I Found a... Scale

Back in September 2018 I posted the "I Found a... Pipe" blogpost - an attempt to initiate a series of found object accounts; exploring the dynamics of curiosity, the chance encounters, the chains of association, the pratfalls and prat-uplifts that may accompany such discoveries.  One of the persistent themes of this blog is the idea that electronic-equivalents of soundmaking processes can be found for free in the physical world - an ideal driven by poverty and its resultant anti-capitalism, and accompanying scepticism towards commercial electronic hardware flavours-of-the-months.  Whereas the pipe of 2018 had limited soundmaking value, this new blogpost examines the musical scales obtainable from multi-holed hollow flints, found during pandemic walkabouts.

The current situation places bin-diving off-limits, so instead, I've been traipsing around fields.  The flint-rich geology of the locale boasts rocks with hollow cavities - channels left by decayed ancient sea sponges.  These hollow flints are difficult to spot, as their holes are usually clogged with mud.  After some cleaning with water and bell-wire, the cavities can be cleared, creating almost ocarina-like 'instruments'.  So far, a number of different flints have been found with interlinked channels, each offering unique microtonal musical scales.

These stones, each with their own in-built set of pitches formed 500 million years ago, are good grist for the arbitrary tuning mill.  Why is arbitrary tuning important?  I consider it a topic all-too-frequently dismissed.  For those who enjoy the divergent aspects of differently-tuned music, or wish to escape the ubiquity of the equal tempered musical scale, it may be surprising that microtonal/xenharmonic music offers very little refuge - it is here that just intonation and "pure" harmonic mathematical dogmatism supplants one tyranny with another.  I exaggerate here a bit, but it's fair to say that random/arbitrary musical scales are generally viewed as unsophisticated in microtonal music circles.

A few years ago I tried to establish a historical basis for 'intuitively selected tuning systems' in my Radionics Radio project (on Sub Rosa records), but drawing upon a fringe science - no matter how artistically groundbreaking those acoustic-radionic activities were in the late 1940s - didn't convince many (radionics involves 'psychically' selecting frequencies that correspond to thoughts).  Random tunings offer complete freedom, and reveal the idiosyncrasies of the instruments used, as well as the identities of soundmakers.  I would go as far to politicise it: arbitrary tuning is perhaps the ultimate musical 'decolonisation' whilst also being a practical and philosophical ideal for microtonal music's LGBTQ+ lineage that embraces such varied personalities as Kathleen Schlesinger, Elsie Hamilton, to Harry Partch and Wendy Carlos - a lineage rarely-discussed, but deeply rooted, I believe, in the opposition to the norms of western equal temperament (and the contra-norms of just intonation and equal divisions of the octave).

The hollow flint... containing a scale.

Hollow flints found in fields speak of the primacy of arbitrary tunings: random, fully individuated tunings literally set in stone.  My favourite is a handheld flint with five channels.  Unlike the specially-lipped ocarina, hollow flints cannot produce pure tones when blown into, unless a sharp 'labium tip' is expertly chiselled into it somehow (a feature of all fipple flutes).  This isn't necessarily a problem - for instance, sound artist Akio Suzuki has been playing upon unrefined natural stones for decades, eliciting exploratory pitched noise: half-tonal, half-percussive, and sensitively done.  Covering the holes on the flint while blowing does produce vague pitches, but too broad to measure precisely.

Kathleen Schlesinger, in her 1939 deep-study of ancient greek auloi (reeded wind instruments dug up from historical sites) and their possible scales remarked that "it is impossible to determine the pitch, scale, or modality of any pipe that lacks a mouthpiece which will play it".  These rocks are not instruments, and it is indeed tricky treating them as such: even if a fipple mouthpiece (from a wind recorder, for instance) is introduced to the rock (which I did), the pitch of the notes varies due to its player's breath pressure: the more open holes there are, the more breath pressure is required to produce a tone - and the natural reflex action is to supply more breath pressure, an action so unconscious that it almost feels as if the rock becomes an extension of the body.  Try it yourself.

It is possible to connect a small lapel microphone to a loudspeaker amplifier, and place the microphone inside the flint to hear feedback.  The feedback pitch is relative to the cavity, and alters according to the fingering of the cavities.  I did a brief experiment with this on camera, and posted it to Facebook to advertise the upcoming episode of Wavelength on Resonance FM where I describe these experiments.

On the internet, there's always either a miserable don't-know-who, or a know-it-all nonsenseclown poised to blurt.  If they're remotely connected to creative doings, it tends to spur on the mission to legitimise arbitrary scales.  On this occasion, one such character (I can't discern which) emerged from the woodwork to advertise their obliviousness to these experiments' contexts: "eh, this is like sticking a piezo transducer in anything. Ok; weird, somewhat regulated noise. 'Man farting in field' has been Lucier'd to death."

Alfred Graham's feedback flute, 1894.

