboard magazine, where he helped them compile the weekly country music chart. He was a busy man, all while moonlighting on Wall Street to pay the music bill. If you are a collector, it’s a bill that can make it difficult to pay the water bill and the electric bill. It might have also had something do with any bills he may have had for alimony. His love of music had, in his reckoning, cost him three marriages.
 So Faurot had met this cat and got to be friends with Bill Vernon and his first wife Mary. Bill was in on the scene there in New York and introduced Faurot to David Freeman, who then started taking his new friend to concerts organized by Loy Beaver. Beaver was another music fan who had to work day gig to support his habit. In his case, he was a mortician and one of his claims to fame was the distinction of being the man who embalmed Franklin Roosevelt. 

Come November of 1964, Charlie got the opportunity to record the music of Wade Ward from Independence, Virginia. Ward had previously been discovered and recorded by John Lomax, the father of the folklorist Alan, after he’d discovered him at the Galax Fiddlers Convention in 1937. Alan went on to record Wade Ward as well, getting him on tape several other times at the end of the thirties and into the forties. It must have been something for Faurot to meet these storied and feted players.

The next summer Faurot himself made the pilgrimage to the Galax Fiddler’s Convention and he had his tape recorder with him capturing the old time sounds of George Stoneman, Kyle Creed, and Fed Cockerham. They all had different styles, but they all sounded so good, he wanted to get the music out on vinyl and approached David Freeman with the idea. Freeman thought it was a good one and the project went ahead. Freeman even got Bela Bartok’s grandson to do the mastering on the tapes.

In 1967 Charlie headed back to Galax, this time with Richard Nevins. They rented a house in town to use as their base of operations on their mission to record. Everyone who was anyone with a banjo dropped in to record: Kyle Creed, Dan Tate, Tommy Jarrell, Oscar Jenkins, Fred Cockerham, Gaither Carlton, Sidna Meyers, Esker Hutchins, Oscar Wright, Willard Watson and Matokie Slaughter. Faurot and Nevins were thus able to make their own link in the chain for reviving old-time music, and the first record of this material came out in 1965 on County Records, simply called “Clawhammer Banjo”.

​Matokie’s hit number, “Big Eyed Rabbit” features on the later album “More Clawhammer Banjo Songs & Tunes From The Mountains” from 1969. This one also features her version of “Stillhouse.” It might be something you’d want to sip a bit of shine while listening to. All of these traditional tunes, she’d picked up from listening to her father play music, songs passing from generation to generation.

From my digging, it seems that when the banjo material recorded by Faurot eventually got re-released on CD in the form of a three-volume set simply called “Clawhammer Banjo.” Faurot recorded and put out a ton of other records for County, and it’s possible some of the other material comes from those compilations.

With all this looking around for traces of Matokie Slaughter, I’m not much further in knowing who she was as a woman, as a Virginian, as a person. I do know she liked to participate in all kinds of musical get togethers, workshops and festivals and that she later formed the band Matokie Slaughter & The Back Creek Buddies. Her sister Virgie was involved with that project as was Alice Gerrard. Their only release was on cassette, an album called Saro in 1990. Luckily for us Alice Gerrard has a bandcamp page and she put the album up there, where it has also been re-released on CD (for all you collectors out there).

Now who is Alice Gerrard, you wonder? For her efforts as a musician and old-time music booster she was nominated for a Grammy in 2015 and inducted into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame in 2017. (Bill Vernon the son of the tax collector was another Bluegrass Hall of Famer, honored for his radio and writing efforts.) Gerrard plays guitar, fiddle and banjo, and worked as a duo with the late singer and songwriter Hazel Dickens as the Strange Creek Sisters. They put out four albums on Rounder and Folkways and their influence pushed bluegrass deeper into mainstream country when Emmy Lou Harris took up their arrangement of “Hello Stranger.” At the time, Gerrard and Dickens had just made history as the first women to record a bluegrass album (as opposed to just appearing on compilations put together by song collectors).

As I mentioned at the beginning, I first got hip to Slaughter reading about the work of Margaret Kilgallen, who had started putting up a Matokie Slaughter moniker on freight trains as a homage to her banjo playing hero. Kilgallen fictionalized, or folklorized her in her other art work.

Our daughter had given the name of our cat Tokie, because she looks like a rabbit (she had lost her tail when she was a kitten). She tells me that “Tokki” is Korean for rabbit. I think it’s a nice synchronicity that the song Matokie became most famous for is “Big Eyed Rabbit.”

Slaughter died just over a week after her eightieth birthday, on the last day of the previous millennium, December 31, 1999.

​This was the world Matokie Slaughter was a part and parcel of. I wish I could find out even more about her. In the meantime, at least I have her music to listen to as I ask the question, “Who was Matokie Slaughter?”

As I promised in previous posts on the Songs of the Five Elements, and Songs of the Nine Planets, I am continuing the series with the music of the Zodiac -which will itself now become a series. There is no better place to start then Mary Lou Williams. 

Mary Lou William’s was born under the sign of Taurus. The sign of the bull is ruled by Venus, the planet of beauty, so it is no wonder she was able to hear the music of the constellations and transform them into her sensual and expressive modernist jazz composition, Zodiac Suite.

Born on May 8th, 1910 she was a child of Atlanta, Georgia but a product of the Midwest, growing up in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Playing piano was something of a survival strategy for Williams. Her hostile white neighbors liked to throw bricks at her house, but this animosity was alleviated when she started playing piano for them. Music really does soothe the savage beast. Perhaps it can even soothe the racist beast. By the age of six she’d graduated to playing parties, and by seven was dubbed “The Little Piano Girl.” I suspect even the infant Jesus smiled down on her playing, just as he did on the “Little Drummer Boy” because she later converted to Catholicism, but not before passing through an exciting life as a traveling performer and arranger for some of the great names in jazz history.   

This phase started at age twelve when she was swinging through the Orpheum Circuit chain of vaudeville and movie theaters. The nineteen-twenties were roaring and she got to see it from the vantage point of a precocious adolescent performer. She must have been a musician in a former life to come back into this one with her fingers ready and poised to channel the music of the spheres onto the black and white of her cosmic keyboard. In this time she moonlighted in Duke Ellington’s band the Washingtonians. Then, a few years later, while in Cleveland, she met her first husband, the saxophonist John Overton Williams. She followed him and his band the Syncopators back to his town of Memphis before hitching a wagon with him out west to Oklahoma where he’d been invited to be a part of Andy Kirk’s group, Twelve Clouds of Joy.

Something about this band and the number twelve must have followed her around for her life. Some quality about the number twelve must have resonated in her soul. After all, the twelve signs of the zodiac are numbered twelve, as are the apostles of Christ, of whom she later dedicated herself to. In numerology twelve is connected to the starry heavens, as suggested by the constellations. It is also the combination three (ternary logic, triolectics and the trinity) and four (the number of the directions and their elements).

​It wasn’t all easy listening for her out there in Tulsa. It wasn’t a smooth jazz ride. Any working musician knows there are hours of toil and other jobs taken just to keep the bread and bacon the table. She found herself hauling corpses for a local undertaker for a spell while her husband got to play. The band moved to Missouri, Kansas and there she found herself sitting in with them at last. Here her own compositions started to flow into the mix of Kirk’s repertoire. The song’s “Mary’s Idea,” “Roll ‘Em” “Little Joe from Chicago, and “Froggy Bottom” all came from her creative mind. 

​Her recording career promptly followed beginning in 1929 with arrangements for the group, and the following year she cut her own solo piano to wax with “Drag ‘Em” and “Night Life.” She was getting hot and the records started selling, opening new doors for her in the music world as her star rose to prominence. She became Kirk’s permanent second pianist, had solo shows lined up, and found herself sought after as an arranger by the likes of Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and Earl Hines. 

With fellow Twelve Clouds of Joy bandmember Dick Wilson she produced “In the Groove” in 1937. The cigarette companies were even lining up to work with her and she wrote “Camel Hop” to the delight of Turkish tobacco enthusiasts and sellers across the land. (I wonder if they paid her in camel cash.)

Benny Goodman at this point wanted to keep her under his wing, but she liked being able to be the queen of her own world, and work with whoever the muse directed her to. Around the same time, the muse, or at least cupid, had bailed on her marriage, and she left John Williams in 1942.

This might have something to do with why she quit the Twelve Clouds of Joy. Harold “Shorty” Baker also quit with her. The two were in a new relationship together. They hooked up with drummer Art Blakely, at least musically, and formed a six-piece ensemble. Six is half of twelve, a number of the sun, but this group didn’t stay out in the daylight long, and the band dissolved. Soon she had a showcase for herself as a member of Duke Ellington’s group, but that didn’t last terribly long either.

Planting herself in New York City she got a taste of the radio bug, hosting her own show on WNEW, a Class A clear-channel radio station that had begun operation in 1922. The aim of her show was instructive, to pass the torch and inspire younger musicians. Mary Lou William’s Piano Workshop is the kind of thing I’d like to hear on radio today. This corresponded with her role as a mentor at the time to heavyweights Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie. The jazz world was poised for bebop and she was right there when it happened. In an interview for Melody Maker the songstress recalls, “During this period Monk and the kids would come to my apartment every morning around four or pick me up at the Café after I'd finished my last show, and we'd play and swap ideas until noon or later.” As for the radio station, Boris Karloff would later ride the airwaves of WNEW in the following decade, with his 1950s children’s radio program. I bet there was nothing like cuddling up to Karloff’s voice as kid.

It was after this that Zodiac Suite poured out of her being. The zodiac is a common word for those of us interested in astrology and astronomy. But what is it exactly? The word comes from the ancient Greek, zōdiakòs kýklos (ζῳδιακός κύκλος), which means a “cycle or circle of little animals.” From there it went into Latin, zōdiacus, and then slipped into English. The zodiac can be considered as a belt around the Earth that extends about eight degrees north and south of the ecliptic, or the path of the movement of the sun around the celestial sphere. Because many of the constellations of the zodiac appear as animals or mythological figures, that’s how it got the name, circle of little animals. Not all of them are animals, but enough are to make it stick: Leo the Lion, Taurus the Bull, Pisces the Fish, Scorpio the Scorpion, Cancer the Crab are all examples.

In composing the Zodiac Suite she followed ancient tradition. Musicians have long sought to communicate the nature of celestial bodies through the medium of modulated sound waves. Her suite is one of the most successful and pleasing to the ears of our times. It rightly consists of twelve interconnected pieces, one for each sign. It starts with Aries and ends with Pisces, the same way the zodiacal year begins and ends with the Vernal Equinox, the point of its eternal return in spring.

