The text below is transcribed from radio broadcast I picked up while on a recent time travel DX foray into one of the futures of northern Ohio, about the Lighthouse Coastal Academy, a school set up to train the mentat minds of Generation Q:

Calling all parental units! Calling all parental units!

We know you want the best for your kids and at Lighthouse Coastal Academy they receive the best: the best instructors and teachers gathered from all points across Eerie Lake Country. Our instructors have repeatedly received high accolades from the top educational journals and societies for providing classes as unique as the students who take them. But it is the students who really shine! The educational philosophy itself is built upon the best tenants from Waldorf-Montessoria, alongside access to the traditional instruction of many technical guilds, art and craft societies we partner with in our work-study program. The Lighthouse Coastal Academy is built around core principles of Love, Work, and Wisdom and we seek to develop the capacity for those all those who seek knowledge within our halls and walls.

The story behind the Light House Coastal Academy is one of reclamation. The town of Vermillion wanted to do something with its decaying Light House. There was also an old abandoned hotel on an adjacent property called the Captain’s Bell. Once destination spots that drew tourists to the area, the Captain’s Bell and Light House had become more of a blight for Vermillion. Town leaders decided to turn these properties into a college. The first wave of teachers and students helped fix up the places. They attended classes in rooms filled with leftover hotel furniture. Anything else they needed they built out of materials taken from the bin. It was all very much a Do It Yourself endeavor. In time the Lighthouse was restored and its lamp was relit. Since that time, the lamp of knowledge has never gone out, and it has become a beacon drawing seekers from all around the Lake Countries and beyond.

Though there are many courses and preset learning spirals available for the students to choose from, it is our evolving self-designed curriculum that remains the most popular. We realize that each student is on an individual journey, and we excel by helping them excel. Our decentralized network of mentors and teachers are there to act as guides and resources as the students flow through an ecological web of learning and knowledge. We also believe that education should never be separated from useful work in the world.

And though the lighthouse on our campus is a kind of tower, it is no ivory tower. We have seen in our history books how the college and university systems of the 21st century imploded. The causes were many, but were in part due to a tendency that privileged theory over practice. Academia had become completely unglued from teaching anything useful, and existed within its own self-referential echo chamber. Unmoored from reality, and after many scandals, financial, and otherwise, the majority of these institutions slipped into a neglect from which they never recovered. Our work-study program is an antidote to that. All of our students are required to get there hands dirty in practical jobs in positions throughout the Lake Countries.

All of our learning spirals, whether preset or self-designed, have an emphasis on interdisciplinary synthesis. No field of knowledge exists alone. One spiral of study leads to another, and as these interweave and interlace, they become a braided knot. On this knot the glass beads of learning can be slid. It is from this approach of synthesis and recombinant aesthetics that several of our students began working out methods for bringing the Glass Bead Game of Herman Hesse out of the realm of fiction and into the world of form. With these scholars early success in this matter the Lighthouse Coastal Academy has become the host of the biannual Glass Bead Game festival.

One of our students most beloved of interconnected spirals are those in the harmonic science grouping: music, astronomy, and geometry. Those who have made a thorough study in these areas have gone on to the great work of unleashing frozen music in the form of public buildings. The Akron Amphitheater was one such piece of frozen music designed by graduate Genevive Kaspel. The specific psychoacoustics within this building have been most useful for the all night sleep concerts held there used to enhance collective dreaming. Students of the art and science of radio are also known to participate in the harmonic science spiral. The voices and ideas of our students are well known throughout Eeerie country as they have full access to our campus AM, FM, and Shortwave stations, all operating under the WLCA call sign.

Speaking of communications, the communications spiral focuses on everything from radio design to broadcasting, analog internetwork analysis, and how to run and operate a successful amateur press association. Hands on learning is a must, and those interested in the textual side of things will love making their own newspapers and zines using our collection of antique movable type printers and mimeograph machines.

The natural world and local ecology of the Lake Eerie watershed are never far from our minds. Spirals focusing on bioremediation, water science, and agricultural studies -everything from permaculture, organic gardening, food forestry to urban farming and deep ecology- are available. A full course catalog and representative syllabi are available upon request.

It’s not all just hard work and study at the Lighthouse Coastal Academy. A rich tradition of sports and games permeates the air, to say nothing pranks. For those who want to get physical our Three Sided Football team is always open to anyone who wants to learn the art of goal defense. Our hiking and rowing clubs are also ever eager for new members. These only scratch the surface of clubs and societies created by our students and faculty, and we can’t even say much about those of, shall we say, a more clandestine nature!

Since our first days when the Captain’s Bell and the Lighthouse were our only buildings, we have managed to acquire further properties from the town, and have created a large library and laboratory. Your student will have access to these and all of the other amenities we have to offer. The Lighthouse Coastal Academy has brought new life back to Vermillion and the town is now filled with cafes, cabarets, music venues, clubs, and coffee houses. Many of the major and minor guilds now have a presence in Vermillion as representatives have come to be close by to the students who wish to learn from them. These guild members have opened many store fronts to distribute glasswork, woodwork, electrical circuits, spice, maps and more. Safe and walkable, Vermillion is only a short train ride away from the cities of Sandusky and Cleveland, and from these hubs other points around Lake Eerie Country, the Lake Countries as a whole, and points beyond.

Take a spiral ride with us into the realm of Love, Work and Wisdom. For more information please send us a letter, radiogram request, or for those with telephone service, call our offices at 1-888-555-CSTL, that’s 1-888-555-2785.