Maybe this person is rightfully irate to some extent: the volume required to obtain the pitches of the flint cavity is horrendous on the ear.  To record it, one rainy afternoon I walked to the field where the flint originated, specifically to avoid remonstrations.  Alvin Lucier used compressors to limit the volume of his object-based feedback.  This feedback technique actually pre-dates Lucier's work by eight decades - the feedback flute was proposed by Alfred Graham, patented in 1894 - a failed history I've excavated and written about in 'Magnetic Music...' and 'Failed Histories of Electronic Music', and recreated as a working model.  Graham recognised the many variables affecting the flute's pitch, such as battery power, the shape and construct of the loudspeaker and microphone, and their relative positions.  Nevertheless, the feedback flint, if held stable enough, is a fairly accurate approximation of the pitch intervals obtainable.  By comparing the feedback-generated intervals with the intervals obtained with an attached fipple, and also with the vague windy tones created when blowing, mean averages can be obtained.

With the lowest note registering as 669Hz, the ratios are calculable as 1/1, 737/669, 775/669, 263/223, 269/223 and 828/669 (giving an ascending 167.590, 254.628, 285.622, 324.674, 369.149 in cents).

What can be done with these notes?  Well, the scale of this handheld flint encompasses less than four semitones (3.69, to be exact), which is a restrictive set of notes, but frequent exposure to the notes acclimatises the ear to soundmaking/melodic possibilities.  This is something noted by the composer Susan Alexjander who derived scales from DNA bases.  DNA bases' tunings might as well be arbitrary, such is the inharmonic chaos - they seemed "so strange and alien that one at first despairs of ever creating a beautiful work of art, or making any coherent 'sense' out of them", according to Alexjander.  By constant exposure to the new scales "played over and over on the synthesiser, some arrestingly beautiful combinations began to appear"...  so when dealing with such disorientating scales, perseverance is key!

More can be heard on Wavelength, broadcast on Resonance 104.4FM on 19th June 2020. "A programme of multiple agendas presented by William English. This week: a tape sync with Oscillatorial Binnage member Daniel Wilson who, prevented from bin-diving during the Covid-19 epidemic, instead turns to "ground-diving" to dig out unusual stones from the earth. The potential for producing 'rock music' is showcased after a lengthy preliminary chat with William on the current state of the second-hand book trade."

Wireless on the Brain in 1922 (with Ernie Mayne) - Radio versus the Music-Hall

Within the expanse of the electromagnetic spectrum is a small band of colour - the human visible light range.  This narrow strip could be viewed as a sort of firewall: above the visible light range lurks dangerous ionising radiations that can mutate organic matter, and below it are the more benign non-ionising radiations facilitating our radio communications amidst thronging natural atmospherics, from the low Schumann resonances of the earth's magnetic field, to the fizz of the sun.

Many radio waves are of natural origin, but since the development of radio technology the possible biological and environmental effects of lower-range non-ionising electromagnetic radio waves have been a source of enduring speculation.  There's still much research to be done to establish the safety of the upper microwave range occupied by radar signals.  5G signals will operate near this range, and the ongoing debates surrounding 5G have reminded me of a song written in 1922 and recorded around 1923, called 'Wireless on the Brain', thus:


Now I'm in my 30s, and my unemployability seems to be fairly well-cemented (at least locally, where I live), I can do things that, when younger, I would've been too shy to do for fear of ridicule.  During the current lockdown I've been exercising, but my belief is that exercise of the voice must accompany that of the body.  So I modulate song onto my breathing.  I run, hop, backtrack, vocalise randomness, gallop sideways, and indulge in all kinds of physical whims, especially around industrial estates, in what I call 'undisciplined exercise'.  If anyone sees me or tells me to vacate the area, I carry on regardless - I simply don't care anymore.  Yesterday I saw some telecom engineers in the distance, which compelled me to start singing 'Wireless on the Brain' (as sung by music-hall comic Ernie Mayne), whilst sprinting sideways, in a circular dance, to the rhythm.  Please, reader, do not think that I'm trivialising a serious matter - I'm just drawing attention to a contested area of thought.  Rather than letting this recalled song nugget go to waste, I thought a blog post on it might be worthwhile.

I can't remember where I first heard 'Wireless on the Brain'.  It may have been taped off the radio.  It appears to be a rare song that hasn't received much attention.  "My wife Jane's got wireless on the brain" runs the chorus - and while it does have some now-un-PC passages that would've been innocent within 1920s vernacular, a malign swipe endures in its cocking-a-snook at Marconi's wireless technology.  Variety performers' livelihoods depended on people going out to music-halls, and so the prospect of audiences staying at home listening to wireless radios was a concern.  Ernie Mayne, aka 'The Simple One', was an effective 'everyman' character to give voice to this wireless cynicism.  (In the vaudeville tradition, Ernie also had an 'everywoman' alter-ego as a vehicle for other songs such as the wartime 'Tale of My Husband's Shirt').

'Wireless on the Brain' isn't actually about the biological effects of radio.  Having something 'on the brain' is likely an early Americanism, noted in Samuel Fallows 1835 'Progressive Dictionary of the English Language' as low slang denoting "an inordinate feeling or desire regarding anything".  Nevertheless, for 1922, 'Wireless on the Brain' is a strikingly visceral title.  The main concern in 'Wireless on the Brain' is that the protagonist husband's wife is too engrossed in listening to the radio to cook his food for him.  A rather antiquated situation.

