Joris Van de Moortel's 'A Dubious Pilgrimage', The Wire magazine as a raw material, and a Victorian chemist

Joris Van de Moortel is a Belgian artist whose work is defined by deconstructing the definitions of music and musical instruments.  This deconstruction frequently involves literal wreckage - electric guitars and amps receive special attention.  In the hands of Van de Moortel, these despoliations not mere acts of gratuitousness, a la The Who, Hendrix, et al, but they are ritualised processes to create something afresh from the chaotic debris.  He once stated that after an event, he'd sometimes "bulldoze over the work to then recycle the rubble into new works" - the name Van de Moortel, incidentally, translates as 'cement'.  Whether bulldozers are available or not, physical and conceptual chunks of aggregate from old works often appear in the mortar and masonry of new installations, montage-like.  With his love of sonic frenzy, he was drawn to a recent issue of The Wire magazine themed around musical excess to which I'd contributed a short history of explosives in music.  Van de Moortel made contact with me in August 2019, and engaged me to write a special essay for him, which is now published: "Van de Moortel's Goception in the Mess: Byways in the History of Noise's Ongoing Transmutation into Music" appears in his new artists book 'A Dubious Pilgrimage', published by Hopper and Fuchs in association with Galerie Nathalie Obadia.  More on that shortly (particularly the word 'goception' - which is a made-up word)...

Close-up detail
Joris Van de Moortel's 'Bomb Culture' (2019)

Interestingly, The Wire - a monthly experimental music-focused magazine - is utilised by Van de Moortel as "a note-gathering source, which also becomes a personal jotting pad to pool ideas together".  The Wire's issue #427 on 'excess' inspired Van de Moortel to produce a series of works based on its various essays.  With a nod to the seven sacraments in Catholicism, seven essays were selected from the issue (including my piece, 'Bomb Culture', Tim Rutherford-Johnson's 'High Emission Zone', Alexander Hawkins' 'Written in the Stars', Simon Reynolds' 'Flash of the Axe', Spenser Thomson's 'Crude Awakenings', Greg Tate's 'Clones of Dr. Funkenstein', and David Toop's 'The Sweet Science'), and large scale mixed-media artworks were produced, retaining the essays' original titles.  Closer inspection of these pieces reveals small distressed snippets from the Wire texts pasted within!  Writers, especially in music journalism, seldom consider what their copy might ultimately catalyse when in print form. This thought-provoking transformation of the magazine's texts made me wonder about any precedents where The Wire might've been creatively reworked and personalised in a similar way... Do you know of any, reader?  Rare as it seems, there's one other instance I'm aware of...

Collage featuring The Wire text from Allen Fisher's 'SPUTTOR' (2014)

In 2014, the poet Allen Fisher published an art-poetry book titled 'SPUTTOR', containing pasted-in and cut-up texts.  It began as a modified copy of a 1986 book called 'Space Shuttle Story' (all letters other than SP-UTT-OR excised from the cover) by Andrew Wilson (no relation to me).  Allen Fisher had included some lines from my Wire magazine feature on Daphne Oram - 'The Woman from New Atlantis' - from the August 2011 issue.  It's fascinating to find two texts I've supplied for the same magazine ending up as raw material in distinctly different works: Van de Moortel's and Fisher's.  I don't actually write for The Wire very often, so maybe The Wire is funnelled into artwork more often than we might expect?  This also summoned thoughts on whether this is indicative of a specific sensibility that The Wire attracts or fosters.

I've also cut-up a Wire issue or two.  Back in 2001 I was anonymously leaving cassettes of homemade, challenging music in public for random people to find.  MC Schmidt from the duo Matmos was interviewed in The Wire's April 2001 issue, and I'd cut out a quote that'd taken my juvenile mind's fancy: "We couldn't have been more pleased than to have gotten a job making music for gay fisting videos and then talking about it".  I cut out this memorable quote for a palimpsest of juxtaposed matter, photocopied for the cassette's paper sleeve.  In more recent years, the cassette diarist and improviser Adam Bohman sent me one of his personalised diary tapes bearing a collaged cover, and although he'd used a Biro-overlaid baked bean tin label(?) on that occasion, it wouldn't surprise me if Bohman used The Wire as collage material too.  I vaguely remember Bohman's Secluded Bronte bandmate, Richard Thomas (who now contributes to the magazine, on-off) once had some unidentified origami folded from Wire pages prettifying his desk at Resonance FM's old Denmark Street HQ... but it was difficult to tell whether it was a significant objet d'art or not - those were messier times.  I also suspect musical anarchist Xentos 'Fray' Bentos aka Jim Whelton has done something queasily irreverent with The Wire at some point (an artist fond of dressing up as Kaffe Matthews to confusing effect).