The piece is as much modernist classical as it is modernist jazz. The year was 1945 and the whole midcentury thing was ready to burst. This music was a part of that, and the era can be heard when you listen to the original Asch recording. The music evokes those times so perfectly

The idea had first come to her in 1942 when she’d gotten hold of an astrology book and was inspired to write pieces for her musical friends. She had the first three written when she set about playing them on air at WNEW, and improvised the remaining nine. Al Lucas backed her on bass and Jack Parker on drums. Later she went into the studios of Asch Recording. Moe was always hungry for something new to press to record, and he championed Williams. She brought in Lucas and Parker to record the suite with her as a trio for Mr. Moe.

William’s work prefigured the later work of jazz and classical composers who sought to fuse the two together. The sound here is also distinctly American. Though it has twelve as a number, it has little in common with dodecaphonic music. There may be some influence, but it is slight, and while she liked the trio Asch recording, she wanted to do up Zodiac Suite with an orchestral backing and she started to re-sculpt the pieces into that for such a format.

 At the time she was in a relationship with Milton Orent. Now who is Milt Orent, you ask? Milt was a double bass player who’d received a classical musical education and had a deep knowledge of twentieth century composition. He worked as a studio musician and arranger for NBC radio. And while Williams was with Orent he played her the music of Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, and probably some other cats who’d gone atonal. Orent gave Williams his input when she recast the suite for a large ensemble. For her own part, she put in more opportunities for the players to improvise, prefiguring the scores of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen where certain segments are left up to the players intuition. Still, Zodiac Suite doesn’t sound European at all, but clearly American, as each piece jaunts through the nature of each constellatory sign.

Her general blueprint did remain and most of the pieces are dedicated to people who were born under a particular constellation. She dedicated “Aries” to Billie Holiday and Ben Webster while “Taurus” was for Ellington. Her lover Shorty Baker got “Gemini” while Lem Davis was given “Cancer.” A surprising number of influential jazz musician are born under the sign of “Libra” and she dedicated it to Art Tatum, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. The rest of the signs follow suites with the luminaries of the age.

This version was first performed at the Town Hall in New York City on New Years Eve, 1945. A couple of obstacles threw themselves in the way and part of the show was bungled, leaving Williams sick for a week. This kind of thing can happen to a dedicated artist. Meanwhile the tapes for the recording went missing and it ended up being bootlegged around in Europe.

​A number of recordings now exist including the first trio version on Asch. Aaron Diehl and the Knights have meanwhile recorded a smashing version, just out in 2023, of the orchestral/big band version. This recording is more in line with the modernist vision she had when revising it for the concert hall, and the shades of modernity in classical music are foregrounded a bit more here, than on other recordings. 

The music life can be a hard life. Everyone knows about the rock and roll casualties lost to drugs. The jazz casualties are just as great, and heroin had long been a part of its subterranean underworld. We know about the marijuana use in jazz circles, can understand it, even celebrate it by lighting up a spliff, as one may now do with full legality in many states. Yet the heroin was there all along, getting into the bloodstream of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Miles Davis among many others.

I don’t know if this was what was on her mind, but something snapped in Williams when she was on tour in Paris, France, 1954. She got up from the piano and that was it, for many years. She was done. Dizzy Gillespie’s wife Lorraine had turned to Catholicism, and Williams followed, converting and shifting the direction of her life, away from the musical service she had given her many fans, to service in the form of the Bel Canto Foundation she started to help the poor, to help poor musicians, and those suffering from the tragedy addiction so often brings its way. With the money shed earned in her career, and some gifts from friends, she opened a half-way house and thrift store in Harlem.

Charlie Parker died in 1955 and she stayed away from music after that for awhile, putting her energy into the new efforts she was making on behalf of those in need. Still, she became close to two priests who told her she could use her prodigious gifts in service to the creator, but it she wasn’t ready just yet to get back to the work destiny had in mind for her. Dizzy Gillepsie also encouraged to get back to composing at the piano. Nobody wanted her to quit playing.

Another priest named Father O’Brien ended up becoming very close with Williams and helped her as a manager in the 1960s. He even had a part in getting her to establish a new jazz club in Manhattan and she got swinging again. Gillespie had introduced her to Bishop John Wright, from Pittsburgh. With his clerical help she went back to the town where she’d first performed and started the Pittsburgh Jazz Festival.

Williams had long had the gift of teaching and Wright got her a gig as a teacher at Seton High School. Her mind had turned by this point to the sacred implications of music in worship. She was commissioned by the church to write the music for a mass and it became the first ever mass done in the style of jazz, the Pittsburgh Mass of 1964. It ended up being released by Folkways as Mary Lou Williams or The Black Christ of Andes. It had developed out of a piece she wrote in honor of St. Martin de Porres, the patron saint of mixed-race people, barbers, innkeepers, public health workers, all those seeking racial harmony, and animals, for his feast day in 1962

​The work is a visionary masterpiece of spiritual jazz incorporating the blues, avant-garde idioms, and spirituals. She had found her way back to music, and continued to teach, stressing the importance of jazz history and its place in American life.

​Her work is well worth acquainting yourself with as you take another trip around the sun.

​​.:.  /|\  .:.   .:.  /|\  .:.    .:.  /|\  .:.

(We'll get to Stockhausen and his Tierkreis cycle next. I've touched on it before briefly in the previous link and also briefly in this Brief History of Space Music as well as an early essay of mine for Brainwashed.com: Music from Sirius: The Dreams of Karlheinz Stockhausen, which I can't find on the site anymore, but it looks like someone put up on Scribd -and also has been referenced in some academic papers - who knew!? 

“The Ultimate Rule ought to be: ‘If it sounds GOOD to you, it's bitchin’; if it sounds BAD to YOU, it’s shitty.’   The more your musical experience, the easier it is to define for yourself what you like and what you don’t like. American radio listeners, raised on a diet of _____ (fill in the blank), have experienced a musical universe so small they cannot begin to know what they like.”
― Frank Zappa, The Real Frank Zappa Book

Radio is a form of technological high magic. There is something about radio that stimulates the imagination; whether it’s tuning in to a distant station, or hearing something new that opens up a door onto a worthy topic of exploration, or transmits heavenly music, there is a mystery to radio that creates a strong pull over those who become enthralled by the medium.  Deindustrial fiction is already under radio’s thrall. Many of the stories I have read in Into the Ruins and New Maps have used radios, to the point where it has become one of the tropes of the genre. I think this points to the resilience of radio for our deindustrial futures, and I think it is worth exploring what the medium might yet become.

The word broadcasting comes to us from agriculture, and is used to describe a way for sowing seeds by scattering them over the soil rather than planting them in tidy rows. Radio is considered the first broadcast medium, for its distribution of audio to a dispersed audience over the airwaves. Though it is spread out wide as a form of mass communication, the effect of listening to radio is more one-on-one. Radio is intimate. Vibrations of a distant person’s voice are converted into traveling electromagnetic waves, then get reconverted into electrical impulses and come out of a speaker to vibrate the air within a listening space. It still remains magical to me after all these years.  To my mind, at its best, radio is on par with literature as a medium for sowing seeds in the imagination.  

Radio can be a literal theater of the imagination. Voices, sounds, and music edited together in a pleasing or thought-provoking way transport the listener to another region. Commercial interests and market forces have put a stranglehold on the medium, however. For the most part, you have to search out the community and college stations, the low-power stations, and even the pirate stations to find programs that are willing to break the self-inflicted format categories typical of the corporate ruled airwaves. Out on the fringes of the dial, and over the edge of what is normally considered acceptable in terms of what you are allowed to do, play and say at a station, are vast portions of imaginary spectrum that remain under-explored.
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These outlier shows are able to take risks that move the form forward without fear of reprisal. No one is paying them to be taste shapers by playing particular songs and they have no one to offend when exercising their freedom of speech because there are no image-sensitive sponsors paying the bills at these stations. These are directions radio would be free to go when the narrow bandwidth of acceptability imposed by advertising is removed. These under-explored areas are also ripe for retrovation. As our future societies downshift in response to being technologically overextended, the simpler decentralized infrastructure of radio will be due to make a comeback, ushering in its next golden age.   

The first golden age of radio was the decade between 1930 and 1940, with some bleed-over into the 1950s when television became the next big thing. Many of the shows that emerged during the golden age were born off the backs of successful vaudeville acts who brought their talent to the airwaves.  The popular pulp fiction of the time floated off its pages to be transformed into new iteration of theater: the radio play. This form of entertainment, where the voices of actors are heard but not seen, accompanied by incidental music and sound effects, is great for the imagination. Radio plays give free rein to listeners to visualize the story unfolding in their own distinct ways, similar to the way a story is imagined when reading. 

Television literally tells a vision of what is in the head of a director. It takes away the chance of visualizing settings and characters. People can have imaginative interactions with TV but in general not much is left up to the viewer.   The stars of the radio comedies, soap operas, and science fiction and mystery plays migrated to TV as it became ascendant. Radio still had power but the variety on individual stations began to dissipate as the concept of the format came in vogue. Stations began to narrow their focus. Some focused on news, sports, talk, talk, talk. Religious broadcasters thumped their bibles in the studio. Music shows and then entire stations diverged into pop, rock, jazz and classical. By the 1980s heavily formatted radio stations had become moribund and varicose. With large corporations owning multiple stations in cities across the country, the sounds of the old, weird America, as heard on regional programs, began to fade, while the sound of McGovCorp cut through any static from coast to coast.

Thinking of all the possibilities radio has, it is a real shame that broadcasting in its commercial aspect long ago fell into such a well-worn, predictable, and boring rut. The songs heard on the air when tuning across the dial have been played so many times there are almost no grooves left on the records. Nor is talk radio exempt. No matter what a person’s political persuasion may be, pundits on both sides of the aisle trot out the same plodding talking points time and again, no matter the issue at hand. It often makes me wonder what the heck the point of all the uninspired and placid propaganda blasted across the spectrum actually is; maybe it’s just a form of anti-thought to occupy the minds of hungry commuters and consumers. Broadcast radio as it now stands is a depreciated spectacle spread across the spectrum. It could be so much more.   

By the ’80s in America, there were few places to experiment with anything off the pre-approved, record-industry-friendly playlists or talking points. If you were lucky there was a college or community station somewhere on the dial where DJs and hosts could play and do what they wanted to. Listener-supported public radio offered some variety, for a time, and in some places pirate radio scenes were (and are) active in their electromagnetic resistance to the mandates of the FCC.  

Free-form radio came about as a result of the creativity of disc jockeys who followed their own muses, playing things of any genre or style, and mixing in talk and made-for-radio audio collages without being beholden to the dictates of a station manager—themselves beholden to corporate interests beholden to making money by selling time to advertisers. Big business doesn’t want views critical of any of their products aired on stations running their ads, thus limiting speech and song. The McGovCorp version of radio also put the kibosh on shows devoted to particular styles. Genres such as ambient, electronica, the heaviest kinds of metal, the most independent punk and rap, and those devoted to ethnic folk music are criminally neglected on the airwaves. This lack of variety often drives some to go pirate.   

