Even in the strange and eccentric world of the ham radio operator, Fred Judd G2BCX (1914–1992) was something of an outlier and maverick.  Fred designed two well-known antennas, the Slim Jim and the ZL Special. Both of these are now antenna standards. Fred was also an advocate of early British electronic music, inventing or modifying the tools he needed to make this adventurous music along the way. G2BCX was the quintessential tinkerer;  a man who loved audio, radio, and the new possibilities for music being opened up by the careful application of capacitors.

As a radar technician in the armed forces during WWII Fred had the opportunity to develop his electrical aptitude and became a full blown engineer. After the war he found a spot working for the Kelvin Hughes company where he researched and developed marine radar devices.  To this day Kelvin Hughes continues to create navigation and surveillance systems.
Fred was a man of strong ambition, and the day job in electronics wasn’t enough to keep him satisfied. As part of his side hustle he wrote articles for hobbyist magazines on radio and the new remote control models coming to market. The first of his 11 published books hit the shelves in 1954. When Amateur Tape Recording (ATR) magazine was launched in 1959 he joined the staff as technical editor and wrote on all kinds of topics connected to tape, electronics and hi-fi.

The slim jim antenna for which G2BCX remains famous among hams is itself a variation on the J-Pole. The J-pole is at the time of this writing a 110 year old design, first invented by Hans Beggerow in 1909 for use on Zeppelin airships. In that regard, the J-Pole, commonly made of copper, can also be considered a steampunk antenna.  Trailed behind the airship, the J-Pole was made of a single element, one half wavelength long radiator with a quarter wave parallel tuning stub for the feedline. By 1936 this design had been refined into the J configuration and given the J Antenna name in 1943, now just called a J Pole.

Fred introduced his J-pole variant in 1978. He derived the name from its slim profile and the J type matching stub (J Integrated Matching). It has similar performance and characteristics to a simple or folded Half-wave antenna and identical to the traditional J-pole construction. Judd found the Slim Jim produces a lower takeoff angle and better electrical performance than a 5/8 wavelength ground plane antenna.  Slim Jim antennas made from ladder transmission line use the existing parallel conductor for the folded dipole element.
The ZL special antenna came from another variant Judd made, this time on the 2-element horizontal phased array created by George Prichard ZL3MH –hence the name ZL Special in tribute to Prichard’s work. L.B. Cebik, W4RNL has written up a detailed analysis of this design at: http://www.antentop.org/w4rnl.001/mu5a.html.

It can be presumed that when Fred wasn’t at work, or on the air as a ham, he was engaged in another aspect of his electronics hobby: making circuits sing. He also wrote one of the first how-to books in the world for making electronic music in 1961, titled Electronic Music and Musique Concrete. It included circuit diagrams alongside practical do-it-yourself tips. (A copy of this tome is available from the Public Library of Cincinnati along with his Radio and Electronic Hobbies book.)

Around this time he also promoted the creation of electronic music via lectures and demonstrations at amateur tape recording clubs all around Britain. As an editor and writer for the Amateur Tape Recording magazine he had access to these clubs and lots of street cred within them. Fred started putting out 7” records of electronic music which were made available through the magazine. Judd was also the editor of Practical Electronics magazine. Chris Carter was an avid reader of both of these magazines and spent time building a lot of the circuits Judd published. Chris Carter went on to be a founding member of Throbbing Gristle, the first industrial music band. Chris continued to innovate in electronic music with his wife Cosey Fan Tutti as Chris & Cosey and latter Carter Tutti.  

As any sci-fi movie or old-time radio show buff will know, one of the things electronic music is perfect for is making sound effects, and Fred became adept at making his own. Have you ever flipped around on the tube and come across the strange sci-fi puppet show Space Patrol? Broadcast in 1963 on the ITV network it was the first on British television show to have a composed electronic music soundtrack running throughout the whole series. Fred made those sounds himself using the techniques of tape manipulation, loops and tone generators in his home studio in London.

The Castle record label and its sister label Contrast issued a range of sound effects discs that he made in his studio, including 3 discs of electronic music. These tracks were later issued by library label Studio G, who specialized in providing stock music and sounds, on the Electronic Age album.

Fred also prototyped and built his own synthesizer. This simple voltage controlled, keyboard-operated unit was used to generate, shape and switch electronic sounds. The feat was small but impressive as it predated the Synket, Moog and Buchla synths.

Fred was also interested in the visualization of electronic sounds. One can imagine he knew his way around an oscilloscope and other test equipment. His tinkering in this area led to his Chromasonics system. By running a pulse generator and amplifier into a modified black and white tv that had a high speed color scanning wheel placed in front of the screen Judd was able to make trippy abstract patterns that moved in accordance with the sound input from oscillators or tape recordings. At the 1963 Audio Fair in London he demonstrated Chromasonics with much acclaim, but interest from electronics firm Stuzzi never made it to commercial development.

From the late 1970s Judd continued to operate as a ham from his home in Cantley, Norfolk. Towards the end of his life, he built several detailed reconstructions of early electrical devices including a Wimshurst machine and Edison phonograph. He was honoured by the University of East Anglia for constructing a working replica of apparatus used by Heinrich Hertz, but it seems that none of this equipment, the Chromasonics apparatus or his experimental music-making machinery has survived. He became a silent key in 1992.

In 2010 all of his remaining original quarter inch tapes have been cataloged and deposited with the British Library Sound Archive. In 2011 Ian Helliwell made a documentary on Judd called Practical ElectronicaA retrospective album gathering together as much of his experimental music as can be located, titled Electronics Without Tears was released by the Public Information label. It also contained an official biography of Judd written by Helliwell. It is available from their bandcamp page at: https://publicinformation.bandcamp.com/album/electronics-without-tears.
​

Here is a short bibliography of books by Fred C. Judd:

Radio control for model ships, boats and aircraft. London: Data publications, 1954.
Electronic music and musique concrète. London : N. Spearman, 1961.
Tape recording for everyone. Blackie, 1962.
Radio and electronic hobbies. London: Museum Press, 1963.
Circuits for audio and tape recording. Haymarket Press, 1966.
Electronics in music. London: Spearman, 1972.
Amateur radio. Newnes Technical Books, 1980.
Two-metre antenna handbook. Newnes Technical, 1980.
CB radio. Newnes Technical, 1982.
Radio wave propagation : (HF bands). London : Heinemann, 1987.

​Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Judd
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J-pole_antenna
https://thequietus.com/articles/12386-f-c-judd-interpretations-interview-holly-herndon-perc-public-information
Electronics Without Tears, Public Information, Biography by Ian Helliwell

This article originally appeared in theJune 2019 issue of the Q-Fiver. (All the articles in the Radiophonic Laboratory series have appeared first in various issues of the Q-Fiver.)

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“Are you sitting comfortably?” These were the only words uttered by the legendary master of Industrial music before his one hour performance at the COSI Planetarium on May 26. As soon as the lights were turned out, the seats began to vibrate and shake from the intense rumble of sub-bass and low-end sound frequencies. Lift off had been achieved.

My grandson Lucas was sitting next to my wife Audrey. When he said “Grandma, I’m scared” I got scared. Was it really such a wise thing to have brought a seven year old to a concert by the pioneer of the Dark Ambient sub-genre?  Lustmord’s live shows are known for being very loud. Granted, we all had ear plugs in, but Lucas’ ears hadn’t yet been exposed to all the damaging noise I had already subjected mine to.  With Audrey’s hand around Lucas, he quickly settled down. He might have even fallen asleep during the show. The abstract video projected on the Planetarium ceiling certainly helped to induce a state of hypnosis in myself as I let Lustmord’s vast, sonorous, and pulsing undertones flood through my body.
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Part of the reason I had wanted to see this show in particular was due to the work Brian Williams, the man behind Lustmord, had done on his most recent album, Dark Matter, released on the Touch label in 2016. The sounds on that record had all been derived from an audio library of cosmological activity that he had collected for ten years between 1993 and 2003.  On the liner notes he wrote, “While space is a virtual vacuum, it does not mean there is no sound in space. It exists in space as naturally occurring electromagnetic vibrations, many well within the range of human hearing while others exist at different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum and these can be adjusted with software to bring them within our audio range. The recordings of these interactions in space come from several different environments including radio, ultra violet, microwave and X-ray data and within these spectra a wide range of sources including interstellar plasma and molecules, radio galaxies, pulsars, masers and quasars, charged particle interactions and emissions, radiation, exotic astrophysical objects, cosmic jets and flares from magnetars."  Brian had gathered this material from a variety of sources including NASA (Cape Canaveral, Ames, The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Arecibo), The Very Large Array, The National Radio Astronomy Observatory alongside a number of educational institutions and private contributors throughout the USA.

