Futures and Fictions

by Simon O'Sullivan

  Muzak’s goal is to discipline the body against its own naturally occurring bio-rhythms and then choreograph it into new kinetic relations, with the machines that have become their self-regulating partners within the factory. This is a technique reified by the fact that no industrial manufacturing space is left untouched by the assembly line logic of sequencing and repetition. Hence, the emerging industrialised body becomes an anaesthetised note in the overall symphony of production (Lanza 2004: 12). It is here that the first spectre of the industrialised cold body manifests itself in the form of the automaton; and it is Muzak that is used to numb the flesh.

  In the production houses of industry, the ever-shifting terrains of the workers’ emotional and psychological status become objectified as valid subjects of phenomenological study. In the 1920s factory we witness the desire to link up a mass neural network of productivity through the influencing strategies of Muzak; each mind becoming a point of reference for ultimate industrial efficiency. As each worker is simultaneously subjected to the same sonic influence for the same duration, the soundscape attains its status as a systematic field of relations applicable to all who exist within it. Muzak — the sound of the working dead.

  1944: The Ghost Army

  Officially named the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, the Ghost Army consists of around 1,100 personnel — mostly sound engineers, artists, set designers and special effects experts selected from art schools and advertising agencies in New York, Philadelphia and from Hollywood studios in California. Given the breadth and depth of expertise enlisted, it comes as no surprise that a number of the division went on to become acclaimed figures in their fields after the end of WWII. A shortlist of those celebrated cultural producers includes hard-edge and colour field painter Ellsworth Kelly, fashion designer Bill Blass, photographer Art Kane, water-colourist Arthur Singer and actor George Diestel. A suitably divergent range of talents, whose co-operation would be crucial to the Ghost Army’s theatre of sensory-fused operations.

  01. AUDINT – Dead Record Network Card - AUD B55: Audio Architecture. Image courtesy of AUDINT.

  Three separate units comprised the division, each handling a different facet of deception: radio, visual and sonic. The “atmospherics” (created by members of all three units), consisted of personnel impersonation and the spreading of false rumours in French villages, where spies lurked, ready to feedback the misinformation. The Ghost Army’s ultimate remit was to saturate the Nazis with disinformation about the plans, whereabouts and numbers of Allied forces. Duping the enemy into believing that encampments and movements of mass Allied forces were occurring was crucial to the Allied forces’ geographical ascendancy. Fake radio transmissions, duplicitous aural environments, inflatable tanks and planes and camouflage became, in the words of Rick Beyer, their “Weapons of Mass Deception”.

  It is Fall of 1942, just one year after the thirty-one-year-old French composer Olivier Messiaen has premiered his chamber piece Quartet for the End of Time in the prisoner-of-war camp Stalag VIII-A in Görlitz, Germany. Rather than end time, the sonic techniques of Fairbanks, Jr and co re-negotiated the spatial and temporal parameters of existing technologies, to the extent that new recording and transmission methods situated their adversaries’ and the theatre of operations at the edges of perception (the sensory frontier that will be territorialised by the Military-Entertainment complex in the twenty-first century). Mobile sound systems consisting of 250kg speakers, forty-watt amplifiers and gas generators on “sonic cars”, amplify the aural emissions of a phantom division’s presence and movements over a range of fifteen miles. Production wise, an extensive range of recordings is made to convince the Nazis of: intense personnel activity; armoured cars and tanks in transit; bridge-building activities; bulldozers; and the laughter and shouts of buoyant troops. All documented for sensorial disconnect.

  The sounds are captured on large sixteen-inch transcription discs. They reverse the regular playing format, the needle moving from the hole out towards the edge, at 78rpm — a format intended for radio-broadcast usage. Two and three turntable set-ups provide the engineers with the capacity to mix the sound effects together, creating artificial soundscapes that are dropped down onto two miles of (non-skipping) magnetic wire (Battaglia 2013). The resulting thirty-minute mixes each have their own characteristics; an archive of haunted ordnance. The original battle DJs are about to bring their noise to the global collision that is WWII.

