THANATOPHONICS From White Noise to Forensic Radio Manuel Cirauqui T he gesture of manually tuning a transistor has taken on the inevitable taste of nostalgic reenactment. In times of customized listening and interferencephobia, the transistor behaves like a living fossil, a piece of talking scrap, a sort of semi-dead mollusk. But quite probably this monster-like appearance will spare it from extinction. As for many other historicized inventions, survival implies entering into the slower market of selected fetishism, an inversion of technological values. Perhaps the old transistor likes becoming a perverse toy, as a return to a certain idea of itself, archaic and inexhaustible, finally detached from the urge of technical efficiency. A noise provider, distortion-friendly, which always remains one step ahead of the news. In the relatively late date of 1993, radio-playwright and theorist Gregory Whitehead began one of his manifestos with the following account: From my earliest radio experience listening to a small transistor throb beneath my pillow in the dead of night, I have been struck by radio’s profoundly split identity. Into one ear plays the Happy Folk Band of RADIO UTOPIA, brainwaves and radiowaves mixed into a grand electromagnetic community. . . . Whilst into the other ear, a different band marches on, the Trigger Finger Crash Band of RADIO THANATOS, with its twisted carnage of countless broadcast aircraft rattling with great gusto, straight into oblivion.1 The idea of a “schizophonic” radio is inseparable from a certain technical context where so-called white noise,2 hiss, interference, and apophenic distortion neighbor clear spots of sound transparency and univocal broadcasting. The leisurely hand on the dial is responsible for the subtle oscillation between a place and a non-place, open and encrypted soundscapes, recognition and phantasm. In any case, noise and clarity don’t exactly oppose since both entail contact, be it literal or perverse. We could even think that the leitmotiv of radio art has recurrently been the mutual contamination of these categories, according to an idea of spectrality, facelessness, and topological mystification that pervades the entire medium. 20  PAJ 104 (2013), pp. 20–25. doi:10.1162/PAJJ_a_00143 © 2013 Manuel Cirauqui An academic legend still claims that the first wireless communication took place between two Mediterranean capes, over the same sea where the Sirens had already been throwing their deadly pre-radiophonic howls for ages, and where, from that moment on, a new form of electromagnetic fog took form. Historical records for radio broadcasting insist on focusing exclusively on the emitter’s side, which is the safe one: a history of wireless communication made from the listening angle should go further back than 1890, rooting itself into that of telepathy and spiritualism. For, the listener prevails, and the use of the device is the device. Although the crystal set was invented in 1901 by Jagadish Chandra Bose (who used a galena stone connected to a circuit as a receiver for Morse signals), we may suppose that only during World War I the practice of radio listening developed as we know it: a blind scanning of layers in search of voices. Only in 1927 did the observation of long-range propagation lead radio technicians to identify a phenomenon that was later described as “ionospheric ducting”: a scrap of radio broadcasting, or a conversation from some walkie-talkie bridge, might travel thousands of miles through the electronic “ducts” that randomly form in the ionosphere. A child messing around with his five-dollar Hong Kong-made transistor in Kuala Lumpur might stumble upon a conversation between cops in the Netherlands, as much as a radio amateur in Greece would be able to tune into an Egyptian number station that, perhaps, no longer exists. And this is the point that we would rather emphasize: an abolition of time has to be added to the abolition of distance that radio operates. It is a topological jamming as much as a chronological one, an abolition by accumulation as much as it is by corruption. In all cases, one plus one (plus one plus one and so forth) is asymptotically equal to zero. Not knowing at all where this voice is and whether or not it comes from the world of the living is quite different and much more significant than listening to a voice on radio. “Finally, my strengthening suspicion is that the life of radio is in fact an afterlife, that the cave is most vibrant when the air is most dead.”3 Maybe the foreclusion of noise, the progressive elimination of interfering or parasitic elements from radio broadcasting (and from the soundscape in general), is but an attempt to neutralize its inscription within a vast negative geography. Purging the “useless” residues of the medium accounts for a purely semantic idea of transmission, and it matches the paranoid agenda of a politics against intruders. The antagonism between the continuous broadcasting band and pre-programmed tuning systems is analogous to that of smooth and striated spaces in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus — more spectrality implying more smoothness. While manual tuning shows the vicinity of zones and layers of noise, voice and hiss from various sources, automatized tuning sets a security fence between the networks of identified radiophony and the wastelands of vacant noise. Thus the FM looks more and more like a mall, whereas the AM resembles a partially unoccupied Eastern-European suburb and the LW an abandoned territory where the radio amateur ends up assuming the properties of a stalker. Only by manipulating a crystal set can we access the raw radio experience and explore, “haptically,” the CIRAUQUI / Thanatophonics  21 experience of tuning. A crystal set doesn’t need a battery since it takes the energy directly from the electromagnetic waves in the air, that is, from the same source as sound. The encounter of the wire with the galena