To be able to hear recordings of these emissions was intriguing enough for me. To hear what an artist of Lustmord’s caliber did with them on his album was a revelation.  Hearing versions of that material live in a planetarium with video projections of the cosmos was a great experience. It has often been said that the study of astronomy is a humbling experience. One of the things astronomy can teach is the smallness of man. The personal problems we so often obsess over, when seen under starlight, feel less pressing. Astronomy also builds character by showing us the transience of both our sorrows and joy in the dance of galaxies. As Lustmord puts it “Everything that has ever been observed by man, even with our most sophisticated instruments, amounts to less than five percent of the Universe.” Do what we will, our hasty minutes fly. When compared to the life of a star we our lives are just eye blinks. Meditating on the fragile mortality of the body and our place in the cosmos to me isn’t a cause of despair, but rather a tool for helping me to focus on what I do and say and think today. It is a reminder to not take for granted the limited amount of time I have been allotted for granted.

Lustmord further explains that, “approximately sixty-eight percent of the Universe is unseen dark energy and approximately twenty-seven percent is unseen dark matter. We have yet to discover what dark matter is, and only know the things it is not. Although it has not been directly observed, its existence and properties are inferred from its effects on visible matter, its influence on the Universe's large-scale structure, and its effects in the cosmic microwave background.”
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The sound of the record was one of desolate rumbling. It had no high points, no low points, no climax or resolution. It is a music of celestial loneliness that gives a shape to what it might feel like to be on an interstellar voyage far away from home: there are other things out there in space, but they aren’t nearby, and the very cosmological activity we find so beautiful in pictures and imagery, when seen up close is violent and deadly. While the album does start and stop, it could have been infinite. It could have gone on forever. Listening to this places you in the void between the stars. That’s a great place to visit, but for all the wonder and majesty of the universe, I’m glad I’m not a cosmonaut. I’m thankful my place in the creation is this verdant earth.

At the concert Lustmord drew material from across the breadth of his forty year discography. I could hear elements from his various records recombined in new ways. Included in the mix were sounds and sequences I recognized from Dark Matter. Experiencing his music live was very different than when I play his albums on my home stereo. While I have good bass response in my speakers, the low-end at the show was something else altogether. One of the reasons I wanted to go was to get the full impression of his powerful subharmonics in the flesh.

Though overtones occur naturally with the physical production of music on instruments, undertones and subharmonics must be produced in unusual ways. Whereas the overtone series is based upon the multiplication of frequencies, the undertone series is based on their division. There are several different ways to create subharmonics and undertones. Composers Mari Kimura, George Crumb and Daniel James Wolf have written works for violin or string quartets that require the musicians to bow their instruments with enough pressure to create pitches below the lowest open string of the instrument. This intense pressured bowing causes the sound waves to modulate and demodulate from the resonating horn of the instrument with frequencies corresponding to subharmonics. At the Lustmord concert the subharmonics were produced by the amplification of his deep bass audio signals through the loudspeaker system.

At times during the show, it was as if I felt the shaking of the chairs and vibrations within my body to be more powerful than the tones that I heard with my ear. This had a kind of grounding effect on me. Even if some of the source material was derived from cosmic sources, and the video projections showed glittering gas nebulas and colorful fields of stars, the deepness and acute pressure of the sub-bass was a full body experience. As the music wound down to a close, the room felt stable again. We were no longer inside a super collider.

When the one hour show was over I asked Lucas how he liked it. He was nonchalant having survived the experience. 

​“It was boring,” he said. “The guy didn’t even sing.”

Who doesn’t like listening in to a conversation being held by two people nearby? Who doesn’t take secret delight in overhearing a snippet of information being mouthed from across the room? Anyone who has enjoyed monitoring local police, fire and utility frequencies, and even cell phone conversations before they were encrypted knows the secret pleasure that comes from electronic eavesdropping. Scanner radios, SDRs and even the humble Baofeng can offer the discrete listener hours of aural voyeurism. Radio traffic picked up during these sessions of signal intelligence and information gathering can be recorded with ease via a simple setup; and what is received and recorded may be transformed and put to artistic purposes.

This is exactly the method used by Robin Rimbaud, a British electronic musician born in 1964 who works under the name Scanner because of his use of the device in his early live performances and recordings. Tapping the airwaves, he mixed the indeterminate radio and cell phone signals into the electronica he was making, and by doing so found himself a name. 

What is being picked up on the scanner will always be something evocative of the time and place where the frequencies were scanned. It is site specific. It is time specific. The people on the other end don’t necessarily know they are being listened to. They didn’t consent to be eavesdropped on, except by pressing the push to talk button. They didn’t sign a waiver allowing their voices to be recorded, mixed with music, and preserved for posterity on vinyl and CD. Robin Rimbaud, as Scanner wasn’t interested in getting their permission. What he was interested in was avant-garde literature, cinema and music. While earning a degree in Modern Arts at Kingston University in Surrey, England he formed the music group The Rimbaud Brothers with another bloke named Tony Rimbaud who was also a student (though they weren’t actually related).  They started releasing cassette tapes in the early 80’s, and later turned into a trio when Chris Staley joined up, becoming Dau Al Set. 
 
These cassette tapes were to prove important. The Peyrere compilation tape he put out in 1986 featured the work of Nurse with Wound, Derek Jarman, Current 93, Coil and Test Dept, cinching his alignment with the British experimental music scene. All these tapes prepared him for his work as curator of the Ash International record label, a subsidiary label of Touch Music out of London. His first debut as Scanner was released on Ash International in 1992.
This first self-titled Scanner album contains just under an hour of intercepted cell phone conversations of unsuspecting callers captured by his police scanner. As such, some of the material Robin Rimbaud picked up and put to record is enough to make you blush.   I confess that when I first heard of police scanners as a thirteen year old skateboarding punk rocker the idea of being able to listen in to a juicy cell phone call was an exciting prospect. As was the idea of being able to hear the cops come bust us for skating at a certain site on the radio and leave before they got there.

Robin Rimbaud got into scanning on accident. He says, “As for the scanner device itself, it was purely by chance that I discovered it, since a friend was part of a hunt saboteur group and they would use it to listen in to the local police,” Rimbaud said. “I immediately saw the potential and intrigue of being able to access these private spaces and incorporate them into these exploratory soundscapes I was producing at the time. I was especially drawn to the fact that the recordings were so intimate, so clear, yet abstract in nature. One had to imagine who these people were you [are] overhearing, where they were, what kinds of lives they led, although the nature of their conversations often clearly explained this! So I began using these live voices and recordings inside the music I was producing and adopted the name of the machine I was using to create the work.”

The window of opportunity for tapping into this telephonic underworld was short-lived however. Back in the day when those rigs were analog the ability to sit on the freqs used by the telcos was a built in feature.  Now it is illegal to monitor cell calls (unless you happen to work for the NSA). The companies making the scanners were under fire from the telcos. The telcos were putting pressure on Congress. So when the bill was sent up to Capitol Hill a new law was passed prohibiting scanners sold after a specified date from receiving the frequencies allocated to the Cellular Radio Service. Later an amendment was added to make it illegal to modify radios to receive those frequencies. There are Canadian and European unblocked versions available, but it is illegal to bring them into the U.S.  Does that mean it is illegal to build your own scanner radio that can pick up cell calls…? Well, all that’s moved to digital now anyways and would be difficult to pick up (unless you happen to work for the NSA).

What about cordless landline phones? Frequencies used by early cordless phones at 43.720–44.480 MHz, 46.610–46.930 MHz, and 902.000–906.000 MHz are still around in some people’s homes and might be picked up by scanners but it’s still illegal to do so. And with all these scanners around most cordless phone makers moved their sets up to 2.4 GHz systems that make use of spread-spectrum modes which adds another layer of security.

The idea of listening in to what others consider private conversations brings us into the realm of ethics. Are radio listeners being nosey, butting their heads where they don’t belong? I think it is a mistaken notion that radio communication privacy can be achieved by declaring certain radio transmissions illegal to monitor and banning radio receivers capable of receiving ‘prohibited’ transmissions. This belief is rooted in a common misconception about the public nature of radio waves themselves. Courts have held that there is no privacy implied while transmitting on the public airwaves. To really eavesdrop in the smartphone centric world of today it might be better to be able to intercept text messages; hypothetically speaking of course. Texting isn’t my favorite thing, so why anyone (other than the NSA) would want to read a bunch of emoji’s is beyond me, lol. 

Yet I do understand the desire to listen in, to gather intelligence, and to monitor, to eavesdrop. It can be exciting.  Some of what you can grab off the air is just plain mind boggling. Robin Rimbaud understands this as well.  He continued to release music on the Ash Interntational label, working closely with Mike Harding of Touch on the first dozen releases. These included Scanner², Mass Observation, Blind, and Runaway Train. [Some of these can be listened to on the artist’s bandcamp site: https://scanner.bandcamp.com/]

All have their merits but this last recording is a real gem, and was already famous when it was in circulation among railway operators before it got released to the experimental music crowd. The Runaway Train album consists of the unedited, un-doctored real-time recording of the radio contact between Alfie, controller of the railway line in New Brunswick, Canada and the engineer Wesley, on March 9, 1948, as the engineer lost control of his train to its ultimate derailment. This entire drama was taped as it happened and is insane with tension. While his colleagues work calmly and professionally to prevent a derailment, Wesley bravely remains on board. 55mph becomes 70mph. The dialogue between Wesley, and Alfie, grows charged as each minute passes. As the train hurtles on threatening the unsuspecting communities it passes through, as well as its crew. At 95mph, with a doctor and ambulance standing by, Wesley faces disaster. Suddenly the line goes dead. Can Wesley survive?

