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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TANK GIRL

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

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

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

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

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

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

BAKER STREET: HONOUR AMONG PUNKS & CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT

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

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

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

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

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

PUNK ROCK AND TRAILER PARKS

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

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

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

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

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

LOVE AND ROCKETS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

☕️☕️☕️ 

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

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

RE/SOURCES:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

☕️☕️☕️ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GEORGE LEWIS - CHANGING WITH THE TIMES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LEJAREN HILLER - A TOTAL MATRIX OF POSSIBILITIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ERIC RICHARDS - THE BELLS THEMSELVES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

☕️☕️☕️ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

☕️☕️☕️ 

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

TRINARY CODE painting by Melissa Shemanna