The title of 'Wireless on the Brain' harks back to another song sung by Ernie Mayne a few years earlier during WWI, 'Farmyard on the Brain'.  Here again, his wife is the affected subject who's working on a farm, and has gone "farmyard barmy" (some extramusical animal imitations underscore this).  Sexist undertones are softened somewhat by the fact that the joke is really on Ernie Mayne, who becomes reduced to a subservient animal state: "if I want a bit of mutton for my supper now, I have to say 'baa baa'".  I can't tell whether the lyrics are all double-entendres - if they are, it conjures deeply unappetising images.  Returning to 'Wireless on the Brain' though... towards the end of the song Ernie is similarly enfeebled, "I tremble like a mouse... for everything is wireless in our house".  Food, incidentally, was a recurring theme for twenty-stone Mayne, whose other hits included 'My Meatless Day', 'There's No Toad in the Toad-in-the-Hole' (both addressing wartime rationing), and 'I've Never Wronged an Onion, Why Should it Make Me Cry?'.

The wife 'Jane' with 'wireless on the brain' hints at a historically obscured female radio listenership, habitually accessing a world of information beyond domestic confines and home literature of the day.  Ernie Mayne's wife wasn't called Jane in real life - she was in fact a performer too, adopting the stagename Alice Davidson (aka Alice Emma Holbrow).  'Wireless on the Brain' was written by one of Ernie's collaborators: a London songwriter called John Patrick Harrington whose wife was named Jane - Jane Eliza Harrington, from Birmingham.  Whether or not the song is a portrayal of their domestic happenings is not known, but happily, Harrington later wrote a gushing poem for his wife on their golden wedding anniversary in 1937.

'Video killed the radio star' sang The Buggles in 1979, but in 1922, radio was threatening to kill the music-hall star.  At the age of 58, Harrington was a veteran music-hall writer, and 'Wireless on the Brain' could be seen as a late jibe at the technology that endangered the livelihoods of those struggling to branch out and adapt their established craft to a brand new medium.  With the ongoing debate over 5G, it's worth considering the positions of those extolling its pros and its cons; the cultural tectonics at play.  Like music-hall songwriting in the 1920s, 5G looms over those whose knowledge bases are rooted in older systems.  Wherever there are livelihoods at stake, arguments often throw up unflattering imagery concerning the contested article.  On the other hand, the heavy investments surrounding 5G prompt counterarguments supporting the new wireless technology, yet the proposed wireless ranges are admitted to have a lack of test studies to back up these reassurances.  Video may have killed the radio star, but will radio itself return to kill everyone?  The public are caught between these arguments.  In the meantime, I will continue galloping in circles around industrial estates singing refrains from 'Wireless on the Brain'.

If I ever meet that son of a gun who first invented wireless
I'll kill him, I'll kill him, I'll have his bally gore.
At listening-in my dear old Dutch is absolutely tireless
And when I want to fall asleep and snore
She went and bought a wireless set, and "what a wreck," I feel;
We have a blooming opera now with every blinkin' meal.

My wife Jane, she's got wireless on the brain;
While she's taking messages I send S.O.S.-ages,
Even in my bye-bye, she cries "you lazy T*rk!"
"Can't you hear the wireless? It's time you started work!'

She gabbles about her wireless ways, her aerials and broadcasting.
No error: a terror, my old girl's going to be,
And when I sit down at breakfast time, I've had to sit there fasting
'Cos she, all smiles, is listening-in, you see.
She says "Lloyd George is speaking now,"
Then I shout good and strong:
"'Ere, ain't it nearly time some wireless kippers came along?"

[Chorus]

I jolly well wish that missis of mine had never met Marconi,
I'm worried, I'm flurried, I tremble like a mouse.
I'm pretty well near off my filbert, and I'm not so far from stoney,
For everything is wireless in our house.
Our wireless dog keeps barking outside on his wireless chain,
And upstairs in the attic they've had wireless twins again.

[Chorus]

My wife Jane she's got wireless on the brain
While she's taking messages, I send S.O.S.-ages
Even in my bye-bye, she's shouting out, "Police!"
"Who's upset the turkey? He's mopping up the grease."

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.

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.

'Is anyone out there?' - Making stuff in the 21st century, and getting people to notice

Worms Making Music, YouTube, 2007

Is it me, or is everything becoming impossible?  Is anyone out there?  My previous blogpost was a dumped rejected article I'd been touting around without avail for ages.  There are countless other laboured-upon projects similarly languishing for want of outlets.  In contrast, 13 years ago I dropped a garden worm onto sensitised soundmaking circuit-board, and the throwaway 90-second clip I'd filmed somehow attained a viral moment on YouTube (albeit to mixed reception).  It all seemed so easy in those days.  Since then, algorithms have come into play, along with the downplaying of free blogging sites like the one I'm using here (e.g. Wiki forbids blogs as sources), and the jaws of obscurity loom larger.  Now I am that worm, writhing for contact-points.  The dynamics behind these struggles fascinate me, hence the long-running studies into thwarted and failed histories I've written about extensively.  But how do you deal with such asphyxia first-hand?  A new Meadow House LP was on the cards this year, but this is now abandoned owing to the label's vanished appetite following atrocious sales of the previous Meadow House LPs of 2016.  To try to publicise those 2016 LPs I'd naively tried to reignite the interest of television's Jason Bradbury (ex-The Gadget Show) who'd once taken notice of my "divergent presentational style" as he flatteringly termed it, but who, in my moment of desperation, dodged even a sniff of the LPs.  I always thought they were quite commercial undertakings, but apparently not.  The 2016 releases remain available to purchase.

