'Electromania' in Strange Attractor Journal, 'Radio Obscurity' in Radio Art Zone, and other 2023 doings

Here's the obligatory end-of-year round-up / self-system-redundancy-check... Thrift, resourcefulness and low-budget solutions for soundmaking are a regular theme of this blog, but in a previous blogpost I wrote of the insoluble retrenchments demanded by a 'minus budget' - thrift's underbelly: resourcelessness. Hammering at doors hoping to find publishers and outlets has essentially become head-butting brick walls. Sponsors naturally possess biases towards commercial-viability (and, by extension, superficiality) and now, on top of this, automated algorithms contribute further to this feedback loop of asphyxia and poverty for original research. These are the ubiquitous dynamics contributing to the 'thwarted histories' that I study so gravely.

I always strive to bring new or previously obscured things into public view. Having spent a good portion of my life in bookshops, it's clear that an overwhelming amount of crowd-pleasing regurgitated hackwork is put into print by publishers who should know better (I'm bitter, of course). The ecological footprint of printed matter should be justified by the freshness of the artefact, and sadly this is seldom observed. Without any support, self-publishing is often the only option - a minefield of unforeseen expense; a tentative run of fifty copies of my textbook 'Post-Electronics: The History, Design & Philosophy of Organic Acoustic Modular Synthesisers' was glitched up by printers early this year, leaving me "looking nine ways for Sunday" as an antiquarian might put it.  Just when I began to feel asphyxiated by the situation, later this year there came some blessèd aeration in the form of two very fresh, original and noteworthy volumes...

The first is the long-awaited fifth volume of the Strange Attractor Journal. It contains my well-illustrated essay 'Electromania: The Victorian Electro-Musical Experience' and, among other things, unveils the first known visual "personification" of electronic sound in 1877. Condensed across fifteen pages is a detailed account of my main object of research: Johann Baptist Schalkenbach (whose archive of German and French manuscripts I've recently had translated), his Orchestre Militaire-Electro Moteur orchestrion hybrid, and its electrifying influence on Victorian entertainment... only to be swiftly forgotten. I started researching Schalkenbach and his contemporaries fifteen years ago, and although I keep bemoaning the baffling disinterest academic employers and publishers have shown towards my analyses of it (covered also in 'Magnetic Music of the Spiritual World'), I have at least managed to give this previously unknown amalgamator of music and electricity some internet presence over those years. The Strange Attractor article adds many new elements, reproduces never-before-seen archival material, and examines the distinctions between electrical and electronic music from a Victorian standpoint.

I'm reminded of an anonymous peer reviewer who green-lit my breakthrough essay on 'The Forgotten Work of J.B. Schalkenbach' in 2013's Leonardo Music Journal. They remarked "this article is the 'discovery' of a not-known precursor of electronic sound art (...) Could be a novel." Indeed, there is a resonant story behind Victorian electro-musical endeavour which has great dramatic thrust. Yet there is the recurring paradox - does obscurity beget obscurity?  It does seem so, although the Strange Attractor publication is a stab towards outmanoeuvring this.

Obscurity is also the underlying theme of a text I've contributed to another book: Radio Art Zone. My text is 'On Radio Obscurity and Infinite Regress' and explores unknown/unknowable moments in radio by springboarding off the concept of a space-time radio, as discussed as early as 1928 in a rare in-house magazine for BBC engineering staff, 'Saveloy: An Aerial Magstaff'. Radio Art Zone, edited by Sarah Washington, is a spectacular full-colour hardcover containing new art, photography and texts across various paper types. Its pool of contributors includes many creators of the 22-hour radio shows engaged in Washington and Knut Aufermann's epic Radio Art Zone project. It's one of the most stimulating volumes on radio experimentation ever published, and could function as a possible "field guide" to the niche genre that is radio art (as a recent review suggested). A text by Felix Kubin particularly fired my imagination with its novel and slightly unsettling introduction of the 'radioparasite' concept (i.e. living vicariously through radio, abstracting its sonic nutrients, forgetting one's own corporeality in the process of intense listening).

