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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Michael Greer recently wrote a post on Music as a Magical Language. Towards the end of the essay he writes that “it wouldn’t be too hard to work out classic rock numbers for every planet and element.”

There is classic rock that I enjoy very much, but it’s not really my main musical interest, so in the spirit of dissensus I am going to make an eclectic list of songs for each of the elements. A later list will contain music for the planets, and still another will go further out into the empyrean to share music about the zodiac.

For the element of Air, Brian Eno’s Music for Airport’s comes to mind. At this point there are many different versions based on his original. I am rather partial to the Bang on a Can version, but there is also one from Psychic Temple the project of Chris Schlarb, a Long Beach jazz guitarist. Air is an element we associate with thoughts, thinking. Sometimes we call someone who gets lost inside their head flighty. What is great about Music for Airports is the way it allows thoughts to land and take off to many different destinations while listening in an orderly fashion. This jazz version of the ambient classic does it up right. I’ve always found jazz to be great music for thinking and writing, and this rendition really does allows the higher qualities of the element of air to circulate within the mind. The Psychic Temple version is also nice in that the album also features a track called Music for Bus Stops.

enry Flynt’s mixture of hillbilly-cum-rockabilly fiddle music overlaid on topic of electronic tanpura drones takes the listener deep into the burning flames of creativity on this revelatory album long cut, Purified by the Fire. This is an exultant combination of the high lonesome sound heard in the hills and hollers of Appalachia, that gets a hard edged rock kick when the electrified strings are distorted. Henry Flynt was one of many students of the classical Indian singer, Pandit Pran Nath, and this work shows that element, not just from the drone, but also from the tones that leap like flames out of the fiddle.

For the element of Water, I suggest Watermusic by William Basinski. It’s a quintessential liquid ambient album designed to be listened to at low volumes. As it moves through the space it will seep into every available crack and pore. The title appears to be a homage to George Friederic Handel’s Water Music, from 1717. Beyond that, and their evocation of the element of water, the two pieces appear to have little in common. This Watermusic is on the tranquil rippling side, and a perfect way to quell the more turbulent manifestations of water. It cools the emotions keeping them in calm equanimity. Basinski did a reworked version called Watermusic II and it is just as elementally essential.

Some people like to make music with the very stones of the Earth. Among them are Scott Gibbons and he did just that on the album Stone for his Lillith project in 1992. Scott got his start in performance with a group called The New Elementals. The sounds on this album are all made just with stones that have been struck, stones that have been smashed, grated even, and includes both granite and clay. The recordings were taken and remixed as raw materials in the studio. This is probably the most experimental of pieces in this list, but the experience of listening is still grounded. Listening is a way to do just that, ground oneself in physical presence.

If we look at the Chinese elements, than the topic of Wood might come up. Many instruments are made from wood of course, but Timber, a cycle of percussion works by Bang on a Can founding member Michael Gordon takes the cake. It is mesmerizing music and I would love to be able to see it performed live someday because he figured out a way of tuning blocks of wood in such a way that when the musicians play them it creates a sense of movement of sound around the room.

Percussion in particular seems to correspond strongly with the element of Earth. The late industrial musician and legendary percussionist Z’ev explored the properties of metal with his homemade and scavenged drum kits. As a Qabalist and mage, he was also very in tune with the elementals and worked with them deliberately in his music. His piece Elemental Music which exists as an early recording from the 80’s and as various performances, captures his connection to the elements. This short filmed performance from a show in Milan, Italy gives a visual example of just how connected he was with his instruments and the elemental metals they came from.

Songs for the element of Aether are a bit harder to pin down. “Structures from Silence” by Steve Roach comes close. Perhaps its just because this album is one of my all-time ambient favorites, or the fact that I use it for meditation and other practices, or the way the title suggests structures emerge out of something beyond, something silent, something still that gives birth to what we might call spirit. The whole album is like that, with “Reflections in Suspension” being my favorite track.

Another piece, and one greatly contested over the decades since it was first performed that I think epitomizes the element of Aether is 4’33” by John Cage. Cage taught us to really listen to the sounds going on around us, the sounds within us. Cage is also responsible for popularizing a saying he got from Indian musician Gita Sarabhai, that the purpose of music is "to sober and quiet the mind making it susceptible to divine influences." When we turn off the music and embrace the silence, we might just began to hear our own thoughts and get in touch with the parts of ourselves that are beyond the physical.

​Have you ever tried to open up a door no one else even knows is there? That’s what I’ve been doing on and off for the past twenty odd years. I tried all kinds of things to get the door to open, but none of them ever worked until I gave up. I spent a lot of time and money trying to get through that door, but in the end the price I paid was just a penny compared to what I gained.
Working downtown at the main library for as long as I have you start to notice certain things. It’s a big building and if you are into exploring at all, you start finding yourself in forgotten corners. The place has seen a lot of construction and remodeling over the years. There are some places up in the stacks where work projects have been started but never finished.

One morning not long after I started the job I managed to come in early. With some time to kill before my shift began I went up to the browse the stacks. I’ve never gotten tired of picking through the old books there is always a new discovery. Just when I happened to stumble across an ornate volume of Giordano Bruno’s Art of Memory I saw someone move out of the corner of my eye in the row next to me. I peeked through the shelf and saw the back of what looked like a middle aged homeless man. He slipped off around the corner along the wall.

The public aren’t allowed up in the stacks yet at the same time I didn’t want to narc on the guy. Street people had been known to sneak into them before closing time to sleep somewhere warm and dry. To me that’s blameless. I did want to see where he was going, so I followed him down the hall until he turned a corner. When I turned the corner he was gone.

I walked along the edge of the wall looking for him until I came to a place where a heavy canvas drop cloth splattered with gray, white and beige paint was hung. It flapped in the wind as I arrived and the air seemed warmer. I could smell hot dust. With it came the memory of the desert, of the time my Mom and I had flown out to visit family in California.  My aunt and cousins took us back home after a few weeks and we drove through the Mojave. I still remember seeing the cattle skull on the side of the road. Then the wind and smell disappeared. As I stood   another memory welled up inside me, a half grazed recollection which lingered on the edge of an impossible threshold. When I reached out to touch it the memory faded.

I pulled back the canvas drop cloth to reveal the door. My jaw dropped at the sight. It was a solid piece of oak so polished I could make out my own reflection inside the mesmerizing grain. The hinges were solid cast iron with bronze bolts. Carved into the door itself were words written in an ancient alphabet reminiscent of both Hebrew and Greek but belonging to neither. It was no script I recognized. The handle and the keyhole were made of silver. Embossed on the knob was an octagon star. When I turned the handle and pushed and pulled the door stayed firm, stolid, in its place. I crouched down and tried to peer through the keyhole. Squinting and looking inside all I could see was a field of black, but then a star glittered and then a field of stars exploded into view, a milky splash glowing against the night until these too faded back to black. Perhaps I had just strained my eyes.

I looked at my watch and was stunned to see I was fifteen minutes late. Where had the time gone? I scrambled down the nearest stairwell to Book Distribution and punched the clock.

“You’re gonna have to stay after a bit Justin, to make that up.”
My manager Rich had a haircut straight out of the ‘70s. He kept it dyed too, the same dark reddish brown as the tie clipped to his neck.

“No problem,” I said. For a boss Rich was cool. He collected Arkham House first editions and had a vast knowledge of Weird fiction. We’d chat about the adventures of Conan, and the intricacies of Lovecraft’s mythos.

I grabbed a cup of coffee from the percolator and started scanning a box of material perplexed and disoriented by what I had seen. 

“So Rich, I was up on D stack this morning and I saw this homeless looking guy up there in the religion section, and I followed him and then I saw this door. It looked like something straight out of a fantasy novel, all gilded and carved and stuff, except it was under this hanging piece of canvas. Have you ever seen that?”

Rich laughed, “You making stuff up again Justin? This would be good in one of your stories.”

“No, I’m not making anything up. When I saw it I became transfixed and lost track of time. That’s why I was late.”

“I’ve never seen that,” he said. “But hey, it’s a big building. Maybe it’s one of those unfinished renovations.”

“Okay,” I said. It was hard for me to believe he hadn’t ever seen the door. Rich was in his sixties and had started working at the library when he was eighteen. He knew the building back and forth.