This message has been brought to you by the WLCA Radio League of Journeyers and by the Lake Eerie School of Retrocognition.

.:. .:. .:.
The writings presented here will always be free and never paywalled, but there are a few ways you can support my work: pass on the essays on to others, share the links to other sites and telling your friends. You can take out a paid subscription to this subslack if you’d like to be a patron to the arts as represented here. I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You can buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music, or my poetry book Underground Rivers, if you want to show some support and keep my writing in circulation. Thank you to all my readers and supporters. Your generosity means the world and helps support my universalist bohemian art life! Thanks for keeping me caffeinated and wired.

☕️☕️☕️

New World Records and the American Experimental Tradition part 4

​It’s hard enough to be a composer. Have you ever tried writing music down on paper from your head and then finding, and asking, a bunch of highly trained and skilled musicians to play the stuff you heard inside your head? The opportunities to write a symphony or chamber work were there- finding the opportunity to get it performed and played, another matter all together. It was hard enough to do this as a man. If you happened to be female, well, the opportunities were even fewer.

Electronic music offered a workaround for this. It was in part why so many composers got into the electronic music game. Sure, equipment could be scarce or expensive, but at its most basic, the tape machines, a composer could still get to work crafting their own material. It was also part of the reason many women composers in the 20th century took to electronics: it was a way to bypass the barriers to entry and just start making what they wanted. Many of these works ended up being for recorded media, as well as being intermedia.

In this post I am going to look at just one album, a compilation, and introduce some of the wonderful women composers. Consider these some of the founding mothers of electronic music in America. The album is called Women in Electronic Music 1977, but it has the prominent subtitle, New Music for Electronic & Recorded Media.

As Charles Amirkhanian wrote in the original liner notes, “The music on this album exhibits an exciting, wide-open, freewheeling approach to the medium of electronic music which has come to be typical of this genre in the late 1970s. No longer are composers obsessively concerned with the agonizing, expressionistic, and purely ‘electronic’ (synthesized) sound formulas which marked much of this music composed between the mid Fifties and the late Sixties. Instead, today we have composers willing to mix media and sonic materials in thoroughly inventive ways to achieve ends which are new-sounding, and often more engaging, than that of the ‘academic’ avant-garde.”

By combining mediums and genres, the work here is often healing, humorous, thought provoking, and at times transcendent. Megan Roberts work takes in the world of rock music, lending an entry point for listeners unused to the sometimes uncompromising sound worlds associated with experimental music. Laurie Anderson’s emphasis on poetic narrative gives listeners a net of words to latch onto in the sonic sea of miasmic bliss. Other pieces range from sinewave meditations to exploratory field recordings.
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The entire album is a snapshot of an important and fertile time in the arts. Looking at what other women artists were doing around the same time gives something of the flavor of the era. Joanna Russ had just published her science fiction novel The Female Man in 1975. It’s a tale following the parallel lives of four women in universes parallel. Each world has different ideas and notions about gender roles and shows how those societies operate according to those roles. In 1978, Russ came out wit her short novel, We Who Are About To… Camouflaged into the typical survival story of a group of spacer astronauts colonizing a new world, is a story of what happens when long-term survival is threatened. The men think the only way to continue is to impregnate the unnamed narrator. As the tensions build, she reaches the point where she has to defend herself against rape, and kills the men, before going hungry, and ultimately (spoilers) ending her own life. A lot of critics panned the book at the time, but Samuel R. Delany, whose critical imagination is itself unparalleled, suggested in his introduction to a new edition that the book was “a damningly fine analysis of the mechanics of political and social decay,” and that “Russ suggests that the quality of life is the purpose of living, and reproduction only a reparative process to extend that quality—and not the point of life at all... only feudal societies can really believe wholly that reproduction... is life’s real point.” (Emphasis mine.) Being itself gives its own meaning to life.

​The 1970s also saw Kathy Acker’s literary rise that would culminate in the 1980s. Acker was a experimental novelist who was as transgressive in her words as was Delany. She made extensive use of her own biographical material, and sent it spinning through a centrifuge of cut-up techniques and other ways of working with words as she grappled with sexuality, trauma, language, identity, and an ever-simmering rebellion.

​In the visual arts Cindy Sherman was shaking things up with her photography, and she herself was the subject of much of those photos. Transformation was the name of the game, and she transformed herself continually, shedding her skin like a snake through the use of makeup, prosthetics, wigs, ornate costumes and elaborate sets. At the center of these transformations was the detournement of an array of female stereotypes culled from popular culture and history.

The sounds heard on this album can be thought of as a corollary to these other kind of avantgarde and artistic activity in other media, and they are all from women pioneering their own paths in the last decade before the Reaganomic nightmare unfurled.

I continue to find inspiration in the works of artists such as these. Yet there are many amazing women electronic musicians working right now. That’s why I want to tell you about this year’s Oram Awards. The awards were named after the founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Daphne Oram. The award exists as “a platform to elevate the work and voices of women and gender non-conforming artists innovating in sound, music and related technology.” For details on how to submit your music check out oramawards.com You will have until July 19th to get something in, and you don’t have to be any previously released music or work.

THE SPECULATIVE SPHERES OF JOHANA M. BEYER

One of the charges that gets leveled against the kind of music often made by avantgarde composers is that it is too academic. That no one outside the academy has any use for listening to such “music,” that it is all just stuff for the brain and little for the heart and emotions that music has so long sought to stir.
Music will forever stimulate the heart and music, but tastes vary, and not all music stirs people the same way. Some music was designed to stimulate the intellect, the mental body, and this is as valid as popular love ballads and dance floor hits.