King Alfaman & Needle Boy (Knut and Lepke B)
Photo by Chris Weaver

RAZ's book launch took place last month (November 4th - also streamed on Resonance Extra) at IKLECTIK (a hugely important but now-imperilled venue), where the project's hallmark of extreme duration was upended: performers were asked to perform for a snappier ten minutes. I performed an exposition on the technique and philosophy of miraculous agitations, coaxing sonic miracles from my electromagnetic apparatuses (which, in keeping with the radio theme, happen to radiate very-short-range actuative EM waves). The short slot wasn't long enough to demonstrate such marvels (miracles take time), but unexpected rhythms and proto-miraculous shudderings emerged, along with shrieks for employment in any paid capacity whatsoever.

At the event, its mastermind Sarah Washington (who also performed ultrasonic gramophonics as Batophone with Lynn Davy) alerted me to two Greek members of the audience who had travelled from afar to see me(?!) perform. They actually expected a different, more famous Dan Wilson - an acoustic guitarist - and they left slightly bemused at my post-electronic apologia. The mismatch was caused by Spotify and automated data-handling scripts linking names to incorrect performers: my name had been auto-linked to another poppier D.W. This could be seen as yet another symptom of the thwarting agencies that conduce to destroy underground culture; a vulgar automated cup-and-ball switcheroo where obscure grassroots performers are supplanted by algorithm-friendly industry-approved namesakes. On the other hand, Sarah highlighted the positive, absurdist Situationist repercussions of this, whereby bewildered pilgrims may be drawn into unexpected novel experiences. Sarah also reminded me that it seemed consistent with the uncanny serendipities that I tend to initiate unintentionally, e.g. another 'crossed wires' moment occurring during Radio Art Zone's 2022 broadcasts, where a radio aficionado - a seasoned explorer of the airwaves - happened to tune into RAZ's 87.8 FM wavelength, catching some of my 'Asphyxia' broadcast (also episodified on Resonance Extra here). Much mystery ensued until the listener at last caught the station's identity via the embedded RDS info. The listener then sent Sarah an enthused message - "I spent the rest of that night recording the station because I was certain I stumbled upon something unknown that needed to be investigated" (a message which is now featured in print on page 175 of the RAZ book). The impulse to record and investigate the unknown is the most precious of impulses.

(I'll resist pondering too much on the unknown causalities behind the odd coincidence, that is: Asphyxia had for its theme the hacking of the British Library information systems, and the suppression of information.. and recently the British Library faced the most serious cyberattack of its history, with its systems still out of action...)

It is also worth mentioning Ed Baxter's contribution to the Radio Art Zone book - 'Rearranging the Furniture' - which traces the underlying animus behind radio through its metonymic instances. One such instance is found in the associative clunks, creaks and whirrs of radio sound-effect-making, where Baxter invokes a name I've been researching for many years: Alfred Whitman - a pioneer of radio sound effect design in the 1920s. "Alfred Whitman" was actually a stage-name of sorts, as he considered sound effect design his 'light' work. I was able to present my research on Whitman earlier this year on BBC Radio 4's 'Knock Knock: 200 Years of Sound Effects' (presented by Sarah Angliss, and produced by Michael Umney and Ed Baxter). Although my appearance in the programme is brief, Sarah Angliss and Michael Umney spent the best part of a day in the BBC's archives with me, examining a document I was first told about in 2009: Alfred Whitman's 'Sound Effects and how they may be produced' (1926).

Alfred Whitman's 'Sound Effects' document

I had to think hard to recall how I learnt of this "confidential" document's existence. Its appearance on my radar came about through lengthy correspondence with an eccentric book-dealer, which highlights that the knife-edge of research is so often situated within the secondhand book trade. The document was mentioned to me by Cardiff-based bookman Alan Conchar (aka Dr. Conker) who wrote that he once had a copy, but that it had sold. Tantalising. It was unlikely another copy would surface, as I soon realised that sound effect design in the 1920s was a secretive affair, somewhat in the manner of magicians guarding their tricks, therefore any technical disclosures would've been rather against Whitman's own interests. There can't be many copies in the public domain, and indeed, libraries currently hold no copies. Enduring wonder so often persists in unobtainability's wake. By sheer serendipity, I was asked to be a part of the BBC documentary, and thanks to the efforts of Umney and Sarah Angliss' enthusiasm, a copy of Whitman's typescript was pinpointed at the BBC's archives (albeit lacking its red covers that Alan Conchar had cited). It is hoped that a re-publication of this groundbreaking manual can be arranged at some point. Whitman's sound effect work has a great bearing on modern post-electronic soundmaking: its mechanical rigours pre-figuring the control circuits of modern electronic soundmaking equipment.

