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
​

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. 

Sometimes all it takes to get the mental wheels spinning along new grooves is listening to a good mix. This was most definitely the case when I tuned into a three hour special of the radio show Do or DIY from Vicki Bennett aka People Like Us on WFMU this past Valentines Day. Her mixture of “pop and avant-garde side by side, sometimes on top of one another” has been a mainstay of my radio listening habits since somewhere between 2007 and 2009 by my best guestimation, though her archives for that particular aspect of her creative work go all the way back to 2003. There are hours and hours of great music there. Her shows always make me laugh and smile, and its refreshing to have humorous music on the air.

The episode in question was, “This Is Bardcore This Is Barcode This is the Pooless Flute.” The Pooless Flute bit is an in joke that goes back to what she called “pooey flute” –all the shitty cover songs done terribly by people on YouTube on purpose, though technically, I suppose some of it is recorder music. But who is keeping track?  This episode was unfortunately pooless, but it did have a few recurring motifs over the course of its very quick three hours. The first was from the bardcore microgenre. A microgenre might as well be called a meme, as Bennett herself put it that way. Often these microgenres function just as much as meme, with artists taking on a certain aesthetic with the use of graphics, phrasing, and other elements as new niches are carved out in what remains of the Internet’s digital playground. The bardcore songs tend to be renditions of popular music done in an electronic quasi-medieval style. 

​Sometimes the genre of bardcore is also called tavernwave, showing its kinship to other microgenres such as vaporwave and mallsoft. It shares the electronic aspect, as most bardcore is made using readily available computer software, as far as I can tell, though I could be wrong in this. Popular artists include Algal the Bard, who originated the style with their cover of a System of A Down’s track “Toxicity.” Hildegard von Blingin’ has been prolific with covers of “Creep” by Radiohead, “Jolene” by Dolly Parton and Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” She distinguishes herself by singing over the medieval version, and by slightly altering the lyrics to resemble older forms of English. Beedle the Bard is another prolific bardcore artist. His cover of the Wu Tang classic “C.R.E.A.M.” is representative of the genre, and he has made quite a few covers of rap songs. Rap might even be the majority of what he has covered in his bardcore transformations.

​Another theme she returned to over the course of the show was various mashups, collages or remixes of the song “Bitter Sweet Symphony” by The Verve. That song came from their album Urban Hymns which has been one of the bestselling albums in UK history. Of the many tracks I loved in this mix was a rap by Ren Gill over the music of Bitter Sweet Symphony. Lyrically it was a cutting and heartfelt commentary on life in London and Britain from the view on the street. And though it was all about London, a city where I’ve never set foot, but traveled to in books, movies, TV shows, and the via the wireless magic of radio, the socioeconomic aspects of the words, juxtaposing not left and right, but top and bottom, resonated with me here in the Midwest. As I listened I felt a strong bond of kinship with my friends across the pond. As my mate One “Deck” Pete says, “Radio connects us all”.

After the show was over I went down a bit of a Ren rabbit hole, because I couldn’t get that rap out of my head. It turns out Ren Gill is an amazing guitar player and singular rapper with a gift for narrative. In essence, he could be considered a bardcore rapper. Not because his music makes use of quasi-medieval sounds, but because of his talent and skills of verbal execution put him in league with the lyrical masters of poetic narrative. The dude is a bard. His music is bardcore down to the bone.