Some music will forever be speculative. According to composer Phil Legard, “speculative music combines metaphysics, cosmology and acoustic science to relate harmonics and tuning to the music of the spheres, and the moral qualities which those spheres were believed to affect in men and women.” While speculative music has its origins in ancient times and millennia past, the appeal of speculative music for composers and listeners has never disappeared, even if its appeal is a minority taste.
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Speculative music appears on this compilation album showcasing the contributions women composers have made to the ars electronica, because even in the age of the machine, musicians have never stopped turning their ears to the music of the spheres. In the opening piece on this album Johanna M. Beyer tunes into the cosmic celestial movements in the heavens above us.

It is fitting that her 1938 composition starts off the album. It is one of the first known works scored for electronic music written by a female composer.

Beyer was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1888 but emigrated to the U.S. sometime in the late 1920s or early thirties. She was a pianist but in 1934 she took the percussion class that one of the ubermensch of American experimentalism, Henry Cowell, taught at the New School for Social Research, aka, the University in Exile, aka The New School University.

The New School was a very experimental social milieu indeed. It was founded in 1919 by a group of grouch, dissatisfied intellectuals who were sick of the bulbous bureaucracy and blasted biliousness of so-called higher ed in America. Among its luminary instigators were John Dewey, Thorstein Velben, and Charles Beard. It started off as a night-school where lectures could be taken in for a modest fee. Since the New School was not in the business of handing out degrees, they were free to dispense with any kind of admission requirement. In places such as these adventurous music teachers could teach a curriculum of their own calibration.

Beyer had a very close friendship with Cowell, perhaps a romantically intimate relationship, but her life was intertwined with others reveling in the modernism of those past times. She knew John Cage, theosophist Dane Rudhyar, and the folklorist and musicologist John Seeger, his wife, the ultramodernist native Ohioan, Ruth Crawford.

Charles and Ruth had a daughter, Peggy Seeger, and some guy named Pete. Their family was significantly involved in the folk music revival. Ruth had worked closely with John and Alan Lomax, and Peggy went on to marry British folknik Ewan MacColl. In a roundabout way all of this tangential information leads us to the contribution Laurie Spiegel made on the Women in Electronic Music Album.

LAURIE SPIEGELS FOLKSY GROOVE

Spiegel was one of the key composers exploring the new frontiers of science and music at Bell Labs was Laurie Spiegel. The year was 1973, and at age twenty-eight she was already an accomplished musician with a restless curiosity when she started working with the GROOVE interactive compositional soft-ware. Having honed her skill and ability through scholarly devotion to musical practice and study, she was the kind of person who could see the creative potential in the new tools the facility was creating and make something timeless.
​
This compilation features the first movement of her Appalachian Grove, made like much of her other early electronic output at Bell Labs. The piece here is built around folk harmonies and shows how electronic music can also be folk music, parsing out themes as pastoral and rural even with the use of machines.

​Like many musicians before her, Laurie Spiegel had been fascinated by the Pythagorean dream of a music of the spheres. When she set about turning Kepler’s speculative seventeenth century composition into music, she had no idea her music would actually be traveling through the spheres. Putting forth Kepler’s third law of planetary motion, Harmonices Mundi was based on the varying speeds of orbit of the planets around the sun. He wanted to be able to hear “the celestial music that only God could hear,” as Spiegel said, continuing, “Kepler had written down his instructions but it had not been possible to actually turn it into sound at that time. But now we had the technology. So I programmed the astronomical data into the computer, told it how to play it, and it just ran.” Her realization of Johann Kepler’s Harmoni Mundi, a cut of which is featured on the Golden Record sent into outer-space on the unmanned Voyager exploratory craft.

(I have explored Spiegel’s work in further detail in my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory.)

IN THE FLUX WITH ANNEA LOCKWOOD

If all roads lead to fluxus, it should be no surprise to find those who have a connection to Fluxus on this album as well. Annea Lockwood is the one to represent. It makes sense that Fluxus would leave behind a trace of inspiration here. On this record the idea of electronic music is considered as a medium, but it is just one media among many, and many of the people documented were inspired to combine media with the electronic music. Indeed, this can be one of the effects of electronic music in general. Electronic music is a malleable medium, built up from electrons and shaping of sound waves, as such it is relatively easy to mix and combine it with other mediums. So much so, electronic sounds have become the background music of our time.

Lockwood was born in Aotearoa New Zealand in 1939, moved to England in the beginning of the sixties where she studied at the Royal College of Music, and attended the legendary Darmstadt course, and completed her studies at Cologne, stomping ground of Karlheinz Stockhausen. She took courses in electronic music with Gottfried Michael Koenig, who was at the head of the WDR Electronic Music Studio. Lockwood was very hip to what was going on back in the states, though too, and felt a kinship with the people who had put together the ONCE Festival (Gordon Mumma and Robert Ashley) and those who later became the Sonic Arts Union (Mumma, Ashley, David Behrman and Alvin Lucier) as well as Pauline Oliveros.

In 1973 composer Ruth Anderson (see below) invited her to teach at Hunter College, CUNY, and so Lockwood moved to the United States. During the sixties she worked on the Glass Concerts.