Constant heartfelt thanks to all, and to readers - you - reading this rather hurried posting here.

'Asphyxia: The "Idiote", the Library Wifi and the Suppressed Safe'

At 6pm today (Wednesday 10th May) Resonance Extra will begin a regular episodic version of what was originally a single 22-hour radio show commissioned by Radio Art Zone: 'Asphyxia: The "Idiote", the Library Wifi and the Suppressed Safe'.

Late in 2022 I was commissioned by Radio Art Zone to be a part of their epic 100-day radio art project.  Radio Art Zone was conceived by Sarah Washington and Knut Aufermann as a radio station - without any interrupting adverts - relaying massive radio shows internationally, and streaming online.  The length of each 22-hour contribution meant that listeners were plunged deep into sound-worlds, grasping at whatever radiophonic cues were at hand to ascertain contexts, acoustical conditions, geographical locations, themes, or narrative arcs (if any).

I titled my show 'Asphyxia' in anticipation of the suffocating atmosphere that'd likely pervade when smothered by a single person's 22-hours.  Many other Radio Art Zone participants minimised the threat of asphyxia by infusing the oxygen of the outside world - e.g. Chris Weaver (fellow Oscillatorial Binnage member) produced 'Rushy Green Tape Exchange' - 22 hours of cassette diary exchanges with improv artist Adam Bohman, spanning continents in their scope; or more explicitly 'Body Edit Mind' by Milo Thesiger-Meacham saw a vast amount of obscure media found online interspersed with real-life recordings testing the limits of editability.

I confess to not having heard many of the other 22-hour shows in full, and I doubt any listener absorbed my contribution beyond a mere dip.  The new Resonance Extra broadcasts of 'Asphyxia: The "Idiote", the Library Wifi and the Suppressed Safe', commencing today, offer more manageable regular one-hour timeslots.

More properly, 'Asphyxia' refers to the all-too-familiar dynamics that condemn things to obscurity. (Incidentally, I have supplied a text on this theme for an upcoming book published by Radio Art Zone's Sarah and Knut, release date TBC).

The show is described as "a damaged would-be radio documentary exploring the Narnia of restricted access material with its wedded themes of suspicion, gatekeeping, conspiracy, frustration, and the maddening infinite regress that emerges wherever information is suppressed.  It is a journey into the inner turmoil of being forestalled; namely, a condition electronic composer Daphne Oram termed 'mismatched impedance'; - where vocation is thwarted, heralding the onset of emotional disturbance as one's energies are clipped and distorted."

The "Library Wifi" refers to the 'hackable' streams of data passing through The British Library's network, whilst the "Suppressed Safe" is the British Library's restricted access material.  Overshadowing all this is my controversial "work where you like" practice whereby I trespass into workplaces where I've been denied employment to "volunteer" my services to prove my employability. The "Idiote" signifies the person in the street, as opposed to the "Clubman" - the patriarch in-the-know; two terms crystallised in the Edwardian era by paranoid ex-accountant turned amateur etymologist, Marcus Stanley Chambers (aka "Exact Thinker"), who wrote scathingly of uncooperative national institutions withholding (supposedly) secret knowledge on the origin of language.

Marcus S. Chambers' illustration

There is an undercurrent of thwarted research and wasted energies throughout the series. Abused necks - seats of human voice - are given special attention in today's first episode - anatomical points of interest in the work of Marcus S. Chambers, and his anarchist, masonic-secret-exposing counterpart Sydney Hanson (with his DIY printing press). These authors are part of an ongoing research project I'd started as long ago as 2006, but ironically I found no willing outlets to publish anything, leading me to wonder half-heartedly whether there really was a conspiracy of silence around their findings. The present-day obscurity of their work forms a self-fulfilling prophecy about the suppression of knowledge (and opportunity), lending much unease, mystery, and squirms to outmanoeuvre "crank" vibes throughout the show.

If the aforementioned makes any sense at all, it should shed light on the many hindrances and impoverishments that have curtailed my activities of late (and others too, I note - the cost of living is crippling), hence lack of posts here lately.  Yet this in itself is interesting, and it's worthwhile to make a study of the factors at play, identifying solutions, etc., continuing the ongoing theme of 'thwarted histories' on this blog and elsewhere.