            Plus, he is from Wales. You know, the place that gave us the famous bard Taliesin. Not that Wales has a monopoly on bards. Singing and storytelling are worldwide traditions (consider the griots of West Africa for one of many examples), but Wales was home to the Eisteddfod, the competitive meeting held between bards and minstrels first mentioned in the written record back in the day of the twelfth century. A bloke by the name of Lord Rhys first held the Eisteddfod in 1176 as a competition in poetry and music at Cardigan Castle. When the Wales was conquered by the Edwardians during their conquest in the 13th century, they closed down the existing bardic schools as part of the Anglicization of the countries nobles. Later the Eisteddfod was resuscitated by the Gwyneddigon Society, a group dedicated to Welsh culture, in the 18th century. Later the Eisteddfod was picked up as perfect vehicle for the Gorsedd Cymru, which was steeped in an eclectic alchemical mixture of Druidism, Philosophy, Mysticism and Christianity.
​
            The Gorsedd Cymru was itself a revival. A Welshman by the name of Prydain ab Aedd Mawr, who was said to have lived one thousand years before the Christian era, had started the Gorsedd as a means to transmit the work of poets and musicians from generation to generation.  In 1792 the Gorsedd was rekindled as Gorsedd Beirdd Ynys Prydain the lovable Rapscallion best known as Iolo Morganwg, given name, Edward Williams. He based the Gorsedd Cymru on his imaginative ideas of Celtic Druidry. The Gorsedd made its first appearance at the Eisteddfod at the Ivy Bush Inn in Carmarthen in 1819, and its close association with the festival has continued since then.

I’m not sure at all if Ren has ever been to an Eisteddfod, or what his take might be on things such as Druidry and Celtic infused mysticism. What I do know is that he was born Ren Gill in Bangor, Gwynedd, Wales, on March 29th  1990 and was raised in Dwyran, on the isle of Anglesey (Ynys Môn in Welsh). Anglesey was the last refuge of the Druids before they got stamped out in the ancient times. The isle has long been esteemed as a place of mystical power. Ren had musical aspirations from an early age and after he got a guitar he taught himself how to play it by slowing down the songs of Jimi Hendrix to copy and learn how to play them. Starting with wanting to copy the music of  a master is always a good sign! Ren also made beats using the popular computer software Reason and hawked these CDs at the music festivals he wen to with his parents. Ren went to study music at Bath Spa University and while he was there he formed the indie hop-hop group Trick The Fox. From there, in 2009, he caught the eyes of the music industry and signed a record contract with Sony in 2010. He started working on an album but became too sick to complete it and moved back home to Wales. He was bedridden for most of the day due to the severity of his sickness. Thus began a run around between himself and the health system. Symptoms suggested autoimmune illness combined with a mental health crisis, but he was misdiagnosed. He did not in fact have bipolar disorder, he was not in fact psychotic. It took him awhile to get a correct diagnosis of Lyme disease in Belgium in 2016, but by then he had suffered from the treatments received for the wrong disease. In that time, despite his ordeal, he never lost the dream of making it as a musician, and he started working on music as best he could in his bedroom. The same year he got his diagnosis he released his debut solo album Freckled Angels, self released without any help from Sony. This had a bunch of material first used in Trick The Fox. 

​​Between 2016 and the time of this writing he has continued to release music. His viral hit “Hi Ren,” came out at the end of 2022 and is one example of why I consider his style bardic. It’s the guitar. It’s the narrative. It is the two points of view, that seemed to have come from him effortless, but are actually the product of his years of effort putting the time in honing his art.  

Listening to Ren got me thinking again on the topic of epic rap.

John Michael Greer has written about how he thinks rap is the seed of a future form of epic poetry. He writes:

“I’m not personally fond of rap, as it happens, but I can recognize a vibrant cultural upsurge when I see one. It’s a little dizzying to have a seat on the sidelines while a new tradition of bardic poetry is being born—for that’s what we’re talking about, of course. More than five thousand years ago, performers with a single string instrument for backup created rap numbers celebrating the events of their time; one of those, passed down from performer to performer, eventually got copied down on clay tablets by industrious scribes and titled Shutur Eli Sharri. We know it today as the Epic of Gilgamesh. The same process in other ages, with slightly different backup instruments pounding away to give emphasis to chanted words, gave us the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Song of Roland, Beowulf, and the beat goes on.”

Even if we are not at the point where rap is the means for transmitting a cultures epic tales, we are at the point where it is continuing to develop its potential for narrative storytelling. Ted Gioia has pointed out that there is currently a return to narrative in pop music. He writes that, “narrative song is especially well suited to the four-chord patterns that underpin so many current day pop hits. Those repeating harmonic cushions don’t offer much in the way of musical sophistication, but do create ideal vamps for supporting a story—not much different from the gusle drones used by Eastern European bards to underpin their epic tales.” He goes on to say that the reemergence of narrative centered music, after a time when popular songs were mostly lyrical or dance, implicates “a glimpse into an emerging movement in society at large.”