J. Carrington Sellars' 'Chemistianity' (1873)

To bring this digression to a close, I should return to the made-up word 'goception'.  The word is a clumsy hybrid of the old English "go" and the Latin 'praecipio' ('to command') and signifies a form of chemical reaction, much like the moment when, say, Van de Moortel scrutinises, annotates and cuts-up a physical copy of The Wire - something is catalysed - something is 'gocepted'.  Goception is a word used by an eccentric chemist named John Carrington Sellars in 1873.  Sellars invented it because he was apparently desperate to achieve poetic flow in his oratorial poem 'Chemistianity' published that year.  I found the obscure book in 2013 during my (ongoing) research into electro-musical performer Johann Baptist Schalkenbach, whom Sellars mentions in a key passage on chemistry's role in producing new sounds.  In 'A Dubious Pilgrimage', I examine Sellars' ideas in relation to Joris Van de Moortel's work at the boundary of music and noise, since Sellars, I believe, thoughtfully illustrates the music/noise relationship long before musical modernism.  This is even hinted at too in Sellars' poetic technique: in the preface, Sellars revealed that after contacting a language professor to enquire about the rules of verse, he received the reply: "it is more a matter of ear than of law", and thus Sellars wrote his verses "from sound", with "lines measured according to sound", leading to new words like "goception", and so utterances once dismissible as noise thereby become formalised (in theory).  More on this can be read in the new publication...  To give one final nugget of curiosity, Sellars was best-known at the time for his Patent Cement, synchronicitously tallying up with Van de Moortel's cementitious namesake.

"Van de Moortel's Goception in the Mess: Byways in the History of Noise's Ongoing Transmutation into Music", appears as a chapter in his new fully-illustrated artist's book 'A Dubious Pilgrimage', published by Hopper and Fuchs / Galerie Nathalie Obadia.

Excess all Areas - Explosives in Music (The Wire #427)

September's The Wire magazine is packed with essays on audio excess.  The issue is the thematic inverse of last year's Minimalism special (to which I contributed a short text on silence broadcast over the radio).  The opposite noisy extreme is explored this month, where I supply a piece looking at the history of explosives in music - titled 'Bomb Culture' - among many other eye/ear-opening contemplations on overwhelmingness.

This explosives+music history is compressed to bursting-point onto a single page.  One enjoyable example that didn't make the cut (deemed more fire-based than explosive-based) was Michel Moglia's 'L'Orgue a Feu'.  A whole book could be written on the subject...  Aside from everything mentioned in The Wire text, there were of course unintentional explosions in musical contexts too: dangerous blasts from mishandled limelight in Victorian music-halls, exploding magic lantern projectors, etc.  Also, of particular relevance to this Miraculous Agitations blog (where post-electronic soundmaking is the order of the day) are early 20th century pre-electronic endeavours to harness the power of explosive potential as an amplifying agent; pneumatic amplifier technologies (such as compressed air gramophones) powered by compressed air cylinders.

Very fleetingly, the rise of outdoor military quadrille bands in the mid-19th century is cited in The Wire piece (exploring the reasons for such bands' popularity at this time is another story).  It may appear that this aesthetic dogged all explosive+music alliances, most visibly in 1980s industrial music's camo-sporting, goose-stepping, theatrical edgelording (where explosives were often detonated indoors).  All this twitchy militarism may give the misleading impression that musical explosivity is an unhinged, particularly masculine quirk, but assumptions are always crying out to be unpicked...  Readers are advised to seek The Wire #427 to learn more...