William English's 'Perfect Binding: Made in Leicester'

About a year ago, the filmmaker William English asked me, a sound designer, to be graphic designer for a book project he was planning.  This was just one of many lateral decisions taken by William English towards producing a uniquely uncategorisable artefact now available to buy: 'Perfect Binding: Made in Leicester'.  Even though I worked closely with William on this book, I'm unqualified to make definitive remarks on it.  It covers an era and culture I'm not 100% au fait with, and further complications are afforded by William's wilful abstractions.  Nevertheless, some opinions and gossip can be provided here.

The book features large roman numeral chapter numberings, and the use of archaic-looking discretionary ligatures on the typeface (stopping short of using the 18th century long s - ſuch a ſtrange flouriſh might've been a ſtep too far).  These unhip, non-modern quirks are deliberately deployed to subvert the book's subject matter, which superficially revolves around 'mod' culture in 1960s Leicester.  Anyone buying it for 'mod' reasons might be perplexed...  The book is a surreal dreamscape shifting between gritty Leicester vignettes: interviews and reminiscences interspersed with arresting, and sometimes baffling, archival matter.

ResonanceFM's Cafe Oto stall

Over the past few weeks 'Perfect Binding' has been creeping into shops.  It was recently spotted at Cafe Oto's Christmas fair earlier this month, where it sat on Resonance FM's stall, along with rare materials from the personal collection of Resonance's programme controller Dr. Ed Baxter (formerly of the LMC) whose Henry Cow posters and public information cassettes threatened to 'outodd' the oddness of 'Perfect Binding'.  It's important to introduce here the fact that Baxter is known for his Baxterisms.  Baxterisms are poetic emissions that paradoxically puncture all poetic pretence.  A Baxterism is both a verbal wrecking ball and a verbal building contractor...  Often contrarian, sometimes maybe temporarily devastating, Baxter had offered a satisfying one-word Baxterism for the title of William English's book: Omphalosophy.  At its production stage, this was earmarked to be its title.  Omphalos is Greek for "navel", and Leicestershire is indeed the centremost county of England; its geographical navel.  (The Ordnance Survey declared a point in Fenny Drayton, a village 15 miles from Leicester, to be England's true centre - a distinctly unexciting fact).  Omphalosophy also signifies navel gazing: a morbidly self-referential state of indulgence that pervades all self-published work to some degree (the blog you're reading now included).  William and I found Omphalsosophy to be a suitably profound and subtly self-mocking title for this work about Leicester-as-a-state-of-mind.  Unfortunately, I found that Omphalosophy had already been used for a book title over sixty years ago.  As newly-formed bands often despair with increasing regularity: "why are all the best names already taken?"

Diagrams from 'Omphalosophy' (c.1953)

'Omphalosophy...' (1953)

'Omphalosophy and Worse Verse: An Inquiry into the Inner (and Outer) Significance of the Belly Button' was published in Iowa, USA, c.1953, coincidentally by another William - a Dr. William Bennett Bean.  It was a slim poetry booklet, with curious illustrations.  One of Dr. Bean's poems discouraged William from using 'Omphalosophy' as a title: a poem called 'Amazonia: USA' presented as a "litany on the decline of the male in our growing matriarchy, written after a sullen view of insurance statistics and newspapers".  Dr. Bean was stubbornly non-progressive on gender matters: "And what I read does most alarm me / A soldier boy who left our army / Between new hormones and the knife / Is now a girl and may be wife", and so on...  Despite its curiosity, we didn't want to be associated with dusty old transphobia, especially as the first interviewee in William English's book is the trans artist Victoria Ashley who had transitioned from Jim Mellors in the 1990s.  But that's not to say that Ms. Ashley herself is any exemplar of progressiveness... Indeed, she's something of a sourpuss in William's interview, moaning that "women are such a scruffy load of bags today, girls going out with just tights on, showing their genitals and fat arses... oh, it really is disgusting."  Nevertheless...

