Aki Onda's 'I Lost My Memory'

Aki Onda's Cassette Memories project is being digitally re-released in its three volumes by Lawrence English's Room40 label.  Cassette Memories' first two volumes were released in 2003, with a third appearing in 2012 - all originally on CD.  FACT magazine's recent feature gives an idea of the extent of Onda's ongoing project.  Cassette Memories draws upon his vast collection of dictaphone tape recordings, starting in 1988, documenting his travels around the world.  The best way I can describe Cassette Memories is as the closest thing to being able to listen to the raw data contents of a 'downloaded' human mind, in all its dream-like non-linearities.

Aki Onda's I Lost My Memory

To shed more light on the paradoxically personal yet impersonal project, a booklet has been published by Room40 to coincide with the digital release, to which I supplied an essay entitled 'Tape, Psyche, Montage and Magic: The Cassette Memories of Aki Onda'.  This text examines the numinous qualities of tape (psyphonics are touched upon).  Limited to 200 copies, the publication is entitled I Lost My Memory and contains Aki Onda's photography and an illuminating artist's statement.  The fact that Cassette Memories is a digital release rather emphasises its 'cassetteness': lively non-linear harmonic distortions, signal compression, random noise grain, all present in even the highest grade cassette tape... but these herald deeper psychological implications - parts of a depersonalisation process which is explored further in the booklet.  I Lost My Memory takes its name from an obscure, hitherto anonymous 1932 autobiography of the same name: I Lost My Memory: The Case as the Patient Saw It, published by Faber & Faber.

I Lost My Memory (1932)

The 1932 book is mentioned in my essay where, for the first time, its author's identity is revealed to be agricultural researcher Clement Heigham (1890-1979).  More details can be read in the booklet.  Ascertaining Clement Heigham's authorship was a peculiar process.  I'd written to Faber & Faber's archivist years ago, who unhelpfully refused to share any details or even say whether any documents survived.  I Lost My Memory: The Case as the Patient Saw It appears to be the first full-length first-person English-language account of psychogenic memory fugue, and it became a key title in my research where data repositories are trawled to find identities of anonymous old authors.  I therefore tried to unveil the authorship using only the data provided in the book.  As its author admits in his 1932 foreword: "every book is a public exposure of its author" giving "little peeps" when they least expect or intend it.  These "peeps" are the clues future researchers can use to triangulate the whereabouts of a writer within digital archival datasets, thereby bringing to life submerged and forgotten stories (stories even half-forgotten by their own authors in this case).  Whether the residue of memory resides in written or sonic form, the idea of this residue being tweaked, assailed, jostled or recollated to bring new revelations and an ever-deepening 'theatre of the mind' has some affinity, I think, to what Aki Onda engages in with his tapes.  Onda questions how we process reality, working with (and manipulating) the essence of memory to feed back upon his own compositional procedures.  Cassette tape is his medium for these enquiries.

When I interviewed Aki Onda last year, I forgot to ask what brand of audio cassette he prefers (a trivial question perhaps).  Memorex?  Onda has said that his tapes are like a surrogate memory to him.  The Memorex Corporation's branding similarly hints at data storage products as prostheses to remembering.  There's also a Memorex advert from the early 1980s unintentionally verging on the esoteric: enigmatic statements regarding Memorex's new High Bias tapes foreshadowed the 'hauntological' essences that would later be felt within the obsolete medium decades later: "you'll find that when you record on Memorex an extra dimension emerges.  Now you can capture that elusive quality that turns sound into music and then makes music come alive".  One such "extra dimension" is enterable via Aki Onda's Cassette Memories series.

The artist's book Aki Onda: I Lost My Memory is out now on Room40 and includes download codes for Cassette Memories I, II and III.

Aki Onda has also broadcast on Resonance 104.4FM, presenting his extensive research into Filipino composer José Maceda (1917-2004).  Also available is a two-part interview with Dr. Ed Baxter on Onda's own work, Space Studies.

Thwarted and Unthwarted Histories: Sound archaeology, and a digression on a Neoist curator

This blog has a recurring theme of 'failed histories', i.e., forgotten stories that hang by the tiniest of threads discoverable only by meticulous scrounging.  Last week I gave a talk covering some of these - 'Thwarted Histories of Electronic Music' - at a salon in Copenhagen organised by The Institute for Danish Sound Archaeology / Institut for Dansk Lydarkaeologi as part of the Gong Tomorrow festival.  'Thwarted histories' was chosen as a title instead of 'failed histories' to provide increased melodrama; 'thwarted' suggests an antagonist...  some sort of external force that acts to condemn things to obscurity.  Maybe this force is traditionalism?  Or prejudice?  Or apathy?