  02. AUDINT – Dead Record Network Card – AUD A01: The Ghost Army. Image courtesy of AUDINT.

  1946: The Opening of the Third Ear

  AUDINT carry out waveformed experiments on ex-AEG engineer Eduard Schüller, and accidentally terminate him in the process. After mummifying his prone body in magnetic tape, it turns out he has not passed on and that he is in fact enmeshed in a network of discourses from across the continuum of human language. Ultimately, he becomes aware of his capacity to interface not only with the living but also with those that permeate the thresholds of existence; those analogous to the ultrasonic and infrasonic frequencies that exist at the perceptual boundaries of humankind — the dead and the yet-to-be-born.

  1949: Delusions of the Living Dead

  AUDINT member Walter Slepian crosses the Atlantic and travels to Paris in order to gain access to the contents of Jules Cotard’s notebook that is now owned by a Madame Isobelle Chimay. The rare and little-understood medical document holds the encrypted formulas for seeding Cotard’s Delusion, also known as the Walking Corpse Syndrome,1 into a subject’s bed of cognition. After drugging Madame Chimay with the truth serum amobarbital, Slepian purloins the notebook and takes it back to the AUDINT bunker in Cape May, USA. Upon further examination, Slepian discovers that it is encrypted in an artificial language called la Langue musicale universelle, or Solresol (Sudre 1866), which was created by French composer Jean-François Sudre in 1827. Now AUDINT need to find someone who can decrypt it. After two months of searching they find their man.

  A stack of 7x5 photographs has been couriered to Abraham Sinkov, a cryptanalyst Arnett knew from his Ghost Army days. He is now Chief of the US’s first centralised cryptologic unit, the Communications Security Program, which will be later renamed the National Security Agency. One of Sinkov’s favourite pastimes is solving arcane ciphers and codes, but whilst able to recognise Solresol, Sinkov is not fully conversant with it. He puts feelers out into the crypto-community and after three weeks he has hooked young aspiring steganographer Georgina Rochefort, who is obsessed with the crafted science of hidden messages. The sixty-six mini scores take her the best part of eight days to translate. Abstract in parts, due to the languages it has been shuttled through, the principles of engagement are clear enough that AUDINT are confident they can program the delusion of the walking corpse into the sentient.

  03. AUDINT – Delusions of the Living Dead Card: Jules Cotard Image courtesy of AUDINT.

  1960: The Sound Sweep

  J.G. Ballard writes a short story set in a future where noise is perceived as the greatest single disease-vector of civilisation, resulting in the sonic becoming an obsolete form of pleasure. Our muted protagonist is a boy who vacuums up the spectral residues of urban sounds that are redolent with associations of disorder and chaos, the channels through which demons are excised. Conversely, in the realm of the inaudible, divine power reveals itself; a hushed soundscape where the God of the early Christian cathedrals conveyed its presence through the embrace of infrasound, and where, now, the futuristic masters of technology communicate ultrasonically, in subliminal domains of absence. Once collected from the echo-bin of the city, the sonic detritus is dumped in “a place of strange echoes and festering silences, overhung by a gloomy miasma of a million compacted sounds, it remains remote and haunted, the graveyard of countless private babels” (Ballard 1960: 61).

  1961: Stone Tape Theory

  Proposed by British archaeologist Thomas Charles Lethbridge, the Stone Tape Theory speculates that ghosts and hauntings are in fact mental impress
ions that have been released by living beings under extreme or traumatic circumstances, and subsequently recorded by inanimate materials such as stone. Given that the recordings are considered to be neither spectral nor otherworldly in nature, it means that under the right conditions they can be subsequently replayed and listened to. Here, ghosts are not understood as spirits but as non-interactive recordings — similar to the registration capacities of an audiotape machine that can playback previously recorded events.