Yet his dismissal only served to make me more curious. Anytime I had to go fetch a book that was shelved near the door I’d make a pit stop and try to turn the handle, see if it would open. Getting to the other side of it became a slow burning obsession.

Years passed. Life happened. I met a girl named Audrey and she became my girlfriend and a year later we shacked up. My curiosity about the door remained. A few years after we moved in together death happened. My mother’s passing was sudden and unexpected. Yet even after death life kept happening and Audrey and I got married the year I turned thirty. All through this time I still wondered about the door and stopped up to take a look at it every now and again, to see if I’d ever be able to crack it ajar. 

On the weekends the lady and I would go antiquing trips to northern Ohio, or down into Kentucky, or Indiana. I’d buy skeleton keys on these jaunts and try them on the door. We had lots of fun and my collection of keys had become quite impressive but none of them ever worked.

I was beginning to lose hope when I saw an ad in the back of Citybeat for a lock-picking class at the local hacker-space Hive 13.  It was real nifty. You get these little pieces of thin metal to put into the mechanism so you can trip the bolt. Not to toot my own horn but with practice I became skilled at picking locks. One time I got my cousin Chris out of a tough bind. His ex-girlfriend called me up in a panic to help unchain him from the bed. It was kind of awkward for everyone. But on the door this skill didn’t do diddley-squat.

 I started spending loads of time in the lock-picking forum on reddit because someone in the world must know how to trip the mechanism. I chatted with folks who were as bedeviled as I was about doors, locks, bolts, keys. Still nothing worked.  

Then I saw the homeless man wondering in the stacks again. I was fetching a copy of The Jerusalem Bible for a patron and there he was. When I yelled “Hey,” he turned to look at me and I saw him. Marvin. The crazy hobo squatter punk. He ran down the aisle ahead of me and turned the same corner he had all those years before. The canvas drape flapped in the desert scented wind as he shut the door in my face.

I pounded on the door with my fists, but he didn’t come back. No one answered. He might be able to tell me what was behind the door, but maybe he didn’t want me to know. My mind despaired. In all likelihood it was probably just a storage closet for the janitors or an access point to the HVAC system and Marvin slept there when he could. Yet if that were the case why was the door made of fine oak and carved with ancient letters in detailed filigree? Maybe it all was just my fevered imagination.

Shaking my head I tried to let the whole thing go. I grabbed the book I’d come up for and took it down to the customer, full of seething resentment and defeat.

I couldn’t believe it was Marvin. I’d seen him around town and knew him by reputation. I’d run in to him at noise music shows over the years. My wife and I saw him milling about at the annual Northside Rock and Roll carnival on the Fourth of July. All the cities hot freaks came out for that. But mostly I’d seen him at the library, looking at books on mysticism, magic, and meditation. My co-workers thought he was weird. I was intrigued by him, but now I was just peeved that he could go in the door, and I was stuck out. He didn’t even work at the library for Christ’s sakes.

My good friend Syd knew him a bit; he even lived with him in a punker’s squat for a few months and relayed Marvin’s crazy stories to me, stuff about being a time traveler. No one believed a word.

 A week later I was still in a stew about it all when I left work. Waiting for the bus, my mind spun in a billion different directions. I paid my fare and noticed the 17 was extra crowded. There was only one seat left and it was next to Marvin who looked at me wild eyed as if he was about to reel in the biggest catch of his life.
 “Don’t worry, I don’t bite,” he said, as I sat down next to him. He had an earthy smell. It wasn’t the kind of bathroom funk you get with a wino though he did have a brown paper bag sitting on his lap. His smell was of strong tobacco, soil, and a dry cracked aroma reminiscent of the desert.

 “Seen any good bands lately?” he asked as I tried to get comfortable.

            “No, I haven’t,” I said.

 He looked to his side with a nervous twitch then whispered, “Will you hear me out? I’ve got something to tell you. I know you’ve seen me up in the stacks and I know you know about the door.”
I nodded my head.  

 He grinned, revealing his nicotine stained teeth. In the sparkle of his eyes I could see hints of far off places. This man had been stretched thin. Despite his rugged muscularity from a life in the elements a burning mystical gulf existed within him, a void filled with silence and stillness.

 “My friend Syd told me you hop trains?”

            “It’s not common knowledge but if you hop a freighter under the glow of a blue moon while shaking a bag of old possum bones and singing Cannonball Blues you can ride the line to another time. If you sing the words backwards you go into the past and if you sing them side-a-ways you step into the future.”
I had just learned my first piece of hobo magic.

            “It works with a harmonica too,” he said.

Marvin pulled a scratched up harmonica from the front pocket of his beat up overalls. To the surprise of everyone on the bus he honked off several bars from Cannonball. It was so captivating everyone shut up. Even the bus driver stopped until a horn blared from a car behind us. Marvin slipped the harmonica back in his pocket and we were on our way.  Conversations continued like nothing had happened.

“I’ve been all across this country,” he said “riding the rails. I’ve walked the streets of San Francisco, Chicago and New York. I’ve done odd jobs in the small towns too, in Springfield, in Ypsilante, in places you never heard of. And on all those trips I wasn’t just travelling across the country. I was travelling across time, out on collecting trips.”

It sounded crazy, but so was the door, so maybe it was true. “Collecting what?”

              “Books. For the secret wing of the library.”

            Something clicked. “Did you ever get caught smuggling books into the building?” I asked.  Steve in security had told me a story about a man they caught sneaking antiquarian books the library didn’t own up into the stacks.

            “That was me,” he said. “For a half-Irish, half-Lebanese madman I’ve wised up a bit since then. Now I use an invisibility orb when I make deliveries.”

             “Then how come I’ve seen you?”

            “People gifted with the sight can see past the glamour of the orb.”

            I was able to see things other people didn’t. “Is that how I saw the door in the first place?” Marvin nodded.

            “But how come you ran...and how come you’re talking to me now?”

            “I ran because I was on a mission. I’m talking now because you’re persistent,” he said. “And because you knocked. Knocking is the first step.”

“I’ve been trying to open the door since I started at the library. I’ve tried everything and it won’t budge!”

            “Next time you’re there it will” he said, “because something in you changed.”

            “I don’t even remember knocking.”

            “Well, you kind of pounded on it a week ago.” I had. I’d been desperate.

             “So what are you doing now?” I asked.

            “I’m gonna hitch a train up to the Cleveland. I gotta pick up a book from another member of the League, maybe check out this band Terpsichore while I’m there.”

            The League. The name was vague, familiar, a half grazed memory.

            I looked outside the bus window and couldn’t see a thing. A heavy fog had settled in. Had I missed my stop? It felt like I’d been sitting there forever. Then I looked around the bus itself and saw that Marvin and I were the only passengers left. The driver got up and said, “Layover boys.”

            “I’m gonna have a smoke, man” Marvin said, so I got up with him and stood outside the bus as he rolled a cigarette from his pouch of bugler. He offered me one and I accepted.

We were parked next to an old gas station. It was the only thing I could see. Everything else was covered in a swirling haze of mist and fog. Gas stations like this only existed in the movies or in the small towns you pass through on a country drive. It had two antique pumps, solid metal, bright red and green. An attendant was pumping gas in a white ’59 Ford Galaxy with the top rolled down. The driver took a swig from a bottle of Coke, and had his arm around a brunette sporting a flipped bob. 

            “I don’t remember there ever being a layover on the 17 between Downtown and Northside,” I said after taking a drag.

            Marvin exhaled and I exhaled. His gray smoke mingled with my gray smoke and both mixed into the penetrating fog. The man in the Galaxy paid the attendant and the car chugged into life exhaling thick smog from the tailpipe before driving off into the misty haze.

“This whole world is a layover. Your trip here on this planet is just a stop at a way station. You come down here and the threads of your life interweave with the threads of other folks who’ve made the same stop. Some get back on the same bus or train as you, and others walk off down the road, go a different way. Some folks you get to know real well, others just intersect your path. A few you may have met during your last stop at the way station. Some you keep on meeting again and again. You and me are like that because I swear we’ve met before, and not just up in the parlor at the Southgate House.  Anyhow, after a time you open your eyes and start seeing how you’re just another passerby. You don’t become wrapped up in the world so much. You start wearing it like a loose robe knowing it’s all just part of the weave. The painful things that go on here, and the joyful things that go on here only end up touching you in a few places, and there lightly. With your eyes opened to what lies beyond this brief layover, you’ll be able to open the door."