            When we talk about narrative songs, what we are mostly talking about is the ballad.

            Ren is another example of this trend. For my part I think a lot of it has to do with the way people crave story. We never got away from story. As postmodernism erupted in the 1960s and 70s, with its fractured and fragmented outlooks, we still had at least elements of narrative and vague outlines of action, even in the most esoteric tomes where it was often hard to pin down a point-by-point plot.
           
Of course the ballad never really disappeared to begin with. It was carried forth by such singers as Shirley Collins and others in the British Folk Revival. The ballad was documented by the likes of Alan Lomax and other song collectors in America. Recordings were transmitted from these collections, and on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. All this traditional songs went on to inform the Folk Revival happening in the United States and influenced Bob Dylan and company, and was championed by beatnik bards such as Allen Ginsberg, who had given us our own homegrown American Romanticism. Dylan studied these old songs like he was cramming for a PhD thesis. He learned to crib, copy and mimic these for his own great artistic purposes. The ballad also had a place in popular country music, which could be considered folk adjacent. The ballad lived on in the heavy metal music of the glam and hair variety in the eighties, where it became a sacharine staple with its sweet guitar solos. In rap, the murder ballad made a reappearance if in altered and different form.

Ren’s trilogy of songs The Tale of Jenny and Screech, make for an impressive case that rap really may be on its way to becoming the next form of epic poetry. These long form narrative efforts tell a conclusive story. Broken down into “Jenny’s Story,” “Screech’s Tale,” and “Violet’s Tale.” It’s the kind of thing that you might once have read in a penny dreadful and concerns many of the predicaments facing people today. Domestic abuse, mental illness, drug addiction. The timeless topics of love, incest and murder are also covered. It’s dark material. But so it ever was. The human species is drawn to the form of tragedy so that we may have a chance for catharsis.   
           
I’m hopeful that the next time I’m dragged to a renfest by my family, that that there will be more bardcore music being played in the background, quasi medieval versions of contemporary rap songs. With any luck there will be bards, inspired by the example of Ren, wondering around with their guitars, busking and delivering epic narrative raps.

            If not at a renfest in the coming years, than at some fair or festival held on the fairgrounds in the deindustrial dark age to come.

Green Day's album "Dookie" has turned 30. It now gets the deluxe box set reissue treatment. That is kind of weird to me. Perhaps, after thirty years, it is time to put this album in a dog poop bag, and put it into the trash. 

Am I being too harsh? Maybe, I finally am.

When I first saw this box set it, celebrating its 30th anniversary, it made me feel old. I know that's relative. Suddenly I was back in the eighth grade when this came out, when I was first exposed to the Green Day version of punk rock, fourteen years old, hitting the streets with a skateboard.  Sure, Green Day, was more pop than punk, but there were many great pop punk bands that I liked much better.  It was the same time in my life when I was getting turned on to the better punk rock music of The Descendants, Minor Threat, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, The Ramones, and later the anarcho-punk that came out England such as Crass, Conflict, Chumbawamba, Flux of Pink Indians and the like. Crass, earyl Chumbawamba and Rudimentary Peni became favorites for me. I really liked that noisey stuff. From there I kept looking, searching, for you know, the sound... the sound that you like... the sound that turns you on, the music that gets you excited, the song and bands you've always been waiting to find and hear.

Green Day was an anomaly within this mix, and never much found its way onto the mix tapes I received or made. As I listen to Dookie now on my headphones, it still doesn't move me very much. I admit the catchiness of some of the songs, such as Longview. But perhaps I've heard them too many times, even if it wasn't me who was putting on the record. Despite this, many of the other bands that had been brought up on Lookout Records I really loved, and it was The Queers who probably remain my favorite. That was my first bonafide punk rock show as well, The Queers opening for Rancid. Probably not long after Dookie came out. And though the Rancid show was good, it was The Queers who really shined that night.