Whatever the thwarting agency may be, the Institut for Dansk Lydarkaeologi (aka IDL) situate themselves in opposition to it.  IDL are dedicated to reviving the legacies of early sonic experimenters whose activities have been neglected (they'll be presenting their researches at Cafe Oto on the 28th November).  IDL's Copenhagen salon was held at the uppermost floor of Huset-KBH, a large old venue with the forthrightly-named 'Bastard Cafe' on the ground floor - the entire place exudes a cyberpunky warmth, or 'hygge'.  Tantalising Danish-language talks included composer Carl Bergstrøm-Nielsen on his work with the Gruppen for Alternativ Musik, singer-songwriter Marie Eline Hansen performing fully-conceived reconstructions of obscure pieces originally by Lene Adler Petersen and Henning Christiansen.  Also, IDL's Jonas Olesen presented his intensive researches into acoustical engineer/therapist Christian A. Volf's electronic sound activities stretching back to the 1930s.  Chatting afterwards, Olesen described his excavations into uncharted archaeological strata - it reminded me that the most tenacious historians are often the ones working independently of academia.  Other IDL members Rasmus, Magnus, and Mikkel spoke on the current culture of reissuing rare, out-of-print material (IDL are also a label).

IDL also diffused the 1978 four-channel Bent Lorentzen work Visions (IDL are about to reissue his electronic works).  Bent Lorentzen is a Danish composer who would perhaps be better-known to the English-speaking musical world if only his promised book 'The New Music Theory' had appeared.  Until this salon, my only knowledge of Bent Lorentzen was of this unobtainable unicorn.  Lorentzen's nonexistent 'New Music Theory' is cited by British electronic composer Daphne Oram in her idiosyncratic 1972 work 'An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics' as dealing with "acoustics, electronics and the psychology of music" and, according to Oram, will "soon appear in English" published by J. & W. Chester Ltd.  Lorentzen's publication seems to have been 'thwarted' for unclear reasons.

Two other English-language talks at the IDL salon were illuminating regarding the dynamics of research/sound-archaeology and information dissemination: Felix Kubin gave a poignant, entertaining presentation on the perverseness of the cassette medium and Germany's cassette culture, developed under the spectre of cold war nuclear annihilation (as also detailed in Kubin's Chromdioxidgedächtnis CD+tape artefact on Gagarin Records), and earlier in the evening, following on from IDL's discussion on reissue culture, sound archivist Andrea Zarza Canova was interviewed by IDL's Jan Høgh Stricker about her Mana Records label she co-founded in 2017 (releasing both old and new works: Benedict Drew's abstract electronic protest music Crawling Through Tory Slime is a modern favourite).

Andrea Zarza Canova's descriptions of her early navigations in experimental music were refreshingly evocative.  She explained that several years ago, she'd regularly visit the online repository for avant-garde music, UbuWeb, where one user named 'Continuo' showcased offbeat and rare materials that resonated with her interests.  Over time, Zarza Canova struck up a correspondence with this uploader, who turned out to be a French collector, which led to the first Mana Records release: a reissue of Pierre Mariétan's rare 1987 urban soundscape composition Rose des vents.  The French collector assisted in establishing contact with the original composer, and so a vanished artefact was able to re-materialise as an artefact once again.

Collectors and archivists provide lifelines to imperilled musics on the brink of oblivion.  Zarza Canova's story gave me flashbacks of my pre-YouTube mp3-trading adventures in online IRC chatrooms, or file-sharing service Napster in the mid-2000s... and negotiating with certain users in possession of untold rarities.  This was a rite of passage for a certain generation.  I had often wondered who these esteemed users were - what were their stories?  How did they obtain these rare recordings?  I had the impression that they must've been associated with the artists, or possibly were the artists themselves.  They were loath to chat.  I remember one whose upload speed was only ~10kB per minute: a cause for much distress, since the user had the apparent entirety of cassette releases from It's War Boys - post-punk label I coveted.  "Patience" he urged me.