Rejected Meadow House LP

Admittedly, the latest rejected Meadow House LP is uncommercial: it's an unpleasant record thanks to the rejection feedback loop...  Successive discouragements and impoverishments eventually disoblige all concessions to 'entertain'.  Incidentally, the writer Colin Wilson theorised that criminality eventually arises from scuppered and gnarled creative impulses.  This seems plausible: if nobody listens, you have to shout, or, in worse cases, bite.  The abandoned 2020 album was given the upsetting title 'Incel Uproariousness', and some criminally disagreeable tracks have leaked out on Johnny Seven's Pull The Plug show on Resonance FM, 16th January 2020.

Anyway... To stave off Colin Wilson's potentially criminous endgames, we would do well to take an active interest in the work of others.  Web algorithms can imprison us in ever-individuating bubbles - to escape, we must broaden.  This would seem the primary solution to the increasing "impossibleness" cited above.  I recently appeared in the background on two instalments of William English's weekly Wavelength show on Resonance FM, showcasing the talents of two very different guests: on the 24th January, the instrument-builder and audiovisual artist Ian Helliwell guested, and the following week, on the 31st, the sound artist and songwriter Samuel Shelton Robinson aka Kalou dropped by.  Despite their contrasting styles, both guests touched upon the dilemmas arising from dwindling oxygen.  Is exposure becoming harder to obtain?  Even Wavelength's host, film-maker William English, took a moment to lament his own omission from a supposedly academic new book entitled 'Artists' Moving Image in Britain Since 1989', whilst also playfully provoking Helliwell that even he too is absented from it - an especially startling oversight given Helliwell's prolific and original output.  Maybe this is evidence of the extent that self-enclosed feedback bubbles have compromised academia.

To return to the Wavelength broadcasts...  It's uncertain whether there would be much overlap between Helliwell's and Robinson's audiences, such are their sonic differences.  But in an ideal world, there would be overlap.  To hasten the emergence of this ideal world I was in attendance at both Kalou's and Ian Helliwell's interviews, as I'd contributed tracks to both their releases.  In a songy frame-of-mind, I remixed the track 'Floundering' on Kalou's cassette-orientated album 'The Sculpture Garden'.  And in abstracter pastures, on Helliwell's 'Project Symbiosis' I contributed one of ten realisations of an obscure electronic graphic score.

Ian Helliwell's 'Project Symbiosis' (2020)

Helliwell authored the landmark 2016 book 'Tape Leaders: A Compendium of Early British Electronic Music Composers'.  During his research, he uncovered instructive articles in the popular magazine Practical Electronics encouraging readers to follow a how-to guide to build an analog synthesiser (i.e. the Minisonic) and realise an abstract electronic score on the instrument.  The score was Malcolm Pointon's 'Symbiosis' (1975).  This discovery led Helliwell to formulate 'Project Symbiosis'.  The story of project can be read in the richly illustrated supplementary booklet accompanying the physical release.  'Project Symbiosis' features ten tracks by different contributors, including Helliwell, all realising the same graphic score (republished on the inside cover) - Pointon's original recording is included too.  Each version reveals the contributor's own interpretive idiosyncrasies and studio quirks.

The 'Lynne Maddy' 1970 instrument

Some years ago, at a car boot sale, I found a peculiar homemade electronic instrument which I later showed to Helliwell.  An engraved plaque on it read "Lynne Maddy 1970".  A drawer at the front contained a paper note: "for bubbly sounds use spoon".  I've never been able to trace Lynne Maddy, despite the unusual name.  Helliwell suggested that my own Symbiosis interpretation should feature Maddy's instrument, but I originally wanted to create a 'post-electronic' version using my electromagnetic resonating devices.  It was reasoned that this would've detracted too far from the electronic basis of the project, and besides, the Maddy instrument boasted a Stylophone-like stylus-contact interface similar to the Minisonic (which was the instrument conceived by 'Practical Electronics' magazine to realise the score) - it was ideal.  Because the Maddy instrument behaved erratically (and its interior caked in crystallised old Exide batteries), I'd given it to my friend Moshi Honen to service.  Post-servicing, it revealed itself to be microtonal, and no amount of tinkering with the trim-pots seemed to spread a standard scale.  Its microtonality doesn't really come across in the 'Symbiosis' recording, but in conjunction with other homemade and customised gubbins, I produced an electronic microtonal version of 'Symbiosis', nominally in 7-limit just intonation during the middle melodic passage.  I suspect the Maddy instrument was a circuit design published by a magazine just like 'Practical Electronics', à la Minisonic (albeit simpler), but further research is needed... maybe for another blogpost (if anyone cares?).

Recording 'Symbiosis' for Helliwell's project

Kalou's The Sculpture Garden

The following week on Wavelength, after Helliwell's 'Project Symbiosis' show, there was a surprisingly different offering: the new album by Samuel Shelton Robinson, aka Kalou, was featured.  Under discussion was the scenario Robinson termed "making music when seemingly no one's really listening".  Curiously, the latest Kalou emission - 'The Sculpture Garden' - is his most consistently commercial to date; its accessibly musical eclectic pop songcraft could feasibly please vast numbers of ears (and hearts - emotional cathartics are at play here).  It's available as a download, but its tiny cassette run of 50 hints at a residual experimentalism.  The idea of the 'song' as a conflict between commercial product and personal emotional uprush is one furtive theme semi-visible on the artistic pedestal (a booklet of lyrics is included).