Admittedly, part of my own dissing of Green Day back in the day, and now, was because of their popularity. With a chip on my  shoulder as a middle class skater punk from the westside, I got irritated with all the people my own age who fell in love with it, but they didn't like the hard hitting and lyrically more devastating music of Bad Religion and the like. Well, now I don't need to be such a jerk about it, but I still find myself driven to comment on the band and album, as in this email. 

However, I'm reminded of the punk novel by Stacy Wakefield, The Sunshine Crust Baking Factory. Set in 1995, its about a young punk girl who goes to NYC and gets involved with the squatters and the underground hardcore music scene there, (hence the crust).

"Sid teams up with a musician from Mexico and together they find their way across the bridge to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Packs of wild dogs roam the waterfront and the rough building in which they finally find space is occupied by misfits who don’t know anything about the Manhattan squatting scene, Food Not Bombs, Critical Mass, or hardcore punk. But this is Sid’s chance and she’s determined to make a home for herself—no matter what."

It was a fun coming-of-age novel with a romantic subplot, and the one thing I always remembered about it was how the main character talks about the guy she falls for, and how she can listen to Green Day with him, without pretending to always have to listen to the harder stuff like Nausea, Aus-Rotten, and Filth.

Perhaps there is a good reason that part of the book stuck with me. In music as with reading: you can't always be delving into the Herman Hesse, Dostoyevsky, or the Bronte's. Sometimes you need to read some Mickey Spillane, Robert E. Howard, Ed McBain or what have you. In the same way you can't always be listening to Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage or Nurse With Wound. Sometimes you need to listen to Green Day. 

And as I listen to "When I Come Around" for the upteenth time, its not so bad. I guess today was my day to listen to this turd of an album that I reviled so much in my past. But maybe it doesn't stink as much as I remembered. I understand why it hit home with all the kids out in the suburbs. And why they covered this song at so many Battles of the Bands. This may be the first time since those days in the 90s when I listened to this album straight through.
But the chances are good I might not listen to it straight through again for another thirty. 

 ​     It wasn’t that long ago that Lucien Kali Breverman turned thirteen. He was Klay to his friends because Lucien felt to uptown for him, even then. It was the same year he’d gone into seventh grade, leaving elementary behind, and wound up at Gimble High, two neighborhoods away in the spotty streets of West Forest. He used to walk to school, but now he had to take the bus.

            This was something he seldom looked forward to. In a car it would only take fifteen minutes or less to get home and up into his room where he could pick up his drumsticks and pretend Johnny’s face was the drum head, pretend Johnny was receiving a beating. Or boot up his Xbox to play Call of Duty and pretend it was Johnny who was the enemy. The problem was Johnny was always on the bus, and with all the stops, the trip took over an hour. Johnny was a sophomore and it was his second time being a sophomore. When Johnny was on the bus, it was never a smooth ride.

            Klay’s best friend Raelon had moved to a different neighborhood and rode a different route. The choice of who to sit with, just like at lunch, hung over him like a cloud of smoke and dust from one of the raging wildfires that had blanketed his city with smog over the summer.  Sitting in the back was more fun, but it was also dangerous. That turf belonged to Johnny and his minions. School had just let out and Klay lingered on the back of the sidewalk waiting for the bus to fill up, hoping Johnny would get on first, so he could sit closer to the front. It was unfortunate that the front was the place where the droolers and other dweebs congregated, but the strategy had worked for him so far. He didn’t see Johnny. Maybe he’d skipped school. The bus was filling up so he had to move, he had to get on. Then he felt a hard knock to his shoulder, as Johnny bumped into him on purpose from behind.

                “Maybe we can sit together today, buddy, whaddya think of that?” Johnny said as he stood waiting for Klay to get on ahead of him.

            Klay hesitated and Johnny pushed him in the back. “Go ahead, get on.”