            As he spoke a kernel of light passed from him and into me. It was a floating golden book with tiny wings no larger than a firefly. It crawled out the crumpled paper bag he held and flew into the shirt pocket over my heart.  

            I looked inside my shirt pocket and the book bug was gone. The faint neon residue it had left behind glowed in the shape of an archaic letter. The fog started to dissipate. The gas station sign flickered on and off, and it seemed like a pink United Dairy Farmer sign emerged from beneath it. A sharp whistle from the bus driver came for us to get back on and snapped me out of my reverie.

Marvin said, “If you want to live a life of service as a member of the League take this.” He offered me the paper bag. With trembling hands I received the gift. It wasn’t a bottle of cheap dime store wine. I could feel a book inside, but it had the heft and weight of a stone tablet.  

            In the distance I heard another whistle blowing, and saw huge tufts of hot white steam in the shape of a stallion billowing into what was left of the fog. The sound of iron wheels against iron tracks rifled through the air making a sonorous drone. As the train came into view I saw it was the magnificent Mercury streamliner that used to serve the Midwest. There had been a display about the Art Deco commuter in the rare book room last month.

            “Come on,” I said. “The bus is about to leave.”

            “No. I’ve got to catch the Mercury,” he said. He tipped his hat to me, turned, and sprinted into the copse of honeysuckle and weeds in the junked out green space behind the gas station to the train tracks beyond.

​            I climbed on the bus and sat down. As we drove the fog cleared. When I reached my stop I walked home in a daze. The book was heavy in my hands, a burden and a weight, but one I accepted. Audrey was at her tap dancing class when I got home so after I fed the dog I opened up the bag to look at the book. I found a note written in exquisite cursive on a scrap of yellow notebook paper.

Justin,

 Stamped below this was the octagon symbol from the doorknob embossed with the letter L in the center.

            My first job for the League.

            The next day I managed to get to work early. I got off the bus, went inside and ran up the steps to the stacks.  As I walked to the door I heard the faint echo of a harmonica playing Cannonball Blues.
 Standing at the threshold I pulled back the canvas and knocked on the door with a tenderness I had not known before. A dry desert wind emerged and combed through my tangled hair. I turned the handle and pushed it open. The smell of old books, dry with the dust of ages, greeted me.

            My heart skipped as I stepped into the secret library. I ran my hand along a row of books, but their spines did not feel like leather or cloth or paper but like the rock wall of an ancient cave. The cave walls were painted with images of antelope and lions.

            I crept to the end of the passage and came to find an alabaster jar. The perfume of the desert emerged from it in a spiral of dust that glittered like the stars. I reached down into the mouth of the jar and my fingers touched a scroll. The paper crumbled as I grabbed it, yet even in the dim light I saw the ancient hieroglyphic text. Afraid the knowledge would be lost forever I licked the little bits of paper from off of my hands and the words dissolved in my mouth. Thousands of little tiny golden books with wings flowed into my bloodstream and a hot red flame, bright as the fire of a welder’s torch ignited in my heart.

            Past the jar I saw the passage curve around a tight corner I had mistaken for a wall. Faint flickering lamplight beckoned to me. I followed the light further until I was standing before a spiraling staircase that climbed up into the stars and down into deep caverns below. I stood in the secret wing of the library where there were many more doors, rooms and mansions to explore.

             Now I have the key.

​​             All I have to do is knock.  

This story was originally written for a reading at a mixed media group show at the Contemporary Dance Theatre in March of 2019 and first appeared in print for Issue # 12 of Mythic Magazine in 2020.

A Sense of Brain Stimulation

Keith Fullerton Whitman was one of those electronic musicians I often heard about, but never listened to much of, except for the tracks of his I’d had from various compilations. I always enjoyed those tracks immensely, but for whatever reason, hadn’t followed up on them to find more of his work. Every devoted music fan will have gaps in their listening like this, artists or albums they have liked, but need to fill in with closer listening and attention. The quest for new music is eternal, and to amend the gap, I’ve sought out and listened to some more of Whitman’s work these past six months.

Presque Là is my favorite of his albums that I’ve listened to so far and it is relatively fresh off the plate, released this past February though the recording itself dates back to November 15, 2017. Devoted musicians, like devoted listeners, will often have a backlog of material recorded that has never seen the light of day. These pieces were intended to be issued on three hour long​ cassettes, but it never happened. Luckily, with sites like Bandcamp, artists can now make their​ works available directly to their fans when a label deal falls through, and I am glad he put this​ up. He has broken down the works into a Red, Yellow and Blue tape, with two fifteen minute pieces for each side. The only thing I miss about streaming this instead of listening on tape, is the​ joy of popping them in out and of the cassette deck.

The album is made up of three hours of music recorded at the INA-GRM studios in Paris,​ France​ a place with a storied past in the history of electronic music. The work was recorded in a single​ eight-hour session and was originally intended to be released on three tapes, with thirty minutes​ for each side, two fifteen minute compositions per side. The title Presque Là recalls to me the​ work Presque Rien from the late French composer Luc Ferrari. Presque Rien translates to​ “Almost nothing” in English, while Presque Là can translate to “Almost There.” The word Là​ can also mean a musical note. “Almost There” is thus a perfect title for this collection of pieces.
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The music almost always gets to a point of standard musical completion, but the hope for notes almost always disappears, leaving the listener hanging, and when least expected. Whitman explains the compositions like this, “Adhering to the time-honored bassline / chord-melody / drum triumvirate, I rendered three hours of music during a single day-long session that breaks free from traditional, logical progressions. The individual pieces gradually build in intensity, only to evaporate at perhaps the least likely moments; or in any case a point in which the forward momentum implanted into the listener would be best left to accrue. Most would interpret this as a series of frustrations; the sensation of having to sneeze but being unable to.” This structure does not in fact frustrate me. It is what makes this music more interesting and novel. I pay attention to it, because it has broken free of the formulas and I don’t know what it is​ going to do next. As such it captures the imagination. In a way, it can be thought of as a kind of electronic jazz or prog rock playing in extremely odd time signatures, but ones that don’t necessarily finish a particular phrase, or pick the same strand back up when the music does continue.

Part of what first grabbed me with the four pieces from the Red Tape was the preponderance of harpsichord-like sounds Whitman used in his electronic palette. Coupled with off-kilter and fractured beats, these combined timbres make me feel like I am attending a chamber concert in a different branch of time, in a parallel universe where baroque musicians are accompanied by little drum machines that stutter in their frenetic and complex staccatos.

The harpsichord-like sounds continue to flow into the first part of the Yellow Tape where the beats have become even more alien feeling and unpredictable. I find these rhythms hypnotic, and abstract at the same. There is a sense of brain stimulation going on when I listen to this music. Steady tempos do have the capacity to induce entrainment within the human body, and while I may not be getting up to dance to these rhythms, I do find them to have an effect that can entrance, even when they are interrupted and end up careening off down other avenues of activity.

As the Yellow Tape progresses, I start to wonder about the behavior of the electronic system he has created for this music. How does it know when to stop, speed up, slow down, or shift into overdrive? “Yellow Tape A2” is made up of many little beginnings and endings, of quick pulses and tones that erupt out of the silence before fading back down to quietude. Constant shifts, starts and pauses give this work its own unique cadence. The pulse is not steady, but erratic, but its erratic nature is itself steady, forming its own kind of atemporal uniformity.

Every once in awhile throughout these pieces there is a pause and what sounds like a test tone from a television set or someone pressing the zero button on an old land-line telephone. These are like very brief reset noises that make it sound as if a new program or sequence is about to start. They bring me out of the spell I was under for a time, but just for a moment, because as soon as the music gets moving again I am caught up in Whitman’s manic mesmerization.

The use of the standard music trifecta of bass, drums, and melody does ground these pieces in the familiar, yet the way he has broken these out of their mold means what he is doing is still risky and groundbreaking research.