During the late 1960s, Lockwood created works such as the Glass Concerts, and audio-visual performance work for amplified glass that exuded otherworldly timbres. My first introduction to her music was a recording of the A Sound Map of the Hudson River, made from extensive field recordings along different locations of that great body of water.

Perhaps her most fluxus feeling work is the series of Piano Transplants she did between 1969-82. She had been inspired by the work of cardiac surgeon Christian Barnard who pioneered the realm of heart transplants. For her work, she took broken down and disused pianos and further burned, drowned, beached and planted them in an English garden. Pianos continue to be burned around the globe as part of the adjacent Piano Burning work.

In the seventies she started to get deeper into the possibilities of field recording. Lawrence English, who reissued the late 1975 work World Rhythms for his Room40 label, an excerpt of which is featured on this comp, put it this way: “It represents one of the first creative works exploring the potentials of field recordings in a multichannel setting. It is a landmark work and a composition that, on its 50th anniversary, has gently carried forward over the decades, but arguably now is only starting to come into true focus, and be understood for exactly how revolutionary it was.

World Rhythms was a work concerned with a practice of sustained listening into the world, and beyond. It expanded outward from many of the compositions and themes Annea Lockwood had been exploring since the 1960s. It sought to take those learnings and apply them to a new set of terrains and circumstances. Moreover, it suggested a sensing of sound that was drawn from profound curiosity, matched only by patience.”
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That sense of patient, slow, deep listening is reflected throughout her work. In 2016 she created a tribute Pauline Oliveros, a graphic score called “Bayouborne, for Pauline” that maps six of the converging bayous around Houston, Texas, the birthplace of Oliveros.

THE SIDEBAND BUTTERFLYS OF PAULINE OLIVEROS
Pauline Oliveros is another artist featured on this compilation. How could she not be? Her influence remains pervasive across the field of improvisation, electronic music and her own efforts at establishing the practice of deep listening, continues to inspire new generations of sound explorers.
As I mentioned in one of the recent pieces I wrote on her work, this piece, “Bye Bye Butterfly” was my first introduction to her work, and the creative use of sideband technique in audio, still blows me away every time I listen.

(Read my other articles on Pauline Oliveros:  A Deep Listening Starter Pack and Slowing Down, Listening Deep)

THE ELECTROACOUSTIC PUNK OF MEGAN ROBERTS

The burgeoning punk ethos of the seventies and the legacy of rock and roll gave Megan Roberts one strand of her inspiration. She married that with electroacoustics, creating an experimental work that also has a touchstone in the world of semi-popular culture.

“I Could Sit Here all Day” is full of aggressive wailing and screaming. It’s best played with the volume cranked to eleven. There is a raw, ritualistic feeling to it, just like there is to the primitive convulsions and gyrations of punk. We can see in her a parallel to that of Diamanda Galas.

Roberts was born in New York on October 12th of 1952, and then moved to California while still a baby. Decades later she was studying under Robert Ashley at Mills College in Oakland where the experimental scene was in full flux. There it was all about multimedia exploration in the realms of audio, video, dance and theater, melting into that swirling chaos, the decadent and primal rhythms of rock and rolls tribal beat.

In 1976 she had created a work using unichore- ovideoelectrobiosonics called “Suite for a Small Chamber.” What is a unichore? It is a kind of dance choreography where the body movements of the dancer are wired to electronic devices to trigger synthesizers and tape-loops. The ovideoelectrobiosonics is reference to her work combining bird and animal sounds, live audio and video feeds, along with other biological elements. “Factory” is a video she made that came out in 1976, and for this piece she utilizes the technique of strobosonic photophonos-copy. In other words, it’s a percussion piece where ultra-fast cuts from one image to another. The colors and motion map onto sound as rhythm and timbre. The work recalls the film Ballet Mecanique by Fernand Léger and the filmmaker Dudley Murphy that set the music of George Antheil into a Dadaist centrifuge.
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“I Could Sit Here All Day” is scored for birds, drums, and disembodied human voices, and is a descent into preterhuman realms of consciousness.

ON POINT WITH RUTH ANDERSON
Evelyn Ruth Anderson was born in Kalispell, Montana on the spring equinox in 1928. She spent two decades studying music. Among her teachers were the legendary Nadia Boulanger and Darius Milhaud, whose modernist influences extended vastly. She also hung out at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center where she studied under Vladimir Ussachevsky. Among her paying gigs she worked as an arranger for NBC-TV, doing compositions for their programs, and later worked for the Lincoln Center Theater. Artists got to eat.
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Her collage piece SUM (State of the Union Message) is included on the Lesbian American Composers collection, issued by the label CRI (Composers Recordings Incorporated -many of the titles by this label later got swooped up by New World Records to keep them in print).

​SUM is a masterclass in commercial audio collage on her piece “SUM.” It is literally commercial, because its source material is made entirely from commercials. In this piece you can hear such wonderful juxtapositions as “America’s favorite snack: Geritol.” Supposedly it also mimics a speech given by Richard Nixon. This is a precursor to the willfully disdainful and humorous works of people like Wayne Butane. DUMP is another one in the same vein, both from 1970.

Points is quite different from these collage works, and is a minimalist drone piece using pure sine tones. From an electronic point of view, these are the building blocks of all sound. The person who crafts with sine tones crafts their own sonic universe, and she was such a craftswoman. She died in 2019 shortly after she approved the test pressings for an LP of her work, entitled Here. The record was put out by Arc Light Editions in February 2020.