            Klay was flushed, and huffed his way on to the bus, hoping to find someone to sit next to who was sympathetic. The bus driver hadn’t once stepped in on Klay’s behalf to stop Johnny’s bullying, he never said a word to shut up the rowdiness in the back. The bus driver’s long hair often concealed headphones. He didn’t pay any attention to the kids, and barely paid attention to the road. He’d overheard his Grandpa Jason grumble to his Mom, who’d been discussing the situation after the second incident, and remembered him saying the driver was probably afraid of getting slapped with a lawsuit if he stepped in to reprimand the kids. 

            As Klay walked passed the driver, he crossed the rubicon into the netherworld that was the school bus.  Three seats back an earth angel awaited him, a radiant girl he had never seen before.

“You mind if I sit here?” as he slid into the empty seat without waiting for a response.

            “Sure. Be my guest,” she said.

            “Would you do me a favor and switch seats, I need to sit by the window.”

             “If you really have to.”

            Johnny stood in the aisle and leaned over the girl to taunt Klay.

            “Oh, so you don’t want to sit with me? I guess you’re going to have to hide behind this puny little girl. Well don’t worry, you’re gonna catch these hands again soon enough.” He slammed his right fist into the palm of his left.

       “Well this ain’t the day, chief,” the girl said as she stood up. “Why don’t you go in the back derp, and shut your flapping face?”

       She was a lean five foot three, but a chill seemed to emanate from her, and Klay new it wasn’t a blast from the AC; no such thing existed on this bus. Then he caught a whiff of what smelled liked mud, like cold sod on a day of heavy October rain.
           
        A chorus of deep ooohs and laughter percolated around the seats, and someone said, “Come on now girl, you don’t want to trigger Johnny!”
        
    But there was something in her iciness that caused him to zip his lip and slink down into the back where he did shut his trap.

      “Thanks for that. I owe you one,” Klay said.

      “Yes, you do. Care to make it up to me?”

      “Sure,” he said, as he looked at her with care. “Did you just transfer here?”

      “No… It seems like I’ve been going here forever.”

      He smelled that scent of wet earth again though it hadn’t rained for days.

        “Will you walk me home?” she asked.

        He gave his ascent and asked “what’s your home room?”

       “302, with Mr. Hagg.”

​       “Wait, I’m in 302. That’s Ms. Grundle.”
       
      She just shrugged and didn’t say anything else. He tried to continue the conversation, but she wouldn’t speak. He felt grateful for what she’d done, and felt like his luck had turned, because she was a smashing beauty. Her style was half-preppie, half-punk, and her eyes were emerald green. Her strawberry blonde hair smelled like fresh cut roses. Yet the longer he sat next to her, the colder he got.

She didn’t say anything else until they got to the stop at Lake Grove Cemetery.

“Let’s go,” she said and grabbed her bag off the floor.

            She managed to get off before him, and when he stepped onto the sidewalk he thought she’d disappeared. He turned around, and on the second turn, she was there again. He for sure needed a nap when he got home. He was tired, or maybe going crazy like his friend Raelon always said.
         
   In quietude she led him into the cemetery. Maybe she doesn’t want to go home, he thought. Maybe she wants to give me kiss, or make out. He’d heard of kids doing that in the cemetery, and he hoped to join their ranks.

            She took him along the winding paths, past the ponds and their geese, past the bone white mausoleums littered with orange maple leaves. She took him into a plot underneath a mighty oak as acorns crunched underneath his feet. No sound came from her.

            “Thanks for bringing me home,” she said and bent to give him a kiss. The wind picked up just then and she was wisped away, gone before his eyes.

            He looked down at his feet, bewildered, and noticed the fresh cut roses on the gray marble gravestone. 

                                                           Jenny Wailings
                        Born January 15th, 1981, Died October 13th 1997
                                   Beloved Daughter, Granddaughter, Sister

​            He pulled out his phone and googled her name. She’d died in an accident while walking home along the train tracks after being bullied off the bus by the resident mean girl.
            The next year and every year thereafter on October 13th Klay would bring her fresh cut flowers.