One of Kalou's philosophies is presented within the album's centrepiece 'Reverence is Dead (Good Riddance)', forming an almost programmatic depiction of the "ego", represented by a decidedly imperious riff undergoing an unsustainable rush, which soon crashes in a grand "death of reverence".  From the postmodern wreckage emerges, as Robinson puts it, "an honour system based on merit".  This is surely the answer to everything?!  (Its message of abolishing all deference to revered 'influencers' makes my aforementioned overtures to The Gadget Show presenter look terribly old-fashioned, nay, wrong-headed.)

Out now: Kalou's 'The Sculpture Garden' is available on the Kalou Bandcamp...
... and Ian Helliwell's 'Project Symbiosis' is available via Public Information's Bandcamp...
Wavelength is a weekly radio show on Resonance 104.4FM hosted by William English, Fridays, 14:30-15:30.

Noise, anti-noise, drama, Jeremy Beadle's private noise research, the Darlington Quiet Town Experiment, and the earliest published story by Mark Gatiss (set in the year 2023)

There are some rustlings afoot: next year promises to be the year that finally sees the release of the long-delayed Oscillatorial Binnage 'post-electronic music' album.  To close 2019, I've decided to dump here, in defeat, a rejected article I've been hawking around magazines and journals for some time.  Regular readers of this blog will recognise the themes of imperilled histories, publicity asphyxia, and the chain of associations triggered by found objects.  The text was originally written to draw attention to one particular pet project I've expended some efforts upon in attempts to make it amenable to BBC radio (often via Resonance FM): a documentary about anti-noise campaigning, or rather, the 'noises' made by these campaigns.  The proposal has consistently met with silence from commissioners who apparently deem it too eccentric, leading me to make ever-'noisier' repeat proposals with equally-futile added razzmatazz.  This prompted some contemplation on the inner paradoxes of noise.

Habitually ferreting in the world of second-hand books ("the last refuge of the unemployable" as a bookseller friend semi-despairingly calls it), I've observed how glitz, high glamour and familiar names sell more readily than, say, old copies of the Philips Bulletin of Recent Developments in the Field of Electronics or similar obscurities that heave with innovation and overlooked histories, yet fail to hold general interest.  All unfamiliar material is background noise to most people.  Appealing to popular taste seems to be the key to getting things noticed, and this same issue was faced by noise awareness campaigners...  How do you effectively insert ideas into the cultural continua and get them favourably acknowledged?

"Six years ago, the city of Dortmund in West Germany found itself engulfed in a rising tide of noise. (...) The leader of Dortmund's noise-abatement campaign is Dr. Helmut Hillmann, the jovial city manager. (...) A natural actor, Dr. Hillmann decided that the way to fight noise was to dramatise it. He shouts at the top of his lungs to simulate the whirrs and roars he seeks to suppress. 'How would you like that when you want sleep?' he demands.  His efforts have made him the public champion of noise victims throughout Europe."

The above quote is from a May 1968 article titled 'The City that Declared War on Noise', removed from an old issue of Reader's Digest by UK television personality Jeremy Beadle and tucked inside his own copy of a 1974 book titled Noise: The New Menace by US science writer Lucy Kavaler.  This book contained many more of Beadle's cut-outs all dealing with rebarbative auditory sensations, and it was found in the basement of Charing Cross Road's Any Amount of Books bookshop in 2013.

A bookplate indicates this copy of Noise was disposed of by Mayfair literary agents Laurence Pollinger Ltd., who were in unresolved negotiations to secure UK serial rights for the US-published title.  It's unclear how it ended up in Beadle's collection.  Kavaler's book dwells on the psychological and physiological dangers of prolonged noise exposure, ending with a chapter on campaigners' activities - 'The People Against Noise' - detailing how noise complainants in America necessarily form residents associations to raise funds for lawyers.  Kavaler also writes about a tenacious anti-supersonic aircraft activist who pestered the US Federal Aviation Administration by letter every three months for six years.  Elsewhere, in an act Beadle would've approved of, Kavaler mentions a Long Island couple who loaded homemade muffins into a "huge medieval catapult" and flung them at airplanes passing very low over their residence.

For those unfamiliar with this book's former owner, Jeremy Beadle, he was best known as a primetime TV prankster.  As a youth in the 1960s Beadle worked as a lavatory attendant in Hamburg, Germany, affording him scope to ply situationist mischief: he'd deliberately block toilets with tea bags, make grunting sounds in cubicles, and place coins in urinals, etc. and would watch people's reactions.  When he found fame with his candid camera prank show Beadle's About in the 1980s and 90s, it's fair to say his style of humour had not evolved significantly.  However, like some other light entertainers of the period his onscreen levity belied wider, profounder pursuits (in the tradition of Barry Humphries, Roy Hudd, Pauline Quirke, Les Dawson, et al); Beadle owned a substantial book collection which was posthumously acquired and dispersed by Any Amount of Books in 2012.  Beadle's friend, the late writer/actor Ken Campbell, had remarked in an interview that it was unnecessary to ever visit the British Library or Oxford's Bodleian Library when he had exclusive access to the "Beadlean Library".  Beadle's eclectic library covered some of the most engaging subjects: esotericism, the uncanny, public nuisances, crime, deception, hoaxes, jokes, disasters, thrillers, as well as seemingly endless trivia.

