Speculative necrophonics or the distribution of the xensible

Given, two stations and a channel. They exchange messages. If the relation succeeds, if it is perfect, optimum, and immediate; it disappears as a relation. If it is there, if it exists, that means that it failed. (…) Perfect, successful, optimum communication no longer includes any mediation. And the canal disappears into immediacy. There would be no spaces of transformation anywhere. There are channels, and thus there must be noise. (Serres, The Parasite)

December 16, 2064

Dear xenaudial,

It was a cargo cult scenario! This box, a 3-CD collection titled Okkulte Stimmen – Mediale Musik: Recordings of Unseen Intelligences 1905–2007 landed on my doorstep like an alien artifact dropped into an unsuspecting culture. In this familiar narrative, increasingly futile attempts at grappling with the anomalous object’s function and meaning end up unraveling social relations directly proportional to their increasing complexification. A slowly ratcheting intoxication such as this consumed me following reception of these archival recordings, while laying waste to conventional history in its smug linearity. I should have been clued in, given that the issuing entity, supposé, had been responsible for some of the most immaculately inscrutable, anachronic missives from the twentieth century: Peter Roehr’s exercises in loopy musicalization avant-la-lettre, sled dog singing as ‘abstract aesthetic experiences’ qua musical ‘compositions’, hyperstitional aud-acities by Michael Snow, among countless others!

Not only do these recordings recast art practice in another light, they make mincemeat out of spatio-temporal orthodoxy. Listen to how Aloisa Schinkenmeier’s syllabic ramble (from the rural hinterlands of Germany) transversally connects with the repetitive divinations of a grave-action at Giza (Tanz der Könige)! Fellow ‘chronoportationist’ George Kubler oft underlined the impossibility of grasping the contours of one’s time without a substantial intensification of molecular scrutiny, locating weak signals of the present pinging into the ether, patiently waiting for boosts into general awareness at some undisclosed point in the future, as per his infamous history-as-circuit model.

I hear you reminding me (again) that recordings are always already occult agents, inducing templexes by reinstantiating past events into present consciousness, unavoidably alienating them in the process. Edison’s interest in the phonograph as a medium for archiving voices of the soon-to-be-dead already foregrounds the necrosonic propensities specific to sound writing. (Remember too how early moving images insinuated themselves quite naturally in the tenebrous folds of midway sideshows.) How quickly we normalize technological extensions such that we become oblivious to their radical priming of our everyday! The artifacts produced at every stage of the process (capture, inscription, transmission) are materially constitutive of the particular reality-assemblages underway, so much so that this collection is practically more instructive about the mètic (cunning) capacities of documentation than occult occurrence. I’m tempted to call this canny incorporation of technological shibboleths the Snow-Paradigm (ratified in the Canadian artist’s 1987 ethnomusicological hoax The Last LP¹) for its abiding susceptibility to the mercurial, distorting mediations of Hermes, the messenger. Wasn’t it James who said that ‘articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion’? (It wouldn’t be the first time the philosopher’s prescient insights had been put to instrumental, manipulative use. Recall the James-Lange model powering Muzak’s stimulus progression!) Indeed, the ‘particular atmosphere and characteristic intensity’ of these recordings can be broken down into a battery of mètic techniques tasked with generating affective current sufficiently robust to conjure the impression of shadowy outsides coming into transitory focus: exacerbation of noise floors and artifacts resulting from the fragility and unreliability of the media substrate (how could mediumistically conveyed messages from eighteenth-dynasty Egypt be anything other than liminally audible?), simulation of incompetent technological handling (amplifying ‘on-the-flyness’ and thus authenticity), the use of repetition to reify a judiciously (and arbitrarily) selected entity into tractable thing-ness (Jürgenson’s Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) recordings exploit the will-to-make-sense entrained by an iterative approach), and the exploitation of presentational formalisms which pre-emptively charge the space in which the emanations are to be received (among other tactics). The issuers make no attempt to clarify the putative signal (even early twenty-first-century audio filters would surely be up to the task) or even provide translations of multilingual emissions, undoubtedly well apprised of the effective capacities of this topology of fakery to successfully condition. Indeed, facticity is rather irrelevant, as underlined by Andreas Fischer and Thomas Knoefel, the set’s editors. Instead, only a heightened hyperstitional consistency (and consistent inconsistency) is required (hyperstition being the making effective of fictional entities), aptly illustrated by the almost impossible breathless intensity of Jack Sutton’s incantatory summoning of dead airmen, cajoled and prodded by the measured stagecraft of his unnamed interlocutor. What matters is that these recordings still induce perceptual and epistemic shifts that resonate long beyond their initial intention, performing Nietzschian transvaluations like all good hoaxes.