THE VIRAL NARRATIVES OF LAURIE ANDERSON

The last two pieces on the album are from another Anderson, this time Laurie Anderson. More than anyone else on the album, she has made her imprint further into popular culture. Like David Bowie, and her late husband Lou Reed, she embraced the androgynous, and played roles in her performance art where androgyny was showcased.

​Again, she has worked across the multimedia spectrum. Born in 1947, her early artistic training started with the violin and sculpture. Her recorded work and performances have focused on the poetic power of language, electronic technology as artistic tools, and idiosyncratic use of visual imagery.
This album features two of her early pieces, “New York Social Life” and “Time to Go.”

n the 1980s she catalpulted out of the insular art worlds and into expanded public consciousness through her UK chart hitting single “O Superman,” part of her larger expansive work United States Live, though it was featured on her debut album Big Science. United States Live can be considered as her early magnum opus (others would follow). Through spoken word, animated vignettes, and performance art and strange sounds she gives her impressions about the vagaries of life life in the United States.
Thus Anderson can be seen as completing this electronic circuit of American music. Her concert film Home of the Brave would come out in 1986. Her unique voice and interpretation of the American spirit warrants further exploration and contemplation.
.:. .:. .:.

Read the Rest of the New World Records and the American Experimental Tradition Series:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

In other news, our 11 year old cat Flynn was getting sick over the past two weeks and we just learned has diabetes. You really know you are living in America when even your pets get diabetes. We just got hit with a hefty vet bill, so if you have any spare change to throw into my coffee jar here here it'd be much appreciated.

​​The writings presented here will always be free and never paywalled, but there are a few ways you can support my work: pass on the essays on to others, share the links to other sites and telling your friends. You can take out a paid subscription to this subslack if you’d like to be a patron to the arts as represented here. I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You can buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music, or my poetry book Underground Rivers, if you want to show some support and keep my writing in circulation. Thank you to all my readers and supporters. Your generosity means the world and helps support my universalist bohemian art life! Thanks for keeping me caffeinated and wired.

☕️☕️☕️

I was new at the refujaunt camp, so I tended to keep my mouth shut, at least with regards to casual conversation. I didn’t want to get kicked out on account of anything I said. My mouth had a way of getting in front of me. That can be a tough thing for a translator, as I’d often want to interject. The way I was raised you had to shout over top of all the other sibs and aunts and cousins if you ever stood a chance of being heard. Funny too, that somewhere along the way I did learn to listen, at least enough to translate. It’s a good skill and kept me out of some real trouble, out of the firing line, and there was no shortage of lines drawn in the sand, and fire on both sides of them, when I was coming up.

I spoke myself three languages, Spanish, Mandarin, and English, but I also knew Sign Language. Not to mention the language of signs. That had come from my conscription, seeing as how I wasn’t fit for much else with my acute muscle pain on account of the Dengue fever I’d had as a kid. It seemed like the mosquitoes followed me north when I left the swamps of Tennessy.

I’d been put in charge of minding after a girl we all knew as Zelzemel. That was the name we gave her. She refused to talk, but knew the rudiments of sign, and I’d been able to coax some of her story from her. She was just one of many orphans. Just one of many who had been separated from her parents by forces outside of her control. She’d gone to sleep in her People’s Army of Missouri issued canvas tent straightaway after the cornbread and pinto beans had been cleaned off her plate. She was an eater, I’ll give her that. Not everyone who ended up in this place was at all healthy. Some had the wasting sickness, no appetite to speak of, anything they put inside their bodies got chucked back up. The medics and nurses thought it was the chemical exposures, depending on where they were from, or some new hatched virus if they couldn’t figure it out otherwise and ways.

I’d grown used to the girl, but I hadn’t signed up to be anyone’s nanny. Yet she did need my services as translator. On the other hand, if she’d just deal with the cards she’d been dealt, and just speak, then things would be different.

I was minding my own business around one of the fires, keeping my fingers warm by clutching a mug of mulligan stew, when a new batch of refujaunts meandered into camp, led over by our chief. They were a raggedy and despondent looking bunch but not many people sought solace with us if they were flush with the clink of coin and on the up-and-up. I figured they must have hopped off that train I heard whistling by not more than an hour ago, and had been drawn in by the light of our fires. One of the new ones was more animated than the rest. She had long wispy blondish hair, on the dishwater dirty side. Her face was full of grit and hard determination.

“This one can’t talk,” Murrie said. “For all that she’s been gesticulating like a mad woman. These others seem to think she’s looking for someone. So come on now, Bobbie. It’s time you earned your keep.”

I scoffed at that last remark even though I knew he was joking. My keep wasn’t much, and my name wasn’t Bobbie, but he called everyone Bobbie, he was always forgetting their names. It wasn’t like my skills got me much more than the daily plate of beans, same as all the rest. There were other perks though, but I can’t get into those here. They are kind of like on a need-to-know basis anyway.

“You got it sir!” I saluted the chief with mock respect and signed for the lady to come sit on down by the fire.
This is the story she unspooled for me, and what a sad tale it was.

Daniela’s Story

My dada cut my tongue out when I was twelve. I’d already lost a lot of my hearing by then, from the way he boxed my ears. My mother was powerless to stop him, as she was half mad, incoherent, from soljuice, and nepenthe when she could get the stuff, which wasn’t all that much, the soljuice was bad enough. I’m sure by that point her brain was cobwebbed and dusted. Because dada was the dealer, that was the only reason she was around. It’s a wonder she ever took a pittance on me, as she wasn’t the only one he kept. I had two other mama’s but they made sure to let me know every chance they had that they weren’t my real mamas.