​All the things that have normally been shunned to the far edges of the dial and overnight time-slots by McGovCorp are actually the things that could make radio great again. I think that time will come during the long descent as the high costs of television production and internet streaming skid into the obstacles of inflation, resource depletion, and waning public interest in spectacle and propaganda. 

Broadcast radio is only use of the technology. As a form of direct person-to-person communication, radio is a real can of worms. Not in that it causes problems, but that the worms so often wriggle forth to make claim after claim upon a person’s time. Radio is the kind of hobby that can easily become an obsession and take over every aspect of your life. In the coming years those saddled with this obsession may serve to keep distant communities stitched together, support their villages and cities in times of natural disaster or manmade emergency, and otherwise have a blast rag-chewing with people across the country and all around the world.  

Many new converts to the ham way of life come to it from the prepper subculture and already have a built-in mindset around the idea of short and long-term catastrophes affecting civilization. These are the people who are building stations, stashing equipment, and fortifying themselves with knowledge to pass on to others. Not every ham shares these views, of course, yet most are community-minded folk and many participate in public service events where back-up comms provide an extra safety net, should those used by police and fire departments fail. Some hams get involved in the allied hobby of storm spotting, relaying their on-the-ground weather sightings to broadcast stations to put together warnings for the wider public. Others are pure techies who spend little time transmitting and put all their efforts into soldering homebrewed gear on their workbench. Others just use radio as a way to be social and have long back-and-forth conversations and roundtable discussions with their fellows. Still other amateurs just want to chase DX (distant foreign stations) whose call signs they can put into their logbook and exchange QSL cards with (postcards, often with artwork, noting station details and specifics of the exchange). DX chasers often end up with binders and shoeboxes full of these cards from friends far away. Those are just a few cans of worms available to the amateur radio hobbyist. There are many more endeavors within the hobby should you choose to open the can. These include bouncing your radio signal off the moon, learning Morse code, and talking through dedicated ham radio satellites—while we still have them, before Kessler syndrome sets in. 

 The many modes available for hams to operate in also allow a great variety of potential use. Every radio signal that goes over the air is modulated in some way—by voice, by the on-and-off of a tone such as in morse code, or by digital methods that connect one computer to another over-the-air, sans internet. A ham with the right setup can send text messages using radioteletype, for instance. This toolkit can be deployed by those who wish to have a resilient web of communication when the existing web goes down (or becomes so much more full of crap than it is now that it is no longer worth the bother).

The existing ham radio network’s decentralized nature is a core strength. This decentralization will help ensure that it remains viable as society shudders, shutting other doors of connection. In the golden age of radio to come, independently self-organized hams will be able to conduct on-air meetings—called nets—to exchange critical information, news and messages.  If one station shuts down—for the night or even forever—others can remain on the air. If an important message needs to be relayed, the decentralized nature makes it more reliable, as there is no single point of failure.  It is even possible, as the long descent continues, for the dedicated hobbyist to set up their own radio-based Bulletin Board System (BBS) to send email and texts over the airwaves as long as basic computers can be kept running. 

 In the 1980s, in Czechoslovokia, behind the Iron Curtain, citizen access to home computers, and their experience with them, was very different than the West. The science of cybernetics had been dismissed by the Communists as bourgeois. When the Eastern Bloc started to gander how computers were being used for strategic military and science purposes, the authorities started to change their tune.  The Communist computer scientists had to roll their own systems without help from the bros in Silicon Valley. The machines they came up with would be unfamiliar to most Americans. As Communist products, most were not used as personal computers, but as collective computers for schools, institutions, and a few lucky clubs. Yet, as with so much else, western systems were smuggled in and personal systems cobbled together. An underground subculture coalesced around the exchange of information and programs, often in the form of zines and cassette tapes from amateur radio and computer clubs.  

Early computer programs were often stored on magnetic tape, reel-to-reels on the mainframes, and later cassettes. Engineers involved in the Nederlandse Omroep Stichting (NOS), a Dutch broadcasting organization, realized the data could be transmitted as audio over the air. They got the idea to create broadcasts where people could tape a game or program off the air and use it on their computer. Such programs gained a niche following in Europe in the early 80s. The tapes, and sometimes the radio signals, sometimes crossed over the Iron Curtain to be copied and traded. 

The sound of these programs will be familiar to those who remember dial-up or those with experience of ham radio data modes. Yet the practice of broadcasting computer programs over the air stopped in the mid- to late ’80s as computers sped up. The audio technique of encoding a program didn’t work for 16-bit computers. Cassette storage was out, and floppy disks were in.

A similar situation as existed in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War could come to the West during the course of its decline. As people are forced to adopt older technologies, a small hacker and ham subculture could trade programs by broadcasting them over radio, to be taped onto cassette and loaded into existing refurbished computers taken out of the basements and garages of avid geeks. Enthusiastic retrovators could do the work to get these vintage computer systems running. When combined with ham-radio-style BBS systems an older ’70s to mid-’80s style of radio-based internet could be kept up for at least some time during the long descent among the technically adept. Mimeographed zines could provide documentation of best practices. 

More recently some ham radio operators have also been known to repurpose wi-fi routers to create line-of-sight internet wireless mesh networks.  Cory Doctorow’s novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town features a punk rocker who runs a dumpster diving operation, salvaging computers to set up a mesh net in Ontario. In the interim before the internet itself is gone, such a mesh net may be useful to those who wish to escape the increasingly censorious panopticon of social media, but want to remain online and able to share files and information.  

Such alternets to the web as it is known today, and other imaginative uses of radio, await the energized hobbyist in its next golden age.

In the absence of a legitimate government, pirate radio is always an option.  The barriers to entry in the broadcasting game aren’t as expensive as one would think, especially if one has a more modest area they wish to cover. If they do their pirate radio on the shortwave part of spectrum they can reach a wider, though smaller audience, due to the propagation effects. Shortwave radio pirates remain active on the air year after year.

Piracy has existed since the beginning of radio broadcasting and there is no reason to think that it will ever stop as long as radio is around. Pirate radio has every reason to continue to proliferate. When certain groups of people and types of programming are kept from speaking their minds and playing the music and sounds related to their culture on the corporate blandwaves, it has even greater appeal. One way of looking at pirate radio is as a “Media Squat,” a term coined by media theorist Douglas Rushkoff. Instead of squatting in an empty unused house, the media squatter takes up residence on an unused frequency. Contrary to the popular conception of squatters, it isn’t a given that they will wreck the place they are squatting. Many make improvements. The same can be said of squatting on a radio frequency and putting out better programming than the stuff trickling down from the big guns. From my study of the current pirate radio scene it seems the FCC is much more liable to hunt down transmitters on the FM and commercial broadcasting portion of the spectrum than they are the sporadic efforts of shortwave pirate radio hobbyists.   

If you want to put your own station on the air without breaking the law, though, there is another option. Part 15 of the FCC regulations ruling electronic communication do allow for smaller FM and AM broadcasting with limited outputs of power and strict guidance for interference with other stations. But small is beautiful, right? These types of stations can potentially reach a block to a few blocks in a city neighborhood, and can be quite fun to run with a minimum of equipment and technical know-how. Certain patriotic groups have even advocated setting up networks of Part 15 stations. Synchronized to a single source, or daisy-chained together, they would play the same material, creating a low-tech network capable of blanketing larger areas—given enough stations. 

Pirate radio and Part 15 stations can be used to create healthier radio ecology than the current monocropping.

The radio hobby is such a can of worms that this column can only scratch the surface of all the possibilities that await those who jump down the rabbit hole into its wonderland. Everything from shortwave listening to radio scanning can be folded into the hobby. For folks who are a bit mic-shy and don’t want to talk on the air themselves, these latter two may be useful places to start. Shortwave listening is one tool for getting information from around the world when other sources fail. Even in times when there is no emergency or crisis, listening to news and views from other countries, hearing their music, and learning about their culture is an engaging past time, as is chasing DX. 
​
On the local front, having a scanner radio capable of picking up police, fire, aviation and other signals is a good way to keep tabs on what is going on in your community before the media picks it up and puts their spin on events. Having a scanner will be especially useful to monitor situations in events of civil unrest and natural disasters. I find scanning to be somewhat depressing, as listening to people get arrested or hearing another call to the fire department about an elderly person who has fallen isn’t always my idea of a good time. Yet the practice of listening in to this kind of radio traffic does have a definite use. If you enjoy trains or aviation, it’s pretty easy to pick up comms from rail yards and air traffic control. These are just a few of the doors that can be unlocked with a scanner. Those who become adept at scanning can end up being sleuths of the airwaves, tracking down frequencies and listening to government agents, utility companies, and private businesses all as a way of gathering information and signals intelligence.  

​CARRIER WAVES

In the next golden age there will be numerous ways to interact with radio, similar but different to how things are done now. Business as usual in the radio industry won’t be an option. The cracks in legacy media are already widening, and beneficial weeds are starting to claw their way through. With any luck these early colonizers will make things ripe for a bountiful media ecology that nourishes the soil of the imagination to regenerate the medium so its many untapped possibilities are open for new uses in a declining age. 

Local and hyperlocal broadcasting may once again rise up, giving voice to bioregional concerns and culture. On these shows a truly diverse range of programming could be encouraged. As television falls away actors could find a new home in the revitalized world of the radio drama. The home use of scanners can keep listeners informed of the goings on in their neighborhoods in times of quiet and emergency, allowing them to make up their own minds about events. On the national level, a smaller number of larger AM and shortwave stations could be used to tie the bonds of North America and other continents together. A robust ham radio scene, intertwined with the remnants of the hacker subculture, may give rise to an alternet web of radio based communications. And on these carrier waves the seeds of America’s next great culture may be broadcast across the land.

***

This article originally appeared in New Maps.

RE/SOURCES: 

American Radio Relay League (ARRL), <https://www.arrl.org/>. For those in the United States, this is a great resource for all things amateur radio, from getting licensed, to finding a club, to setting up your first ham station and getting on the air.  

DeFelice, Bill. Part 15 Broadcasting: Build Your Own Legal, License-Free, Low Power Radio Station. Self-published, 2016. < https://www.hobbybroadcaster.net/resources/free-part-15-radio-broadcasting-ebook.php> Bill DeFelice has put together a wonderful website at hobbybroadcaster.net devoted to Part 15 broadcasting, with many articles and resources to help people get started.

English, Trevor. “You Could Download Video Games From the Radio in the 1980s.” Interesting Engineering (website), Mar. 8, 2020. <https://interestingengineering.com/science/you-could-download-video-games-from-the-radio-in-the-1980s>

Finkelstein, Norman H. Sounds in the Air: The Golden Age of Radio. New York, N.Y.: Scribners, 1991.
HF Underground. <https://www.hfunderground.com/board/index.php> This site offers the description, “Shortwave Pirate Radio In North America And Around The World, And Other Signals That Go Bump In The Night.” HF Underground is more of a message board where people who listen to shortwave pirates post about what they hear. Active radio pirates have been known to hang out and lurk on the boards.
Lewis, Tom. The Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio. New York, N.Y.: Edward Burlingame Books, 1991. 