Whitman also says in the notes that he had the intention to “remove the composer completely” from the work itself. In fact he walked around the nearby streets and had lunch while the electronic system he had set up was making its music. This has clear precedents with the work of John Cage who wanted to remove himself from the process of creation. Before John Cage, the composer Joseph Matthias Hauer had wanted to erase his personality from the music he was making. To do so Hauer developed systems of chance operation using the I Ching, well before Cage had hit upon the idea. Hauer was also a rival originator of twelve-tone music coming up with his theory of “dodecaphonics” shortly before Arnold Schoenberg. Hauer was a probable model for the character Joculator Basiliensis in Herman Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game, which involves the creation of games that connect different intellectual ideas together, often relating them to music. Hauer wanted to be a conduit for what he called the “continuum” and what spiritually and religiously inclined people might think of as higher powers within the universe.

I don’t happen to know what Keith Fullerton Whitman’s philosophical predilections might be, but one way to make music where the composer distances him or herself from the creation, is by setting up an electronic musical systems who once they are running do the rest of the work themselves.
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This is not to say they lack artistry. The artistry is in setting up the system, designing the game as it were, and all the rules the game or system operates on. For this system Whitman writes, “These pieces are the result of an experiment in automating virtually every facet of the ‘form’ of a piece of Electronic Music by way of 12 randomly generated control voltages multiplied & applied to 38 discrete parameters. The idea at work here is the implementation of a complete system which allows, via a simple algorithmic approach utilizing core Analogue Computer concepts, the piece to police itself, eschewing the predictive, emotionally manipulative aspects of traditional build-release dynamics in Electronic, popular, and in fact the majority of Western music.”
I like that he mentions the “emotionally manipulative aspects” here. So much music is written to brow beat the emotions the composer wants you to feel right into the listener. There isn’t much choice in how to feel about that kind of manipulative music, because it has been predetermined for you to give precise reactions.
I find the music of Presque Là to be refreshing precisely because of this lack of manipulation. It stimulates the mind and expanding our notions of what is possible for music to do other than massage you into feeling sad, angry, mellow or exalted. Using chance to create systems that take out the familiar have results that are no less beautiful. Listening is like taking a new path through the circuitous labyrinth of space and time. The beauty here continues all the way to the final notes of the Blue Tape pieces. After many twists, turns, dead ends and reroutes the music leads to a clearing that can only be found in the mind. 

There have been many instances in the history of science when a discovery is made independently by two different people at close to the same time. The simultaneous invention of the telephone by Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell is one of the most famous cases. The independent development of calculus, or the mathematical study of continuous change, by polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and alchemist Isaac Newton was another case in point, and one relevant to the line of inquiry being developed here. The simultaneous discovery and adoption of new artistic techniques is less documented but it does still occur. The development of twelve tone “dodecaphonic” music was conceived by two different composers independently of one another, first by Josef Matthias Hauer with his “law of the twelve tones” in 1919, four years before Arnold Schoenberg’s put forth his twelve-tone technique, though Schoenberg claims to have made his initial discovery in 1921. 

            It is Schoenberg who often gets the praise (or the blame, depending on a listeners point of view) for giving (or inflicting) twelve tone music on the world. His less famous contemporary, Josef Matthias Hauer receives little credit in comparison for his own contributions to music theory and practice, even though he was technically first on the scene in creating his method for composing using all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. Hauer was more of a hermetic and solitary figure who did not gather around him the large circle of disciples to promulgate his theory the way that Schoenberg had, even though he did have friends and students, and hung out in cafes discussing culture. Schoenberg’s branch of twelve-tone technique will be referenced throughout this series of posts as others adapted his system to their own ends, but the work of Hauer is of more immediate concern, because it is highly likely that he became a model for the brief, though pivotal, character of Joculator Basiliensis in Herman Hesse’s Glass Bead Game.

            Josef Hauer was born in Austria in 1883, and his parents lived inside an old monastery where a school was housed. Hauer was eager to learn and by the age five he wanted to go to school, but he was still too young. He begged his parents to send him to school, but they didn’t. To placate him, his father bought his son a zither. He took to the instrument quickly, writing “soon I could tune the instrument, and had learned to recognize the circle of fourths and fifths, the keys and their accidentals. This so impressed me, that one day I, too, attempted to transcribe for zither a piece which I had heard on a barrel-organ.”

It seems the atmosphere of the monastery and school must have impregnated him with the love of learning and spiritual contemplation. In order to make a living Hauer trained to become a school teacher himself at the Wiener Neustadt Teacher's Training College in 1897, but he continued his studies in music with private lessons and gained further movement ahead under the steam of his own ambitions as an autodidact. He devoted himself to the study of harmony, counterpoint and music theory and became a multi-instrumentalist, as he learned to play cello, organ, violin and piano as well as conducting choirs. 

            In 1902 Hauer got his first teaching gig in the small market town of Krumbach and dedicated himself to composing. During his time in this town, he reconnected with Ferdinand Ebner, a friend from his hometown of of Wiener Neudstadt, whom he happened to spot while on a train. It was 1904 and both were on their way to Vienna to take their teachers exams. Ebner was another brilliant mind who became well known as a philosopher, theologian and poet and the two men developed a close friendship.

Hauer taught in grammar school in the town of Krumbach for a little while. He had met his wife, Leopoldine Hönig at Krumbach and the pair were married in 1907 going on to have three children together. After passing another test he was able to able to start teaching school back in Wiener Neustadt and the couple moved to his hometown with their young family. When Ebner moved to the nearby town of Gablitz it became easy for them to keep up their friendship.  

Hauer and Ebner were both born within a year of each other, and around this time they were 28 years old. They both became involved in something of an intellectual and artistic salon that met at the Café Lehn in Wiener Neustadt. This was to prove to be a fortuitous time for Hauer, and his personality and strong views about music began to exert a gravitational force at these meetings, becoming a focal point of attention. Stimulated in this atmosphere his ideas started to take on a more cohesive form, and his first dissonant pieces were composed and performed. Ebner and the others encouraged him to continue, and Hauer later recalled that he had a feeling of rebirth in the twenty-eighth year of his life, making the music he had first perceived in dreams, become manifest in reality.

This is the period when he composed early works such as Nomos I and Apokalyptische Phantasie. Their reception was mixed among the public and panned by critics, but he did not let this flag his spirits and he continued on with his work.

It seems that deep subjects and questions regarding philosophy and metaphysics came naturally to him. His earliest surviving composition is “Tragödien des Sophokles,” a piano piece from 1911 that took the Greek playwright Sophocles tragedies as theme. He also had a strong love of the German Romantics. Ebner had brought his attention to the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, and he began to work on the Hölderlin-Lieder, setting some poems to music.

While still in the service he moved his family to Vienna in 1915. After he was discharged from active duty in 1918, he taught school again very briefly, but by the next year had decided to retire and live on a small pension. In this respect he was well acquainted with the artists life and he and his family remained down at heels. He was offered a position to perform in the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, but turned it down. It makes one wonder what effects being in the war had on him, and he had already had somewhat ill health. 
In Vienna he came to know Adolf Loos, an architect and writer most famous as part of the Vienna Secessionist movement of architecture. Loos is famous for his design of Villa Müller which embodied his idea of the Raumplan, or spatial plan, method for arranging interior spaces. Loos [later?] brought Hauer into contact with the circle of Arnold Schoenberg.

​In the meantime Hauer had found inspiration for his first work on music theory based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Theory of Colours while working with Ebner as a copyist for his friends first major work of philosophical theology. 