This blogpost is getting nostalgic.  To counteract this, I should present a present-day wonder: a digression on a collector/uploader operating today...  There is a YouTube user who curates one of the most extraordinary experimental audio collections available online: 'celestialrailroad', who began uploading in 2012.  Much of this channel's content makes the It's War Boys label look like Parlophone.  In 2017, celestialrailroad was almost derailed by the Arts Council-funded Lux organisation making heavy-handed copyright strikes against the channel, temporarily disabling all its content.  I intuited that after this near-calamity celestialrailroad reached even deeper underground towards more wayward things still.  The channel's breadth is extensive - there are It's War Boys relics of course, along with big name experimentalists such as Walter Marchetti, Bob Cobbing, Ian Breakwell, etc., but there are gobsmacking obscurities too; one-off slices of life such as found audio cassette journals, or recordings of aeroplane shows.  Whoever is behind celestialrailroad has a finely-tuned sense of what's what...  A sense of the 'pre-internet perverse' - a sort of authentic, jolting waywardness: off-grid activities somewhere between the definition of 'art' and 'a cause for concern', like something coming through your letterbox in the dead of night wrapped in tinfoil.  Sumptuous grit... (if this makes any sense).

As with the online IRC and Napster archivists of yore, I began to wonder about the character behind the collection.  In February 2018 celestialrailroad uploaded one of the taped phone calls of Captain Maurice Seddon (Royal Signals, retired) from The Seddon Tapes Volume I (on Paradigm Discs).  I'd worked on the audio segues on this LP with William English, the custodian of the Seddon archives (Seddon was the inventor of heated clothing).  English and I vaguely theorised that the head of Paradigm Discs, Clive Graham, could be celestialrailroad.  After talking to Graham at The Wire magazine's Xmas party in 2018, he denied this, but the plot thickened: he too was curious about the channel's mastermind and had been able to discover that it was run by somebody called Wirb Neug, who also had another YouTube channel of the same name, and a Facebook page.

This new information simply raised more questions.  Wirb Neug's Facebook revealed interests in spoken word and rare poetry ephemera, particularly Bob Cobbing's Writers Forum and its milieu, and also the work of provocative playwright Edward Bond.  Among this were status updates on things such as smells emitted by co-workers, photos of a clothes hanger, a re-posting of an old memory about being woken by the sound of a neighbour vomiting.  It was all fascinating.  Many references went over my head.  Further investigations seemed futile - Wirb Neug/celestialrailroad seems to be ensconced in the traditions of Neoism: exactnesses evaporate.  Mirages abound.  Poetry is everywhere.  The following oblique bundle of facts may illustrate the potential complexity: The Celestial Railroad is a modernist piano piece by Charles Ives, based on a short work of fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, which is itself presented as a dream, which constitutes a parody of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, which is, in turn, an allegory.  The channel takes its name from this.

I had pondered whether celestialrailroad could be more than one person, especially as there's one exchange on Wirb Neug's Instagram where a user assuming Wirb to be the creator of a post's content (a Graf Haufen/Karsten Rodemann nugget) receives a reply where Wirb claims to be "a young Croatian woman" living in Berlin.  This is plausible.  But one day, in May 2019, a live video was uploaded (quite uncharacteristic of celestialrailroad)...  It was a Cafe Oto gig with Akio Suzuki, Aki Onda and David Toop, where I just happened to be present.  I remember noticing the person filming, sitting directly opposite me at the other end of the room - and it was neither Graf Haufen nor a young woman, but a youngish man with glasses, probably in his 30s, which jarred with my imagined vision of celestialrailroad as being of an older generation (I believe there are generational boundaries inhibiting acquisition of certain rare materials for specific age-groups - this is observable somewhat in the antiquarian book world, but I digress).  Was this Wirb Neug?  The obsession was nearing an answer...

My Oscillatorial Binnage bandmate Toby Clarkson was in attendance at that Oto gig too, seated beside me.  I asked him to scrutinise all the photos he'd taken that evening, but alas, as an experimental photographer, his leftfield sensibilities compelled him to document only the floor of the venue.  The best photo he obtained merely shows Akio Suzuki's legs as he reaches into his box of soundmaking tools.  The photo is a few hundred pixels shy of capturing celestialrailroad's shoes at the upper right-hand corner.  See below:

Additional contemplation at this time leads to the conclusion that further evidence remains unknown and may remain so.