Suffice to say, regular visitors to this blog know that I regularly excavate pre-electronic electro-musical culture.  Many of the late 19th century 'electrical music' performers happened to be fond of detonating small bombs via their electrical instruments - the effect was epitomised by Dot D'Alcorn's and Maud Irving's variety acts.  The bulk of my research on this, drawn from archives of rare materials, was self-published as 'The Magnetic Music of the Spiritual World' (bankrupting me in the process).  That 2015 paperback was intended as a sort of draft to hawk around publishers, and I had hoped - and still hope - that a publisher will take the opportunity engage me to get my original researches on their roster.  I trust it's not excessively vulgar to remind prospective publishers of this work, which is busting for wider aeration... otherwise I may explode from the pressure.

Read more in this month's The Wire #427 - 'Excess All Areas'

Dead Air (The Wire #414)

The Wire #414 - a Minimalism special - contains my short history of broadcast radio silence (precursors to John Cage's unrealised 1948 plan to broadcast silence over the Muzak cable network).  The piece does, however, contain an editorial distortion! Hopefully I can provide an errata here.

It's frustrating when meaning is lost during editorial trimming down of writing, but a paid outlet for new research (even if slightly maimed by editors) is preferable to the unpaid academic journals who often disparage submissions from non-institutional researchers like me.... so... mustn't grumble too much.

The BBC's ticking clock, c.1930.
For silent moments in programmes.

I'd written about the 'ghost in galoshes' - the nickname given to the BBC's ticking clock sound that reassured 1930s listeners during silent moments within radio programmes.  15-minutes of this ticking was broadcast in October 1932 when the script for J. B. Priestley's talk To a Highbrow was mislaid.  I'd originally written that this 'dead air' was rebroadcast via a transatlantic line to the US CBS network at a reported cost of £2-per-minute.  However, in the editing (without my knowledge), this crucial detail about the transatlantic relay was removed, leading readers to assume that merely broadcasting silence itself cost £2-per-minute (roughly £100-per-minute today).

Despite this failing, the piece may have interest for anyone curious about the origin of the radio term 'dead air'.  Modern glossaries date it to the 1940s, but my research indicates it originates in late-1920s New York radio circles.  One of its earliest appearances is in a rare little dictionary of radio slang printed in early 1931, compiled by New York-based CBS engineer Irving Reis: the entry reads "Dead Air - Absence of broadcasting" alongside "Dead Mike" (an unconnected microphone).  Technological progress has rendered most other featured terms obsolete: 'Soup' (current fed to the aerial), 'Woof' (signal to start a programme), or 'Motorboating' (a distinctive sound produced when powered microphones had insufficient volume) are all unfamiliar now.

'Dead air' also appears in a transcript of spoken testimony dated November 1st 1929 during an appeal by the imperilled station WMAK against the Federal Radio Commission, who were insistent that stations in New York's overcrowded ether use their wavelength to full capacity.  Here, newspaper reporter and employee of the station WGR for Buffalo, New York - William G. Cook - used the term at least twice weighing up instances of radio silence.  As the Wire piece states, the negative term originated in America where airtime was precious, yet broadcast silence was more valued in other countries (notably the UK and Japan).  The BBC's director-general John Reith stated in January 1930: "We need silence badly, and consciously or unconsciously long for it"...

William G. Cook (left) and Irving Reis (right) - responsible for early appearances of the term 'dead air' in print.

Read more in this month's The Wire #414 for more - 'When Less Is More'

The Wire #409 - Psyphonics: Further Listening

Coined by soundscape theorists Stuart Gage and Bernie Krause, the terms biophony, geophony and anthrophony have come to represent the complete range of sound-types audible within natural recordings (referring to biological sounds, geological sounds, and human/machine sounds).  March's eclectic issue of The Wire (#409) features my piece on psyphony - an impish addition to this trio.

Gage and Krause's terminological trinity isn't a totally inviolable gamut.  The definitions can be chipped away to some pedantic extent, e.g., where do those rare sounds that penetrate earth's atmosphere from outer space fit into this?  Appropriate terms might be 'cosmophony'(?) or 'astrophony'(?).  But I digress slightly...  The Wire's article - appropriately titled 'Further Listening' - goes far beyond this into more wayward territories, introducing psyphony as a capturing of hypothetical intangible essences of thought and idea within sound.  (Readers of this blog may be reminded of the previous blogposts on Delawarr Laboratories' "thought-to-sound" experiments).