stone is translated into an intense irregular buzz, and it is only by a meticulous examination of the mineral that the operator ends up finding some intelligible sounds mixed with a loud pulsation. The question “Where?” has to be asked, therefore, to the stone. Attila von Szalay’s mind operated just as a galena stone when, by the end of the 1950s, he did the first experiments in a site-specific research of voices from the beyond, using a tape recorder and a radio set wired to his body’s “psychic antenna.” A few years later, as it is well known, Friedrich Jürgenson and Konstantin Raudive undertook a series of experiments in different European locations, leading Raudive to coin the term Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP), and eventually to the publication of the book Breakthrough in 1971. Academic physician Ernst Senkowski developed a parallel research during the same period, using the term Instrumental Transcommunication (ITC) to refer to the same kind of experiences. All of these researchers took radio as a medium (a better word could be “prosthesis”) to establish contact with the dead. Their experiments showed that the more the area of sound scanning was reduced, the better the results. Jürgenson obtained interesting materials by recording the recorder’s noise and then developing the band, in a process comparable to the one Brian de Palma depicts in his 1981 film Blow-out (itself being a sound variation on Antonioni’s Blow-up theme). Raudive’s technique was also based on the autopsy of recorded tapes, digging into and filtering and slowing down the noises until a voice, a semiotic substratum, was almost alchemically distilled from an apparently asemic material (noise). In his text “The New King of Pop: Dr. Konstantin Raudive,”4 artist Mike Kelley proposed an aesthetic reading of Raudive’s EVP taken as both the result of early experiments in ambient music and an expression of a “regressive” poetic. In his essay, which is a foreword to a multimedia project entitled Esprits de Paris, made in collaboration with Robin Rimbaud (a.k.a. Scanner), Kelley echoes an interesting mythological gossip — according to which the surviving intelligence of the dead is linguistically degraded, inclined to, say, dadaistic glossolalia. Kelley does not take a definitive position concerning the ontological status of the Raudive voices, and assumes that they might be produced by “energetic residues” as much as audio hallucinations. Commenting on William S. Burroughs’s lecture on EVP, “It Belongs to the Cucumbers” (1976), Kelley defends a pseudo-materialistic interpretation of the psychic voice experience and its cultural relevance, especially in regard to the genealogy of techno music. His project with Scanner started with a number of recordings in significant posthumous Parisian locations, such as the famous Grotte des Cascades in Buttes-Chaumont Park and the house where Isidore Ducasse died. Another notable example is the grave of spiritualist researcher Charles Cros (1842–1888), who was better known for his investigations on early color photography than for his extravagant attempts to communicate with other planets by means of a giant mirror (which, of course, he never got to build). 22  PAJ 104 Treated and rearranged as ambient drones, Scanner and Kelley’s recordings were superimposed on video images of crowds dancing in techno clubs, and presented as a video installation in the Sonic Process show at MACBA (Barcelona) and Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris) in 2002. On this occasion, Kelley stated: “I want to do a concert in which the tapes are mixed live as they would be in a dance club, with mediums presented as front figures in the manner of pop singers.”5 The entire project was based on the idea that Raudive was the first to use white noise as an object of research in itself, inventing a specific listening technology for sound void. According to Kelley, the treatment of voice samples gathered by Raudive on a 7” record that accompanied the book Breakthrough, foreshadowed the repetitive pathos of future techno and ambient music. Despite the fact that Mike Kelley’s text, as an “academic cut-up” with randomly ordered, “easily digestible” chunks, contains a tacit homage to Burroughs, his reading might seem a little reductive. For Burroughs, who delivered his lecture at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (Naropa Institute, Boulder, Colorado) in the summer of 1976, dealing with Raudive’s voices was less about operating a critical disenchantment than opening the psychphonic field to other uses/narratives than the purely spiritualistic. Every recorded source that is subjected to a specific sound treatment, be it slowdown, speedup or overlap, is apt to produce samples of ghostly speech. But the question is — why has the spiritualist narrative culturally overpowered the poetic one? As soon as you start experimenting . . . you will get new words that were not in the original recordings. . . . Words and voices that are quite definitely and clearly recognizable by a consensus of listeners. I have gotten words and voices from barking dogs. No doubt one could do much better with dolphins. . . . In fact, almost every sound that is not too uniform may produce words.6 After outlining a brief genealogy of the tape cut-up procedure, Burroughs explains its divinatory applications, trying to demystify another aspect of the Raudive voices, that were supposedly capable of predicting future events or solving criminological enigmas. Besides, the cut-up offers the advantage of working efficiently with any kind of recording, needing no other equipment than a reel-to-reel recorder and no more methodology than random cut. How random is random? We know so much that we don’t consciously know that we know, and perhaps . . . the operator on some level knew just where he was cutting in. . . . While you are doing the tape, on some level you know where your words are.7 In other