The I, The Thou, and the Logos
 
            It is no secret that Hauer held serious metaphysical and spiritual views. These ideas fed directly into his compositions and his writings about music and aesthetics. One of the key influences on Hauer was the philosopher Ferdinand Ebner, who he encountered in the cultural ferment that had bubbled up in Vienna in the aftermath of World War I. Ebner expounded a “philosophy of dialogue” centered on humanity existing in an “I-Thou” personal relationship with God.  Ebner articulated this philosophical theology in his work Das Wort und Die Geistigen Realitäten: Pneumatologische Fragmente (The Word and the Spiritual Realities: Pneumatological Fragments) from 1921. Ebner’s work became an influence on Martin Buber who drew on Ebner’s insight for his work I and Thou published in 1923.  Hauer was a friend of Ebner’s and copied out the The Word and the Spiritual Realities for publication, coming to know and understand it intimately. Ebner’s work ended up being one of the seeds that sprouted into his twelve-tone theory. Hauer was not just on an aesthetic quest, but on a spiritual quest.
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            In Ebner’s theology the “word” is on the one hand, the spoken utterances used as language to communicate between one person and another person (I and Thou). On the other had he considers the I and Thou relationship to be a manifestation of “geistige Relitaten” or mental/spiritual realities. Ebner links this thought to the Bible where in the Gospel of John it is written that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” In other words, Ebner’s Christianity is orientated towards the Logos, which in Greek philosophy concerned the idea of a universal mind of divine reason that can be considered the mind of God.

            To get deeper into the idea of the Logos it will be helpful to have a brief history of the idea of the Logos in western philosophical and religious thought.

            Before the word Logos was used by the apostle John, it had been used by Pythagoras. Also like the Christians, Pythagoras believed in the primacy of the number three, but instead of it being the trinity of God, Son, and Holy Spirit, he taught of the Monad, Dyad and Harmony. These three principles formed the basic structure of the cosmos. The Monad, or the One, represented the Supreme Being of the universe. The Monad begat the Dyad, representing the principle of otherness and diversification. From the Dyad come the multiplicity of numbers, but in these numbers there can be found Harmony, as relates to the proportions between numbers (and extrapolating from numbers musical notes and geometrical shapes). In Pythagorean thought, Harmony is based on the idea of logos, which creates a unity between the Monad and the Dyad.

            In the Greek language the word logos has two meanings, mind and rationality. It can therefore be thought of in two distinct ways, but like the Monad and the Dyad, there is a Harmony between them. (Gottfried Leibniz was another thinker who used the Monad as the basis for a system of metaphysics and philosophy. His Monadology will be explored at later time.)

            From the Pythagorean’s the logos went on to inform the philosophy of Heraclitus and from there went into the work of Plato, and from there seeped into Aristotle and went on down the line of the Western tradition finding culmination as a key religious principle of Christianity.

            Heraclitus was a Greek philosopher from Ephesus (in present day Turkey) who is best known for his enigmatic and paradoxical writings that only now exist in fragmentary form. Germane to the present discussion is his notion that everything is always in a state of flux. His teaching has come down to us paraphrased as the statement that “no one ever steps in the same river twice.” The idea here is not that everything is in such a state of flux that things do not hold their shape, or that we would not recognize our wives or children. The idea is actually much closer to those of modern physics. The atoms that make up a river are constantly changing, but the river itself remains constant. The changes in its contours are hard to see on the human time scale. Thus, the more things change the more they stay the same. Discounting the experience of aging, our perceptions of our bodies are relatively the same, even as the processes that keep them alive continue to bring in and expel various elemental forces.  

            This leads to another concept from Heraclitus, that of the unity of opposites. The following is typical of his gnomic expressions, “As the same thing in us are living and dead, waking and sleeping, young and old. For these things having changed around are those, and those in turn having changed around are these.” Things that seem to be opposed often have more in common than not, and reveal hidden unities. As much as things are changing, they all can be traced back to the one, to the Monad. “Having harkened not to me but to the Word (Logos) it is wise to agree that all things are one.”

            The Logos, or Word, can be thought of then, as an expression of the Monad.

            In Taoist terms this can be thought of as the Eternal. Change is constant. Everything is always in flux. This is one thing we can count on. For Heraclitus the Logos was a unifying principle that structured and ordered the constantly changing cosmos. 

            The Logos became an important concept in the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. Plato had an understanding of Logos as that which enabled a thinker to convey with accuracy what they actually know. For Aristotle Logos was related to the human capacity for reason and rationality. Indeed, for him the word was closely related to ratio, where we get our word rationality. It would seem then that rationality is related to the mathematical or geometrical concept of ratio. The Latin word means reckoning, or how we estimate and calculate, as a way of knowledge.

            The Stoics also came to use the word Logos. Marcus Aurelius was inclined to “always think of the universe as one living organism, with a single substance and a single soul.” This single soul is of course the Logos (and again due to its singularity, could be related to the Monad). The Stoics believed that Logos permeated everything in the manifest universe, while at the same transcending everything in the known universe. This meant it took on aspects of divinity, while at the same time divinity took on the aspect of everything, allowing us to know the divine. It was, for them, the principle of reason and rationality guiding the unfolding of the cosmos. Since it was manifest in all things in the macrocosm, it was also manifest in the life of the individual as the microcosm.

            The founding father of the Stoic school of philosophy, Zeno of Citium said that, “God is not separate from the world; He is the soul of the world, and each of us contains a part of the Divine Fire. All things are parts of one single system, which is called Nature.”

            The Stoics believed in an interior or inner logos, and exterior or outer logos. These again can be thought of in terms of macrocosm and microcosm. The inner logos being the one inside each of us, available to offer guidance, the outer logos being the macrocosmic all of divinity, omniscient and all knowing.

            The idea that the one and the many interpenetrate each other is one way to make sense of the idea of how oracles work. All of the symbols within a coherent system become a language through which the divine can speak. It becomes a tool for communication and a bridge between the inner logos and the outer logos.

            All of this talk of Logos and the changing and the unchanging relates directly to Hauer’s idea of the Continuum, which also had some echoes of Ferdinand Ebner’s philosophy. Hauer used the I Ching as a means for composing his Zwolftonspiele pieces. It was his way of getting out of his own way, and allowing the divine to come through so he could express something beyond himself. John Cage would go on to embrace a very similar philosophical point of view in his own music.     

            To relate all this back to Ferdinand Ebner, he thought that humanities ability to speak was a key component of our human existence and that the “word” was a divine gift. Language itself is exemplary of the “I and Thou” relationship between humans, and between humans and God. Since in Christianity, Jesus Christ is considered to be the Logos, we are able to communicate to God via Christ, the human Thou. 

​            Ebner rejected Renes Descartes idea that “I think therefore I am,” because in his view, the human I is not to be found in solitary reflection, but can only be experienced in relationship. This gave what might be called a strong anti-individualist cast to Ebner’s ideas about the role of artists in society.

Ebner wrote that, “Man has his true spiritual life in the relation of the I to the Thou, in the realization of this relation; true spiritual life cannot be found where it is sought the most willingly: it cannot be found in poetry and art, philosophy and mythical religion where he dreams about spirit - even if he does this in the most ingenious, most brilliant way. Every form of culture have never been and will never be anything else than a dream about spirit, dreamt by man in the I-loneliness of his existence, far from the spiritual realities of life.” (
          
  In other words, Ebner believed that the works of man could never equal the works of God. Artists who claimed they were vehicles for the expression of divinity were fooling themselves. They could only ever be expressing their own mortal egos. Josef Hauer picked up on this idea from Ebner, and it he came to believe that a composer should be a blank slate. The author John Covach wrote of that
Hauer thought that  “music should arise through a composer in the most unmediated manner possible, and when he hit upon the principle of constantly and systematically circulating all twelve notes, he believed he had discovered the realm in which music could transcend the personal and attain the spiritual.”

            For Ebner eternity was always accessible in the present through prayer, where the I-Thou relationship is practiced in conversation with God.
           
Josef Hauer developed his own way for interacting with the divine, that was just as much an I-Thou relationship and ongoing conversation as was Ferdinand’s devout and prayerful way.  Hauer used his Law of the Twelve Tones, and later chance operations and aleatoric procedures involving the I-Ching, to allow the all permeating Logos to be expressed through a composition. This keyed him in to another of Ebner’s ideas as he was able to bypass his conscious mind and ego from composing and allow the expression of these greater spiritual realities to come through him.

            Lauriejean Reinhardt wrote in their notes for a composition of Hauer’s contained in The Moldenhauer Archives at the Library of Congress that:
           
            According to Hauer, atonal (i.e., twelve-tone) music was not invented (erfunden) but rather "perceived" ("gehört"). The atonal musician was not an active agent--neither a music maker (Musikmacher) nor a performer (Musikant) or "original genius" ("Originalgenie")--but a passive "hearer" ("Hörender"), one who "perceives that which is unchanging, intangible, the eternal in the essence of things ("Tao")." Compositions were regarded as a Sphärenmusik that provided a path to self-discovery, and the creative process was likened to a cosmic game, with certain elements left to chance.
 