I’d go out and play and be gone for hours, for as long as I dared. I’m surprised I hadn’t left before I was sixteen when I finally did get the nerve to go. I first met Arnie in the woods behind the houses between our street and Cyclorama Drive. There was an abandoned concrete bridge there that used to connect our streets together, but parts of it came down in the floods and mudslides. It used to cross Valley View Road, which went back to being a creek more or less, with trees of heaven coming up from all over out of the concrete long before I was born. Most of the houses on Massona had rotted and crumbled and that was my playground. There was some other woods there too, on the sides of either hill behind the molded homes that looked like pus sores along the valley. Some of the old trees I liked to talk to and they talked back to me. Old Man Nik the Oak, he used to tell me things. He told me to go, to get my stuff and get the hell out of the flop shop I’d been born into. Besides Old Nik, Arnie must have been my only friend in the world.

One day Arnie and I got to kissing, it was the first time for each of us, and it was something special, there underneath Old Man Nik, the only one who saw us do it. It was after then he brought me his trinket, said he loved me.

His dada was a repo man, often working out on the old highway between Cortland and Syracuse. He’d repo some fine things off any high minded dandy he pleased. One day he brought me a trinket and I weren’t durned if it was some kinda silver, all shiny like an old soul caught in metal.

It was real dumb of me to tell mama. Don’t know why I felt any obligation to her but I did. I’d come home and take care of her, after the soljuice had worn off and her lips were half blue, covered in red spittle. I’d giver her little snorts of the revivver and she’d wake up enough to go into a lull. Then I’d tried to feed her some eggs if we had any or corn mush. Sometimes Arnie would give me some racoon meat, but mama didn’t hardly have any kind of appetite except for the soljuice. Whatever was left my other mas would fight over, if they was in an eating mood, and of course I had to cook for dada, and it wasn’t no lol if his dinner was burned.

Lucky he weren’t home all the time but down at the dog pit, gambling over them dogs, seeing which one would live. He really liked himself a cock fight too. Or when they made those broken soljuice men fight for a shot, he liked that too. There weren’t much of a fight he didn’t like.

Now some of the folk who lived over on Cyclorama said Arnie was a headcase. At the time I didn’t know what it meant, but later I knew. I figured it out. He just didn’t think like other people, and it sometimes caught him off guard, as he didn’t know what to say or do. We’d meet down by the bridge as often as we could, and sometimes hunted for crawdads together. They lived in the pools where the asphalt had sunk as the creek took over the abandoned street.

Arnie’s dada gave him lots of goodies, and every once in awhile, he’d get enough to buy me some candy nuts or a little cheese to take home. Then the heat started overtaking our bodies in the summertime when we were thirteen or fourteen. We made ourselves a nest there under the deep copse of honeysuckle, the best smell around. All those kisses had led to other things before, but now they really led to something. I was careful of my moontime and I stole some of this drink my mamas had that was supposed to keep the babes away.
It worked for awhile anyway.

Then my mama had another one of her close calls, almost died before I found her and gave her the revivver.
I’d gone and gotten a candle with some words written on it and oils. It was dedicated to Lady Maria of the Stars. But dada came home and saw my praying with the candle, chanting the prayer just as I’d been told and he blew out the candle and threw it down the hill in our backyard where the rest of the garbage was, and whomped me on the ear over and over again. That was when the rest of the sounds started to disappear. I’m surprised I made it through, but I think Lady Maria was watching over me, if not my mama anymore.

I wasn’t there when she died. I was in the woods again talking to Old Man Nik. I felt bad always pouring out my woes to the Old Man, but he listened better than anyone could, better than even Arnie, who understood me without words. Dada came looking for me, which had never happened before, and he heard me talking to the tree, talking about him, talking about mama, talking about Arnie, and how I was scared because my blood was three weeks late. Talking about what the hell I was gonna do if I was with child.

I never even felt the blow come to my head because I was so wrapped in my own thoughts and mind, and I hadn’t heard him creeping up on me. I woke up at the house, and I was all tied up in a chair, and he was yelling at me for talking to a devil tree. That I was a witch and I’d cursed him and mama. He’d blamed me for his losing streak betting on the dog fights. He was blaming me that his rival Zane had stolen most of his soljuice bidness.

I tried to protest and he said only one way to stop me using my magic was to cut out my tongue, so I could speak no more spells on him or anyone. My own mama was dead in the other room, she’d taken her last drink of the juice, and I hadn’t been around this time to bring he back from the edge of the forever sleep. My other mamas held my mouth open as dada sauntered over with his buck knife. I struggled, but they held open my jaws even as I tried to bite. After the cut, when blood was spilling down my mouth and all over my greasy shirt and skirt, he held it in front of me as he railed, talking about how I’d never talk back to him again, how the devil would never speak through me again, how I would never be able to cast another spell.

I ran down to the lady I bought the candle from and she knew how to cauterize my tongue.

My other mama’s had built a pyre in the backyard and burned mama before I ever got home.

The next day when everyone was partied out and asleep I crept out back down to Old Man Nik. Arnie came along and I showed him, my tongue never to meet his again, but I still had my lips. He told me he was going to take me away. His own father had been missing for a few weeks, probably killed on one of his repos.