  04. AUDINT – Dead Record Network Card – AUD B18: The Stone Tape. Image courtesy of AUDINT.

  1966: Backmasking

  The process involves embedding subliminal transmissions that play backwards on a track that plays forwards, predominantly in musical recordings but also in films (such as Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut) and adverts. Allegations (often made by organisations affiliated to the Christian religion), most commonly against rock bands and their vinyl productions, reveal the full extent of the cultural and social fears about music’s capacity to channel information from perdition. Historically the convergence of Satanism and backmasking can be traced back to English occultist Aleister Crowley. In Magick (Book Four), he proposed that an adept should learn to first think and then speak backwards (1997). This re-engineering of the learning process was to be practiced using a range of techniques, one of which was listening to phonograph records playing in reverse.

  Numerous popular recording artists have been accused of utilising Satanic backmasking techniques, including Pink Floyd, Styx, Cradle of Filth, ELO and Slayer, amongst a long list. The most infamous incident of a defendant alleging that backmasking on a record had inspired their actions occurred during the trial of Charles Manson for the Tate/LaBianca murders in 1969. During judicial proceedings it was proposed that Manson believed an apocalyptic race war would engulf the country and that the Beatles — through songs such as “Helter Skelter” (their 1966 album Revolver also contained backward instrumentation on tracks such as “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “I’m Only Sleeping”) — had embedded hidden messages foretelling such violence. Manson’s delusional response (to these perceived messages) was to record his own prophetic music and to have the “family” carry out the murder of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca and actress Sharon Tate, amongst others, in order to trigger the supposed conflict; daubing the walls of the murder scenes with symbols to make it appear as though the Black Panthers were responsible.

  05. AUDINT – Dead Record Network Card – AUD B38: Charles Manson. Image courtesy of AUDINT.

  This anxious disposition subsequently attributes music — and by extension frequencies — with the potential to manufacture evil deeds, and, more than that, with the power to transfer the somatic and the spiritual to the environs of the underworld itself. In this context, music can be perceived as a phenomenon operating between psychological torment and its physical expression; between the scientifically monitored condition and the unthinkable act; as a force that transgresses the material world of things yet deeply affects and orients actions within it. Thus it is music’s contradictory symbolic index — as religious celebratory expression and as transmission of the devil’s will — that renders waveforms as phenomena to be both feared and revered.

  1967: Wandering Soul

  Throughout the late 1960s period of the Vietnam War, the 6th PsyOp Battalion and the S-5 Section of the 1/27th Wolfhounds of the United States military use a literal interpretation of haunting to induce a sense of angst and anxiety within “enemy” territories. They compose a religiously charged sonic strategy named “Wandering Soul” (also referred to as “Ghost Tape Number 10”). It is part of the “Urban Funk Campaign” — an umbrella term for the operations of sonic psychological warfare (“planned operations to convey selected information […] to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning” [Psywarrior]) — conducted by the US during the conflict.

  After researching Vietnamese religious beliefs and superstitions, PsyOp personnel initiate this audio harassment programme that amplifies ghostly voices to create fear within resistance fighters. Early iterations of the tape are focused on Vietnamese funeral music, but as the studio engineers are given license to stimulate the flight-or-fight reflex, they respond with new content. Initial experiments include sampling and looping the “demonic” portion of The Crazy World of Arthur Brown’s 1968 hit single “Fire”. Realising that this basic method is not particularly effective, they develop multi-layered compositions, working tirelessly to create an archive of sinister and eerie aural textures that are dropped into the phantasmal collage. New samples, such as a tiger’s roar (given that the Viet Cong were regularly attacked by such predators), are mixed in due to their capacity to elicit further misgivings. The montages dispatched from Hueys2 down into the jungle canopy, filling the clammy dense air where Charlie crouched with dread. Audio napalm.

  06. AUDINT – Dead Record Network Card – AUD B63: Wandering Soul Curdler. Image courtesy of AUDINT.

  Blasting frequencies ranging from 500-5000Hz, at an amplitude of 120dB, from helicopter-mounted speaker systems named “People Repellers” or “Curdlers”, the US military transmit their aural payload during the dark hours of the war-torn nights, often provoking hostile fire. Explaining the rationale behind “getting into it” (the deeply rooted psyche of the jungle) on his website, via “Wandering Soul”, SGM Herbert A. Friedman (Ret.) relates that the

  cries and wails were intended to represent souls of the enemy’s dead who had failed to find the peace of a proper burial. The wailing soul cannot be put to rest until this proper burial takes place. The purpose of these sounds was to panic and disrupt the enemy and cause him to flee his position. Helicopters were used to broadcast Vietnamese voices pretending to be from beyond the grave. They called on their ‘descendants’ in the Vietcong to defect, to cease fighting (Friedman).