            So if twelve-tone music wasn’t invented, but perceived -who perceived it first, Josef Hauer or Arnold Schoenberg? To get into that, we will have to look at Schoenberg’s parallel development as another Viennese composer of the same generation who also perceived twelve-tone music that seeded the work of the serialist composers who followed.

It starts with the fizz of static, like a can of pop being opened, but this isn’t pop music. Maybe it is more like the spark inside an old transistor radio, coming back to life. From within its speaker emerges the staccato pulses of detuned strings vibrating into the atmosphere.

When I first stumbled upon this album while digging through Bandcamp’s endless crates, I was immediately excited. When I tuned, I was hooked. Guitar drone and guitar ambient have become a favorite little niche area of music for me to explore the past few years. It interrelates to another musical obsession of mine over the same time period: American Primitive guitar music, the soundworlds of John Fahey, Robbie Basho and others who have carved out a new-old vision of minimalist fingerpicking.

Guitar based ambient and instrumental American Primitive go well together because they both reveal expansive, yet intricate, spaces where the imagination of the listener can relax and flourish. Relaxation is a key ingredient for me anymore in music, though I still love all the pulse pounding stuff and material with hyperkinetic beats. The world outside often seems hyperkinetic enough, and sensory overload all too real, so I seek regular refuge inside the ambient bubble. This means I am also ever on a quest to find nourishing sounds that can inspire, while at the same time, relieve tension. This doesn’t mean they need to be New Age or on the light-edged side of ethereal music. It can be music with a darkened, sepia toned tinge. Warm and glowing distortion is also welcome. I found what I was looking for on this album from the Bern, Switzerland based Zimoun.
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Modular Guitar Fields I-VI encompasses the expansive quality of dark ambient and the fuzz hear is warm, analog, and rich. Zimoun captured the tones of a Tenor Baritone Guitar processed through various elements of a Modular Synth setup, that was then fed into a 1960s Magnatone Amp. I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing this model is a tube amplifier, giving this album its distinct warmth, even as it swirls in a slight dusting of melancholy. Amp modeling has become very popular in music software, but the real thing can’t be beat.

Here the emphasis of the music is not on the virtuosity of a guitar player, as it often is with the fingerpickers whom I admire, or with the metal heads and punkers who knows how to shred. Zimoun focuses in on the gentle flutter of tones and notes erupting through the processing chain. The emphasis here is on long sustained tones interrupted by micro-glitches and slight changes of texture. The experience is primarily a timbral one. There is a grain to the recording, like the grain found in old wood. The gnarled whorls and patterns feel so organic, you forget the music you are listening is in part electronic.

These compositions fill up the listening space, and become part of the room, conferring on it a sense of dark majesty. The term “sound sculpture” sometimes feels a bit cliché when talking about ambient music. Yet with these drones it is totally spot on. That makes sense when you look at the other work of Zimoun, work I was not at all familiar with before hearing this release. Though Zimoun releases plenty of recordings, most of them are based off his work as an installation artist.

Zimoun uses the principles of mechanics and rotation and oscillation to make physical objects vibrate and produce sound. He uses a mixture of things found in everyday life coupled with some from industry, like motors, cable and welding wire. He builds small apparatuses, and will often use many of them in one work, to create an orchestra of mechanic sculptures that fill a space with their orchestrated song as everything is set into motion.
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This album however is similar to works by other artists who have used “prepared guitar.” Keith Fullerton Whitman had also previously combined guitar with is modular synthesizers. Yet with the inclusion of the word “field” in the album title Zimoun suggests the overiding spatial qualities of the sound produced by the object. It is a field I will be happy to spend more time in, basking in the combined glow of guitar, synth, amplifier. 

This review was originally written for and appeared on the wonderful Igloo Magazine: Experimental and Electronic Music.

​Forget the sounds of ASMR. Music made for the night is as immemorial as music itself and music made to help one slip into slumber is as old as the first lullaby. 

Using music as a sleep aid goes back in time as far as that of Enki, the Sumerian god of wisdom and fresh water, of trickery, mischief and magic. The word that is at the root of lullaby,  “elulam,” appears in the ancient text Enki and Ninhursag, where it say, “No singer sang an elulam there. No wailings were wailed in the city's outskirts there.” That word remains rooted in human consciousness as it morphed into the German word “einlullen” and the English word “lullaby.” The letter l in the word is one of the things that make it all so lulling.

Some folk consider lullaby to have come from a word meant to banish the demon Lilith of Judaic tradition. “Lilith-Abi” is Hebrew for “Lilith begone.” Bye and bye, it is thought that the songs sang to children at night came from these often-used words that were carved on amulets and hung on nursery walls to protect babies from the things that go bump in the night.

​Western classical music has the tradition of the nocturne, from the Latin word nocturnus meaning of the night. This type of composition came rather late in the game and first appeared in the 18th century before it had a small proliferation in the 19th when nocturnes were picked up by composers writing for solo piano. Frederic Chopin became the master of this form, and was able to distillate stillness into moving sounds. ​Later William Basinski created a mesmerizing and rich Nocturne with the bell like tonalities of a prepared piano.

​Classical Hindustani music is perhaps the most attuned to the sense of time and the passing hours of each day with specific ragas meant to be played at specific times. Without getting into the weeds, they split up the day into eight three-hour segments. A broader division is that of morning, afternoon, evening, and night, with specific times having specific charteristics that harmonize with the corresponding mood of those hours. 

In the 20th century, coming under the heavy influence of ragas and eastern music, composers like Terry Riley who inaugurated a series of his own all-night music concerts in 1967, just a few years before his journey to the east. ​Poppy Nogoods All Night Flight was an album he culled from from his all night concert series.

 Ambient music pioneer Robert Rich continued the tradition, though in a different vein, with his many sleep concerts given over the period of his career. Started while he was a student at Stanford in 1982, these seven to eight hour long concerts were done in halls where people were encouraged to bring their pillows and drift off into a somnambulant state during the concerts.

In an interview about the sleep concerts he said of the first one, “I Xeroxed a bunch of flyers and stuck them up on kiosks around campus. It was a free concert: I said “bring a sleeping bag”. I think I called it ‘Sleep Music’, and it started at 11pm and went until 8am in the morning, and it was in the lounge of the dormitory that I was living in.” Armed with a homebuilt modular and two cassette machines, Rich performed through the night to a 20-odd audience of friends, neighbours and curious passers-by: “I had a tape echo and a digital delay and a spring reverb and it was very simple, very primitive drone stuff. And very quiet.”

These became a tradition that he started to do a couple times a year, and then later he started getting asked to perform them at various venues, including the Association for Sleep and Dreaming.

For Rich these concerts, even back in the 80s, were a way to slow down, and disconnect, and get back in touch with healthier rhythms. “When you look at cultures that retain more of a ritual or a shamanic relationship to inner life, you’ll see that they are very open to sharing their dreams in the morning, to talking about the inner life. And it’s something that we have lost – it’s something that we have perhaps pushed away from ourselves as a remnant of puritanical materialism. [It’s] this strange state our culture is in where we deny inner life and we have very little use for religion, at least in the intellectual spheres, and everything is seen in these materialistic terms of functionality, and how hard can you work. I live here in Silicon Valley, where everybody brags about their 60 hour work weeks at Google and things – it’s kind of missing some fundamental aspects of human experience.”

Robert Rich released an album of sleep music in this vein, Somnium, in the 1990s which at the time was the longest running album on any format ever released. This has been a boon to his many fans who have wanted to experience a sleep concert and who didn’t have the opportunity to actually be at one. This is hypnagogic music at a very sublime level.

He has continued to perform the sleep concerts periodically, while noting they are rather taxing on him as a performer due to their long duration, something that hasn’t gotten any easier as he has aged. 