Maly, Martin. “Home Computers Behind the Iron Curtain.” Hackaday (website), Dec. 15, 2014. https://hackaday.com/2014/12/15/home-computers-behind-the-iron-curtain/

Philips, Utah. “Radio: The Story of Radio from Crystal Set to ‘Sandman the Midnight D.J.” < https://www.thelongmemory.com/loafers-glory-episodes> The episode in question is number nine of Loafer’s Glory, but any of Utah Phillips amazing slices of radio are worth taking the time to listen to.

Radio Society of Great Britain (RSGB). <https://rsgb.org/> Our friends across the pond tell us great things about RSGB. It is also open to international members. For those in the UK wishing to get licensed the RSGB will provide the relevant details. 

​Reitz, Ken, ed. The Spectrum Monitor. <https://www.thespectrummonitor.com/> A monthly online PDF magazine covering “Amateur, Shortwave, AM/FM/TV, WiFi, Scanning, Satellites, Vintage Radio and More.” Each issue is a hefty chunk of knowledge, history, how-to, and reports from radio active writers. 

For the past few months I’ve been a regular reader and occasional commenter on Ted Gioa’s substack The Honest Broker. Something I said on his recent post “Nine Observations on the Avant-Garde” caused quite a spark, as those comments, on music and on place, on geography, on the Midwest, caused quite a spark with other readers judging by the amount of “likes” and responses I got to the comments I made. It seems fitting that thoughts on noise music should lead to a meditation on the idea of a Rust Belt Renaissance, but so it goes.

I first started thinking about the idea of a revival of the Rust Belt in the spring of 2009 when John Michael Greer wrote his article “Rethinking the Rust Belt,” originally published on his peak-oil focused blog The Archdruid Report. 

As most of my readers know, I live in Cincinnati, and the idea of this area becoming a revitalized haven during the vagaries of climate change, gradual deindustrialization and attendant downshifting of the financialized economy was very appealing. As I have seen so much of things Mr. Greer has predicted come true in the decades I've been reading him, this remains so. I love my home town, the state I’m from, and the Midwest in general. I love other places too. I have family in Maine and my wife and I sometimes fantasize about moving there. I don’t know the exact contours of our future, but for the foreseeable portion of it, we are here to stay.  

The Rust Belt used to be a hopping place. In the mid-20th century we were coming into our own as a manufacturing economy, making cars, steel, and offering a plethora of services, trading American made goods abroad. In Cincinnati GE was one of the big companies, making plane engines, among other things. Families with one worker could bring home the bread, the bacon, and the butter, raising multiple little ones on a single paycheck. They'd even have some left over to take out their land boats onto the newly paved highways for vacations around the country. The kids could even buy some tchotchkes at the roadside attractions that dotted the landscape. It was a plentiful life even for the working class. Now the working class is oftentimes straight up homeless.

The closing down of the factories and relocation of labor to distant countries by the corporate powers sent these once powerful centers of productivity and culture here in the heartland into crumbling disarray. The same migrations that brought people up from the south to Detroit and elsewhere now caused them to move to other points and these places emptied out, many of the factories closed, and they became the playgrounds of graffiti artists, urban explorers and photographers looking for the perfect centerfold for their next piece of ruin porn.

This exodous happened some fifty years ago. The people who had made a life in the Midwest left when the opportunities were gone. They had to look out for themselves and their own after all. There is no blame. Many found work on the coasts in the seaports, receiving the goods back from overseas that they once were responsible for making to ship there. In the meantime the heartland began to rust, and like the Tinman from Oz, it remained in serious need from some tender care and drops of oil to keep its valves moving.

Yet now the Midwest and Rust Belt are becoming destination spots again as the failed social policies and expensive economies of the east and west coast put a good life out of reach for all but the elites. People who I know who moved away around the time I graduated high school in 1998 are now coming back in drove. These people couldn't wait to get out of Cincinnati for New York, Seattle, or Portland (Oregon, not Maine) are coming back, remembering all the good things about the area.

In the meantime my own neighborhood has become gentrified. A number of those doing the gentrifying are people who have left California. My wife and I have been in our neighborhood for over twenty years. It wasn’t all yoga moms and people pushing strollers with lattes when we got here. Our neighborhood was a mix of Appalachian working class folk, African Americans, gays and lesbians, and of course, artists and creatives. It followed the similar story we all know from our many lessons in gentrification. The artists and alternative types came and pioneered the run down neighborhood, put in some record stores, bars and coffee shops, and others started flocking to the microcultural mecca thus created.  That's why we were here. It was fun and funky, and there was diversity of both kinds of people and kinds of thinking. Now people are flocking to it from all the way on the other side of the country, and its less diverse. That has driven up the real estate costs, part of the same bubble that seems ready to burst all across the country, and bring down the rest of the economy with it. I couldn't move to my house if I sold it now. But relative to coastal dweller,  our homes are downright cheap. For someone coming here from LA, it’s nothing to drop half a million on a flipped house with good bricks and bones. We were lucky and got in when a house here cost less than a hundred grand (minus all the interest the bank got from us) and stayed put. 

In addition to neighbors from Californian, a stranger who was a reader of John Michael Greer’s blog got in touch with me last year to ask if I wanted to meet up for coffee. I did. It was kind of awkward but fun. He and his family had just relocated from California. He had some family connections here and they were looking to start a small farm somewhere outside the city. He was really enjoying it so far, and had mentioned part of the reason they came was how culturally chaotic and expensive things had gotten in his home state. 
  
Cincinnati has fared much better than our neighbors up north in Youngstown and Detroit, but those are coming back. Detroit had already been a destination for people with ambitions to go in, buy a really cheap house, fix it up with some elbow grease and get to work building a life and rebuilding the city, maybe with some urban farming thrown in for good measure. Some didn't even buy a house, but pioneered abandoned homes. And so the trend of inward migration from the east and west coasts continues. Part of it has to do with climate change too. Aside from risk of tornadoes and serious thunderstorms, we don’t have a lot of natural disasters in this part of the country. A bit of flooding during the heavy rain season of winter is now becoming more common along our river ways. But there are no wildfires like in California. We don’t have the same issues with regular ongoing drought either.

There are other advantages for people to come here though. We may not have the oceans, but we do have all kinds of rivers and the in the northern parts of the heartland, the Great Lakes -which according to esoteric tradition are poised to become the center of a future great civilization. Another advantage is the age of the cities here. Unlike cities further west, we were built before cars had come to dominate urban planning. Our neighborhoods were already established when walking and horse and buggy were the main ways of getting around, followed by street cars and short-line trains out to the suburbs where the wealthy magnates of industry established themselves. Our neighborhoods are very walkable, built on grids, and already densely built in many cases with older painted lady shotgun houses in rows (like ours) and beautiful Italinate architecture, as well as traditional classical and Art Deco style buildings in our city centers.

People like me who’ve had family here for a few generations don’t need to be convinced about the good life you can have in Cincinnati. But others are cozying up to the cheaper cost of living and the culture we have here. The museum, music, nightlife and art scenes are as fine as anywhere else. And that’s where this starts to tie back in with the avant-garde and the humanities in general.

I know so many people who left for the coasts in order to pursue a life in the arts. LA, San Francisco, NYC, Portland and Seattle, these were the places to go to meet “like minded” people and pursue the dream of making it as an artist, whether in the visual arts, music, writing, acting, what have you. One in particular did make it onto the national and international tier as a musician after moving to New York. He is the exception. Many others have had certain achievements in the arts  but not what can be considered continued commercial success. Not enough to "make it." But the lasting success of building a quality life has evaded quite a few of them and they have come back here, drawn by our many amenities. I'd also say they are drawn by the friendlier disposition of those of us in the Midwest (I heard the latter from two friends who had moved to Seattle, who described the people as standoffish and cold). Back in the early oughts people were talking about this migration from the inner cities of America to the coasts as the Brain Drain, and I resented it then, not least because friends I enjoyed conversing with and some making music with had left. Now I can look back and smile, but  not out of meanness. I stuck to my guns by staying here and through hard work we have managed to get out of debt, when many my age or older even, are starting over again when they come back. But all in all, I am happy they are back, and I welcome the newcomers. There is no blame. Together we can all retrofit the crumbling infrastructure and make something remarkable of these walkable neighborhoods.

In Ted Gioia’s article he cited a conference about the “crisis in the avant-garde” and Lucy Sante in particular who said, “An avant-garde needs a scene, and the cities are too expensive for scenes now. An avant-garde needs an excess of time, and that’s in short supply nearly everywhere.”

In point four of Gioia's article he says, "The avant-garde today is too much about grant-writing, and cozy relationships with the wealthy." I agree for those on the coast, but that wasn't my experience.

Cincinnati always had a small but mighty avant-garde music scene. The people who I looked up to when I was coming up in the nineties had roots in that going back to the punk, industrial and art music scenes of the seventies. It might have been on smaller scale than what was happening in NYC or San Francisco, but it also allowed us to forge our own way and remain scrappy. We weren’t tied to any of the big patrons or donors or institutions in the way the coastal elites were. 

Noise music in the Midwest came out of the feeling of this being a landscape of noise, of rusting factories. In many ways its in our bones. Trent Reznor, who is arguably the most recognizable of musicians working in the industrial genre was born in Pennsylvania and started making his brand of music in Cleveland where he rubbed elbows with the likes of Pere Ubu, the great art punk rockers. The noise in the environtment and the urban decay have gone hand in hand making the Midwest  a place where this kind of music has thrived.

As a commenter by the name of Kerem on the Honest Broker put it, “to locate the contemporary avant-garde, or at least one manifestation of it, perhaps you should shift your focus away from its traditional strongholds. Possibly the most electrifying performance I've ever witnessed was Aaron Dilloway and Victoria Shen (noise musicians from Ohio and the bay area, respectively) on a shared bill earlier this year in St Louis. St. Louis and other cities in the midwest / rust belt are home to thriving, highly localized noise and free improv scenes that operate almost entirely outside of the mainstream culture industry.” I’ve been to several shows in my neighborhood just this year from local and touring musicians myself, all put on completely underground, all put together under the rubric of the DIY ethic.

Thus those coming to the Midwest will have a certain freedom from the mainstream culture industry as another decisive bonus. What kind of music, art, writing and acting people want to do now is up in the air, but living in a place where it is cheaper to build a life, gives more of a possibility to living a frugal Bohemian art-life where less time can be devoted to a day job and just getting by, and more can be devoted to achieving individual and community visions if people are willing to do it DIY.