Beadle's books - most bearing his embossed 'Property of Beadlebum' ex-libris stamp - were shelved across all subject areas in Any Amount of Books' basement.  The Lucy Kavaler Noise book was in the Music section.  Its binding heaved with Beadle's annotated noise-related clippings.  It was intriguing that Beadle had such concern for noise pollution.  Was the 'psychology of noise' a factor in his prank research?  (After all, in his formative toilet attendant days he'd played a radio "very loudly" and juggled toilet brushes to the beat, according to his autobiography).  Or, like noise-sensitive soundmakers Jools Holland or Jimmy Page, did he actively seek silent respite from the hubbub of showbiz?  (Beadle's address label reads "Semley Place, London" - his mother's flat above the busy Victoria bus station).  The truth may be more prosaic - Beadle had a thirst for general knowledge, and apparently collected a bit of everything.  Former Any Amount of Books owner Nigel Burwood explained to me that Beadle "had books on almost anything, especially disasters.  Noise would have interested him, but probably no more than, say, wolf children."  Yet of all the Beadle books I had a chance to examine in the basement semi-regularly over several months, I didn't see another as crammed with material.

Noisy bits and bobs from Jeremy Beadle's copy of Lucy Kavaler's 'Noise'

Kavaler's Noise with its cargo of clippings was a suggestive discovery, highlighting the dramatisations, gimmicks, stunts and the enlisting of high profile figures that all characterised anti-noise campaigning.  Noise-awareness necessitates the noise of publicity.  And publicity needs an element of theatre.  This was also recognised by Scottish doctor Dan McKenzie, who in 1916 published The City of Din: A Tirade Against Noise, a book he dedicated to his wife, Dora Christine McKenzie.  I'd found this book many years ago elsewhere, and was reminded of it whilst shelving Kavaler's Noise next to it.  Dr. McKenzie's 1916 "tirade" took the form of dramatic high-flown prose with as much humour and poetry as hard science.  As well as a throat and ear specialist, McKenzie was a published poet too.  In his later 1923 book Aromatics and the Soul: A Study of Smells, McKenzie remarked how The City of Din was itself a counter-noise of sorts:  "A few years ago I stood before the public singing another song (...) wherein I invoked the wrath of the high gods upon such miscreants as make life hideous with din.  You must not think that imprecations cannot be sung.  All emotional utterance is song, said Carlyle (...) Beside, denunciations are, of course, grunted and growled with more or less semblance of singing in modern opera."

McKenzie went on to co-found the Anti-Noise League in the 1930s, and it's interesting to note that nearly 20 years after The City of Din's publication, copies of the original book remained unsold, most likely due to insufficient publicity, ironically.  Published in the middle of the First World War, The City of Din's medical publisher, Adlard, only produced a limited run for the as-yet-unproven author, but nevertheless, undistributed stock lingered for decades: the catalogue for the Science Museum's Summer 1935 Noise Abatement Exhibition offered extant copies priced at two shillings and sixpence: "arrangements have been made with the writer and publishers of The City of Din whereby the proceeds for the sale of the remaining copies will be handed over to the Anti-Noise League".  (In the copy of City of the Din I have, there's an old makeshift bookmark advertising Aspirin tablets, perhaps giving some idea of the sensitivities of its target audience).

Dr. McKenzie's City of Din epitomises the paradox of anti-noise campaigning: the 'noisy' dramatic frissons pushed through the media infrastructure to garner publicity; making 'noise' about noise.  Attempts to silence noise invariably involve counter-noise, frequently literal.  There was a landmark case in 1892: a 30-year-old engraver for printing blocks - Harry Fitzner Davey - had created a home studio for himself at his semi-detached home in Angell Road, Brixton.  He soon found that his musical nextdoor neighbours hindered his delicate work with their incessant music lessons.  Davey retaliated with his own noise by knocking on the wall, "beating on trays, whistling, shrieking, and imitating [the music] being played".  It was in fact his neighbours, the Christies, who, embarrassed by Davey's counter-noise, took the matter to high court and won their case, almost ruining Davey who was fined just over £400 (roughly £35,000 in today's money).  The decisive point bore down on the fact that Davey's counter-noise was made with malicious intent.  Countless similar cases have played out over the years, as some of Beadle's newspaper cuttings indicate.

Noise awareness is itself beset with paradox...  A Noise Abatement Act was established in Britain in 1960.  At a 1961 symposium of noise at the National Physical Laboratory, physicist Douglas W. Robinson remarked: "new inventions, especially the jet engine, have brought into existence bigger noises than man has previously been able to create.  Perhaps the obvious impossibility of living at close quarters with such devices has triggered off a sort of chain reaction down the noisiness scale, so that even domestic refrigerators now have their share of critics on grounds of noisiness": in a culture of noise awareness, humming fridges accrue affinities with genuine wreakers of industrial deafness.  The 1963 Wilson Report, drawn up by the Committee on the Problem of Noise, assessed auditory annoyances, noting that noise such as creaking doors, crying babies or distant parties can have "an emotional effect out of all proportion to its physical intensity", conveying senses of "alarm, neglect, sadness [and] loneliness".  The Report also highlighted that the commonest annoyance of noise is its hindering of sound-based communication, including "the enjoyment of radio and television programmes" in leisure time, and yet radios and televisions are noise culprits too.