words, the poetic and the divinatory functions of the cut-up exist on the same level, which is that of an unconscious re-elaboration of meaning by the operator. And this is how, as Burroughs himself had pointed out the same year, “when you cut into the present, the future leaks out.”8 CIRAUQUI / Thanatophonics  23 The question is, once again, how and where does the pattern recognition begin. The cut-up could appear as a technique of infinite audio matrixing. Quite curiously, a recent application of cut-up procedures appeared in the field of contemporary spiritualist research. In 2002, EVP investigator Frank Sumption invented a device for the composition (rather than the search) of messages from the beyond, based on the indiscriminate sweeping of AM and FM bands. The so-called Frank’s Box was the first of a number of “ghost boxes” that were launched into the market over the last decade. Among the most popular are the MiniBox, developed by Ron Ricketts, and the Radio Hack Shack, also known as Mike’s Box, yet both are essentially inspired by Sumption’s. All are designed to make radio speak the language of spirits, replacing Raudive’s sound excavation process with the aleatory composition of messages out of fragments of mundane voices. Through radio sweep, the entire broadcasting band becomes a keyboard upon which a psychic entity types its precarious phrases. The dead build up their speech an-atomically, pasting pieces of the living’s voices like a mosaic. In spite of the fact that each sweep is obviously open to a multiplicity of disparate recognitions, the initiated users note that the machine will specifically address you in a mediumistic manner. Thus Ron Ricketts, in his MiniBox Operations Guide, points out that “turning on the unit without asking questions will only yield noise, although after a while the MiniBox will call your name, or nickname, like it’s trying to get your attention. This is normal, so don’t be alarmed or frightened. This indicates that someone or something wants to communicate.” The MiniBox “will become attuned to you after a few sessions, so tuning will become easier very quickly. . . . Using the MiniBox is much more like playing a musical instrument than operating a piece of electronic gear.”9 The most characteristic feature of all ghost boxes is, however, their functionality as a spirit medium: they operate on the principle of a two-way radio that the operator can question (like a Ouija board) but through which the spirits respond using a mass of composite language as a prosthesis, in a process similar to concrete poetry. We may call it “psychic lettrism.” In all the recordings of these radio experiments, we hear the operator formulating a question and then the punctuation of three or four phonemes amidst the scattered sentences and the raps. In one of the most baffling examples of these dialogues provided (along with a sound file) by the ghost box makers, the operator asks: “Would you please come forth and speak through the box?” and, some seconds after, a female voice seems to rise: “Yes,” plus a male one: “Yes.” Then, the operator insists: “Yes?” And a male voice is heard: “Right.” The operator: “Who’s there?” and then a muffled: “I am.” He says, “Come again, over — can you repeat that?” And the male voice: “I am. I am the one.” Then, “You are? What’s your name?” and quickly the name: “Roger,” followed by “Gino,” can be heard. This brings us back to schizophonics. In another experiment, the operator’s question: “Is spirit rescue the goal?” gets a stifled reply: “We missed you. It’s very important . . . very important. Yes.” 24  PAJ 104 Reading all of these testimonies, some words of Bertolt Brecht come inevitably to mind. In a text entitled “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication,” published in July 1932, Brecht declared his dissatisfaction regarding the listener’s confinement on one side of the broadcasting: “The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be, if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him.”10 Exactly what was Brecht imagining? Maybe a radio you can talk or shout to while you listen to the news or switch randomly from station to station? Maybe — a ghost box. NOTES 1. Gregory Whitehead, “Shake, Rattle and Roll. A Theater of Operations for the Body in Pieces,” Audio Text (Fall 1994): 33. 2. The term “white noise” is not completely correct since, as Dr. Ernst Senkowski once pointed out, all technical units have a finite bandwidth. 3. Gregory Whitehead, “Who’s there?: Notes on the Materiality of Radio,” Art & Text 31 (December–February 1989): 11. 4. Mike Kelley, “An Academic Cut-Up, in Easily Digestible Paragraph-Sized Chunks, Or, THE NEW KING OF POP: DR. KONSTANTIN RAUDIVE,” 2001, accessed August 2012, http://www.mikekelley.com/academicut.html. 5. Ibid. 6. William S. Burroughs, “It Belongs to the Cucumbers,” in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1993), 53. 7. Ibid. 8. William S. Burroughs, “Origin and Theory of the Cut-Up Technique,” recording of a conference presentation given at Naropa Institute, Boulder, CO, April 1976. Included in Break Through in the Grey Room, Sub Rosa Records, 1992. 9. Ron Ricketts, “MiniBox Classic Operations Guide,” Paranormal Systems, 2007, accessed May 2011, http://www.paranormalsystems.com/documentation.html. 10. Bertolt Brecht, “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication” (1932) in John Willett ed., Brecht on Theatre (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964): 51–53. MANUEL CIRAUQUI is an art writer and curator. A visiting lecturer at various universities and art institutions in recent years, he is also a regular contributor to critical art journals such as Bomb, Frieze (UK), 20/27 (France) and Kaleidoscope (Italy), among others. He currently holds the Curatorial Fellowship at Dia Art Foundation, New York, and is completing a collection of essays on radio and art, entitled Radio Marginalia. CIRAUQUI / Thanatophonics  25