This tape had been circulating among CN and VIA Rail employees and a copy eventually reached the father of a man named Brian Damage. Brian got the tape from his dad and shared it with his friend Robin Rimbaud who was looking for unusual field recordings to put out on his Ash International label. Ash released it in 1994 (Ash 1.9) as a one-sided record in an edition of 500 copies, with an additional 500 pressed the following year. [You can listen to this one yourself on bandcamp at:  https://phycus1.bandcamp.com/album/runaway-train]

Listening to this recording now, over seventy years after it was first captured off the radio is still a dramatic edge-of-your-seat listen. On a psychological level, it showcases the way humans are predisposed to focus in on the tragedy of others, to tell stories of death, demise, and destruction. Just the other day at the time of this writing I turned on my radio to see what traffic I could catch from local police and fire departments after a plane crashed into a home in Madeira. The same thing is at work when I slow down to look at an accident while driving. Our radios and scanners simply extend the reach of our observation. The allow us to listen in to the drama of human life as it unravels around us in real time.
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The weird thing is that for the people involved the tragedy continues long after our scanners are turned off. In the case of train engineer Wesley, even though he walked away from the accident with his life intact, his 43 year career was over, and the pension that had been promised him was in limbo. The whole aftermath of his story was documented in the press and collected by Daniel Dawdy on the webpage: http://www.cwrr.com/Lounge/Feature/runaway

Now that I’m not reasoning like a teenager anymore my motivations for monitoring radio frequencies are different. It isn’t to evade the police. For one, cops and skaters get along better these days and there are designated spots where it is legit to have a street session. For another it’s fascinating to learn how radio traffic is handled during small and large emergencies. As a ham learning how to communicate clearly on the air is a skill that could come in handy if ever my skills are needed for the greater good of the community. Listening in is one way to develop that skill.

Additional sources:
http://www.clotmag.com/robin-rimbaud-aka-scanner
https://electronicsound.co.uk/product/issue19pdf/

Magnetic Lemniscate: A Brief History of the Tape Loop

Sometimes, if the day has been hectic, when I get home I just want to kick back, relax and put on a record. Or a cassette. I still have hundreds of hours of music stored on tape, one of the finest mediums of storage ever invented. This privilege of being able to listen to recorded audio is unique in human history, and my ability to soak in the musical glow from my hi-fi system with my feet propped up and my head in my hands was built on the sweat of many researchers. The phonograph, loudspeaker and microphones all proclaimed that the age of audio had arrived. The promises made by this tech only cracked the door ajar. There was still a bolt in place on the other side barring further entry. The invention of magnetic tape recording proved to be the golden skeleton key responsible for unlocking the door to the studio of the audio engineer, and from there many other rooms in the mansion of new media.

Inside the tape studio it is possible to cut. Splice. Rewind. Fast forward. Edit. Create a new sequence for creative playback. The practice of recording and editing audio using magnetic tape was an obvious improvement over the previous electro-mechanical methods. The leap in audio fidelity alone was a dramatic feat. Further, it allowed for new practices of editing. It allowed for repetition, a key aspect of music, and so the loop was born. Splice. Snip.  Audio on magnetic tape had established itself as simply superior. The analog tape recorder made it possible to erase. Audio mistakes could be fixed at less cost by recording over a previous recording, something not possible on the shellac and vinyl based medium of the phonograph. The edit turned into an art form as tape had the advantage of being cut. Spliced, it could be joined back together in an endless profusion of edits.  Music could be rearranged, deranged, or removed.

From 1950 onwards magnetic tape quickly became the standard medium for audio master recording in the music and broadcast radio industries. This led to the development of hi-fi stereo recordings for the domestic market. If the day has been hectic, just kick back with some Les Baxter or the exotica of Martin Denny and let it transport you away from the work of the daily grind. Now in hi-fidelity, and turning at 33 1/3 rpm, longer songs and longer sounds mean more time to chill in the lounge. Sonically edited the album now offered to audio engineers the same plasticity of arrangement known to film directors. The many new combinations available became mind boggling and cinematic.

When I think of tape, I think primarily of its role in audio and video storage.  I think of the way it revolutionized sound recording, reproduction and broadcasting. It allowed radio, which had always been broadcast live, to be recorded for later or repeated airing. I think of how I sat with a radio and it’s built in cassette player to tape those late night radio shows. To be listened to again and again. But there was also data storage on tape. Remember tape drives? They were a key technology in early computer development, allowing unparalleled amounts of data to be mechanically created, stored for long periods of time, and rapidly accessed.

When I think of tape I think of iron oxide. It’s on tape and it’s also in your blood. It’s the stuff responsible for giving it that bright red color. It’s the stuff that holds the memory of a recording on the tape making it magnetic. The memory is in the blood. Iron oxide stores the genetic memory of music. Editing a tape splices the DNA of sound. Perhaps it is this magnetic resonance of the iron oxide, a shared connection with a vital and elemental force that has given tape such a place of prominence in electronic music. Perhaps it was the way the tapes could be manipulated, slowed down, sped up, chopped up and put into new patterns, which made tape such a dream. This medium of preservation and creation is in the very blood of electronic music.

With the invention of the tape loop the dream of creating infinite music was realized. The use of the pause button had been put on hold. Tape loops are spools of magnetic tape used to create repetitive, rhythmic musical patterns or dense layers of sound when played on a tape recorder. Sound is recorded on a section of magnetic tape and this tape is cut and spliced end-to-end, creating a circle which can be played over and over again, continuously, over and over. This is usually done on a reel-to-reel machine, though industrious lo-fi recording artists have been known to rig their own cassette tapes into loops. The loop originated with the musique concrète work of Pierre Schaeffer in the 1940s. He used the simultaneous playing of tape loops to create phrase patterns and rhythms. Musical experimentalists continued to explore the possibilities of this method on through the 1950s and 60s. Devotees of the tape loop included Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Brian Eno.

The medium is perfect for creating phase patterns, rhythms, textures, and timbres. When the speed of a loop is accelerated to a sufficient degree a sequence of events originally perceived as a rhythm now is heard as a pitch. The variation of the rhythm in the original recording produces different timbres in the sped up sound. Tape can also be slowed down, causing the music to drop in pitch and for sounds to be stretched. Tape was also used to create echo systems. The first delay effects were made using tape loops improvised on reel-to-reels by shortening or lengthening the loop of tape and adjusting the read and write heads, to create an echo whose time parameters could be adjusted. This delayed signal may either be played back multiple times, or played back into the recording again, to create the sound of a repeating, decaying echo.

Being the pioneer he was Stockhausen made extensive use of loops in Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–56) and Kontakte (1958–60) and he used the technique for live performance in Solo (1965–66).  Steve Reich was the composer to use the technique the most, specifically in his "phasing" pieces Come Out (1966) and It's Gonna Rain (1965).

In the realm of popular music it was used to great effect in the 60’s and 70’s. Think of the psychedelic music of the Beatles on the White album and of its use in the progressive rock and ambient genres. A standard loop on a standard reel-to-reel is at most a few seconds long. This is not enough for some composers.  To create a longer loop a standard practice was to use two reel-to-reels or for even longer stretches of tape, to run them around mic stands, or even door knobs. Perhaps the best known album made with this technique was Brian Eno’s Music for Airports: Ambient 1. This recording ushered in the vast and sprawling genre of ambient. In creating his 1978 landmark Eno reported that for one song, "the tape loops was seventy-nine feet long and the other eighty-three feet". 

Enter William Basinski

Texas born Basinski is a classically trained clarinetist who studied jazz saxophone and composition at North Texas State University in the late 1970s. At the age of twenty in 1978 he became inspired by the techniques of Steve Reich and Brian Eno and started the process of developing his own musical vocabulary using old reel-to-reel tape decks. Basinski experimented with short looped melodies. When played against themselves the loops created a pleasant feedback. Working with this discovery he created his singular meditative, melancholy style within the drone and ambient genres.

Basinki’s first release was Shortwave Music. First created in 1983, it wasn’t released until 1998 when Carsten Nicolai's Raster-Noton label put it out in a small vinyl edition. It was followed by his shortwave magnum opus The River. Basinski writes, "As a young composer in the early 1980’s I was experimenting with tape loops: recording and mixing them with sounds coming from the airwaves. The idea was to capture music out of the ether. In NYC, there was a very powerful radio station, I can’t remember the call letters, but it was the station that played American popular standards….that is, the ‘1001 Strings’ smoothed out, de-syncopated versions of the American popular standards: what was commonly referred to then as Muzak, or ‘elevator music’. In those days, there was no Prozac, only Muzak to smooth out the seams and ease the tension of hectic neurotic life in the mid-late 20th century. At any rate, this station was so powerful, it could be picked up by simply running a wire across the floor, so frequently I was picking up background transmissions in my recordings. Since it was inevitable and I had no choice in the matter, I began experimenting with recording off the radio small loops of string intros, outros and interludes randomly in my primitive studio in Brooklyn. I would then slow them down a couple of speeds and as if peering into a microscope, to see what I could discover beneath the glossy surface. Frequently, these loops held great depth and melancholy. This appealed to me greatly and I created a vast archive of these loops to later experiment with. I am still using this archive to this day.”