​Meanwhile Nurse With Wound, that purveyor of sinister whimsy from the mind of Steve Stapleton, took his sleep concerts in a more surrealist direction.  Stapleton’s Sleep Concerts are in more of the vein of remixing his discography into what has been called a “DJ somniliquoy,” augmented by visual projections. At a Sleep Concert for the Drogheda Arts Festival in 2014 audience members were given air mattresses, blankets, and taken to a secret sleepover location near the festival, followed by breakfast, before being shuttled back to the fest. Nurse With Wound has revisited the Sleep Concert with performances in England, Germany and Switzerland since around 2010.

The German-British protominimalist composer Max Richter explored Sleep in his music for sleep, writing eight and a half hours of music in chunks and blocks of twenty to thirty minutes. He described it as an eight hour lullaby.  A selection of these has been made available on his From Sleep album. Like Rich, he was inspired to create these works as a counterpoint to the hasty and ever driving accelerated pace of modern life. These works are more than somnolent, and can easily bring one down into the liminal places.

Sleep music as provided by a 24 hour radio station dedicated to the surrealistic needs of sleepers is something also the world is in desperate need of. The Imaginary Stations project aimed to plant those seeds in the WZZZ programs 1 and 2. 

​It seems obvious that music has long been used to protect us and envelope us in our sleep. The fringeworth interest in sleep concerts seems like something worth continued exploration, as humans will continue to need music to protect them from the terrors of the night and as a way to get off the road when life has been placed in the fast track.
 

Things have been quiet around here, but I have been very busy inside my secret workshop since this past fall when my book, The Radio Phonics Laboratory, was accepted for publication by the wonderful atelier of electronica, Velocity Press. 

Now my book is finally ready to begin its escape from the lab and is available for pre-order.

Some of you may have read the original articles that make up this book in earlier forms here on Sothis Medias, or in the Q-Fiver, the newsletter of the Oh-Ky-In Amateur Radio Society where they had their first genesis, but this book has the additional benefit of several rewrites, the hand of a skilled editor, and much additional material not included in my original articles. It also has the bonus that if you pre-order by March 14 you will get your name printed in the book and receive it first in May for those of us in North America. 

The Radio Phonics Laboratory is due for release on June 14 but because the publisher is in England, it won't be readily available in the US until late summer or early fall. They have to get the copies in from the printers and ship them to their distributor in California. Pre-ordering is the best option for supporting my work, the efforts of Velocity Press, and getting a copy in your hands ahead of time for summer reading. The price is £11.99 for the paperback (about $15.16 US) + shipping. The shipping to the US is a bit more expensive than domestic shipping prices, but you'll get your name printed in the book as a supporter if you order before March 14 and you'll have my gratitude. 

This book is the culmination of many seeds, some planted long ago when I first started checking out weird music from the library as a teenager and stumbled across the CD compilation Imaginary Landscapes: New Electronic Music and tuned in to radio shows like Art Damage. This is the culmination of many many hours of research, listening, reading and writing over for a number of years. Full details about the book are below. Thanks to all of you for supporting my writing and radio activity and other creative efforts over the years.

I would be grateful for any help you can give in spreading the word about the Radio Phonics Laboratory to any of your friends and family who share the love of electronic music, the avant-garde and the history of our telecommunications systems.

https://velocitypress.uk/product/radio-phonics-laboratory-book/

The Radio Phonics Laboratory explores the intersection of technology and creativity that shaped the sonic landscape of the 20th century. This fascinating story unravels the intricate threads of telecommunications, from the invention of the telephone to the advent of global communication networks.

At the heart of the narrative is the evolution of speech synthesis, a groundbreaking innovation that not only revolutionised telecommunications but also birthed a new era in electronic music. Tracing the origins of synthetic speech and its applications in various fields, the book unveils the pivotal role it played in shaping the artistic vision of musicians and sound pioneers.

The Radio Phonics Laboratory by Justin Patrick Moore is the story of how electronic music came to be, told through the lens of the telecommunications scientists and composers who helped give birth to the bleeps and blips that have captured the imagination of musicians and dedicated listeners around the world. Featuring the likes of Leon Theremin, Hedy Lamarr, Max Matthews, Hal 9000, Robert Moog, Wendy Carlos, Claude Shannon, Halim El-Dabh, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry, Francois Bayle, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Milton Babbitt, Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire, Edgar Varese & Laurie Spiegel.
 
Quotes
 
“From telegraphy to the airwaves, by way of Hedy Lamarr and Doctor Who, listening to Hal 9000 sing to us whilst a Clockwork Orange unravels the past and present, Moore spirits us on an expansive trip across the twentieth century of sonic discovery. The joys of electrical discovery are unravelled page by page.” Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner
 
“Embark on an odyssey through the harmonious realms of Justin Patrick Moore’s Radio Phonics Laboratory echoing the resonances of innovation and discovery. Witness the mesmerising fusion of telecommunications and musical evolution as it weaves a sonic tapestry, a testament to the boundless creativity within the electronic realm. A compelling pilgrimage for those attuned to the avant-garde rhythms of technological alchemy.” Nigel Ayers
 
“In this captivating exploration of electronic music, Justin Patrick Moore unveils its evolution as guided by telecommunication technology, spotlighting the enigmatic laboratories of early experimenters who shaped the sound of 20th century music. A must-read for electronic musicians & sound artists alike—this book will undoubtedly find a prominent place on their bookshelves.” Kim Cascone
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If the Muses inspire the pens of poets, then it was the spring sacred to the Muses that Herman Hesse drank from when he dreamed up the concepts in his inspired masterpiece, The Glass Bead Game. Castalia is the main setting for the book, a fictional province somewhere in central Europe, some centuries in the future. The province had been set apart as a place for the development of the mind. Individuals who are deemed to be worthy of attending the boarding schools of Castalia are sent their and educated by an order of intellectuals and mystics. The life in the order is much like that in a monastery, yet in Castalia the devotees of the order cultivate and play something known as the Glass Bead Game. Throughout the book the exact nature of the game is never spelled out in full, and the reader is expected to imagine what the nature of the game is by inference. To play the game well a person needs to have an encyclopedic grasp of mathematics, music, the arts, science, religion, and cultural history. At its most basic it could be described as a game where the player makes connections between different fields of study that may at first seem unrelated. A well-played game becomes an act of creative synthesis showcasing the beauty of the connections formed, of the different subjects threaded and woven together. Playing the game is an active form of contemplation for the Castalian, as is watching a game being played by a master player. The meaning of the game, and any connections made during its play, become further objects for exploration in contemplative meditation as taught by the order.

            Music has a special place in Castalia. In the hierarchy of what they hold dear it is one rung below the game itself. Young acolytes are trained in music from an early age, and music is often incorporated directly into the games. Hesse gave a number of precedents that he conceived of as influencing the eventual development of the game. These included the Music of the Spheres, beloved of the Pythagoreans, systems and ideas of a Universal Language, and scholastic philosophy among many others.

            But why give the province the name Castalia in the first place? To answer this question we turn to Greek mythology.      

Castalia was a naiad, a kind of nymph or nature spirit, that preside over springs, fountains and streams, often living in them. The difference between the spring itself and the naiad can be blurry for those who try to separate the spirit from the matter. Castalia was the daughter of the River God Achelous. She either threw herself into the spring, or was transformed into a spring, in the course of trying to evade the creeping advances of Apollo, God of music, knowledge and oracles. The spring took on her name and became a sacred source of inspiration to Apollo, her would be suitor, and the Muses.

            The location of the spring, or fountain as it is sometimes also described, happened to be on the sloped base of Mount Parnassus. This mountain range in Greece was long held sacred, on the one hand to Dionysius and those who were initiated in his mysteries, and on the other to Apollo and the Muses. Delphi itself was situated on the southern side of the mountain. The ancient Latin poet Lactantius Placidus said Castalia had transformed herself into a fountain right at Delphi. Apollo then consecrated this source of water to the Muses. Those who drank her waters, or even those who sat next to the spring and listened to the liquid trickle, would become inspired by the genius or daimon of poetry. These same waters were said to be used to cleanse the temples at Delphi.

            By calling his province Castalia, Hesse invokes the power of the Muses and of Apollo. The Muses are the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, memory, their mother who presides over them. These are the Greek deities of intellectual and artistic pursuit, of poetry, literature, music, astronomy, philosophy, dance, and history.