Jeremy Beadle's noise clippings - culled from items published between 1967 and 1981 - span a period when the issue was being pushed by newly-formed groups in the UK such as the non-departmental public body the Noise Advisory Council, and the Noise Abatement Society action group.  Dr. Helmut Hillman's aforementioned quote, that "the way to fight noise [is] to dramatise it" was prescient, as subsequent campaigns sought to grab the public's attention with increasingly dramatic flourishes.  In 1972 the Noise Advisory Council convened the 'Panel on Noise in the Seventies' and its 1974 publication Noise in the Next Ten Years offered an idea of setting up a "Quiet Town Experiment".  It recommended that the Government should select an area where authorities, industry and private citizens would be invited to co-operate in "an effort to see to what extent, given the goodwill of all concerned, the ambient noise level of a town can be reduced".  This experiment materialised two years later and represents the pinnacle of the 'dramatisation' of noise: the Darlington Quiet Town Experiment.

Darlington Quiet Town Experiment attempted to create a town-wide awareness of noise pollution from 1976 to 1978.  Unusually, none of Beadle's cuttings referred to this extraordinary long-running project which represents one of the 'noisiest' anti-noise campaigns in the UK.  However, I've interviewed a few coordinators of this initiative who tend to view it as a failed experiment.  "I am amazed that 40 years after that 'experiment' anyone should be interested," said its former publicity officer.  School shouting contests, plays, and literary competitions took place across Darlington and its suburbs as part of this experiment overseen by the Noise Advisory Council; a cassette containing a specially-composed song 'Turn It Down' was distributed.  "The World's First Quiet Bingo Game" was held, among other events forming a widespread publicity campaign that notably roped in celebrity motorcyclist Barry Sheene, pictured on a poster captioned "if I can win without a din, why can't you?"

During the Darlington Experiment, a shift from a Labour to a Conservative government signalled the end of the Noise Advisory Council, which was killed off as an expendable quango in 1981 (a New Scientist column titled "Quango's Noisy Death" suggested the Council might've been a bugbear to the government due to its public-facing noisy proactivity).  Before its demise, the Council published its summing up of the The Darlington Quiet Town Experiment.  This fascinating 1981 monograph features a pocket containing five publicity examples, with other specimens peppered throughout the text.  There's a distinct flavour of Scarfolk's fictitious hauntology about these bizarre nuggets of ephemera; it's decidedly fantastical.  One leaflet, for instance, encourages householders to "banish the noisy gnome from your home", with the gnome symbol recurring throughout the campaign.  A survey at the conclusion of the experiment disappointingly revealed only one respondent had realised the "noisy gnome" was associated with noise.

Leaflet from the Darlington Quiet Town Experiment.

The role of stories in the Darlington experiment stimulated creativity in schools, fostering noise-awareness in the next generation.  One publication - Children on Noise - collected noteworthy entries from noise-related literary competitions that many schools local to Darlington participated in.  Winning entries were supplied by schoolchildren aged between six and sixteen.  The poems are the exact opposite of the Italian Futurists' early 20th century poetry where, with a "Zang Tumb Tuuum", noise was celebrated.  By the late 20th century the rising generation were waxing poetic on unwanted noise: "Brrrrrm Brrrrrrrm / The motor-bikes go / It makes the tools in the shed go / Rattle Rattle Rattle / Brrrrrm Brrrrrrrm / They make a terrible noise when they whiz round my street..." wrote 7-year-old Niranjani Satha.

Children on Noise also contains stories, some intriguingly futurological.  Almost invoking the fringe science of radionics, 14-year-old Jennifer Simpson wrote: "noise is a form of energy and by the law of physics cannot be destroyed.  If this is true, sound must build up over the years."  In her story, 'The Dangerous Monster: Noise', Simpson develops this premise with the introduction of "Sound Hoovers" that vacuum-up accumulated noise, but these can only be operated by hypersensitive cleaners: "noise build-up cannot be detected by non-sensitive people".  Simpson's story follows the story of Gareth, a sensitive noise cleaner, whose "Sound Hoover" accidentally empties a decade's worth of noise whilst in his car, causing an accident.  The story concludes: "Who can tell what destructive force such as Gareth encountered will not lie dormant elsewhere if noise in its varying forms is not suppressed?"