Without giving away too much of the piece (which is a fun 'thought piece' whilst also containing fresh research-nuggets such as the BBC's radio telepathy experiments and J. Tyssul Davis' odd never-before-discussed 1928 publication The Sound of Your Face), it will suffice to say that the term psyphony can be applied to audio pieces that challenge or call into question the extent of any hearing person's sonic perception.  However spurious psyphony may appear, its concept can be discerned within today's experimental music and radio art, from occult/quasi-occult sound practices (for example - Silent Records' compilation Tulpamancers: A Collection of Sonic Thoughtforms) to the more procedural technologically-geared sonifications and data mappings (as with Masaki Batoh's Brain Pulse Music).  It spans various genres.  The concept of psyphonics came into focus whilst contemplating Viewfound's EP Memorate, a dense ambient EP aiming to capture memory essences.  The concept was also tentatively trotted out to describe the fascinating sound-work of Aki Onda.

Silent Records' compilation Tulpamancers / Shimmering Moods releases: Memorate by Viewfound / Resonant Moments by Andrew Tasselmyer

Some may view psyphony as indicative of a recoil from modernity's technological materialism.  To those who may decry its 'woolliness', they should bear in mind that similar ideas can be found in plain sight in the most sedate framings...  When I first visited The Wire magazine's office some years ago - back when they were situated on the upper floor of a building near Spitalfields Market - interesting music was being played.  I asked what the piece of music was.  I can't remember the answer to this, but more memorable was the casual remark that every month, any music played in the office gets listed in The Wire's special 'Office Ambience' tracklist.  As a little metaphysical aside, it was quipped that the music heard in the office might be somehow ingrained - as a quantum essence - within that month's issue.  It was said in jest... but as George Orwell once commented: "every joke is a tiny revolution"....

The full particulars on 'psyphonics' can be read in The Wire #409, March 2018 - out now.

The Wire issue 344: Unofficial Channels: 'Acoustic Synthesis' and Post-Electronic Sound

The 'Unofficial Channels' column of this month's Wire magazine (#344) hosts a very short piece I've written on Acoustic Synthesis, giving a short overview on experimental manoeuvrings in the largely undefined sphere of post-electronic music.

As described elsewhere, 'post-electronic music' is a term I use to refer to the application of classical electronic music technique to acoustic systems, usually involving electro-mechanical parts and mechanical gears.

The sub-harmonic demonstrations of music theorist José A. Sotorrio are mentioned in the column.  Sotorrio's introduction to the undertone series can be viewed here on Youtube.  A sounding tuning fork held against a movable obstruction (such as paper) produces different notes of the undertone series (seen at 1:00 in the video).  The ease at which the undertones can be elicited in physical vibrating systems provides glimpses of a sonic netherworld quite distinct from musical traditions derived from the overtone series.

Acoustic synthesis (as I practice it, at least) is principally concerned with enhancing the exactness with which mechanical controls act upon vibrating assemblies.  For instance, an electromagnetically sustained tuning fork may be gradually brought into contact with the paper by a vernier gear with a very high reduction ratio - this would allow undertones to be slowly scanned through discretely and selected.  These kinds of colliding interactions are an integral part of tone production.

The usage of adjustable prong-umbrellas to build up subharmonics (note the usage of a reverberant grille-pile)

The rich effect of subharmonics / undertones can be heard at the end of this short unfinished study on a small apparatus.   The growling occurs due to a vibrating prong colliding with a Rice Krispies box, periodically repelling it, before making contact again.  A swinging microphone adds a timbre shifting effect.


One may well wonder about the origins of post-electronic music.  I had often wondered if an 'acoustic equivalent' of a synthesiser was theorised during the electronic music heyday of the 1970s, or even earlier.  It seems that this was indeed almost touched upon by Terence Dwyer in his 1975 school course Making Electronic Music (Book 2 - Advanced).  The work of Terence Dwyer (now in his 90s) has received fresh attention recently thanks to Ian Helliwell's captivating article in last month's The Wire (#343).