A Rust Belt renaissance won’t be achieved by art alone, however, but it won’t be achieved without art. As climate change, economic downturn, and limited energy supplies continue to put the pinch on the ability to outsource our lifestyles from overseas, low-tech and small scale industry will return to the Rust Belt as well. This will make the region a viable place for people starting families again and looking to get a home (after that bubble bursts). 

John Michael Greer nailed the nascent trend we are now beginning to see become fulfilled. As we proceed further we can also take to the heartland these words, “One of the implications is that transport costs will no longer be a negligible part of the cost of goods shipped over long distances. More energy-efficient transport modalities will tend to replace less efficient ones because they, and thus the goods they ship, will be more affordable; equally, diseconomies of distance will tend to outweigh economies of scale and foster the reemergence of regional economies. Among the likely beneficiaries of these changes are the towns that thrived best in an earlier, more regional economy — those that are well served by rail and water transport, surrounded by farming regions that don’t depend on irrigation, not too far from major markets, and provided with ample and inexpensive real estate for the factories and warehouses of a downscaled and relocalizing industrial economy.”

Away from the pernicious influence of the self-appointed guardians of culture and taste on the coasts, those born with the inclination to make and make do have many opportunities to put their own vision into action here in the Midwest. There will still be challenges as we adapt to the limits we can no longer rightfully ignore. There will still be challenges as we adapt to the consequences of bad past behaviors. All of this in turn can help create a resilient social and physical infrastructure. Both of these infrastructures are certainly in need of some retrofitting now. They could also use some retrovation. We should look back towards traditional ways of doing things and being together before the internet and streaming put such a vice grip on our social lives.  We need to have more “third places” where the seeds, buds and blooms of the Rust Belt renaissance will begin to form.

The Rust Belt is ready for its devoted old timers, returnees and new comers to join together and build up the book shops, cafes, bars, venues, galleries, breweries, urban farms, apothecaries, smithies, glass blowing studios, pottery barns, and wood shops and more all needed as we downshift from industrial culture to vibrant local life and bioregional communities.      

****

In other news my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory is now officially available in North America. US readers can find it on Bookshop.org here , Amazon.com here and fine bookstores everywhere.

I also had the honor of being interviewed by Neil Mason for his wonderful Moonbuilding magazine and substack of the same name. You can get the print issue of Moonbuilding from the Castles in Space bandcamp page, and read the full interview over in this issue of Moonbuilding.

The Radio Phonics Laboratory also received a very nice review from the wonderful Steve Barker in the September issue  487 of Wire Magazine, out on news stands now.  Be sure to check out the magazine if you get the chance, and Steve's great radio show, On the Wire. 

And over at Igloo Magazine there is a feature with my interview with ambient music pioneer Don Slepian, material from which went into the Rad Lab.

To celebrate the US launch of the book, I've created the Rad Lab Vox Machina mix of songs utiiizing vocoders and text to speech software. 

For the most part, in the discussion of dodecaphonic music, Joseph Matthias Hauer has been little more than a footnote to the work of Arnold Schoenberg. Here, Schoenberg may be seen as little more than a footnote to Hauer. Even if Hauer was the first dodecaphonic composer, most who followed afterwards did not follow after him, but after Schoenberg, who left his stamp and extraordinary influence on the subsequent development of serialist technique. Schoenberg is therefore is another central player in this game of tones.
           
​But before we get to the music, we need to take a look at what was happening in the world of painting in Austria at the end of the 19th century and in the beginning of the 20th. Schoenberg was also an accomplished painter, and the two worlds had considerable overlap. 

​In 19th century Austria the art scene was dominated by the Academy of Visuals Arts from the Kunstlerhaus, a massive piece of architecture in the style of an Italian villa designed by August Weber that was built as a gift from Emperor Franz Joseph to the artists of Austria, whereafter it became a major exhibition space. Historicist painting held sway within the Kunstlerhaus, and as the 1890s rolled in resentment began to creep into the younger generation who felt their expression was being held under the thumb of the old school. When these fuddy-duddy’s refused to put up works by the younger generation, the youth went into revolt. 

Barred from having their work shown in the state palace of the muses, they did what later generations of young people did when their wills were thwarted: they broke with the stifling traditions of their elders and started their own movement. It was 1897 and Gustav Klimt led the revolt. He was joined by a number of graphic artists, sculptors and architects who included Josef Hoffman, Koloman Moser, and Otto Wagner.

This new group was variously called the Secession, or the Jungenstil, a German term for Art Nouveau. Within the movement were many artistes of various skill. Richard Wagner’s notion of the “gesamkunstwerk” or total work of art had fired their imaginations. They held that one discipline was not more important than another and they united in the cause for the unity of arts, for their combination and synthesis. Besides uniting the arts, they had other aims which included reviving the decorative arts which would allow for beauty to permeate living spaces and life. They wanted to have dialogue with their contemporaries outside of Austria, and they wanted to be a thorn in the side of the Vienna Association of Visual arts and establishmentarian art salons.

​But if they were to be considered serious, they needed their own space. To this end they found an ally in the mayor who gave them a plot of land. The generosity of steel tycoon Karl Wittgenstein, father of the famous philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, gave them the financial backing needed to build a temple of art that would be a more than worthy rival to the Kunstlerhaus.

 Above the entrance to their building was their motto, “Der Zeit ihre Kunst. Der Kunst ihre Freiheit” (To every age its art, to every art its freedom). Below this were sculptures of the three gorgons, Stheno, Euryale, and Medusa, here representing painting, sculpture and architecture. These gorgons were used to ward off the profane, to ward off the philistines. Amazon and Theseus flanked the door, accepting those who were brave enough to enter.

The group also started up an arts journal named Ver Sacrum (“Sacred Spring”). Hermann Bahr, a playwright, director, critic and otherwise member of the Austrian literati, wrote in the journal, “Our art is not a combat of modern artists against those of the past, but the promotion of the arts against the peddlers who pose as artists and who have a commercial interest in not letting art bloom. The choice between commerce and art is the issue at stake in our Secession. It is not a debate over aesthetics, but a confrontation between two different spiritual states.”

The Sacred Spring referenced by the journal is not the same as the one at Castalia. It is better understood as a practice of specifically ancient Italian paganism. The sacred spring was a ritual traced back to the Sabellic tribes. When things were going bad, they would consecrate livestock and harvest produced gathered between the beginning of March and the end April (and sometimes even from the whole year) and sacrifice it to one of their deities, often Mars. In addition to animal sacrifice, it is probable that humans were also sacrificed. Later, as the age of human sacrifice wound down, sending the young children who had been devoted to Mars off on their own into foreign lands was substituted in the place of their ritual killing, and they would leave their communities at around the beginning of their twenties. The gods were thought to protect them as they left their natural territory for the border. When they reached their destination, this group set about to expel the original inhabitants or force them into submission. They would then make their own home there.

The fact that Vienna Secession named their journal after this ancient practice relates to their own voluntary expulsion from the Kunstlerhaus and the establishment of their own artistic settlement. In effect, the Vienna Secession can be seen as the sacrifice of the young to build a new community outside of the place where things had grown stagnant. Soon, when the building was opened, and the journal was circulating they were in a position to host exhibitions of their own work and invite their neighbors from across Europe to join them. The transition into atonal composition can be seen as a similar secession, moving further away from the strictures of the past with their tonal centers, to what Schoenberg called “the emancipation of dissonance.”
​
Arnold Schoenberg, the poster child of dissonance and future father of the Second Viennese School,  was born in 1874 (about nine years before Hauer) into a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna. His father worked at a shoe store while his mother taught piano. He took counterpoint lessons from his future brother-in-law, the composer Alexander Zelminsky, but beyond that, he was mostly a self-taught composer. He earned a living in his early twenties by orchestrating music for operettas, these perhaps best being thought of as operas lite. In his free time Schoenberg started composing his own pieces, such as Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) from 1899. This is considered his first significant work, and he later rendered an orchestral version that became a favorite among his listeners. Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss were among his early boosters and recognized his prodigious talent. Mahler even went so far as to take on Schoenberg as something of an apprentice, even as Schoenberg sauntered away from tonality and into a musical language the elder composer found incomprehensible. 

​In October of 1901, Schoenberg married Mathilde Zelminsky, the little sister of his counterpoint teacher. The couple had two children together before the artist Richard Gertsl entered the scene in 1907, striking a chord of disruption in Schoenberg’s harmonious family. 

 Gertsl appears to have been something of a handful in his early years. He couldn’t hack it at the prestigious Piaristengymnasium school in Vienna, and was kicked out as a disciplinary measure. Yet Gertsl showed promise as a painter and was accepted to study under Christian Griepenkerl at the Academy of Fine Arts. Griepenkerl was a man with a reputation for being a cantankerous curmudgeon and took a classical view to the tradition of painting. His area of focus was on mythical themes and allegory. A number of his students thought his ideas were outdated. Egon Schiele was among them, and though Schiele was appreciative of Gustav Klimt and Art Nouveau, he went on to help found yet another crew of artists, the Neukunstgruppe (New Art Group) which was in part a retaliation to Griepenkerl. To this day, historians most remember Griepenkerl for his rejection of Adolf Hitler’s application to attend the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. They also remember him for being the guy Schiele rebelled against.

Gerstl was rejected by his teacher who proclaimed of his student, “The way you paint, I piss in the snow.” But Gerstl didn’t find a home in the Vienesses Secession either. He thought their work was as high minded as the old guards was rigid. So he did his own thing and explored his own capacities, foregoing further training and apprenticeships, for two years, before studying with a few other teachers, situations which soon fell apart again.  

  Gertsl liked to hang out with musicians more than his fellow painters, and attended the concerts of Schoenberg and Zelminsky. Schoenberg was something of a painter himself, and Gertsl gave him some instruction. The two became so close that Gertsl moved into the same apartment building as the Schoenberg’s. While there he painted portraits of their family, including the woman who would become his lover, i.e., Scoenberg’s wife. He also painted her brother, her husband, and the children.  Composer Alban Berg also sat for his visage to be captured in paint. Gerstl’s style and use of pastels has been considered a precursor to German Expressionism. 

Mathilde Schoenberg was six years older than him and soon the lines between friendship and something more became blurred as they engaged in an affair, a lot of suffering ensued. When Mathilde left to travel to Vienna with Gertsl for the summer in 1908, Schoenberg was sent into a crisis.

Schoenberg had already been working on his Second String Quartet when she ran off with her paramour.  Spurred on by pain, he started to experiment in more depth with atonality, the first glimmer of which was seen in the inversions used in his Transfigured Night. The second-string quartet oscillates between tonality and atonality, showcasing his growing conviction to break away from the established norms of western music. He also featured a soprano singer in the quartet, which was a highly unusual move for the time. The lyrics were a setting of the German Symbolist and mystical poet Stefan George from his book published in 1907 The Seventh Ring. Schoenberg wrote of this that, “I was inspired by poems of Stefan George, the German poet, to compose music to some of his poems and, surprisingly, witho[1]ut any expectation on my part, these songs showed a style quite different from everything I had written before. … New sounds were produced, a new kind of melody appeared, a new approach to expression of moods and characters was discovered."