Having this library of ‘found’ material became very important to his work, as it became the basis for many future albums and releases. Something else he found at a thrift store was also important, the machine that would provide his radio static. “I bought a wonderful old Hallicrafters shortwave radio at the Goodwill around the corner and began listening to that. The sounds coming from this magical device were awesome. The idea that one could hear transmissions from ‘behind the Iron Curtain’ or Japan or London was thrilling and mysterious. The waves of shifting static and interstellar particle showers were mind-boggling to a young man who grew up in the shadow of the space race.

I was having a problem with a 60 Hz ground loop hum in my recordings. I had no idea what was causing it at the time…probably our fluorescent lights…just that it bothered me and I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it. So I decided to try to mask it with the shortwave radio static. I would set the Hallicrafters on a pleasing in-between-stations setting teeming with showers of sparkling static and record live while mixing my loops. The results were extraordinary. The Hallicrafters would sometimes shift focus as if responding to the music coming from the loops. Occasionally a distant station from the Middle East perhaps, would slide into range just for a moment like a lingering column of cigarette smoke swirling slowly in a spotlight. I was very encouraged and excited. I didn’t know if I was really a composer, or if this was music, but to me it was magic! I loved it and was in my laboratory every night after work, like Dr. Frankenstien, just waiting to see what fascinating and strange sounds would bubble up next. The results of this period of experimentation were the Shortwave Music pieces and ultimately, the 90 minute masterwork of the series, The River. It would be over 25 years before these pieces would be released to the public."

Even though it wasn’t until the late 90’s that his music saw release on a label Basinski remained very active in the NYC music scene. He was a member of many bands including the Gretchen Langheld Ensemble and House Afire. In 1989, he opened his own performance space, "Arcadia" at 118 N. 11th Street. In the 1990s he helped put together many intimate underground shows at his space for artists like Diamanda Galás, Rasputina, The Murmurs, and Antony as well as his own experimental electronic/improvisation band, Life on Mars. In 2000, he made a film titled Fountain with artists James Elaine and Roger Justice.

In August and September 2001 Basinski started work on what would become his most recognizable piece, the epic four-volume album The Disintegration Loops. The album is made up of old tape loops whose quality had degraded. In an attempt to salvage these loops by recording them onto a digital format, the magnetic iron oxide ferrite on the tapes slowly crumbled. With each pass of the tape over the head on the reel-to-reel deck more and more of the iron oxide fell off.  The loops were allowed to play for extended periods as they deteriorated further, with increasing gaps and cracks and spaces in the music. These sounds were treated further with a spatializing reverb effect to further enhance their haunting aura. Basinski was able to capture the sound of their disintegration and the results were beautiful and stunning. The disintegration of these tapes was made all the more poignant as he finished his work on them on the morning of 9/11. Basinksi sat on the roof of his apartment building in Brooklyn with friends listening to the finished project as the World Trade Center towers collapsed. The artwork that accompanies the album features stills of footage he shot of the NYC skyline in the aftermath of the attack. In September  2012, the record label Temporary Residence reissued the entire Disintegration Loops series as a 9xLP box set, marking the project's 10-year anniversary as well as its impending induction into the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.

The creation of the Disintegration Loops was something of an accident, timestamped by their own destruction and the terrible tragedy of 9/11.  The four albums are perfect as a reminder of the beauty to be found in imperfection, as a reminder of our own transience, of our own ultimate disintegration, of how the iron oxide in our blood will once again return to dust.

References:
Live wires :a history of electronic music by Daniel Warner, Reaktion Books Ltd,  London, England, 2017.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sound_recording
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_tape
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_loop
William Basinki’s website: http://www.mmlxii.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Basinski
https://wavefarm.org/ta/works/azeqwc

​At the Osaka ’70 world expo Takeisha Kosugi was creating environmental sound works as a commissioned artist. This was the same year Karlheinz Stockhausen and his ensemble were creating an oasis of musical calm and exultation within the spherical auditorium at the world expo, playing pieces like Spiral and others utilizing shortwave radio. The space/time coordinates for technology and experimental music were in perfect alignment at the expo. Born in 1938 Kosugi already had considerable experience with musical antics by the time 1970 arrived. His exploration of diverse sound worlds and his humorous antics continued until his death on October 12, 2018 at the age of 80.

​GROUP ONGAKU

In 1958 Kosugi was a student of musicology at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. It was there that his apprenticeship and final mastery for creating experimental sound worlds began. Joined by fellow student Shukou Mizuno he founded a collective improvisation ensemble. When they participated in a dance festival at the Tokyo Dance Institute they donned the name Group Ongaku. It translates into English as Group Music and is a simple description of their practice. Many more of the group's few performances were at dance concerts, symposiums and festivals, but they also performed at recitals of music by Toshi Ichiyanagi and Yoko Ono, the two leading lights of Japanese experimental music in the world scene at the time. They also performed at member Yasanao Tone's one man exhibition at the Minami Gallery. This connection to world of dance and the visual arts would follow Kosugi the rest of his life. He was later a key collaborator in Merce Cunningham’s famous dance company. Group Ongaku played radical music and it soon established them as an essential component in Japan’s post-war music scene.  

As early practitioners of collective improvisation they attempted to create acoustic sound spaces that corresponded to the actual time & space they played in. Violin was Takeisha Kosugi’s primary instrument. The other members of Group Ongaku played cello, drums, guitar, and saxophone as well as using their voices and whatever else happened to be lying around nearby. Usually there was a radio nearby and whatever they could tune in off the bands became a part of their improvised sets. This is evident on the “Automatism” recording from 1960 (released by the Hear Sound Art Library in 1996.  The members were also fans of the tape recorder. The recordings they put to tape were further manipulated and added into the mix during their live shows.

If you listen to it and it sounds strange and chaotic I’d agree with you. The thing about collective improvisation is that it takes practice and is a skill set that must be learned. The listener who judges the results based on previous exposure only to pop and rock music may think it is all just noise. An appreciation of jazz will have the listener better prepared for what might be encountered in the forays of Group ONGAKU, but they may still be left bewildered, apparently abandoned in a wilderness where loud predators lurk behind every menacing sound. The different voices of the instruments may appear disconnected; but there is a unity, like a golden thread, amidst all the howling. There is a method to the apparent madness of inchoate gurgling that churns alongside sax squelches, vacuum cleaners, and violin scrapings. This is the soundtrack for a generation waking up and coming into adulthood after the devastation of the Nagasaki nightmare, their memories forever burned in the aftermath of Hiroshima. In their early twenties and full of the vigor of youth is it not to be expected that their experience, when translated into music, the language of pure emotion, shows signs of chaos and rage?

Yet they were firmly in the zeitgeist of the time even if they were removed from centers of musical innovation in the west. The sounds they made shared a common goal and direction with other contemporaries such as John Cage with whom Kosugi would later formed a close friendship. Audiences in Japan did not hear the work of those such as Group Ongaku, Cage and Stockhausen with the same revulsion and outrage as often happened on opening nights in Europe and America. Steeped in the traditions of Zen Buddhism and the Shinto religion felt more at ease with the random, non-linear, and abstract acoustics they created. Which isn’t to say they were adored as much as the Japanese bands who brought rock and roll into their hearts and made it their own, but only that their existed a level of understanding from their countrymen.

Listening to these recordings now, over fifty years after they were made, they sound remarkable and are right at home in the canon of twentieth century improvisational and experimental music. The work Kosugi did with Group ONGAKU formed a strong foundation for his later journeys with his next band the Taj Mahal Travelers, and his ongoing work as a solo artist.

THE TAJ MAHAL TRAVELLERS

The efforts of Group Ongaku gradually wound their way down. Throughout the rest of the 60s it served the needs of individual composers within the group as a way to have a ready ensemble able to play their work. Ready to embark on a new project Kosugi pulled together the members of the Taj Mahal Travellers in 1969. His recruits were from the ranks of the younger generation of Japanese. They had grown up with rock and roll and jazz. Their minds had been turned on the moment they had tuned in their radios and they were ready to drop out. Standard musical instruments were played by the Travelers, but the way they played them was very not standard. For the most part the instruments used were acoustic, such as the santur (an Iranian hammered dulcimer), harmonica, tuba, tympani, trumpet. Others were electrically amplified such as Kosugi’s violin. Ryo Koike also amplified his double bass, but he is remembered more the way he played with it sitting flat on its back across the ground. Straddled across the top his bass the way he bowed his instrument was very sensual. A Mini Korg synthesizer was also a part of their set up.  Besides playing mandolin Michihiro Kimura was also the resident tree branch shaker. As Julian Cope noted about this unusual instrument “Kimura appears to have spent much of the early ‘70s shaking a tree branch in a wide variety of obscure locations around the world.” Other instruments in this vein were “voices, stones, and bamboo winds.” Trying to hear those on their extant recordings is part of the magic and the mystery. The Taj Mahal Travelers had made themselves a promise to play “wherever a power supply was available” and their sound had an emphasis on heavy electronic processing. The use of delay effects and echoes congealed the array of their instruments into a swirling cosmic gel.