All characters in William's book, in fact, tend to exhibit this individualistic bite - a 'pulling apart' from other people, sometimes to self-destructive extremes (the book suggests this is a peculiarly male trait).  These volatile qualities led William to arrive at the title 'Perfect Binding' - a glue-based form of bookbinding in which 'perfect' is a misleading overstatement, as pages are liable to break apart with regular use.  Similarly, the personalities in the book jostle to disbind themselves from each other, perhaps in an attempt to escape Leicester itself(?).  'Perfect Binding' is actually published as a sewn binding.  Figures forcibly stitched together include some renowned characters such as William's film photographer brother Jack English, co-founder of the BOY boutique Stephane Raynor, and fashion photographer David Parkinson who died young.  But then there are the less-extroverted figures who selflessly and perseveringly sought to animate Leicester's cultural landscape (and who sometimes met with resistance), such as Peter Josephs who set up the Chameleon coffee bar on King Street, and Roger Brian De L’Troath whose short-lived 'Crescent' publication was Leicester's earliest arts magazine.  Beyond this, 'Perfect Binding' documents other figures of such obscurity that they approach the quality of 'thwarted histories': their stories are virtually unknown.  Familiar Leicester names like Colin Wilson or Joe Orton are mere footnotes here.

'Jelly' in 'Perfect Binding'

Leicester clearly isn't the most glamorous location, but it has recently received some attention elsewhere by author Shaun Knapp, notably 'Mods: Two City Connection' (2019).  Whereas Knapp provides a fairly straightforward history, William English's 'Perfect Binding' is proof of lived history's irreconcilable untidiness, as well as the multi-dimensionality of primary source material.  Everyone constructs their own reality; how can this be documented effectively?  For instance, 'Perfect Binding' devotes a whole chapter to the contested origins of a mysterious red suede jacket, worn by Leicester "face" and proto-Mod John "Jelly" Nixon at a time when such sartorial nonconformity might trigger public convulsions.  William English's group interview*, recorded in 2004, with Nixon, Stephane Raynor, and fashionable rogue Bob Hughes sheds no light on the matter, throwing up hazy, conflicting testimony.  The red suede jacket is symbolic of what is uncapturable by historians (but which is potentially explorable by artists!).

We are all inextricably tied to our formative cultural memories, and the 1960s contains William's.  I grew up in the 1990s, an era that holds a certain fascination for me - the ideals of modems, cyberspace and email.  Sometimes I feel that a form of investigative time travel is possible by a mixture of meditation and scrutiny upon archival footage of 1990s TV advert breaks, continuity announcements, or within CD-ROM magazine coverdisk directories, or in gunk plucked out from inside a rollerball-based computer mouse...  it is almost as if by tilting the artefacts slightly - metaphysically speaking - light can be shone down the memory tunnels to illuminate the past from a different, fresher angle, thereby exposing history's complex webbing.  This, I think, is what William's 'Perfect Binding' is getting at.  It's a fresh primary source nugget, preserving all the dimensions of raw absurdity, natural poetry and factual overlap that characterise real life's ongoing historical continua.

William English researching

As well as sifting his archive, over the years William has been leafing through Leicester's local newspapers questing after what I presume to be that aforementioned metaphysical memory 'tilt' ('Perfect Binding' is the result of over a decade of interviews and contemplation).  William ceased researching any newspapers published beyond 1965, as his focus was on the cultural metamorphoses within the first half of that decade.  I, meanwhile, continued casually perusing for graphical inspiration.  This led to the discovery of what would later become the rear cover of 'Perfect Binding' - an extraordinary uncredited long-exposure photograph from the Leicester Mercury of September 5th 1969.  Titled "Picture 'painted' by Leicester’s bumpy roads," it was intended to highlight the issue of Leicester's poor road conditions.  Its creator is as yet unknown.  To end this blog-post, I quote the full caption for it below, as it pits the mundane against the the surreal, with a mildly snooty sardonic thrust... perhaps these are the special ingredients for a 'Leicesterism'?

Rear and front covers for William English's 'Perfect Binding'

"No, it's not another puzzle pic, but a brand new art form which we are calling 'car camera doodling'.  The white-on-black scrawligig was produced by a car passenger holding a camera on a half-minute time exposure to the windscreen of the moving car along Leicester's London Road.  The varying squiggle design was made by lights of other cars ahead through a camera shuddering itself under impact of Leicester's bumpy roads.  The result: A careless, surrealistic picture in the night.  Painted, it would probably fetch a fortune in the trendy art world." (Leicester Mercury, 5/9/69)

* Some of the interviews contained in 'Perfect Binding' were originally partly aired on William English's long-running radio series Wavelength on Resonance 104.4FM.

'Perfect Binding: Made in Leicester' is out now.