That night we left for the coast where Arnie thought he could make a living as a salvage trawler. We left right then and right there, it weren’t as if we had anyone to tell, or any stuff to gather. It was a long long walk but we had some luck on us then. That’s when we met Sister Argyle of the Cord Cutters Guild and she started teaching me the sign language. She came around quite often to check on us in the encampments surrounding Hartford, who were something of her flock, and she made a point to visit us. It was Argyle who delivered Anzelma.

I can proves she’s mine. We have a birthmark in the same place, on the left shoulder. It’s part of why my father thought I was a witch, having the mark of Cain and all on me since birth.

Arnie brought in enough to keep us mostly fed. It was better than the life I’d had growing up, and we were happy, but it was hard. Then he got cut on something, wading out in the tidewaters scrappoing, pulling in whatever he could find. It was a bad cut in his leg, and he kept it hidden from me, not wanting me to know. Two days later it festered and he was feverish, and something was in his blood. I fetched Sister Argyle and she tried with all she had, but the fever and infection spread and he burned himself out. She seen something like it before, a mixture of all the chemicals and bio contaminants pulsing together in the hot soup of the intertidal zones when the summer heat got to a rolling boil.
​
I didn’t know what to do after Arnie was gone. He’d always been my protector, my provider. Argyle helped Arnie transition, helped me build a pyre I got to light myself this time. She knew my plight and said their might be a place for me working for the Cord Cutters. I took her up on it, and stayed there for a time.

When Sister Argyle was called to go to a nearby town to help with an outbreak, I went with her. Two nights into the trip the three of us were camped in a large parking lot at one of the empty strips of stores. The sound of motors woke me up and set me on a path to disturbance. I couldn’t hear them all that well, as most of my hearing was gone by then from the repeated slaps to the head, but I could feel the reh-reh-reh of motorbikes outside, vibrating through the dirt and land.

Anzelma was only five at the time. As they got closer we were running and hiding, inside the abandoned store. I hid her under some rags, and put one of the fallen pieces of moldy drywall over her and then I let myself have them, hoping she wouldn’t cry and give herself away.

I don’t even want to tell you what happened when Jimbo and his crew got a hold of us. Eventually Sister Argyle and I did get away from them, and we spent our time searching for Anzelma to no avail, and I worked with her and learned, and one day she got sick with a fever that never came down when we was tending down by the intertidal. I didn’t know if I had what it took to be a Cord Cutter, so I lit another candle to Maria of the Stars and started combing the land again looking for Anzelma. In between then and now all kinds of different things happened. I was traveling with these here refujaunts, tending to them as best I could with the weeds I was shown, and we all hopped a train.

.:. .:. .:.
When she was done telling her story, I wen’t over to Zezel’s tent, rather Anzelma’s I should say. I gently woke her up and bid her to come out to the fire. She was hesitant and I understood her reluctance. The fire was usually no hang out spot for kids. It was the place where old fogies recounted their own youthful foibles. There weren’t many others her age at all in the refujaunt camp. Those who were less than teeners had a tight leash kept on them, if they had any kind of parental authority over them at all. There were plenty of kids who had run away from a mom or a dad high on soljuice. My own authority over this child was about to end.
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When she finally saw I wasn’t going to leave her alone and came to the fire, and she saw her mother there, and her mother saw her daughter, and they were reunited, no further words needed to be spoken or signed. Everything they had to say to each other was done in quietude, and for that, no one needed any translation.

A Secret History of the LOUTS Research Unit

Ahistorical Immaterialism is a temporal theory about the way that immaterial forces make impacts on the physical plane and manifest throughout human society at all levels. First postulated by ancient shamans, mages, priestesses and priests in times immemorial, the idea that forces of the unseen beyond the ken of the rational mind might just have something to do with the way history appears to play out from our time-bound perspective, has once again been gaining traction as the limits to rationality come into the sight of society at large.

One of the key ideas of Ahistorical Immaterialism is the postulation that events on higher planes of reality do not need to have “happened” or will “happen” in the same “time zone” of physical manifestation to have an impact on things that are happening in what human’s experience as “now.” The energy from a supernova that exploded thousands of light years ago may just now be hitting our planet after all. Its effect is no less apparent in the day-to-day goings on of your average shop keeper, but it still remains. The same is true of those beings gathered inside the timeless inner library of the upper astral plane, who might release a book down into the dreamworld, from what in our perspective, might have been a thousand years ago, but it takes an artist or scribe until “now” to pluck the relevant ideas out of the aether and brings them to fruition in so-called present time through the work of the quill.

But where did the theoretical underpinnings of Ahistorical Immaterialism come from to begin with? (Besides the proverbial psychedelic campfires and shaman sessions of the ancient past.) In order to satisfy the rational mind about irrationality, a theory was needed and to that end, a group of dissident fringe intellectuals came to the fore and answered the call. These new-yet-timeless ideas about Ahistorical Immaterialism started to sprout around the end of the last millennium and in its first decade, but only in a small group of weirdos who liked to hang out on online message boards.

Theorist and researcher Sardaku Sawai was a formative member of this renegade group who became something of a cybernetically inclined research unit when they all started working together. He was teaching at the Free School of Momentary Cognition in Gary, Indiana when he met Amity MacHale. The Free School had been set up by wealthy folks who had escaped from the Chicago suburbs to start a new life for themselves in a place most other people were actually trying to get out of, but who did not want their kids to go to the local public schools. But that’s another story. In Saradaku’s free time, tired from leading field trips into the ruins of the Midwest rust belt, she would go online to try and find people who shared their quirky interests. Eventually they stumbled across Amity.