It is undoubted that the Taj Mahal Travellers were infused with the psychedelic spirit of the day. Yet group leader Kosugi put forth a valiant effort to make sure they were not confused with being a mere commune of music making hippies. In their first year they played a series of shows at Shibuya’s Station 70 club and the stage was taken over by revelers who wanted to contribute to the music making. They jumped up onstage, even though they hadn’t been invited, thinking it was some kind of “happening” or “be-in”. Yet the sound of the Travellers wasn’t intended to be a free for all among whoever wanted to participate. Rather it was an improvised exploration of sonic geography between dedicated musicians who were united in a singular aim. After these initial performances Kosugi took pains to only book his band at places such as art galleries or the kaikan culture-halls.

The group took a break over the summer when Kosugi went to Osaka for to perform as a solo artist at Expo ’70. He became friends with Stockhausen and the members of that group and was inspired by their day long performances in the specially designed spherical auditorium. With these experiences fresh in his mind at the end of Expo ’70 he was ready to get to work with the Travelers again. Some of the band still insisted on trying to play at rock venues, which Kosugi resisted. Their collective destiny changed when they were asked to play a dawn-to-dusk concert at Oiso Beach. This experience gave the groups the modus operandi they needed to succeed. Throughout the rest of their career they continued to perform outdoors for the most part, playing their strange music on beaches and hilltops. Their music consisted of improvised drones composed and long spontaneous passages reflective of the deep meditative presence they occupied within the unique space/time of coordinates of each specific performance. The group continued to play at beaches, and on mountains and were also invited to play at Shinto temples. Between 1971-2 they went on a tour where they played in majestic locations in the Netherlands, Germany and England, before heading on to Iran and India where they played at the Taj Mahal itself, before coming back home to Japan. From 1972-74 they spent a good deal of time both on the road and in the studio. The names of their recorded songs reflect their process, such as “Taj Mahal Travelers between 6.20 and 6.46pm” or “Taj Mahal Travelers between 7.50 and 8.05pm”. They are snapshots of what was played by a certain group at a certain place at a certain time.
​
After making two albums with his band Takeisha returned to the studio in September of 1974 to make a solo album. Catch Wave is a piece he wrote for processed violin, voice, radios and oscillators. It is available for listening in the extensive cultural archives of Ubu.com at http://www.ubu.com/sound/kosugi.html. The first side of the LP arrives like a beam from a strong station. With the antenna pointed it gets a bearing on the transmitting station and comes in full quieting. As only good radio and good music can do, Catch Wave transports you to another world, one of endless shimmering undulations. The rising of the waves of the radio and the oscillator, and a prevalent wah-wah-wah and whirr-whirr-whirr of mysterious origin are mixed in with the floating see-saw of the electric violin. The entirety of the piece creates an immersive mysterious sound world. The waves build and then fall back again into nothing. The piece takes up the entirety of two-sides of a slab of wax. It is the kind of signal I always want to tune right into. It is kind of wave I always want to catch.

Sources:
Japrock sampler: how the post-war Japanese blew their minds on rock ‘n roll by Julian Cope, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007
https://www.soundohm.com/product/music-of-group-ongaku/pid/16484/
http://www.ubu.com/sound/kosugi.html

Holger Czukay was another musician who was fascinated with the sounds of shortwave listening. He brought his love of radio and communications technology on board with him when he helped to found the influential krautrock band Can in 1968. Shortwave listening continued to inform Czukay’s musical practice in his solo and other collaborative works later in his career. It all got started when he worked at a radio shop as a teenager.

 Holger had been born in the Free City of Danzig in 1938, the year before the outbreak of World War II. In the aftermath of the war his family was expelled from the city when the Allies dissolved its status as free city-state and made it become a part of Poland. Growing up in those bleak times his formal primary education was limited, but he made up for it when he found work at a radio repair shop. He had already developed an interest in music and one his ideas was to become a conductor, but fate had other plans for him. Working with the radios day in and day out he developed a fondness for broadcast radio. In particular he found unique aural qualities in the static and grainy washes of the radio waves coming in across the shortwave bands. At the shop he also became familiar with basic electrical repair work and rudimentary engineering. All of this would serve him well when building the studio for Can. In his work with the band he not only played bass and other instruments but acted as the chief audio engineer.

He spoke about this time, and his fascination with the mystery of electricity, in an interview. “When I was fourteen or fifteen years old, I didn't know if I wanted to become a technician or a musician. And when you are so young you think the one has to exclude the other. So in the very beginning I thought I am sort of a musical wonder-child, and want to become a conductor and that was very very serious, but there was no chance to get educated as I was a refugee after the war. And then, suddenly, electricity. Electricity was such a fascinating thing - it was something. And then I became the boy in a shop who carries the radios to repair them and carries them back again. That was so-called three-dimensional radio, before stereo. There was one front speaker in the radio and at the side, there were two treble speakers which gave an image of spatial depth. I must say these radios sounded fantastic.”

In 1963 at the age of twenty-five he Czukay decided to pursue the musical side of his vocation and begin studying under Karlheinz Stockhausen at the Cologne Courses for New Music. This is where he met up with Irmin Schmidt, another founding member of Can, who was also a student of Stockhausen’s. As much as Can itself was one of the guiding forces of Krautrock, or Kosmiche music as it was also called, a broad style of experimental rock music developed in Germany in the late 60s. Krautrock was for the most part divorced from the traditional blues and rock and roll influences of British and American rock music scenes of the time. Krautrock featured more electronic elements and contributed to the further development electronic music and ambient music as well as the birth of post-punk, alternative rock and New Age music. Stockhausen himself could be thought of as one of its chief instigators, a kind of Godfather of the genre. This was due not only to his influence as a teacher of German musicians, but because of his pioneering work with the raw elements of electronic music itself at the WDR studios.

Eccentric British rock musician and author Julian Cope discusses the importance of Stockhausen’s composition Hymnen in his book Krautrock Sampler. He considered that piece in particular pivotal to the whole Krautrock movement. It’s release had “repercussions all over W. Germany, and not least in the heads of young artists. It was a huge 113 minute piece, subtitled ‘anthems for electronic and concrete sounds’. Hymnen was divided up into four LP sides, titled Region I, Region II, Region III and Region IV.” In a previous column I had discussed this piece of music as an early attempt at creating ‘world music’. With its sounds of shortwave receivers and electronics it plays anthems from various countries in an attempt to unify them. What he did with the German anthem, ‘Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles’ had a liberating effect on young Germany, who had grown up under the shadow of the worst kind of nationalism. Cope writes of the German publics reaction, “The left-wing didn’t see the funny side at all and accused him of appealing to the basest German feelings, whilst the right-wing hated him for vilifying their pride and joy, and letting the Europeans laugh at them. Stockhausen had just returned from six months at the University of California, where he had lectured on experimental music. Among those at his seminar’s were the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh, Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane and many other psychedelic musicians. Far from snubbing the new music Stockhausen was seen at a Jefferson Airplane show at the Filmore West and was quoted as saying that the music ‘…really blows my mind.’ So whilst the young German artists loved Stockhausen for embracing their own rock’n’roll culture, they doubly loved him for what they recognized as the beginning of a freeing of all German symbols. By reducing ‘Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles’ to its minimum possible length he had codified it…Stockhausen had unconsciously diffused a symbol of oppression, and so enabled the people to have it back.”
​
Czukay’s time studying with Stockhausen was as important to the development of Krautrock as was Hymnen itself. In fact while Stockhausen was working on Hymnen at the WDR studio during the day, Holger Czukay and the other members of a pre-Can group, the Technical Space Composers Crew, would go in and use the equipment at night to record their own album Canaxis. In the piece ‘Boat Woman’s Song’ some of Czukay’s early pioneering use of sampling can be heard. The proto-ambient pieces of music on this record were painstakingly assembled from tape loops and segments of a traditional Vietnamese folk song. In an interview Czukay spoke of the experience. “When Stockhausen left for home, we had a second key and went in and switched everything on. We went in and Canaxis was produced in one night. In one night the main song ‘Boat Woman Song’ was done. I prepared myself at night at home, so I knew exactly what I wanted to do, so in four hours the whole thing was done.” David Johnson helped Czukay and Rolf Dammers engineer the album. “He knew the studio a bit better than me. He was engineering a bit, switching on stuff, copying from one machine to another…and that was okay. In four hours the job was done.”  The music on Canaxis is eerie and beautiful and haunting. It is both a part of this world, but also not of it. It seems as if it has come to us from beyond, and some fifty years later it still sounds fresh, as all timeless music does. 

Stockhausen influenced Czukay in other ways. It hadn’t originally been Czukay’s intention to become a rock musician. He was more interested in classical music, which he thought was the best, with a definite leaning towards it’s avant-garde. “Therefore I went to Stockhausen as he was the most interesting person. Very radical in his thoughts. With the invention of electronic music he could replace all other musicians suddenly: that was not only an experiment; that was a revolution! I thought that is the right man, yeah? So I studied with him for about three years. Until I finally said, if a bird is ready to fly, he leaves his nest and that is what I have done.”