One story in Children on Noise stands out from the rest for its imaginative complexity.  'The Anti-Noise Machine' is a science fiction tale penned by a future household name (returning here to the theme of celebrity and noise) - an 11-year-old Mark Gatiss, who attended the village Heighington CE Primary School, near Darlington.  Gatiss continues to write and also perform, and is now widely known for his work in The League of Gentlemen, Sherlock, Doctor Who, etc.  In that olde-worlde tradition previously alluded to, Gatiss also has sprawling interests that encompass the art of John Minton and the stories of M.R. James (and he has fronted documentaries on both respectively).  A few days ago, over Christmas, Gatiss' eerily atmospheric M.R. James adaptation Martin's Close was broadcast, and, coincidentally(?), noise was a key feature.  In its opening scene a troubled prisoner is seen clasping his ears to block out an ethereal sonic disturbance: a degraded dirge of an old folk song, The Keys of Heaven.  Last Christmas, another Gatiss ghost story was screened - an original psychological supernatural horror where noise is also apparent: The Dead Room featured a present-day narrator (played by Simon Callow) trying to record a story in an old studio.  He is assailed by a number of sonic cues that trigger delirious memories of a dark misdeed.  Again, the uncalled-for noise is in the guise of a song - Fox's already-unsettling 1976 S-S-S-Single Bed - which becomes increasingly tortured.  Perhaps the threads of noise, in its haunting potency, cropping up in Gatiss' work all link back to Darlington's Quiet Town Experiment?  To end these noisy ruminations, in unsanctioned abandon I'll paste here, in full, the earliest published story by a young Mark Gatiss, 'The Anti-Noise Machine' (published 1978), which, like anti-noise campaigning itself, concludes with a paradox - "if we destroy that [anti-noise] machine, noise will return -  if we don't, we'll be killed every time we shout."

[This blog seems an obscure enough nook to air Gatiss' early literary emission, as it's unlikely to cause any faux pas or be widely seen, swamped as it is by the noise of the internet.  If in the unlikely event Gatiss himself does see this, hopefully he won't mind.  But consider this: 'The Anti-Noise Machine' is set in the year 2023 - three years away - so maybe there's an urgent public duty to prepare people for such things...]

THE ANTI-NOISE MACHINE

[note: * Stellagram = a futuristic meeting hall]

It was an eyesore, protruding from the buildings it stood gleaming in the sun.  If one had first entered the City of Darlington your first impression would be it was so quiet.  In fact it had to be quiet, if it wasn't it was against the law.  The gleaming eyesore was the enforcer of that law.  It was the District Energy Able Theocomputer Heavy Duty Robot, or D.E.A.T.H. D.R. for short.  In the City of Darlington on the day of 22nd July, 2023, Richard Schlitz began his resistance group.  Schlitz and a group of ten gathered together the instruments they needed and walked from the stellagram* onto the terribly quiet streets.  "On the count of three, start playing." said Olden to another member.  Three was counted and the party started making a terrific noise.  Then a high pitched whine filled the air.  Death Dr appeared round the corner.  A thin tube emerged from the massive body.  Then a pencil of blue light escaped it, with a horrible scream Schlitz and his party were bathed in the blue light, froze, and were gone.  The message was plain, "Keep Darlington quiet or else......"

David Montgomery sat at his desk.  He was on the phone.  "Why on earth should that great lumbering machine have to go round destroying great noises?  Why not 'peacefully'?  The thing's specially programmed not to ruin computer or agricultural machines."  He continued, "For goodness sake, they are human beings you know."  On the other end of the phone, Death Dr's inventor Professor Bernard Krine argued with him.  "Montgomery, in 1978 Darlington tried it peacefully, and no-one would listen, noise inflamed Darlington City and we had to stop it!"  "But why can't we try again, I think they've learned their lesson," retorted Montgomery.  "Destroy my machine and you may as well leave Darlington to rot!"  He slammed the phone down.  Montgomery put his head in his hands.  Tom Montgomery was David's son, he was around 18 when he first started his noise movement.  Today was his final reactionary movement, not in terms of retirement.  As his group began their sound, the whine began again.  Death Dr emerged, Tom and his party crossed quickly to a skyscraper.  Noiselessly Death Dr swept over to the building's third wall, dissolved it with yellow flames and sighted the group.  They were totally destroyed by the blue beam, including Montgomery's son.

"NO, I won't believe it - that dilapidated dustbin has killed my son."
"I'm very sorry David, but it's true," said Gregory Harrison, Montgomery's friend.  "I'm going to destroy it, I'm going to kill it," said Montgomery.  Before Harrison could stop him he rushed outside with a fire axe.  Wielding the weapon Montgomery began screaming - a great noise.  Death Dr fired as usual but missed as Montgomery dodged.  Firing again it again missed.  The huge axe was thrust up at the anti-noise machine.  It hit with dreadful accuracy at Death Dr's computerized brain.  The blue beam cut into Montgomery and destroyed him.  The machine's complex brain was now a complicated mess.  It was haywire: agricultural and computerised machines beware!  Death Dr is out to destroy all great noises!  "Look, don't blame me, it was Montgomery who made my machine crazed ...", the frenzied argument erupted between Krine and the Mayor, it was a signed death warrant.  The noise was enough to register on Death Dr's sensors.  It glided to its creators office, destroyed the wall and dissolved Krine.  The Mayor was next.  "If people had listened in 1978 that machine would never have existed at all. .."  He too was cut off abruptly by Death Dr. The Mayor backed away in terror as he was bathed in blue light and vanished.

"Well, what can we do?  Drop an Atomic Bomb on it?" said Geoffry Blase, a scientist.  "If we destroy that machine noise will return."  "If we don't we'll be killed every time we shout." replied Blase to Henry Ealiey's comment.

Ealiey walked through the desolation.  Crumbled buildings around his heels.  The Bomb had been dropped the people evacuated, and Darlington a ghost town.  He thought, "If only they had listened all those years ago, if only, if only ....."

MARK GATISS
AGE   11 years
(from Children on Noise [1978])