--Justin Patrick Moore
Cincinnati, Ohio
​October 13, 2023

PDF File of Story

​ "Your body belongs to you, and in the appropriate ritual, it has been given to you to explore the full dimensions of your being." -Fakir Musafar

Putting a sharp pointy object straight through the skin is a time honored practice among us humans. Piercings have long been a way we have sought to make ourselves beautiful. Wearing jewelry through the skin has been a part of our aesthetics of adornment dating back thousands of years.
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But why do we pierce? The answer to this question has varied depending on the time and era. Some people have gotten piercings for magical, mystical and spiritual purposes; for others it is just a way of expressing themselves. Some get piercings for sexual pleasure, such as on the nipples or genitalia. There was a time in America when getting your ear pierced as a man, was seen as an act of outright rebellion. Getting another part of the body punctured was beyond the beyond of proper decorum, for either sex. Yet in other societies being on the receiving end of a needle for a piercing is a way to conform to the norms of the culture, be a part of the group, and fit in. It is much the same with those who belong to certain subcultures, such as punk, where a piercing can signify affiliation.
Piercings started to regain prominence in western society starting in the seventies, and underpinning their revival was a strong current of magic.

ENTER THE FAKIR

The late Fakir Musafar was often called the father of the modern primitive movement, for his pioneering work in body piercing, modification, ritual and teaching. Fakir was born on August 10, 1930 as Roland Loomis on what was then the Sissiton Sioux Indian reservation in South Dakota, a baby of the Great Depression. There wasn’t a lot going on in Aberdeen, where he grew up, and by 1943, at age thirteen, he was a bored teenager, looking for something to do while the world was at war. He felt different, and knew there must be something different to discover out there in the wide world; something other than what was presented to him by straight-laced society.

Loomis took to haunting the school library, in search of anything strange. In one of the libraries dusty and forgotten corners he found what he was looking for in some old issues of National Geographic Magazine. His imagination became captivated by the pictures and articles he saw of people from other times and places. There was one issue in particular, from the 1920’s, where he saw photographs of people in India who had pierced their flesh with hooks and hung suspended from a cross arm high up in the air. The thirteen year old wondered why they were doing this. He also wondered what it felt like. The imagery called to him, touched something deep inside his soul.

A couple of years later Loomis learned that some Native American tribes also practiced piercing their flesh so they could either hang suspended from it, or be pulled for long hours against the these piercings in a ritual known as the Sun Dance. This set off an aha! moment for Loomis. The tribes who practiced these rites had been those of the Plains Indians, many of whom lived in South Dakota, his birthplace. These ceremonies had last taken place some fifty years before he was born.

There are a number of commonalities across tribal cultures that held the Sun Dance. A sacred fire, smoking and praying with the sacred pipe, and fasting from food and water were all typical. The songs and dances used were passed down over many generations. Traditional drums and drumming accompanied the song and dance, the latter of which was seen as an arduous spiritual test. Some Sun Dances involved a ceremonial piercing of the skin, a further test of bravery and physical endurance. The pain and blood were seen as part of the sacrifice involved in the ceremony, that was used for the benefit of the tribe. Some dances involved going around a pole that the men were attached to by a piece of rawhide pierced through the skin of their chest.

He also learned about the Okipa ceremony of the Mandan people of North Dakota. It was a four-day ceremony performed every year during the summer that retold their creation story. Like the Sun Dance, the Okipa involved dancing inside a lodge filled with their sacred objects, while men prayed, fasted and sought visions. The younger men demonstrated their bravery by being pierced with wooden skewers pushed the skin of their chests, and backs. These men were hung by ropes from beams in the lodge or from trees, while their legs were weighed down from other skewers sent through their thighs and calves. Crying was seen as cowardice. Those who could withstand these intense sensations the best went on to become leaders within the community.