After leaving the nest Holger became a music teacher in his own right as a way to make a living. Later he was able to work full time as a musician, because as he often joked, he was married to a rich woman. Teachers always learn from their students though and his were teaching him about the rock and pop music of the time, playing him records of Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones. The Velvet Underground and Pink Floyd's stood out to him, as did the song I am the Walrus by the Beatles. Czukay fell in love with that masterpiece of psychedelic pop. In particular he loved the way bursts of AM static and the sound of tuning between stations had been used for a musical effect at the end of the cut.

All of these influences and elements would fused together in his work with Can, a project begun while he was still a teacher. Irmin Schmidt’s mark on the band was equally massive, and he was just steeped, if not more, in the 20th century avant-garde, but exploring his contribution is not in the scope of this article. For most of his time in the band, Czukay played bass, but toward the end he gave up that instrument altogether in favor of a shortwave radio. He speaks about Stockhausen’s influence in making this switch.

 “A shortwave radio is just basically an unpredictable synthesizer. You don’t know what it’s going to bring from one moment to the next. It surprises you all the time and you have to react spontaneously. The idea came from Stockhausen again. He made a piece called ‘Short Wave’ [‘Kurzwellen’]. And I could hear that the musicians were searching for music, for stations or whatever, and he was sitting in the middle of it all and the sounds came into his hands and he made music out of it. He was mixing it live – and composing it live. He had a kind of plan, but didn’t know what the plan would bring him. With Can, I would mix stuff in with what the rest of the band were playing. Also, we were searching for a singer and we didn’t find one – we tested many, but couldn’t find anyone – so I thought: ‘why not look to the radio for someone instead? The man inside the radio does not hear us, but we hear him.’” This he used without additional effects. “The radio has a VFO – an oscillator – where you can receive single side-bands, which means just half of the waves and you can decode it – it’s like a ring modulator. And that’s more than enough. The other members of Can were very open to these unpredictable uses of instruments, especially in the early days.”

​His work with radios in a musical setting was a way for him to bring in energies from outside the band into their work. In his own words, “I looked for the devices to bring a different world into the group again and they had to react on that. That was the idea, working with a radio or working with tapes or working with a telephone. I even had this idea that with a transmitter, we could transmit and receive things back again. Or to call up people like today's radio shows where people call up or you call people. This sort of interaction I wanted to establish. But the group was not interested in this. So I finished with Can and went my own way. And here, I really followed this. I was working on that for a few years (with Can) but then I found it that it wasn't fun anymore. I continued alone then worked with other people.” 

Can had a great run as a band from 1968 to 1979. Afterwards Czukay continued to flourish with his solo recordings, including albums like Radio Wave Surfer. The methods he developed for using radio as an instrument he termed radio painting. He continued to make solo albums and collaborate with other musicians on various project throughout the 80’s, 90’s and 2000’s. He died of unknown causes on September 5, 2017.

All of this tells you the who, what, where, when and why. But to get the full experience I invite you to blow your mind by listening to Stockhausen, Can, Holger Czukay, and other crispy Krautrock bands! There is no better place to start than with Hymnen, the Can discography. 

Sources:
Krautrock Sampler: one head’s guide to great Kosmische muisk 1968-onwards by Julian Cope, Head Heritage, 1996.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_(band)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holger_Czukay

Interviews:
http://www.factmag.com/2017/09/06/holger-czukay-interview/https://rwm.macba.cat/en/curatorial?id_capsula=584#
http://media.hyperreal.org/zines/est/intervs/czukay.html

Starting in the early 1960s Karlheinz Stockhausen composed several instrumental works which he called "process compositions". These did away with traditional stave notation and instead used symbols including plus, minus, and equal signs that indicated the successive transformations of sounds that were otherwise unspecified or unforeseeable by the composer. In this way he brings elements of improvisation into the fold of Western classical music where the strict adherence to a fixed score left little room for interpretation by musicians. The scores in his process pieces don’t dictate specific notes or ways of playing but rather specify the way a sound is to be changed or imitated. Taking a cue from his studies of information theory Stockhausen created a way of writing music that is similar to computer programming. The program “determines the way information is processed while leaving the choice of information to be processed to the individual user.” (Maconie 1990, 156-157)
​
Stockhausen’s process pieces include Plus-Minus (1963), Prozession (1967), Kurzwellen, and Spiral (both 1968). Eventually they led to the text based processes of his intuitive music compositions in the cycles Aus den sieben Tagen (1968) and Für kommende Zeiten (1968–70).
Kurzwellen (Short waves), the third of the process pieces also marks the beginning of Stockhausen’s magnificent voyage using shortwave receivers as a medium for musical transportation.  The formal procedures in Kurzwellen (and the others) are fixed. Stockhausen thinks of these not as fixed in the way Beethoven’s Fifth symphony is a fixed piece that will sound the same to a greater or larger degree from recording to recording or performance to performance.  Only the processes themselves are fixed. These are indicated primarily by plus, minus, and equal signs and constitute the composition.

Yet the sound materials themselves, like the knobs on the tuners, are variable. The process scores can be followed and bring about very different results each time they are played and yet somehow still sound similar. The sound material coming in from the shortwave radios is unpredictable. Yet the prescribed processes themselves can be heard from one performance to another as being "the same".  These developments in musical theory and practice make live performances and new recordings exciting events.

The sounds coming in from the radio are what they players use as source material for the process of transformation as indicated by the score. Each player has a radio at their station. Stockhausen writes, “An undreamed intensity of listening and of intuitive playing is reached – and shared by all co-players and listeners – through the concentration of all players on unforseeable events coming from the realm of short-waves, in which one only very rarely knows who composed or produced them, how they came into being or from where, and in which all possible acoustic phenomena can appear.”

In practice the performers search for desirable sounds on the radio. These are for the most part the more  abstract and noisy sounds found in the spectrum. Then they replicate those sounds on their instruments and transform them by using variations in register, volume, duration or rhythmic density. There are additional instructions in the score for players to form synchronous duo, trio and quartet events, where players play together in tandem, or alternatively trade short events with one another. 

Part of the reason Stockhausen proscribed shortwave receivers rather than just the AM and FM broadcast band receivers most often used by John Cage is that they pulled in sounds from around the world. This played into his idea of creating a kind of world music. Shortwave also has a rich variety of sounds that allows the musicians greater freedom in finding sound material transform.

He continued to use shortwave radios in the pieces Spiral, Pole for 2, and Expo for 3. Writing of Spiral the composer says, "Doesn't almost everyone own a short-wave receiver?  And doesn't everyone have a voice? Wouldn't it be an artful way of life for everyone, to transform the unexpected (which one can receive on a short-wave radio) into new music - i.e. into a consciously-formed sound process which awakens all intuitive, mental, sensitive and artistic faculties, and makes them become creative, so that this awareness and these faculties rise like a spiral?!"

Expo is kind of the penultimate of these pieces, though it shares close similarities with Spiral and Pole, differing mostly in the number of players. All can be heard as being part of the same family of process pieces using shortwave radio. Expo was written for Stockhausen's 1970 stay in Japan at the World Fair in Osaka ("EXPO '70").  For the Fair Stockhausen designed a large spherical auditorium that was then developed by his collaborator Fritz Bornemann. Outfitted with 50 loudspeakers the audience was literally surrounded on all sides by sound. Karlheinz was able to control the movement of the sound mix around these speakers, moving the audio vertically and horizontally. Sometimes he created rising and falling spiral motions using what was termed a "rotation mill". There were also various balcony stages and platforms as the podium that gave the works peformed there further spatial dimension. For 183 his crew of twenty performed daily from 3:30 to 9pm. With breaks for individual musicians I’m guessing. The German pavilion became one of the main attractions at Expo '70.
These pieces represent a kind of music where both musicians and listeners must surrender completely to the process without worrying about the outcome. As humans this “not worrying about the outcome” of an action or a path taken can be a brutal challenge. These works embody a philosophy that has the effect of helping me to worry less about outcomes in my life. Process music as applied to my life gives me a sense of freedom from the outcome of an action. This allows me to be more present with the action itself as it happens, whether it is writing, radio, or some other activity. Listening to process music reminds me that I need to surrender to what I am doing in the moment. Surrender is difficult. Part of the joy to be found in the arts is submitting to how they grasp hold of us. Listening itself becomes a transformation.
​
To the amateur radio or SWLing enthusiast the sounds of Kurzwellen will be familiar. The static crashes and buzzes, warbling of telemetry, announcers in multiple languages and mysterious numbers stations are sweet nectars of sound for the radio hobbyist. Listening to these recordings is like drinking a fine wine. I prefer it served in a darkened room with ears open to the world.

Sources:
http://stockhausenspace.blogspot.com/ (plus/minus series of articles)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_music
The works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, by Robin Maconie, 2nd edition.