“I feel air from another planet,” George had written. Those words, it turns out, were also picked up and used as the title for a Stereolab song.

It doesn’t get more mystical than the final sung lines, translated into English as: 

“In a sea of crystal radiance— / I am only a spark of the holy fire /I am only a whisper of the holy voice.”

He dedicated the finished work to his beloved wife.

All this suffering Schoenberg endured seemed to open him up to the further break with tonality. Gertsl however didn’t survive the affair. Already on the fringes, he had become further ostracized by his few musician friends. When Mathilde went back to her husband in October, he became distraught and committed suicide the following month. He was only twenty-five.

Schoenberg also managed to squeeze a short musical drama out of these harsh experiences. The result was Die glückliche Hand (The Hand of Fate), a drama in four acts. It had some similarities to Erwartung which he had written the previous year, a one-act mono drama that had been influenced by his reading of the book Sex and Character by Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger, which made a claim that all people are composed of a mixture of male and female substance. Beyond that it raised some arguments that would now seem contentious about gender roles and the nature of genius. Slighted as he was by his wife’s infidelity, it seems Schoenberg took these ideas to heart, specifically that it is the nature of the male aspect of the psyche to strive towards becoming a genius. In doing so they must give up sexual expression in favor of the love of the absolute or God. Perhaps this is why Weininger too, committed suicide.

            In the summer of 1910 Schoenberg devoted himself to writing. What came out of his pen was one of the twentieth centuries most influential books of music-theory, his Harmonielehre (Theory of Harmony). By this time Schoenberg had taken on musical pupils in the form of Alan Berg and Anton Webern. Berg moved in the gilded circles of fin de siecle society, and Webern was of minor nobility with a blue bloods education. It seemed everyone was forming a school or  a clique, and so the Second Viennese School was born by Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, with the latter becoming its central autocrat in later years.

            Schoenberg and his disciples preferred the term pantonality to atonal. I kind of get that. Pantonality has a positive vibe whereas atonal sounds negatory. Music with no key. Keys had tonic. But with pantonality, all notes should be a note unto itself. If the word pantonality had come into greater use, the music itself might have been adopted with less hate. And people did hate it. Premieres of new works were lively events in those days and people weren’t afraid to let their views about a piece be heard, even while it was still being played.  In some respects this was a marketing issue. The word atonality sounds a bit anal, while the word pantonality is rather all embracing, and didn’t demarcate such a dividing line between the musical past and the future.

            Schoenberg loved the music of the past. He saw himself as a pivotal figure, but he didn’t see his role as a severer of past Western musical traditions. He wasn’t out to destroy. Twelve tone theory was an expansion of what was already there in the musical tradition.

​            When he wrote the melodrama Pierrot Lunaire it had no key center. He also mined the musical past for forms, using the passacaglia, for instance, to ground his work in tradition even as it broke new ground. He also mined the musical past for forms, using the passacaglia, for instance, to ground his work in tradition even as it broke new ground. The work is scored for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and a vocalist. This set-up became known as the Pierrot ensemble and was used by a number of other composers afterwards. Pierrot focused on numerology in the composition, as this was a subject he was obsessed with. Seven note motifs are used throughout, and with the addition of the conductor, seven people are making the music. The lyrics come from a setting of  a cycle 21 poems by Albert Giraud, translated from the Belgian to German by Otto Erich Hartleben. 21 is a multiple of seven, but it is not the only instance of numerology. Each of the poems is made up of thirteen lines and the first line of each poem occurs three times, with the repetitions happening on the seventh and 13th lines. Stylistically, he used the “drop out” method common in recording artists -letting one instrument take a break so another can come to the fore. It also employs sprechstimme, or speech song, a cross between speaking and singing.

After the artistic success of this piece, Schoenberg wanted to keep going in a similar direction, but he didn’t know what way to go to keep moving forward. WWI intervened, and he spent the intervening years putting together his musical society. Contemporary composers were being vilified by the public for not playing things they happened to like, for daring to go outside the bounds of traditional tonality and music structure. To remedy this and continue to give those who did appreciate the new music a place to hear it, he founded the Society for Private Musical Performances in 1918. This was to be a forum where composers could work with musicians who were willing to play these pieces for a small audience outside the dictates of commercial and popular appeal. As anyone who has been to a noise or experimental music show, at least in the midwest, has known, the situation remains the same. A small dedicated audience coming to hear the works of new music makers.

In 1926 wrote an article that was to become something of a banner for the disciples he had begun to gather around him in the Second Viennese School. Titled “Opinion or Insight?,” he wrote about dissonance as becoming a tool for the emancipation of humanity.

When looked at in one way, dissonance became a factor in the breakdown of society. If the power of music is conceded than the music itself, then dissonance becomes a means for breaking down power structures.
Dane Rudhyar wrote in his book Dissonant Harmony: A New Principle of Musical and Social Organization, that “Dissonant music is thus the music of true and spiritual Democracy; the music of universal brotherhoods; music of Free Souls, not of personalities. It abolishes tonalities, exactly as the real Buddhistic Reformation abolished castes into the Brotherhood of Monks; for Buddhism is nothing but spiritual Democracy.”

Jazz composers like Duke Ellington and Sun Ra made use of atonality. Duke Ellington wrote that, “That's the Negro's life ... Hear that chord! Dissonance is our way of life in America. We are something apart, yet an integral part.”

Schoenberg continued to compose tonal pieces throughout his career. It was only the school of serialism as came through Anton Webern that became dogmatic in applying twelve tone techniques to all aspects of the composition. Schoenberg used his technique more as a way to come up with new ideas. He didn’t necessarily stick with everything just by the rules. He allowed his ear and artistic intuition to help guide him through the path of pantonality. In this respect, his use of twelve tone techniques could be considered in some ways akin to the use of the cut-up method by writers such as William S. Burroughs, and especially those who followed. The cut-up didn’t need to be used exactly as it came out. It could be considered as a creativity tool that allows for a jumping off point for writing. In the same way, using the twelve tone technique for Schoenberg was a way to get into a composition. It was his students who at once both expanded on its potential and looked at it with an unnecessarily strict dogmatism,  much stricter than he himself had ever intended.

There is also a misconception regarding Schoenberg. People seem to think that after he discovered his version of dodecaphonic music, that he completely abandoned tonality. It just isn’t true. He wasn’t afraid of tonal music, and he used it throughout his work. Atonality was just another tool on his composers toolbelt, even if it was one of the big tools. Another difference between the serialists who followed Schoenberg and his own work was the way they drove audiences away from the concert hall. Schoenberg had wanted to mend the fences between the audience and the composer, even if that meant keeping some people out of the concert hall, as in his Society for Private Musical Performances. That society had only been formed because of the aberrant disruption of their concerts by people who were opposed to the sounds.
 
Schoenberg eventually fled Europe for the United States as the Nazi’s came to power. He had gotten baptized as a Lutheran, but not because he had a deep seated conviction to be a Christian, but more as a political chess move to keep him somewhat safe. Whatever safety his baptism conferred didn’t last. His music was deemed degenerate. Later, he reaffirmed the faith he had been born into.
In California, Schoenberg became good friends with Gershwin and the two composers would often play tennis with each other. He continued to teach and write new music. One of his students happened to be John Cage.

Schoenberg was very superstitious, especially with regards to the number thirteen, which he had a strong fear of. He would consult astrologers about his fate whenever the last two digits of a year were the multiple of 13. He happened to have been born on September 13th and he died on July 13th of 1951. This latter may have been brought on by his triskaidekaphobia, or fear of thirteen. Furthermore it was a Friday the 13th that he died on in his 76th year. From a numerological standpoint the age 76 can be reduced to the number thirteen by adding seven plus six. The Italian composer Gioachino Rossini also died on a Friday the 13th, which by the 19th century had begun picking up connotations of being an unlucky day.

***

A new essay of mine, For the Love of the Amateur, has been published in the inaugural issue of the journal Symphonies of Imagination, edited by John Engelin. 

Symphonies of Imagination is a magazine that imagines a realistic, hands-on Tomorrow... it explores our exciting, naive and inspiring futures that await our society here on this planet. It does so through stories of fiction and reports of facts to paint a picture that leaves you with the inspiration and the practical knowledge to go out and contribute to this amazing journey.

After all, it is a manual for tomorrow.

In print and digital, featuring 10 beautiful imaginative stories, 2 essay and 3 poems, more details are below:

• Story: Where Giants Will Stand by Spencer R. Scott
• Story: Aloft by Anthony St. George
• Poem: Ordinary Ways by Marianne Brems
• Poem: In the Rubble of Bable by J. Kramer Hare
• Story: Unemployable by Gustavo Bondoni
• Normal People
• Story: A Secure Environment by Glenis Moore
• Poem: Happiness by Richelle Lee Slota
• Story: Amortal Riche by M.C. Schmidt
• Story: Merrily, Merrily, Merrily by Aldrian Estepa
• Story: Resurrection by Brett Abrahamsen
• Story: Follow the Carrot by Eddie Moore
• Story: Those in Darkness by Laura J. Campbell
• Story: Midnight in Turtleland by Clement Tyler Obropta
• Essay: For the Love of the Amateur by Justin Patrick Moore
• Essay: Imagining Differently in Order to Act by Ariel Kroon
• Open Source Corner

With illustrations by Gregor Schop, Aly Elsayed and Elmakhina.
The cover illustration was done by Cindy Tran.
Get your copy here: ​https://symphoniesofimagination.com/issue1/

Today I want to tell you about my favorite step-child: WAIF, Cincinnati. I’m for real about that. The for-real, legal name, of the organization is “WAIF, the real step-child radio of Cincinnati.” It is fitting for a station that can be considered to be part of Generation X to also be a step-child. The station was conceived in the early seventies, with organization taking place for it in 1973 and it first went on the air in 1975 (that’s what makes it Gen X). The only thing that would have made the name better is if it was the real red headed step-child. Sometimes, when you are involved in community radio, it feels like you are a red-headed stepchild.

I first remember tuning in to WAIF during the summer after the sixth grade. This would have been around 1991. I loved listening to the radio, but it was usually limited to WEBN at that time, as they played the hard stuff. Heavy metal was one of the first subcultural forms of music I flocked to. My older sister Margaret was into metal, as was my cousin Matt Frantz, who now makes post-industrial experimental music (https://mattfrantz.bandcamp.com/music). The older kids on the street I grew up on were mostly westside hoods and they listened to metal. But I start to drift into more alternative sounds whenever I heard them. That was often enough as just then the heyday of alternative music was getting underway. Janes Addiction was in the air, Nirvana was in the streets, and Radiohead was about to creep on in. And I’d heard rumors of something called punk here and there when I came across movies like Valley Girl being played on Star 64.