Loomis started hunting out the places where the Sun Dance and Okipa ceremonies had taken place, and went to visit them on his bike. He found they had left behind a psychic residue and that this residue seeped into his own life as he absorbed the energies from the places where the Lakota, Arikira and Sissiton peoples had pierced their flesh, sometimes in rites where they hung from a tree. Loomis got to know some of the trees, as some were still there, holding memory on the living land. This became a tremendous inspiration to the young man.
​
He was so inspired by these discoveries he had to try piercing himself. He even felt like he had done these things before -perhaps in a past life. He claims his first experience of these past lives came to him at age four. His later anthropological studies gave confirmation to his feelings. So he started modifying his body. Loomis did his first permanent body piercing, on his penis, at age fourteen, conducted his first mini Sun Dance ritual and had an out-of-body experience as the result at age seventeen, and his first self-made tattoo at age nineteen. At first it was a private thing, and he kept it private, kept it secret for thirty odd years before he went public. 

While he pursued the inner calling of exploring the outer body his destiny had born him into, he also racked up some impressive skills inside the confines of the culture at large. He worked for the U.S. Army during the Korean War between 1952 and 1954, where he was an Instructor in Demolitions and Explosives. He taught ballroom dancing at Arthur Murray’s. Loomis picked up a B.S.E in electrical engineering from the Northern State University and an M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, the city he’d moved to at age 25. His creative abilities as a writer helped him in his work in executive positions as an ad man in San Francisco. He also operated his own advertising agency in Silicon Valley for a spell.

Yet there was also isolation and shame around the things he was doing in secret, and those came from fear. Fear, that if he let people in his interests and practices, he would be deemed crazy, institutionalized, locked up and the key thrown away. Through his extensive research into other cultures, and long talks with native elders, he had learned that his interest wasn’t something that should be considered a sickness, a perversion or a mutilation of the body, but a practice that could lead into what some traditions called a “state of grace.” Rituals of piercing could be used as a way to access different modes of consciousness.
​
Loomis eventually came out of the closet as piercing freak, a process that started when he met Doug Malloy in 1972, an eccentric millionaire, and ally who proved to be the alloy that bound the disparate elements of the underground piercing scene together and brought them up to the surface.

AN ECCENTRIC ALLOY

Malloy was a man who led a double life. His first life was as Richard Simonton, an aficionado of organ music, steamboats, a family man and a businessman who worked for the Muzak corporation, selling their piped in sounds to corporations in California. The side of him that was Simonton led a fascinating life in his own right, but I don’t have space to get into that aspect of his personality in this context. Simonton tended to keep his fly zipped anyway with regard to his penchant for piercing his penis, except in sympathetic company, or when he wrote about the subject as Doug Malloy. His double life was also exemplified by his bisexuality.

Of his many interests, Malloy had made a study of the New Thought movement, even going so far as to meet Ernest Holmes, author of The Science of Mind, in 1932. His interest in metaphysical and spiritual topics prompted him to traveled extensively in India and the Philippines where he explored Eastern thought-ways. His mind had always been bent towards the unusual and different. Adorning his body with bits of metal poking through the flesh wasn’t so weird. At some point he started getting pierced.

In 1975 Malloy’s fictional autobiography titled Diary of a Piercing Freak came out, released by a publisher who specialized in fetish material. It was later republished in softcover as The Art of Pierced Penises and Decorative Tattoos. Malloy had also started to cultivate a network of like minded individuals. These included Roland Loomis, Jim Ward, Sailor Sid Diller and the Londonite tattooist Alan Oversby, better known by his alias Mr. Sebastian.

Malloy had also organized the Tattoo & Piercing group (T&P) of ten to fourteen people or so who would meet once a month for a “show and tell.” Malloy had seen some photos of the experiments Loomis was doing with his body that dated back to 1944, and invited him to be a part of T&P.  This group expanded the practice of piercing and tattooing as the individuals gathered would later help each-other execute further body modifications.  Together they developed a lexicon around body piercing, what each type of piercings was called, and what the best practices and tools were to do them.
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Jim Ward, the other prong in the trifecta that catapulted the practice of piercing to what it is today in America, was a close friend of Malloy’s and co-founder of the T&P gatherings.