Appreciate the sonic rescuings of celestialrailroad and Wirb Neug on YouTube.

Tapedropping - Cassette Culture, Mediadropping Musings and the Decline of Audio Pamphleteering

Tapedropping: For Thee...

It is frustrating to find that audio cassettes are now obsolete.  I say this not out of nostalgia, but because cassettes were the ideal medium for mediadropping (that is, anonymously leaving homemade music in random places).  Indeed, prior to the manifest decline of the cassette in around 2004, I referred to mediadropping as tapedropping.  The neologism mediadropping came later.

Available here is a paper entitled Mediadropping Musings detailing the practice and philosophy of mediadropping / tapedropping.  The essay formed part of a larger collection which were often dropped likewise in acts of pamphlet-dropping.  This particular text is reproduced here with all its original faults, but remains a useful document for any effusionist.

The majority of people no longer own equipment to play cassettes.  This practice of mediadropping is now almost completely thwarted by lack of suitable media.  CD-dropping was experimented with, but CDs can also carry data.  I have conducted wide-ranging dropping experiments using both CDs and tapes bearing email addresses in order to harvest responses.  CD-droppings have low response rates.  There is perhaps a sense that CDs can carry computer viruses or even just potentially *too graphic* multimedia experiences.  This makes people loath to pick up a rogue CD-R, even if enticing cover art is provided.  Cassettes, in contrast, are obviously meant for audio - tapes are mysterious Pandora's boxes which rouse curiosity concerning their content.

Tapedropping: Bad Trad

In recent years, tapes have become 'cool' again for their retro appeal in niche circles.  These people who maintain the tape mantle are, however, too knowing to be targeted as tapedropping recipients.   The ideal audience for tapedroppings are just ever-so-slightly leftfield of the middle-of-the-road, but generally uncaring shits - the very people who have now migrated from tape to the latest invisible mp3 zapping technology.  It is a shame.

My own early tapedroppings were anything but 'cool'.  They were rabid affairs characterised by an element of 'trolling' (before the word came to represent foul cyber-desecrations of basic human decency).  Early tapedroppings were directed at aggressors, muse-stiflers, intimidatingly dull bastards, etc.  Often, the tapes smacked of puritanical fanaticism and stoic exhortation against the utterly arrogant sexual mores of tacky, brutish schoolboys.

Tapedropping 'music' is rather like a personal individualistic manifestation of what used to be called "rough music" (see E. P. Thompson's chapter in Customs in Common for an excellent overview).  'Rough music' involved a "rude cacophony" produced by sections of the community to mock or wind up certain persons who had transgressed community norms.  Tapedropping is rather rough music's reversal, in that it is generally directed back at the community norms.

Rough Music in Warwickshire, 1909

During schooldays I was keen on the concept of thought-vengeance.  A perceived injustice should always be repaid by an anonymously deposited cassette containing specially tailored semi-musical, sonically-distorted composition-rants, all creatively fuelled by the bitterly energising gall-whisk of futility.  Often, these 'injustices' didn't even involve me - for instance, when a quiet boy was kicked downstairs by fourth-formers known to me, I would enact a tapedropping vengeance on the victim's behalf.  An agitating listening experience would be dispensed, timed in such a manner that it wouldn’t be attributed to myself.

Regrettably, many of the early cassettes were unique - no other copies existed other than the master copies deposited for their intended recipients.  I recall most of the audio-pieces were noisy affairs (turning the air many shades of blue - on tape) intended not only for bully-types, but also those unwittingly cruel ‘casual-bullies’ whose demotivating throwaway remarks were more potent than sustained targeting due to their ‘coolness’.  Cassettes were left in their desk drawers, lockers and in their shoes during gym lessons, among other places.  To effectively irk the deserving targets, it was necessary to give the impression that the cassette originated from somebody much older.  An intricately constructed soundscape was also needed to give the impression that considerable effort had been expended on the article.  Overt obnoxiousness was withheld, pitches were lowered and efforts were made at robust articulation.  Even more effective was the inclusion of the target’s own voice (distorted and made ridiculous through processing) which I might surreptitiously capture on a portable dictaphone during breaktimes and lessons.  On one occasion I gained access to the French teacher’s cupboard where she stored tape recordings of every pupil’s spoken assignments - all the pupils’ names alphabetically arranged.  This was fantastic sonic material.  Later, I would obtain information to weave into lyrical matter by creepily browsing records in the school office (obtaining information such as home addresses and parents’ professions) and phoning the parents from phone-boxes to extract information or to record their voices for later processing.