Nevertheless, this doesn’t account for the sheer uncanniness of the multiple art–occult confluences at play that liberate unanticipated transtemporal affordances. The occult classification assigned to these recordings effectively occults their purchase in less esoteric currents – note the close proximity of Banta Trance Speech or Pentecostal glossolalia to Dadaist sound poetry (and later circuit uptakes via Steve McCaffery or Claude Gauvreau’s exploréen) and the secret languages of children (have you seen Jean-Pierre Gorin’s Poto and Cabengo?²), or the eerie exchangeability of the 1980 Rufai-tradition document with contemporary minimalist performance (chock-full of spooky lockstep synchronisms), or the easy incorporation of Jürgenson’s shortwave recordings within experimental electro-acoustic composition? (And how peculiar that a broadcast of alleged ‘Ancient Egyptian–Coptic’ music intercepted precisely at 470 MHz AM might as well have been the ethereal support for classic paranormally themed entertainment, replete with synthesized tones and requisite mesmeric glockenspiel?)

These are not entirely comfortable mappings. Perhaps what donates occult intensity most of all is a quicksilver propensity for switching between continua on a dime, category tripping to show up the futile, mercurial nature of the categorical impulse in the first place (reflexively instantiated one presumes in order to forestall the horrors Lovecraft suspected would ensue given the ability to correlate a sufficient volume of information). The way Schinkenmaier’s xenoglossic flux or the glossolalic fruits of ‘language disorders’ captured by Theodor Spoerri tilt into poetic ramble upon cursory cognitive reorientation demonstrates the vulnerability of these documents to détournement. The Banta Trance’s shifts from aphasic saccades to florid recitatives regularly trips the wires of consistency, which naturally pulls the listener more securely in. Contrastingly, the medium's qua vocal impressionists such as Leslie Flint or Rita Goold (or even the thinly vocoderized transmission of ‘the deceased Dr George J. Mueller’ via the SPIRItual COMmunication system) miss the mark in privileging uniformity of voice as if the vagaries of conveyance could simply be abstracted out of the mix. Today’s jaded spectronauts demand more obliquely fashioned qualitates occultae. (As Serres reminds us, if there is a channel, communication has failed.³) Where classical music is concerned, stylistic coherence is already a messy proposition, ripe for hijacking, which lends the examples included here an oddly conservative patina. Perhaps Wynford’s transcription, cruelly downsampling Chopin’s late, chromatically luscious style into basic harmonic structures (as if Schubert was being mistakenly intercepted) fell victim to an over-ambitious etheric noise filter, interposed somewhere between sender and receiver. Noted musical transducer Rosemary Brown (impressed that Chopin ‘is a very quick worker’!) fares better at eking out a postmortem simulacrum from Franz Liszt, though far from registering as ‘disjointed’ and ‘strange’, Grübelei is of a piece with the meandering nebulousness of the Abbé’s late (or premortem, rather) style. (Is creative inertia the price to pay for continuing productivity?)