It is interesting to find Terence Dwyer suggesting the acoustic mimicry of electronic sounds in a volume of his Making Electronic Music textbook.  The textbooks serve as an introduction to the rudiments of electronic music for school students, but are practically concerned with tape splicing and tape effects.  Curiously, Book 2 contains a small section titled 'Imitating Electronic Sounds' - wonderful wispings towards a post-electronic modus operandi!  Acoustic equivalents are given: electronic waveforms and their acoustic substitutes:

Sine wave (pure, no harmonics) - Recorder, Tuning Fork, Whistling, Rubbed Wine Glass

Sawtooth (ramp) wave (all harmonics) - Kazoo, Comb and Paper

Squarewave (odd numbered harmonics) - Clarinet

White noise (random superimposition of all frequencies) - Vocal hissing by several people

Filtered noise (narrow bands of random frequencies) - One person making various hissings such as Ss, Sh, Ch, F, V, Z, Zh, Kh, Hh

The Wire - August 2011 - Daphne Oram

To mark the exhibition of the Oramics machine at The Science Museum, this month's The Wire contains an article I wrote on the little-known esoteric interests of Daphne Oram.  This represents, it seems, the most extensive examination of this aspect of Oram's work in print at present.  Daphne Oram was a true pioneer in experimental and electronic music - she is known principally for her establishing of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and her subsequent development of Oramics (a technique of crafting electronic music by hand-drawn notation).


What is not generally known is that Oramics refers not solely to the drawn sound technique, but also to a wider philosophy of sound - a holistic approach to studying all vibrational phenomena and their relationship to human life.  Part of the reason for the obscurity of this phase of Oramics may be in part due to the general scarcity of the only book she published - her groundbreaking 'An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics' (1972).


'An Individual Note ...' presents not only a breathtakingly fresh perspective on electronic music, but also asks "fascinating questions relating to the working of the human mind and the present and future roles for the individual and for society".  It studies the human aspects of electronic music.  Of particular relevance today is the analogy Oram gives involving "mismatched impedance" (relating to audio devices improperly connected).  For a healthful functioning society, people must find matched impedances, e.g. university graduates should secure an employment where their energies are put to use comfortably.  If a highly qualified or energetic individual finds himself/herself psychologically constrained, working in a fish and chip shop, a form of potentially damaging distortion ensues.  I would personally go further and say that if no matched impedance is provided, i.e. unemployment upon graduation, it is utterly destructive in many ways - one's activity is bounded by hard constraints (waveform clipping!) and these ricochets against the constraints produce agonising harmonics.  Incidentally, the writer known for studies into the unknown, Colin Wilson, has highlighted a link between artistic frustration and criminality... But I digress...

In the early 1980s Daphne was preparing another book, this time on ancient acoustics - a field of study known today as archaeoacoustics (the most notable recent study being 'Archaeoacoustics' published by McDonald Institute in 2006).  If her manuscript, 'The Sound of the Past', had been expanded and published in book form, it would have marked yet another pioneering achievement.  Sadly, lack of matched impedances prevented this being realised.  However, this short unfinished text will soon be available on the Daphne Oram website.

In 'An Individual Note', Oram places emphasis on the joy of musing - "on sniffing the air" and "catching scents".  She says, "if the scents lead me sometimes 'up the garden path', I still enormously enjoy catching them".  In time, science may go some way to verify some of Oram's more radical speculations (particularly those in her unpublished notes).  For instance, the behaviour of the human organism in response to geomagnetic wave phenomena is taken more seriously now than in previous decades.  These zones of thought on the periphery between knowledge and mystery are also where profoundly fascinating insights take place, with accompanying inspirations.  And such inspiration is, after all, fine fuel for artistic creative endeavours.

Acupuncture, astrology, ancient resonances of Egypt's Great Pyramid and Britain's dolmens and barrows, John Erskine Malcolm's curious theory of systemic arterial resonance.... Read about all this (and more) in this month's The Wire, issue 330... because it's extremely difficult to condense all this into a single blog post.