John Cage's composition Imaginary Landscape No. 4 wasn't the end of his engagement with the use of radio as a sound source. In fact his imagination, now glowing like a hot tube, was just getting warmed up. I will turn to his next experiments shortly, but I wanted to dwell for a moment on his earliest radio work, that I overlooked in last month’s  article. I had quite forgotten about Cage's involvement with the Boy Scouts in Los Angeles in the early 1920's . It was during this time period that his fascination with radio was sealed. His father had built a crystal set that could be plugged into an electric light system. For his effort it got his father listed in the city directory as a "radio engineer" though he had been more recently famous for his work on submarines. Cage sr. had invented parts and systems for subs that helped keep them level and also a system for running the engines on gasoline instead of batteries, which increased the speed of the subs. His father's flair for invention seemed to have been passed on to Cage jr. As a Tenderfoot in the Boy Scouts John got the idea of hosting a scouting program on the radio. First he obtained permission from his organization, and then he approached LA station KFWB who rejected his proposal. He next took his idea to KNX, and they gave the show the green light. It broadcast weekly on Friday afternoons. John at the time had considered himself destined to be in the ministry as his grandfather had been. As such he began each program with ten-minutes of oratory from a local religious person, be they minister, rabbi, or priest. The rest of the show was devoted to singing Scout songs over the air, sometimes with John accompanying his fellows on the piano. Other topics included such favorites as building fires and tying knots. KNX is still on the air on 1070 kHz in L.A. as one of the original clear channel stations, blasting a non-directional 50,000 watts. KNX had begun with a humble 5-watts when amateur Fred Christian put it on the air as 6ADZ. It was from these small beginnings, and his first taste of the airwaves, that he built on as a composer, presenter, experimenter, creating works for radio and incorporating radios themselves into a number of works.

After Imaginary Lanscape No. 4 Cage's next piece involving radio was written for a television program. His piece, Water Walk, lasts about three minutes and consists of many small actions relating to water. He timed each of his sound making actions to the precise second required by the score using a stop watch. Written for such fun sound making things as gong with water gun, and crushed ice in electric mixer, it also includes five radios and a piano. He stopped at the radios and adjusted frequency and volume, then released steam from a kettle, and plinked a few keys on the piano. Water Walk appeared live on television twice, first in 1959 in Milan, on the show Lascia o Raddoppia, an Italian version of the then popular Double or Nothing Game Show. Returning back home he got the chance to share it with American audiences on I've Got a Secret in 1960.  

Six years down the road came Variations VII that was presented on two of the nights of 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering that paired artists, musicians and performers with engineers from Bell Labs in presenting new works fusing technology to contemporary art practices. The 9 Evenings was the first in a series of projects that came to be known as E.A.T., or Experiments in Art and Technology. This was the first organized large scale collaboration between artists, engineers, and scientists.  Some of the engineers included Max Mathews (whose work was included previously in this column), Bela Julesz, Billy Klüve, John Pierce, Manfred Schroeder, and Fred Waldhauer, alongside many others, around 30 in total. There were 10 artists involved including  Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, David Tudor, and Robert Whitman. The collaboration between the artists and engineers produced a number of "firsts" for technology in the theater. Some were specially-designed systems and equipment.  Others repurposed existing gear in innovative ways. Closed-circuit television and television projection was used on stage for the first time; an infrared television camera captured action in total darkness; a Doppler sonar device translated movement into sound; a fiber-optics camera picked up objects in a performer's pocket; and portable wireless FM transmitters and amplifiers transmitted speech and body sounds to loudspeakers.  The performances took place between October 13-23, 1966 at New York's 69th Regiment Armory, at Lexington Avenue and Twenty-Fifth Street. Around 1000 people attended each evening.

The engineering side for Cage's piece was overseen by Cecil H. Coker whose primary area of focus was acoustic research, specializing in articulatory speech synthesis. Coker, with two colleagues, wrote the first software text-to-speech program in 1973. Coker had worked with Cage before on the piece Variations V helping to develop a system of for using photoelectric cells to provide lighting and randomly triggered sounds. Variations VII was considerably more involved though it still used photoelectric cells as a key component for triggering sounds.

In composing Variations VII, Cage used no previously prepared sources of music. It consisted only of "those sounds which are in that air at the moment of performance." Part of the elaborate set up included ten telephone lines installed to the Armory and kept open at various locations in New York City. Some of the places they were connected to included Luchow's restaurant, the Aviary, the 14th Street Con Edison electric power station, the ASPCA lost dog kennel, The New York Times press room, Merce Cunningham’s dance studio, and one next to fellow composer Terry Riley's turtle tank. Magnetic pickups on the telephone receivers fed these sound sources into Cage's sound manipulation system, and from there to a dozen loudspeakers, one ceiling speaker. He also used 20 radios, one tuned to the police department dispatch),  2 television bands, and 2 Geiger counters. Oscillators and a pulse generator were other sound sources. Rounding it all off were a dozen household appliances such as blenders, fans, a juicer, and washing machine, wired with contact microphones. If that wasn't enough sounds from four wired body parts, heart, brain, lungs and stomach were included in the unpredictable mix. The entire set up stood on a platform with equipment stretched across two long tables. Cage, David Tudor and three other musicians moved around between the rows twisting knobs, plugging and unplugging cords and circuits, and flipping switches. Adding further randomness to the mix were the 30 photocells and lights mounted at ankle level around the performance area. These  activated and triggered different sound sources as the performers, and audience who came in close to watch, moved around the set up.
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 Video artist Naim June Paik compared the roaring noise of Variations VII  to a Niagra Falls of sound. Nothing like it had ever been heard before. And since so many of the sounds came from live sound sources an exact sound replica can never be recreated. Paik also considered to be Cage's masterpiece performance in the realm of electronic music. 

​The Maker and Hacker movements have had a great success in continuing to build relationships between the technically minded and the artistically minded. Ham radio has different restrictions imposed on it by the FCC. However it seems to me that somehow Hams could still work in creative ways with artists and musicians, and continue to forge vital connections between art and technology. 

​Sources:
Begin again: a biography of John Cage by Kenneth Silverman, Alfred Knopf, New York, 2010.
Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists, by Kay Larson, Penguin Press, New York, 2012.
Reception: the radio works of Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage, by Alana Pagnutti, Smith and Brown, 2016.
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9_Evenings:_Theatre_and_Engineering
http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=611   

​The development of telecommunications technology and electronic circuits had a major impact on the creation of new musical instruments from the very beginnings of the field. But it was only in 1951 that a composer first got the idea that the radio itself could be used as a musical instrument.  Since then the use of radio as a source for live, unpredictable sound, music, and voice has become commonplace across the genres of contemporary classical, and the various styles of electronic, rock and pop music. The next several installments of the music of radio series will explore some of the key composers and pieces of music that used radios as the primary instrument. Using the radio as an instrument has become part of what composer Alvin Curran has called "the new common practice" or grab-bag of themes, principles, and methods being used to create the sonic backdrop of the landscape that everyone now inhabits in this age of electronic multimedia.

"It's not a physical landscape. It's a term reserved for the new technologies. It's a landscape in the future. It's as though you used technology to take you off the ground and go like Alice through the looking glass." John Cage wrote this about his series of Imaginary Landscape compositions that first began in 1939 with No. 1, written for two variable-speed turntables, frequency recordings, muted piano, and cymbal. It was potentially the first piece of electroacoustic music ever composed. The turntables played test tones. Some were constant, others had a sliding pitch. From the very beginning the piece was envisioned for radio, to be performed for either live or recorded broadcast. Since Cage had been a boy, he had been fascinated by the medium. Born in 1912 broadcasting was still in its infancy when it first reached his ears. Radio was so new anything could be done with it. The lackluster formats most common on the broadcasting portions of the spectrum now could well use an injection of the wonder the medium held in those first few decades.

Imaginary Landscape No. 1 was written while Cage held a teaching position at the Cornish School in Seattle. The school had been founded by Nellie Cornish, who had received some education in radio technology from Edward R. Murrow when visiting him at the CBS station in New York. In 1936 she created at Cornish the first school for radio technology in the United States. The studio at the school was equipped with the latest broadcasting and recording gear. It was there that Cage first began to experiment with the use of electrical sounds for musical purposes. At that time he was deep into writing percussion music and he began incorporating the sounds of radio and oscillator frequencies into these pieces. Reporting on Imaginary Landscape No. 1 the Seattle Star wrote that it was a "staccato roar of radio static and ghastly, ghostly whistles with intermittent shrieks". While this might have terrified listeners of the time, anymore people take such music as a matter of course, paying it no mind, especially when it is used in such things as the soundtrack or incidental music in film and television.