Art’s xeno-potentialities, its correspondences with an inaccessible outside, can be compellingly gleaned here. The performative failures of Janet (at the crux of the Enfield Poltergeist phenomenon in Voices from Possessed Children) and Leo (re-embodying Caruso), their asymptotic tending towards iridescent immediacy with an alternate reality (im-mediate Iris rather than insidiously warping Hermes) in which even their physiological (vocal) capacities are unimaginably altered, manifest a xenocommunicative imperative – to communicate what cannot be communicated, their efforts all the while remaindering eldritch emanations. (Though Bess Houdini regretfully concedes that ‘spirit communication in any form is impossible’, Edison had already conceptualized a delicate apparatus ‘in the nature of a valve’ – yet to be built – tasked with amplifying xenosignals from the beyond.) Indeed, though Bataille’s horizon of a radically direct experience stripped of all middle terms might appear unattainable, it still enforces a resolutely alien(ating) orientation. (Flint frames the paradox when he states (as Oscar Wilde) that ‘no individual can ever act as an instrument in the true sense’, while his attempts at doing just that pursue their weird peregrinations.)

What’s certain is that this set generously constellates both erstwhile and still volatile modalities of transubstantial engagement. Three cardboard sheaths cloister idiosyncratic assemblages, binding together heterogeneous missives according to inscrutably broad rubrics (whose will-to-coherence summons the intuition of a curation more devious than at first suspected). Trance Speech and ‘Direct Voice’ (the first chapter) spans across a wide continuum of plausibility, prematurely reaching Artaudian paroxysm, a monstrously galvanizing glimpse into the nine-month exorcism of the doomed Anneliese Michel, in whose wake the monologues of Goold, Flint, and Minnie Harrison (channeling ‘Douglas’ with insufficiently machinic speech) appear resolutely humdrum (at least integumentally). Weird detours nevertheless defer the completion of a containable gestalt: the spirit-control Feda (a teenage Indian native girl) joyously piping through Gladys Osborne Leonard (her ventriloquizing redolent of children’s entertainment), Rudi Schneider’s quasi-inhuman hyperventilating ‘trance-breathing’, and the final Houdini séance at Hollywood’s Knickerbocker Hotel in 1936 (among others) are capped off by Erik Jan Hanussen solely fulfilling the promising heading of Precognition, having most notably (perhaps spuriously) predicted the Reichstag fire, a feat which hastened his assassination, though the notes fail to mention the one-time circus performer’s role as theatrical advisor to the Führer himself, further confirming the instability of borders between stagecraft, mass psychology, and xenocommunication.

The second volume aggregates discrepant instances of xenoglossy and glossolalia (the boundaries distinguishing them murky at best), abutting recordings of rituals culled from ethnographic expeditions against shamanic procedures (Kara Ool and Larissa), Crowley(an) incantations, ‘typical’ schizophrenic and paranoid torrents (meticulously titled by Professor Spoerri: ‘ecstatically emotive artificial language in a chronic paranoid, rhythmically structured with combinations of strophically ordered sounds rich in vowels’), the marvelously contagious laughter of medium Betty (undoubtedly skilled at invoking xenojokes), and labile Pentecostal prophesy. The concluding sheath houses instances of Mediale Musik (translated as ‘paranormal’, though the musical numbers, subtracted from the gravitational pull of eccentric shifters, register as little more than faded simulacra – one is left ruminating instead on the intrinsic material–temporal coordinates necessary for a musical conduction to effectively alien-ate), followed by an array of psychokinetic noises and rapping sessions leading us into EVP writ large: enigmatic dispatches ferried by electronic technologies (as opposed to simply being documented by them, though the Snow-Paradigm appreciably scumbles this distinction) running the gamut from quasi-intelligible telegraphic incursions on empty carrier frequencies, vagrant spirit trills, random cut-ins qua psychedelic adjacencies (Burroughs: ‘When you cut into the present, the future leaks out’), warped choirs (I suspect an intrepid musicologist might locate their source in the decidedly less abstruse domain of classical composition) and spectral crank calls. Insofar as receptive devices constitutively incorporate interference as ontological imperative – bringing distant signals into proximity, glitching linear communiqués via aporetic calculi, subjecting the mundane to turbulent contingency – they remain eminently generative avenues of creative transformation, resisting their characterization as supine, mute relays.