Amity was a historian without a job, but was supported by her wealthy parents who were corporate lawyers in Bentonville, Arkansas. She had recently published a livejournal post called Slaking the Thirst for Rational Cause and Effect in Historical Analysis. This was just the kind of thing Sawai was interested in and the two hit off, and started chatting on IRC.

Even though they met through cyber systems, they were quick to realize the Internet itself was not all it was cracked up to be, even as it allowed the spread of their ideas and the finding of the others.

Slaking the Thirst became the driving force in determining the methods and ideas that would synchronistically converge around the strange attractor of what came to be called Ahistorical Immaterialism.
Music critic and redoubtable raver from Detroit, Marc E. Piscator, also started logging on to the webwork of messages boards that became the initial hub for the movement. His analysis of so called “Hauntological Graffiti” (and his paper of the same name) became another node in what was an emerging field of research. A few other intellectuals, inside and outside the academy, came to be a part of the loose association, and it wasn’t long before they formalized their emerging group as the LOUTS, Lurkers Outside Time/Space.

The LOUTS held their first virtual conference in October of 2001. It was not lost on them that a hole in the pattern of the future had been ripped open by the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. What came in its aftermath, particularly the further enforcement of the burgeoning surveillance state, in the U.S., was a focus of much of their research at the time. They were also interested in the negative effects of corporate capitalism, and what to do about it in their version of the then present, but they were also just as averse to crony communism, and so the theories of Marx and Engels held virtually no appeal. It was their search for something else that led them further explorations of Wilhelm Reich’s orgone energy. This was because quite a few of the members had been dissident psychoanalysts. They were far more attracted to the lineage of Carl Jung and Wilhelm Reich in psychology than that of B.F. Skinner and his reductionist worldview.

While they deeply respected the work of Wilhelm Reich and his formulation of the life force as orgone, they weren’t always as convinced about his avowed socialism. Yet it was while they were doing some charity work bringing orgone accumulators to the inner-city urban gardens of Gary to help boost vegetable production that Stevie Brooks had an out of body experience. His spirit guide during the experience transported him to a realm of oracle scrolls where the words and messages were not written at all in any kind of linear order, but were instead made by a more metaphysically advanced form of William S. Burroughs cut-up method. Brooks returned from this voyage with a seed planted inside him and from that he wrote the book Clockwork Cronyism in Corporate Capitalism and Communism. It was also at that point he could no longer deny something existed inside of him beyond just his physical body.
​
A complete kundalini awakening experience then unfolded with the blossoming of his third eye.

The book starts from a consideration of how time is completely different on the astral plane and in the dream world, and how yet the astral and the dream world still have major effects upon events in the material world. From their it is argued that immaterial events outside of time and space have direct impacts upon what is perceived as time and space now. Only this isn’t how it really is, only how are brains sort it out so we don’t get fried by the overload of too much sensory input. As other hangers on of the movement started adding their own writings and critiques it led to the further development of Ahistorical Immaterialism within this strange milieu. Another key aspect of the book was how the creation of clocks had balkanized the minds of humans to accept the working conditions brought on by both capitalism and communism.

To get out of this conundrum, the LOUTS investigated various ways to move beyond the limits of the dialectic. Asger Jorn’s triolectic system was tried out, and once it was tied in with homemade analog ternary computers, the fun really got cracking and cranked up among the LOUTS. Triolectical Immaterialism thus became a subfield of the research and activity.

Ahistorical immaterialism thus dispenses in many cases with logic altogether, yet at other times, goes beyond the polarizing rhetoric associated with binaries, and applies the logic of triolectical immaterialism to human civilization. This then began to have economic implications.

All human beings must engage in economic activity for the necessities of life.​

In the writings of Karl Marx he identified four modes of production that humanity has already used: hunting and gathering (sometimes called primitive communism), slavery, feudalism (serfdom), and capitalism. Then his big idea: communism. He hadn’t foreseen, however, that just as capitalism created a new class of people, industrial workers and their CEOs, the communist also created their own social order with their apparatchiks who never did any work. He also never foresaw how many trust fund kids doing bong hits and playing video games would be the main promoters of communism.
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Clearly a different way was needed. This was when the LOUTS realized since a lot of stuff didn’t make sense anyway, surrealism would be a potential model for a new economic theory and practice. The whole area of “automating” became fruitful, especially when applied to car culture in the United States. (Automating is as much about cars and other vehicles joining together in sexual congress as it is the “absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern” in the process of picture making.) Automating thus became the real “motor of history” for the LOUTS.

In the aggregate, surrealist economics means that every society relies on unconscious eruptions for injection of new ideas into the modes of production. The LOUTS had decided that both capitalism and communism were pretty damn boring, and the use of other methods employed by the surrealists, such as frottage or the exquisite corpse had not yet been explored enough in their application to money, trade and organization of the workforce.

When the numbers on Wall Street get used as stimulus for the creation of abstract electronic music, for instance, new possibilities are liable to emerge that no businessman would ever be liable to think about. As the LOUTS continued their work, the theory of Ahistorical Immaterialism caught on in fringe artistic groups, such as the steamwave movement, trash sculpturists, and among anti-foodie diner denizens, among myriad others along the fractal fringe. The fact that history is not solely caused by economic activity has liberated a generation of intellectuals who are now free to pursue other ideas and systems outside of those that have been handed down.

Who knows what yet might happen. The LOUTS were only the beginning.

.:. .:. .:.

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