WAIF wasn’t beholden to corporate playlists, and back in those days, the summer was a fun time to tune in to the station, as it would be flooded with new shows, many of them of the most strident and strange variety. The summer show schedule was different each year and lasted all the way from the beginning of operation until 2012, because for those first few decades of its existence, it shared the frequency with a school.

When a radio station applies for a license it needs to have a probable frequency it will be able to sit on where it won’t interfere with other frequencies. Those can be few and far between in a crowded metro area. So rather sit on their behinds waiting for a miracle to happen and a frequency to open up, they partnered with a vocational school who had station WJVS that operated during school hours, nine months out of the year. WAIF would only come on the air after school was out for the day. This was sometime between three and five in the afternoon and it would stay on until somewhere between six and eight in the morning, except on weekends.

So before WAIF moved to 24 hour broadcasting, their was always a block of shows in the summer that would be temporal, giving people who wanted to have a go at making radio a chance to have a summer show. Tuning in during the summer in the nineties was like being out on the open range. It was a time of wild untamed broadcasts from twenty-something Gen Xers and a slew of weirdos who set upon the station to get their voice and music out on the air.

I remember the day clearly when I first latched on to the station. I was told to wash the dishes and I wanted to be entertained while I did so, so I plugged in the cheap GE boombox I had and tuned around, settling on something that sounded a little different at the far left of the dial. That’s when I hard the announcers read out the “Sensitive Materials” disclaimer warning listeners who might be offended to tune away. After that business was done they played the song “Cop Killer” by Body Count, the legendary heavy metal band fronted by rapper Ice-T. The song had been banned and copies of the record recalled, causing a stir in the media. Yet, it was still out there, and here I was hearing it, in all of its unedited, uncensored glory. Killing anyone is not something I advocate, being of a non-violent persuasion, but to hear such music grabbed my attention to say the least and I became glued to the set. Not the TV set, the radio set.

I wish I knew the name of many of those shows from the summers from throughout the nineties on WAIF, and it’s possible I still have cassette recordings of some of them. I taped what I could, but there was so much, and sometimes I taped over other things. I didn’t think that one day, having already listened to the tapes a bunch, I’d be craving to listen to them again. Maybe some of those shows still exist in the box of tapes in my closet. I hope to rediscover some of them when I make the time to go through those Memorex memories.
As the years went on I became more and more of a dedicated listener to WAIF, and started to discover some of the shows on the evening roster. Some of these are as follows.

Some of the regular shows I listened to included Alien Transmissions a two-hour block of punk rock on between 10 PM and Midnight on Mondays. When the clock struck twelve, one of my all time favorite radio shows came on. This second show, the legendary Art Damage, has had profound influence on my life came on the air. It was hosted by founder Uncle Dave Lewis, but with a variety of rotating hosts that came in and out of the studio doors. A friend of mine had given me a tape of Art Damage before I ever tuned in, but after that I tuned in as often and as much as I could. The tape had been edited to remove all the talking, so for the longest time I had no idea who the bands that had been played were, or who the DJ was. Later, I ended up figuring some of it out, as I encountered those songs again in the wild. There had been pieces by Sun Ra, Nurse With Wound and many others who became staples of my later listening. But Art Damage played a lot of local music too by the bevy of experimental artists and misfits in Cincinnati and hard to find underground sounds from beyond. Every show was an avantgarde education. I had my first exposure to Charles Ives listening to Uncle Dave who rhapsodized about how Ives had been an early music collagist, only doing those audio collages in the idiom of classical music. The people involved in that show also organized a lot of gigs in different venues, and as soon as I could (towards the end of high school) I started going to these, but it took me a bit longer before I actually met any of the people who were involved. After I came back from my brief tenure at Antioch College, where I’d gotten my first taste of broadcasting, I found myself working with someone closely connected to the show and he got me on the air as part of the rotation, but that’s another story.
​
One other show I remember clearly from that same time period of first discovering Art Damage, was another summer program and that I don’t remember the name of, had a profound impact on me and my desire to make cut-up tape music with cassettes. The host talked about how it was possible to plug in two different sound sources, one for each of the left and right jacks on stereo, to make a homemade, cheap, down and dirty two track recordings. Because of its nature, this method isolated each sound to one side of the stereo field.  The combined influence of Negativland, Art Damage and the instruction from this show convinced me I could make music with tape myself. I’d already been using the cassette recorder as instrument in my band The Astral Surf Gypsies, so it wasn’t much of a step to  proceeded to make some of my first tape cut-up albums, such as Mental Stirfry. These tapes too sit in my closet (I hope!) and long to be digitized.

Another favorite show on WAIF was Alien Soundtracks. It differed from Alien Transmissions by being more devoted to playing electronic, early industrial music, psychedelic and goth music. The show always opened up with the track “Forever Alien” by Spectrum (Sonic Boom).  Then it would slip into playing music by the likes of Chrome, Helios Creed, The Legendary Pink Dots, and Babylonian Tiles (who I got to see and meet before lead singer Brin sadly passed away). Alien Soundtracks was hosted by Chris Lockhart who had also spent time as an Art Damage host. He gave me my first taste of The Poppy Family and the song “Free From the City” which I’ve remained especially fond of.

Hometown-HiFi was my go to show on Wednesday evenings, on between ten and midnight. It did things that a lot of shows at WAIF did. Since this was community radio nobody was getting paid, and most people had day jobs. This could make it difficult to keep a show going as a solo host. What a few shows ended up doing was have rotating hosts, and different people would come in each week. Hometown HiFi took that to the next level with a different version of the show being on on the first wed., a second version on the second, and a third on the third. While I no longer remember the exact order, or even all of the shows, I do recall most. Poodlebites gave listeners an education in all things Frank Zappa. And while it didn’t turn me into a total Zappahead overnight it was always wild. These days I’d say I’m a Zappa fan lite. I like so much of it and have my favorite Zappa albums, but I haven’t become a totally converted disciple. Another Hometown HiFi flavor was Mekon Country Radio, which I always enjoyed. This was hosted by Michael Riley, a local record store worker, music promoter, and all around hero in the scene. I never got to know him personally but I did enjoy this show which was on once a month, and was devoted to the music of the Mekons, the punk band from Leeds, England. After their initial splash and dash with punk they drifted over into alternative country and roots music, while never losing their taste for DIY or their punk edge. Riley played a lot of other similar stuff from other bands who were mining and making the alternative country sound back then in the nineties. He also worked at the little record store inside the late Buzz Coffeehouse, and back then I barely had enough money for the coffee required to hang out inside, let alone records. If their was a fifth Wednesday in the month it was always devoted to Electric Church, two hours of music by Jimi Hendrix. These were fewer between, but always worth catching. The show is still on, but they’ve moved away from that rotation, now having settled into a format that is still heavy on the Zappa but veers into other rock and roll with large doses of comedy.

Back on the local culture front, the long running Kindred Sanction was always the place to hear all manner of music from the many fine bands in town. Most of it was in the indie genre, but they branched out to play other styles as long as it was from an artist who had a Cincinnati connection.

Weird Trips was a late overnight show I heard only a few times, but boy was it weird. It was similar to Art Damage in some respects, but as if the people involved in Art Damage had gotten taken to a few Dead shows and Rainbow Gatherings. In other words, it was highly psychedelic and very hippie. It featured sound collages, but these were aimed at people who liked jam bands and tie-dies and things with bears on them, more than the art school types who congregated around Dave Lewis and his show.

 Other shows are the stuff of legend. The shows that were on before I heard them myself, and had already gone off the air by the time I tuned into WAIF. Michael Riley’s Danceable Solution explored a wide selection of underground music. Hippies in the late seventies had a late night broadcast called Nocturnal Emissions. Others I heard people talk about and forgot, even as the transmission itself was gone.
​
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the show I spent the most time on the air for at WAIF, On the Way to the Peak of Normal. This program was started by John Cadwallader and Craig Kelley, with Kelley taking over the reigns for many-many years. He was joined by Carrie Nation at times. When my friend Andrew Hissett started filling in for this show, he pulled me in and I became part of the rotation. When Craig wanted to retire from doing the show (he’d done it for close to twenty years since the early to mid-eighties) he handed the reigns over to me, and I kept the show on for a few more years until early 2014. On the Way to the Peak of Normal played an eclectic mix of krautrock, alternative rock, post-rock, electronica and everything in-between. Listening or being on the air for the show, I always felt musically at home.

There were a number of reasons why I ended the show and “quit” radio, but one of them was to focus on writing. I have done that, and have started to achieve some of what I set out to do with my writing. But at the same time, I didn’t leave radio behind for long. In 2015 I got my ham radio technician license, and the following year upgraded to general. I became an active member in the Oh-Ky-In Amateur Radio Society. In 2016, Ken Katkin, the host of another WAIF radio show I love, started asking me to fill in for the first time on his wonderful program of underground rock music, Trash Flow Radio. All these years after I “quit” radio, I’ve been getting on the air with my ham station, filling in at WAIF for Trash Flow sometimes just a few times a year and sometimes more. One of the first things I started writing a series of articles about was radio, and now those articles have become my first book, The Radio Phonics Laboratory. And I haven’t even mentioned getting hooked up with Pete Polyank and DJ Frederick, and the journey taken onto the shortwaves, creating segments for the shows Free Radio Skybird and Imaginary Stations. For those who’ve tasted radio, it’s something really hard to give up. But why would you want to?

WAIF, of course, isn’t the only station I listened to. Stay tuned to this frequency for the next installment of Radio Shows From All Over the Freaking Place That I’ve Known And Loved.

John Michael Greer recently wrote a post on Music as a Magical Language. Towards the end of the essay he wrote that “it wouldn’t be too hard to work out classic rock numbers for every planet and element.”
To that end I posted a list of musical pieces as they related to each element last week. Again, there is classic rock that I enjoy, but in the spirit of dissensus my list was very heavy on the ambient, jazz and contemporary classical as those are some of my favorite genres. For this list of songs used to invoke the energies of each of the nine planets I tried to actually try to be a bit more eclectic.

We start by following the actual rules for once, picking a classic rock song, and setting our controls for the heart of the sun. This song is unique in the Pink Floyd catalog for featuring all five band members on the recording, with both Syd Barrett and David Gilmour playing guitars. Roger Waters meanwhile took some of the lyrics from a poem by Li He, a sickly Tang Dynasty poet. The poem was titled in English, “Don’t Go Out of That Door,” but we’re not going to follow that advice today. Instead we are going to knock on the door.