WARDEN OF THE BARBELL

In the course of his long time wandering, Doug Malloy had made a visit to Germany where meet Horst Streckenbach, better known as Tattoo Samy. Samy had been born in 1925 and got his first tattoo at the ripe old age of ten. By 1959 the rubble had stopped bouncing from the second world war and Samy opened a tattoo shop in Aschaffenburg. Later moved he moved it to the bigger burg of Frankfurt in 1964. There, one of Samy’s students was a guy named Manfred “Tattoo” Kohrs. Together they worked on developing some new styles of piercing jewelry, namely, the barbell. In time, Samy started to make trips to America, and on these visit’s he would come to LA to visit Malloy, who in turn introduced him to Ward and others in the T&P circle.

Ward was born in 1941 in Western Oklahoma, moved to Colorado at age elven, and by the time he was 26, was in New York city where he joined a gay S&M biker group, the New York Motorbike Club. That’s where he got on the nipple piercing tip, and started studying how to make jewelry. Ward stated, "The first barbells I recall came from Germany… On one of his [Samy’s] first visits he showed us the barbell studs that he used in some piercings. They were internally threaded, a feature that made so much sense that I immediately set out to recreate them for my own customers."

From his own studies, and from Samy’s innovations, Ward began to put his spin onto the piercing jewelry he was creating, including the fixed bead ring design. Meanwhile Malloy had encouraged Ward to start a business for piercing people and gave him the funds to do so. Ward ran this business at first ran privately, out of his own home starting in 1975. He dubbed his studio the Gauntlet. Malloy drew upon his contacts to help Ward build a clientele. Ward the placed ads for the Gauntlet in underground gay and fetish publications. 
​
His business started to boom. 

BODY MODIFIERS UNITED

Next up on Malloy’s masterplan for modifying the body of the American republic was to host an International Tattoo Convention, in Reno, Nevada. He did this with the help of tattooists Sailor Jerry and Ed Hardy, and invited both Loomis and Ward to participate in the convention and show their piercings to the public. From this fixed point, 1977 on the timeline, piercings began to take off in tandem with tattooing.

Malloy asked Roland Loomis to demonstrate the various practices he had begun to adopt from other cultures, such as laying on a bed of nails or bed of swords for the convention. Malloy didn’t think the name Loomis was memorable, and he encouraged him to change his name for the event so as to receive more publicity. Loomis had revered the 12th century Sufi saint whose name was Fakir Musafar. This saint had also practiced piercing himself as a way to get closer to the divine. Loomis adopted the name for himself and it stuck.

His namesake was a mystic from Meshed, Persia (now Iran) who lived for sixteen years with six daggers embedded in his chest and back. He also had six horseshoes he kept suspended from twelve permanent piercings in his arms and shoulders. He believed, as did the man who took his name, that unseen worlds can be accessed through the body. From the unseen worlds the very source of being can be found. The stories around the original Musafar speak of how he was ridiculed and thought of as strange. He felt his message was going unheard and these rejections caused him to die of heartbreak.

At the convention Loomis “came out” as body piercer and started to go by his adopted name. Fakir Musafar became the mystical and magical pioneer around these practices in modern times laying out a metaphysical and cross-cultural groundwork for body modification. Meanwhile, Jim Ward, bolstered by the success of his private practice, took The Gauntlet public in 1978, and laid the framework for the commercial success of piercing with its first business.

All of this was synergerzied by the networking and business acumen and can-do spirit of Doug Malloy. Together these three exerted a lasting influence on the American body. As Musafar, Ward, and Malloy continued their crusade, they each also contributed further metaphysical, theoretical, and practical material to the growing scene. Malloy wrote the pamphlet Body & Genital Piercing in Brief, which continued the process of getting stories into circulation about the origins of various piercings, especially those relating to private parts. In 1977 Jim Ward started publishing Piercing Fans International Quarterly, which featured contributions from both Malloy and Musafar, as well as the coterie of metal clad pierceniks who had begun coming out of the shadows.
​
Fakir Musafar continued to develop the ritual dimensions around piercing and other more extreme forms of body modification, transforming himself in the process into a contemporary shaman and father of the modern primitive movement. Along the way he racked up some impressive experiences, within the body, and while hanging from hooks, in the planes beyond out of body.