            Apollo, was among other things, a god of prophecy and it was he was the god of the oracle of Delphi, the most important of all the oracles in ancient Greece. Though Delphi was his chief oracular shrine, there were others sacred to the god. Branchidae and Claros, both in Iona, were also places where people sought his wisdom.

 It seems that Hesse chose the name Castalia because of its connection to Apollo and because of the oracular nature of the Glass Bead Game itself.  Being a game of rich symbolic connections, and a game that sometimes involves the play of chance, and the intuition and knowledge of the player gives it an oracular nature in way that is similar to methods of divination that may have started in some instances as games, such as the tarot. Other diviniation systems such as the I Ching may not have started as games, but later take on elements from games, such as coin tossing and dice throwing. One way to think of divination is as a consultation with spirits, gods, or the intelligent life force active in the universe.
            In ancient Greek religion people took consultation with the Gods as a given. They believed, much as the more familiar Christians of the past two thousand years have believed, that establishing a line of communication with their deity would allow them to receive divine wisdom. They prayed for success in life, strength to overcome difficulties, and hoped to court the personal favor of the Gods and Goddesses with various offerings and rituals.

            Apollo was a favored choice among the Greeks when they needed to know the future. Being a god of prophecy made him a natural fit for those who wanted to take a peek ahead and try to see what was around the corner for them in life. His prophetic side is only one aspect of this deity. Apollo is a god of music, medicine, and archery, as well shepherds and their flocks. He is seen as giving order and purpose to civilization, assisting in its development, as well as with endowing codes and laws. Philosophy is pleasing to Apollo.

            Hesse would have been very familiar with the idea of the dichotomy between Dionysian modes of culture and Apollonian, a theme very much alive from the time of the German art historian and Hellenist Johann Joachim Winckelmann on up to the work of the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin. The literary theme was taken the furthest and made most well-known by philosopher Friedrich Nietszche in his work The Birth of Tragedy. To gloss a complex line of thinking it can first be noted that Dionysus and Apollo are both sons of Zeus, though with different mothers. Dionysus, ruled over wine, dancing, pleasure seeking, and importantly, all things chaotic and irrational. He is associated with primal instincts and passion, the primacy of emotion, and was the son of Semele. Though not a god of the moon per se, Dionysus can be thought of as relating to the lunar current in humanity and those things associated with it such as dreams and visionary states. Apollo, by contrast, is a solar god, whose orbit encompasses the realms of art, music, logic, order and reason, and is the son of Leto. These brothers, often at odds with each other in their personality, and in things over which they each have been given control, were not seen as opposites by the Greeks. Instead they were thought to be deeply enmeshed with one another. Still, that didn’t stop later thinkers from seeing within their interplay something of the yin and yang.

            The mode of life in Hesse’s Castalia is the epitome of order and reason. There is a deep mysticism and embrace of the spiritual by the Castalians through their practices of study, meditation, and contemplation. Yet their route to the heights of illumination is taken as a slow gradual step-by-step program or process of spiritual unfoldment. The Dionysian mode by contrast is perhaps best represented by what Arthur Rimbaud called the “systematic derangement of the senses” through means of intoxication, visionary drugs, and losing oneself in the ecstasy of dance and passion. Illumination can come that way, but for dabblers, it is often at steep costs.  As such as Apollo is the appropriate god to see over the unfoldment of Hesse’s future province.

            How Apollo came to be a god regarded as prophetic is not known, though his civilizing aspects goes way back into olden times with him being a god of the shepherd where his skills in medicine, archery and music would all be appreciated. The string that makes a bow for an arrow can also be used to make a lyre.

            There were other beings and energies associated with Delphi aside from Castalia, and even more famous, namely, Python. This dragon or serpent was said to live in the center of the earth, and before Apollo came to kill him, he presided over the oracle which existed at that spot as a cult for Gaia. The Greeks believed that Zeus had made this spot the navel of the world, in other words the axis mundi, or to say it another way, the center of the world. They used a stone called the omphalos to mark the exact spot. Python guarded this stone and when Apollo slayed the dragon he set up shop in his place.          

Every eight years there was a ritual re-enactment of his Apollo’s earliest adventure, the killing of the Python held at the shrine. In the Delphic Septeria ritual, a boy who impersonated the god was led to a place called the Palace of the Python. This was a hut near the temple. They set the hut on fire and the boy was banished from the realm. The ritualists went to the Vale of Tempe to be purified. The Vale of Tempe was a place known in legend. Its deep gorge had been made when Poseidon cut through the rocks with his trident. The place was a favorite hangout spot for Apollo and the Muses, and was later home for a time to Aristaeus, his son with Cyrene, a Thessalian princess who later became the queen and ruler of her namesake city Cyrene, in Libya, North Africa. Aristaeus offended the nymphs when he chased after Eurydice, causing her to be bitten by a serpent and die. Seeking revenge, the nymphs destroyed his beehives. Going to his mother, she suggests he seek the wisdom of Proteus, a god of the sea. Proteus explains to him the cause of his misfortune, and his mother recommends he sacrifice his cattle to the nymphs. When he returns nine days later after the slaughter, he finds the carcasses of the cattle to be swarming with bees. There is a correspondence here with the bees who made honey in the skull of the lion after the biblical Samson slayed a lion, and when he returned, noticed a swarm of bees and some honey it’s carcass. The Pineios river flowed through the Vale of Tempe on its right bank was a temple of Apollo. It was hear where the bay laurels used to crown the victors in the Pythian Games were gathered. After purification in Tempe the adherents to the ritual came back by a path known as the Pythian Way. This whole enactment was a way of commemorating the dragon slayer.

             Visitors would come to the oracle and ask a question of the Pythia, the high priestess, who would then deliver cryptic lines and verses of advice. The Pythia sat on bronze tripod over a crack in the earth where Python had gone inside to die. The fumes from his rotting corpse emanated up from the crack to help the Pythia enter into her oracular trance. The Pythia was also trained in the teachings of the Mystery Schools of the time and she learned the spiritual and magical techniques needed to communicate the messages of Apollo to the people who came seeking his wisdom. At the beginning of each day, before sitting on her special throne she purified herself in the sacred waters of the Castalian spring.

            Though the site was remote, it was situated on an important trade route between north Greece and Corinth, allowing people from all across the land to come and seek the wisdom of Apollo.

            There is another similarity between Delphi and the Castalia of Hesse’s novel. Unlike other sacred sites in Greece, it was not attached to a city-state. Instead, it was protected by a council known as the Amphictyonic League. These leagues were charged with the maintenance and care of the temples. The province of Castalia in the book is kept separate for the most part from the economic life of the surrounding countries, so they will be free to pursue their intellectual pursuits. The Amphictionies helped maintain the Oracle of Delphi as a neutral space. Castalia also seems to have another parallel to the neutrality of Switzerland where Hesse emigrated had emigrated from Germany.

            The Amphictionies were also charged with holding the Pythian Games, just the Order who ran Castalia held a major festival for the play of the Glass Bead Game. The Pythian Games were a competition in music. This is another parallel. The Pythian Games weren’t as popular as the Olympian, with their focus on athleticism. There focus had been on the creation of a hymn to Apollo. These would be sung with accompaniment on the cithara, a seven stringed version of the lyre that was seen as more professional and less country bumpkin. At first the Pythian Games were held every eighth year, just as the Delph Septeria was, but they were later reorganized by the Amphictionic Council, and held on every third year of the Olympiad. The competition involved singing, instrumental music, drama, and the recitations of poetry and prose. Races on foot and horse were later added after the Olympian Games, which honored Zeus. The prize for winning was a crown of bay leaves brought from the valley of Tempe.
             
            Getting a consultation at the oracle wasn’t just something you could go up and do anytime you needed a word of advice. There was an elaborate process around the whole shebang. Access was limited. People could only consult the Oracle once a month for nine months of the year. Apollo took a vacation the rest of the year. It was believed he left for the winter to go to warmer climates. Given the limited time span when he was available, it might be thought, that like in today’s world, only the wealthy would be able to utilize such a precious resource. Yet anyone could visit the oracle of Delph, though there was another hierarchy based on where people came from came into play.

​Even so, all mortals were just mortals to Apollo.