In 1941 Cage had found himself spending a large part of the year in Chicago. It was here that his interest in radio music continued to grow. Around this time he had published an article "For More New Sounds" in the journal Modern Music. In this essay he wrote about the similarities to be found between the materials used to create sound effects in radio studios and the instruments in the percussion wing of an orchestra. One of his interests was to bring radio sound-effects to the concert hall. He wrote, "organizations of sound effects, with their expressive rather than representational qualities in mind, can be made. Such compositions could be represented by themselves as 'experimental radio music'". That same year he got to work with the poet Kenneth Patchen in creating a radio play for CBS. The first draft of the musical score was scrapped by the sound engineers however. Some of the sounds he wanted to create, such as the escape of compressed air were too expensive to produce for the program, he was told. After some revisions he eventually gave CBS something they considered acceptable. The resulting piece by Cage and Patchen, The City Wears a Slouch Hat, was broadcast on May 31st, 1942. The surreal text by the poet was mixed with sounds of telephones, crying babies, rain, foghorns and Cage's metallic percussion instruments. In 1942 he also wrote No. 2 and 3 in the Imaginary Landscape series. No. 2 was written for tin cans, conch shell, ratchet, bass drum, buzzers, water gong, metal wastebasket, lion's roar and amplified coil of wire. No. 3 required musicians to play tin cans again, muted gongs, audio frequency oscillators, variable speed turntables with frequency recordings and recordings of generator whines, amplified coil of wire, amplified marimbula (a Caribbean instrument similar to the African thumb piano), and electric buzzer.

Imaginary Landscape No. 4 was first performed in 1951 and is scored for 12 radios played by 24 musicians, two on each radio, one to control the tuning, the other to control the volume. It is a great example of indeterminate music. The only guarantee about the piece is that no performance of it will never be heard the same way. This is guaranteed because John incorporates chance operations to determine how much the dials of each radio are to be turned by each performer. The novelty of each performance is also guaranteed by the nature of radio itself. Depending on the place and time of a performance, the things coming out of the radio speakers are going to be different. During its premier concert at Columbia University's McMillin Theater those in the audience heard the word "Korea" over and over again, as well as snippets of a Mozart violin concerto, news about baseball, static, and silence. The performance took place around midnight and many of the stations in New York had already gone off the air for the night.  Of course the silence never bothered Cage, who considered  in an integral part of the experience. He had said that "silence, to my mind is as much a part of music as sound."

Listening to a recording of this piece from 2008 reveals the prevalence of country music and commercials. Voices come in and say things like "60 percent off" and read the weather and the latest buzz words in the news cycle. Many people listening today might be as confused about the "musical" quality of such a piece as they were back in 1951. But what John Cage has done  is to ask people to tune in and experience the unpredictable sounds and signals coming in from the radios and from the world, as a form of music.

The Imaginary Landscape compositions came to a close with No. 5  a work for magnetic tape recorder and any 42 phonograph records. This piece in the series was written in the same year as he began work on Williams Mix, for eight simultaneously played independent quarter-inch magnetic tapes, that became the first piece of octophonic music. As John Cage continued to compose until his death in 1992, he continued to work musically with new technology, including early computer music compositions in the 1960's.  A number of other composers and musicians have taken a vast amount of inspiration from Cage's work with radio and continued to build on it. These will be explored in further transmissions.     

A lot of these recordings are available to listen to on the wonderful UbuWeb:
http://www.ubu.com/sound/cage.html

Sources:
Begin again: a biography of John Cage by Kenneth Silverman, Alfred Knopf, New York, 2010.
Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists, by Kay Larson, Penguin Press, New York, 2012
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_Landscape

Lev Theremin's skill at invention was not lost on the Soviet machine. Not long after his musical instrument was patented, the radio watchman security device it was based on started being employed to guard the treasures of gold and silver Lenin had plundered from church and clergy. The watchman was also being used to protect the state bank. Setting up and installing these early electronic traps took him away from his primary interest in scientific research. Just as he was approaching the limits of his frustration his mentor at the Institute gave him a new problem to solve, that of "distance vision" or the transmission and reception of moving images over the airwaves. The embryonic idea for television was in the air at the time but no one had figured out how to make it a reality. The race was on and the Soviets wanted to be first to crack the puzzle.  
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Having researched the issue extensively in the published literature, Lev was ready to apply the powers of his mind towards a solution. In the Soviet Union parts weren't always readily available. Some were smuggled in, and others had to be scavenged from flea markets -the latter a process very familiar to radio junkies. By 1925 he had created a prototype from his junk box using a rotating disk with mirrors that directed light onto a photo cell. The received image had a resolution of sixteen lines, and it was possible to make out the shape of an object or person but not the identifiable details. Other inventors in Russia and abroad were also tackling the issue. Fine tuning the instrument over the next year he doubled the resolution to 32 lines and then, using interlaced scanning, to 64. Having created a rudimentary "Mechanism of Electric Distance Vision" he demonstrated the device and defended his thesis before students and faculty from the physics department at the Polytechnic Institute. Theremin had built the first functional television in Russia. 
    
After this period Lev embarked to Europe and then America where he lived for just over a decade engaging the public, generating interest in his musical instrument, and doing work with RCA. As Hitler gathered power he was anxious about the encroaching war and returned home to the Soviet Union in 1938. He barely had time to settle back in when he was sent to the Kolmya gold mines for enforced labor for the better part of a year. This was done as a way of breaking him, a fear tactic that could be held over his head if he didn't cooperate: do what we say or go back to the mines. The state had better uses for him. He was picked up by the police overlord Lavrenti Beria who sent him to work in a secret laboratory that was part of the Gulag camp system. One of his first jobs was to build a radio beacon whose signals would help track down missing submarines, aircraft and smuggled cargo.

With WWII winding to a close the Cold War was dawning and Russia was on the offensive, trying to extend its reach and gather intelligence on such lighthearted subjects as the building of atomic bombs. In their efforts at organized espionage the Soviets sifted for all the data they could get from foreign consulates. Having succeeded with his beacon Lev was given another assignment. This time the goal wasn't to track down cargo or vehicles but to intercept U.S. secrets from inside Spaso House, the residence of the U.S. Ambassador. Failure to do the bidding of his boss would mean a return to the mines. His boss had high demands for the specifications of the bug Lev was to plant. The proposed system could have no microphones and no wires and was to be encased in something that didn't draw attention to itself.
  
The bug ended up being put inside a wooden carving of the Great Seal of the United States and was delivered by a delegation of Soviet Pioneers (their version of Boy Scouts) on July 4, 1945. Deep inside this "gesture of friendship" was a miniature metal cylinder with a nine inch antenna tail. The device was passive and was not detected by the X-Rays used at Spaso house in their routine scans. It only activated when a microwave beam of 330 Mhz was directed at the seal from a nearby building. There was a metal plate inside the cylinder that when hit with the beam resonated as a tuned circuit. Below the beak of the eagle the wood was thin enough to act as a diaphragm and the vibrations from it caused fluctuations in the capacitance between the plate and the diaphragm creating a microphone. The modulations this produced were picked up by the antenna and then transmitted out to the receiver at a Soviet listening post. Using this judiciously the Soviets were able to gain intelligence to aid them in a number of strategic decisions. The Great Seal bug is considered to be a grandfather to RFID technology.    

This wasn't the last time Lev was asked to develop wireless eavesdropping technology. For the next job his overseers upped the ante on him. No device could be planted in the site targeted for surveillance. The operation was code named Snowstorm. Lev used his interest in optics to figure out a method. Knowing that window panes in a room vibrate slightly when people talked he needed a method to detect and read the vibrations from a distance. Resonating glass contains many simultaneous harmonics and it would be a difficult to find the place of least distortion to get a voice signal from. Then there was the obstacle of reinterpreting the signal back into a speech pattern. Using an infrared beam focused on the optimum spot and catching its reflection back in an interferometer with a photo element he was able to pick up communications. Back at his monitoring post he used his equipment and skills to reduce the large amounts of noise from the signal.   
A few years later Lev was released from his duties at the lab, but was kept on a tight leash and not allowed to leave Moscow.

HOW TO BUILD A THEREMIN FROM THREE AM RADIOS 
    
For those amateurs wishing to build and play a theremin there are many commercial kits available on the market. However a simple theremin can be built using just three AM radios. If you don't already have these laying around the house they can easily be obtained from your local thrift store.

One of the radios will be a fixed transmitter, another a variable transmitter and the third would be the receiver. The volume knobs on the fixed and variable transmitters can be turned all the way down, as they are just used to produce the intermediate frequency oscillations that will be picked up by the receiver. The receiver radio should be set on an unused frequency in the upper range of the AM band such as 1500 Khz. If it is in use tune to a nearby space where only static is heard. The fixed and variable transmitters should then be tuned 455 Khz below where your receiver is set, in this example 1045 Khz. 455 Khz is a common difference in the local oscillator frequency, although there can be variations. As these frequencies are set the receiver should start to make a whistling type sound, the production of a beat frequency.

The next step is to open up the variable radio and look for the variable capacitor, often housed in white plastic with four screws. Find the terminal that takes the station out of tune and use an aligator clip attached to the antenna, or solder a wire from the antenna to the oscillator terminal. Now the controls will have to be adjusted slightly again. Tune the fixed transmitter until the receiver starts whistling and have fun playing with the sounds it creates.          

Sources:
Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage by Albert Glinsky, University of Illinois Press, 2000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Theremin
How to Make a Basic Theremin by eltunene: https://app.box.com/s/kgdstzwaoc/1/17284427/181802859/1