Special instruments were built from soft drink cans, bits of wheelbarrow and the cord found in the waistbands of elasticated trousers. The more confusing sounds produced, the better.

I noticed that these tapedroppings could bring about changes of behaviour in their targets.  Beholders of rogue cassettes loudly voiced their concerns over the following days, playing detective to fathom the origins and purpose of the strange anti-gift.  Answers were never forthcoming, but gossip and false information were: “Mr. Foulsham made that cassette because he hates your mum”, etc.  Generally, a few weeks after receiving the cassette, the recipient became softer and less liable to abuse quieter people - a good thing.  The effects weren’t so lasting on dyed-in-the-wool bullies, but certainly the ‘casual-bullies’ became more pleasant.

 

Countless tapes were deployed, but I tried to avoid targeting the same person twice or thrice.  My philosophy was that you only get one chance at this kind of operation, so it had better be a good one!  If a recipient were to receive a second tape, he would be more mentally prepared and its potency would be lost.

At some stage it became apparent that certain combinations of sounds, voice information, treatments and ‘instrumentation’ were more effective at affecting a target than others.  Catchiness of chant or melody was certainly potent.  Without referring back to a master tape, it was impossible to judge what compositions were the most successful.  Until this point, I had been recording directly to cassette using my parents’ hi-fi and dubbing extra tracks by using the second tape deck.  At a car boot sale around 1998, I obtained a four-track, so I began constructing ‘stock’ backing tracks, leaving space for different voice dubbings each time to be tailored for the specific target.  The four-track machine enabled the re-use of certain flights of sound combinations and the retaining of copies.

With age comes maturity, and with maturity comes the unlikelihood of honest puerility. This makes these targeted ‘mediadroppings’ even more discordant, thus memorable, for the recipient.  Aged eighteen, whilst most of my fellows were desperately trying to cultivate some kind of misguided competitive strut, I thought it to be the perfect time to puncture their fledgling pseudo-poise with tapes of ever-sophisticating dispensation.  Tissue-box zithers were strung with extra strings.  There were persons whom I had not yet repaid for past aggressions upon me, some stretching back years.  At this time, CD-Rs were becoming popular, so the sonics took on a digital slant.  With CD-Rs there is the aforementioned problem that the media itself can be mistaken for computer data, thus requiring a printed sleeve to indicate that it is indeed a ‘harmless’ audio CD.  Some printed sleeves featured voyeuristic grainy digital photographs I had taken of the targets from some distance.  These personalised sleeves created such a furore (with incredible near-tearfulness) throughout the sixth form common room that I desisted from this particular graphic quirk, as it seemed to detract from the audio content which should be the focus.

At college, a more altruistic route was taken with the tapedroppings.  I reverted back to cassette and randomly made tapedroppings on a near-industrial scale all around public places.  I mainly strove to create an interesting listening experience for random people who happened to stumble across the tapes.  Encouragement was also given in the supplementary sleeves for the random recipient to create his/her own sonic deployments.  I wanted to hear what other people were sonically capable of when all obligations to follow musical trends were discarded.  Crucially, an email address was provided on the tapes.  Email allowed for recipient feedback, and many responses were harvested this way.  With catalogue numbers on each cassette, the recipient could be asked to cite the number, and thus the actual material would be identified and subsequently honed further and further toward the most reaction-eliciting sonics.

The document Mediadropping Musings highlights the various shades of severity in tapedropping sentiment.  I have divided these into three categories: Subdued, Burlesque and Wayward.  The dangers of 'wayward' mediadroppings are also detailed therein.  Without the surreal, artistic, fantastical, incoherent and abstract elements, mediadropping can be hijacked by the aforementioned "dull bastards" who may use anonymity to extend their bullydom and make comically sick provocations to strangers.  This is what we see happening online with the 'unacceptable' face of 'trolling'.  It is vital, therefore, that the mechanics of mediadropping are understood in order to "troll the troll" in attempts to restore equilibrium where possible.  In the digital age, it is, sadly, difficult to coerce people to play unsolicited audio from an unknown web source.   Here's hoping a new physical audio format suited to mediadropping may emerge in the future!