The sun is the planet of the self, of personal identity, of the individual and their will. As such a great solar song comes from no other than Moondog, and his song “Do Your Thing.”

“Do your thing! / Be fancy-free to call the tune you sing / Don't give up! / That's not the way to win a loving-cup / Do your best / And Opportunity will do the rest / Don't give in! / Capitulation is the greatest sin / Do what's right / What's right for you, to do with all your might / Don't regret! / What might have been, you might as well forget.”

Moondog certainly lived up to his own ethos. In Robert Scottos` biography of Moondog he writes about the musicians life as true American original and “one of the most improbable lives of the twentieth century: a blind and homeless street musician becomes a legendary eccentric in New York City and rises to prominence as a major-label recording artist and internationally respected composer. He became an honorary member of the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in the late 1940s. His unique, melodic compositions were released by the Prestige jazz label, and the late 1960s Viking-garbed Moondog became a pop music sensation on Columbia Records.”

​Moondog had become blind when at age sixteen he found a dynamite cap in a field, and not knowing what it was, it blew up in his face. He lost his sight, but his older sister Ruth enriched his life by reading to him every day for many years. She read to him philosophy, science and myth and he took all of this deep into his central core. When she read him The First Violin by Jessie Fothergill, he found his mission and embarked on the path of becoming a composer.

he dulcimer and guitar playing songwriter Pantaleimon offers a mystical take on the sun, with her track “I Am (Solar Dust)” It’s from her wondrous 2008 album Heart of the Sun.


One way to listen to this piece is as a way of tapping into the “I Am” concept used so often in New Thought. “I Am the Stars and the Seas I Am” she recites in the background as a kind of affirmation or mantra -and its not a bad one at all to use and sing along with.

In astrology the Moon is considered as a planet, and it rules the changing tides of our emotions and the astral plane. Considering that dreams are a part of astral plane phenomena, “The Dreamer Is Still Asleep” by Coil seems an appropriate song to invoke the energies of the moon. This song comes from their 1999 album Musick to Play in the Dark. This record signified yet another change in Coil’s amorphous discography. In this case it was a change from being a “solar” oriented music project to a “moon” oriented music project, and the songs were meant to be listened to as “moon music.”

An alternate choice might be “Lunar Phase” by the Heavenly Music Corporation. This album had been a commission for the St. Giga ambient music satellite in Japan that broadcast its programs according to a tide table.

Speaking of satellites, Mercury is the ruler of communications, writing, radio, transportation, and thieves, among other things. As such, this classic 1962 hit by The Tornados and produced by Joe Meek is a fitting song to invoke the energies of communication.

Telstar 1 was the first of a new breed of communications satellites, launched on top of a Thor-Delta rocket on July 10, 1962. It lived up to the star in its name via the successful transmission through the vacuum of space the first television pictures, telephone calls, and telegraph images, and provided the first live transatlantic television feed.

In the spirit of communication Project Telstar was also part of a multi-national agreement. It is reminiscent of the way ham radio encourages cooperation and communication between nations. AT&T, Bell Labs and NASA were all part of the U.S. team working to get it into orbit, while in the General Post Office in the U.K. and the National Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphone in France tackled the experimental satellite communications across the pond.

Any project of this size needs a team to see it birthed from the dream and into reality. Headquartered in Bell Labs, John R. Pierce helmed the project and Rudy Kompfner invented the special traveling-wave tube transponder while James M. Early designed the transistors and the solar panels. Those panels drank in the sunlight to keep the bird alive and capable of generating 14 watts of electrical power. Pierce was an early proponent of computer music and collaborated with the likes of Max Mathews, as talked about in my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory.

The instrumental was launched on the radio waves and in the record shops in December of 1962, just as the satellite it was named after was experiencing its technical difficulties due to all the bombs the superpowers were exploding in the atmosphere. Telstar soared to number one in the US Billboard Hot 100 that month and also number one in Meek’s home country on the UK singles chart. It remained in the US charts for sixteen weeks and in the UK for 25. It is still heard with fondness or even religious zeal by Meek devotees to this day.
What gave Telstar some of its unusual appeal and staying power as a still weird song, was the use of a Clavioline or Univox. It’s hard to know which is which as the two were possibly overdubbed together in the mix on this piece. That’s the lead keyboard instrument carrying the thrilling melody. Invented by the French engineer Constant Martin the Clavioline consisted of a keyboard and a separate amplifier and speaker unit. The keyboard usually covered three octaves, and it had a number of switches to alter the tone, add vibrato, and other effects. The Clavioline used a vacuum tube oscillator to produce a solid buzzing waveform, almost a square wave. Using high and low-pass filtering, as well as the vibrato, it could be made to sound very unique. Its amplifier also lent to its signature tone with deliberate distortion, something Joe would have loved.

Many people would think of the planet Venus as a woman, and they wouldn’t be wrong. It is the ruler of females, their causes and issues, as well as being the planet of art and beauty. A beautiful woman such as Bjork, however, can think of "Venus as a Boy". This song is an embodiment of Venus as a male lover out to please and pleasure the woman he is with.

Another Bjork song that could be used to invoke the powers of Venus is her number, Big Time Sensuality, recalling the halcyon days of clubbing in the nineteen nineties, loaded up on the love drug, MDMA. This song is more about the hook up. “I don’t know what is going to happen after this weekend / and I don’t want to.” Use with caution.

Perhaps her best invocation with regards to Venus is that of love itself in “All is Full of Love.” This bright and powerful song can be put to all around use. From her third studio album Homogenic, it still speaks to all of those who’ve had their hearts broken, which is to say all of us. Beyond it is healing and the love that streams from the universe itself.

​As I write this, I began to think that Bjork herself might very well be an avatar of the planet. And while that may not be exactly the case, I do feel she is a transmitter of its energies.

It seems to me the martial energies might best be stirred by the varieties of hard rock, metal and punk. These genres have typically been favored by men, not that there aren’t women musicians and fans who can throw down like a Valkyrie. Mars as a girl, in other words.

To that end we will start with something from doom duo Year of the Cobra. Their track “Into the Fray,” which I got to hear live last summer at the Southgate House Revival, is the kind of thing you’ll want to listen to as you put on your armor and head into battle.

"Woodpecker from Mars", is another to listen as you prepare to engage. This hard alternative rock instrumental still sears after all these years. I had this on a cassette tape not long after it came out in 1989. It was an album that shaped my leaning into sounds that were just a little bit different. Faith No More provided a wide array of songs on that classic record.

Jupiter is the planet of kings, queens, and benevolent rulers. It’s a planet of wisdom, law, and orderly growth and expansion.

The track “King” from Swiss folk metal band Eluveitie does a good job, through the lyrics, of invoking divine kingship. Listening to this and singing along should do a good job of tapping into Jovian energies. The fiddle and flute solos alongside pounding drum rhythms are enough in themselves to lift the spirits, something Jupiter is known to do.

​“I, high king, sovereign and servant / Holder of divine, regality bestowed in the Omphalos grove / My kingship, the song of the gods / Thou shalt know me by my fruits, the abundance in which we grew”

Music for Jupiter was harder for me to determine. “On Jupiter” by Sun Ra seems like another good choice, even though Sun Ra is from Saturn (though it seems clear to those who know his music that he has explored the solar system). Piano, synthesizer and lyrics in swing evoke a planet of royalty guiding their kingdoms in wisdom.

The planet Saturn, is among other things, the planet of melancholy. One of the saddest songs I know is “A Sadness Song” by Current 93. It evokes the spiritual dryness of that state.

​David Tibet sings about being “we're wrapped inside our troubles / And we're wrapped inside our pain / And wracked with fires with longing / And our eyes are blind with night / With our fingers clutching coins / And our thoughts burning with ‘I’ ” That notion of “burning with ‘I’” seems so true to depression, when our introspections turn morbidly on ourselves.

One way out of the grip of melancholy is to apply oneself to meaningful work. Saturn is also the planet of hard limits, hard work, dedication and discipline. Sun Ra was a Saturnalien who knew discipline. He rehearsed for hours and hours and hours every day with his Arkestra. Discipline was such an intrinsic part of his everyday life that he made an ongoing series of pieces called “Discipline.” So here is “Discipline 27-II parts I-IV” by Sun Ra.

​Uranus was one of our latter day planetary discoveries, coming to us only in the year 1781 as the world continued to be wracked by revolutionary waves, including the one that established America. Uranus is thus considered to be the planet of sudden switcheroo’s and the unexpected. Change in general is ushered in when Uranus comes into play. Uranus also deals with rules, freedom, and originality, as showcased by it’s discovery during the years of revolutionary fervor.
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David Bowie is a Uranian par excellence and his song “Changes” can be used when thinking on Uranian themes. Those changes might even be sex changes and reversals of gender.

Those changes might even be sex changes and reversals of gender. Uranus is the planet that rules the LGBTQ+ movement. Back in the day gay men were sometimes called Uranians. Before Uranus was discovered, homosexuality as such did not exist as a specific movement and subculture, but after its discovery, it has made inroad after inroad to being a part of our common experience. With this in mind, the song “Rebel Rebel” also by Bowie, can be used, as can the number by his friend Lou Reed, “Take a Walk on the Wild Side.”

Neptune was the next planet to be discovered by adventurous astronomers. The way the planets are named is interesting. The planet Neptune doesn’t really deal with the ocean, as you might expect it to when named after a god that does control the literal tides of the sea and rules over its life. Neptune does deal with another kind of ocean though, the ocean of our collective unconscious, and rules over things such as dreams and fantasy. As such, prog rock and its variants are particularly Neptunian, especially in the way that so many prog bands have used themes from fantasy literature as part of their music.
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There is a dark side to Neptune, though. In as much as it deals with fantasies, it also deals with the illusions of the drug user. In the same way that the discovery of Uranus initiated the beginnings of queer culture, Neptune initiated the beginnings of drug culture. Neptune was discovered in 1846. Morphine had been made from opium at the beginning of the 19th century and heroin came in the 1870s, all under the orbit of Neptunes dark side. The song par excellence, of this dark side of Neptunes energy, comes from the Velvet Underground, with “Heroin.”

On the positive side of Neptune, the famous track “Soothsayer” from guitarist Buckethead taps into the aspect of the planet that is visionary, prophetic and sees beyond the veil.

To top all this off I’ll give you my favorite pop song about astrology from grungy outfit Slothrust. This is off the album Parallel Timeline where Leah Wellbaum gives an introspective and relational suite of songs, this one being “Strange Astrology” about the topic many people want to know about with astrology, what’s your sign, and are we compatible. Here those themes are turned into a fine number. This song should have been in the top forty, but we all know that system is rigged.

The book is officially out next week on June 14th and this playlist was created to celebrate its release. Those in the UK and Europe can pick up the book directly from the publisher at Velocity Press, while those in the states can get it from Bookshop.org and fine bookstores everywhere.