  From on high, this sonic demarcation is more an audio erasure of the boundary between the living and the dead, rendering the absent as distressingly present. The proposed psychology of this tactic suggests slippage and existential echo. The sonic portals of disquietude at being mortally out of body, place and time elicit conceptions of the “night of the living” and the “day of the dead”, to invert and co-exist in the same location. For the Viet Cong, the airborne sonic virus that is “Wandering Soul” propagates anxiety and apprehension as it makes communicable the oscillating channel of purgatory. Quite literally, it is the sound of “hell on earth”.

  1984: Outsider Trading

  Whereas the crime of insider trading relates to the reception of covert information from within a company to unfairly guide investment gambles, AUDINT’s Nguyễn Văn Phong’s “outsider trading” involves the use of computer systems to decrypt information from spirits and ghosts. Due to their trans-temporal access to the future, they are able to perceive the imminent present retrospectively, and are thereby capable of providing fail-safe forecasts. In the final analysis, what Văn Phong has done is to produce a mathematical algorithm for transcoding the voices of the undead into implementable market data, rendering the phantom economy of Ghost money into tangible assets.

  1993: The Waco Siege

  Holed up in their Mount Carmel compound in Waco, Texas, the Branch Davidian apocalyptic sect are surrounded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), who are trying to lure out the eighty-five members taking refuge in their heavily fortified home. What they are really after, however, is their leader, one Vernon Wayne Howell, also known as David Koresh. The fifty-one-day siege, which begins on 28 February 1993, is legally predicated around the sect’s suspected weapons violations. Initially triggered by a neighbour’s complaint to the local sheriff — of noises that sounded like machine-gun fire — this report sets the tone as the “occult performance of the state of siege” (Virilio 1977: 36) unfolds “as a series of uniquely audio events” (Madsen 2009: 90).

  After a set of interviews on the initial day of the
raid, negotiations between the Davidians and the FBI continue over the telephone. The exchanges between the adversaries remain purely sonic, a dynamic that will be perpetuated by the tactical utilisation of audiotapes, radio programmes, covert listening devices and loudspeaker barrages of music. As Koresh desperately tries to transmit his interpretation of the Seven Seals to the media and the wider public, the FBI are synchronously attempting to implant doubt and scepticism in his followers.

  Losing patience with Koresh, the state responds with “Operation Just Cause” — a psychological warfare technique that includes surrounding the Mount Carmel compound with a boundary-marking sound system. “At all hours of the night and day, the loudspeakers belched forth such curious content as audiotapes of rabbits being killed, chanting Tibetan monks, and Nancy Sinatra singing ‘These Boots Were Made for Walking’” (Shupe and Hadden 1995: 189). By initiating this strategy, the FBI effectively remaps the aural environment of the stand-off by severing the dialogue and opening up a new one-way line with the sect. Disorienting, silencing and depriving the Branch Davidians of sleep, this strategy of sonic attack only stops when the Dalai Lama intervenes and demands that the employment of sacred Buddhist music for martial purposes cease.

  The sparks which fly between the state and the apocalyptic religious sect are flickering precursors of the charnel house that the compound will become; an ambiguous sonic space on the edge of civilisation where symphonies of conflict are (out)cast, fired and tempered by duelling protagonists, who understand each other to represent the living (but soon to be) dead. The blistering noise caused by the all-consuming fire that breaks out and kills the majority of Mount Carmel’s inhabitants scores the final chapter of the siege. All the material and visual evidence of lives once lived in the compound is converted into searing frequencies; the waveforms of the flames becoming the ultimate auricular signature of the crisis; an ashen swansong that is serenaded by the sirens of firetrucks rather than by the trumpets of angels.