I used to think that instances of xenoglossic cryptomnesia – suddenly erupting into an uncharted language you forgot you already knew – were simply a side-effect of time travel and its attendant anachronisms, but it could easily be otherwise, their astonishing effervescence the product instead of a more nebulous collective entity’s uncontrollable, irradiating metastatic leakage. The least one can say is that the exceptional nature of these recordings gains considerable traction in the context of a (now somewhat quaint) belief in the paradigm of the self-contained individual. Freud’s discovery of the death drive leveled another blow to the withering notion of human agency, though it was Jung who made the most provocative leap by suggesting that a significant part of the unconscious resided wholly outside the bounds of the human security system, impersonal, distributed, machinic (insights further exacerbated by cyberheresiarch Nick Land in some of the most speculative philofiction of the hallowed 1990s). I’m talking about a vodun egregor, a group mind.

Today, the advantages of being pervasively penetrated by cybernetic vectors through and through, when what passes as a self is nothing more than a provisional (and perpetually de- and re-composable) pinching together of symptoms, make me nostalgic for these earnest transmutations. (Einer Nielsen’s enigmatically oscillating vocal personae lend credence to a baseline condition of multiple, concurrent inhabitations.) Edison again: ‘There are many indications that we human beings act as a community or ensemble rather than as units’ (though his speculative necrotechnics were predicated on the (intact) survival of individual personalities after their etheric transition). Perhaps, recalling Roger Caillois’ account of psychasthenia as becoming-background, these manifestations of spatio-temporal dislocation (which need not be pathologically valenced) hold the key to exposing protocols of xenocommunication and the distribution of the insensible (indistinct molecularities lacking sufficient momentum to register), though the spiraling machinations of historical time shuffling dispositions in and out of pre-eminence ensures these targets will never stand still for long. By what aesthetic handles, servitors, hyperstitional carriers – no longer bound by the shackles of authorship (and sympathetic to Valéry’s dismissal of chronological history as antiquated fetish) – could this dispersed cognition evolving outside the confines of any individual body be accessed and inflected?

It may be best to heed the advice of the xenoglossically inclined Pentecostal preacher who entreats us not to ‘be in such a hurry’. Indeed, dear xenaudial, my chronoportated doppelgänger, spend the requisite amount of time with this exquisite, lovingly assembled document from your contemporaries to fully absorb its lessons both exo- and eso-teric, so you can be acutely prepared for those kairotic (opportune) moments when access to the portals of subterranean practice, those dim adumbrations of untold promise, will be of vital necessity.

Catalyze!

Xen

Notes on contributor

Marc Couroux is an inframedial artist, pianistic heresiarch, schizophonic magician, teacher (York University, Toronto, Canada, Visual Arts), and author of speculative theory-fictions. His xenopraxis burroughs into uncharted perceptual aporias, transliminal zones in which objects become processes, surfaces yield to sediment, and extended duration pressures conventions beyond intended function. His work has been exhibited and performed internationally and published by Manchester University Press, United Kingdom. He is a founding member of The Occulture (with eldritch Priest and David Cecchetto), a Toronto collective investigating the esoteric imbrications of sound, affect, and hyperstition through (among other constellating ventures) Tuning Speculation: Experimental Aesthetics and the Sonic Imaginary, an ongoing workshop with yearly iterations. Recent talks occurred at the Signal Path workshop (New York, Center for Transformative Media, Parsons, United States), Kingston University (London, United Kingdom), Goldsmiths, University of London, and the Aesthetics After Finitude conference in Sydney, Australia. His hyperstitional doppelgänger was famously conjured in Priest’s Boring Formless Nonsense. He tweets as @xenopraxis.

Marc Couroux
Department of Visual Arts, York University, Toronto, Canada
[email protected]
© 2015 Marc Couroux
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2015.1079981

Notes

1. Snow,The Last LP.

2. Poto and Cabengo, dir. Gorin.

3. Serres, The Parasite.