Tetherd Cow Ahead

Try this (you will need about ten uninterrupted minutes):

Tune your tv to a channel that is just static. Make sure it’s not close to any actual transmission – it should be pure static. Turn the volume up to a comfortable level, not too loud. Sit close enough to the screen that it fills up most of your view. Now just watch attentively. In a few minutes you will start to see things. Shapes, movements at first, but then, possibly, faces, figures, objects. Soon enough you will hear voices in the static, and perhaps even music.

Go outside and look at the clouds. It doesn’t take long to find a face or an animal.

Hardly a week goes by these days without a tv report about someone finding a figure of The Virgin Mary in a cheese sandwich or an image of Mother Theresa in a cinnamon bun.

It’s plain to me what’s going on here – we see or hear a fuzzy enough data cloud and our brains leap in and impose some order on it. I imagine that once long ago when we were all living in the long grasses on the veldt, this capability came in mighty useful in picking out the shape of a hungry predator camouflaged in the shadows.

The whole thing comes unstuck though when there is actually nothing in the data but noise. Given a sufficient motivation, we can find pretty much anything we want in that chaos.

If it’s a case of lying on the grass looking at the clouds and playing ‘Find Elvis’ we pretty much understand it for what it is. Occasionally though, some suggestible people start to believe that it can’t just be randomness and that there is a message there, typically from God or the spirit world, trying to get through to us.

It’s instructive to listen to some EVP recordings without reading what the ‘voices’ are meant to be saying. The CD I mentioned in the last post The Ghost Orchid has a large selection of recordings of alleged spirit communications. The first time I listened to it, I couldn’t hear any sensible words at all in the faint voice-like sounds. Sure, they sound like voices (mostly…), but to my ear, just static-affected grabs of partially tuned radio signals. I could make a stab at what they might be saying, but I wouldn’t wager my house on any of it. Reading the transcriptions, though, like reading the transcriptions in Breakthrough is very instructive. It is clear that most of the content in these messages is coming from the mind of the interpreter rather than anything the voices are ‘saying’. In some cases, what I am being told the voices are saying does not in any way sound to me like what I am hearing.

I like ghost stories, but I don’t believe in ghosts. I think that the fact that large numbers of people are convinced they have been abducted by aliens is fascinating, even though I don’t believe for a moment they have. I find the fin de siecle obsession with Spiritualism endlessly intriguing but I don’t think there is a life after death. I thought the whole ‘Crop Circle’ phenomenon was wonderful, but I didn’t for an instant think that the circles were being made by extraterrestrials. What interests me is not so much these phenomena per se, but the people involved with them.

Human beings are amazing in the breadth of their capacity to be fooled. More than that, we want to be fooled, which is why it is so easy. Ask any magician.

Breakthrough is pretty much unreadable. A small portion of the book is given over to explanations of how the ‘spirit’ voices are captured and to rambling accounts, daft philosophizing and pseudo-scientific jargon about the voices and hypnosis and psychology and acoustics and all manner of other abstruse matters.

The larger part of the book consists of transcripts of what the voices had to say. Here’s the thing that becomes apparent very quickly on reading them: if these really are the spirits of the dead trying to communicate with us, then they have either all gone completely senile, or only the loonies are bothering to keep in contact.

These are some of the things the spirits wanted Raudive to know (the messages were also polylingual, just to add an even more insane dimension to the process):

Nedoma zirgi (Horses don’t think)

Matei sip galva (Mother has a headache)

Golva! Golvas nav! Konstantin, Konstantin, esmu ar tevi vienmer (Head! No head! Konstantin, Konstantin, I am always with you)

Vi koordinati (We are co-ordinated)

Kosta, van, pietiek ar muziku (Kosta, friend, it is sufficient with the music)

Konstantin, streite nicht! (Konstantin, don’t quarrel)

…and on and on and on for hundreds of pages with thousands of other incomprehensible and/or dreary snippets. The voices seem entirely incapable of stringing together more that about a half a dozen words into any semblence of coherence.

Man, and I thought this life was confusing and full of trivia. Heaven comes across as some kind of huge dull and sprawling cocktail party filled with the kind of people you’d step in front of buses to avoid. All on acid.

(If you want to hear some EVP the best all-in-one-place collection I’ve found is a CD called The Ghost Orchid. And if you want to make your own recordings of ghostly voices you can find out how here.)

But I digress. Back to the story. As you will recall, in last week’s episode I had forked out my 7 bucks for a copy of Breakthrough. Now I had some inspirational material for my piece.

What I thought of doing was this: since EVP is a technologically-based phenomenon, I would take the process one step further than plain ol’ magnetic tape and bring it into the computer era (there are now numerous examples of the Dear Departed communicating via computers, but that’s a story for another post, perhaps). My concept was to choose some of the phrases from the transcripts of Raudive’s recordings, and then use the speech function of my Mac to say them out loud. A dismebodied voice speaking the words of disembodied voices. Out of this, I would assemble a soundscape. Nifty, huh?

I typed out about a page of stuff. Then I realized the text was on the wrong computer, so I transferred it across to my work machine… and this is where another bizarre thing happened. Somehow, I have no idea how, the text I had typed out got completely corrupted in the transfer. Not a corrupted file mind you, just a completely corrupted rendering of the text. The document that opened was pages of unintelligible gibberish; fragments of words and bits of punctuation peppered throughout with lots of weird arcane-looking characters that I didn’t even know existed. This had never happened to me before, and it has never happened since.

Then I had a screwy idea: what if I got the computer to speak this stuff?

It was truly eerie. My Mac was speaking in tongues. Long experience has taught me that when an opportunity like this presents itself in the studio, you record it immediately in case something happens and you can’t reproduce it.

So I did. And then the computer crashed. And when it came back up, I could no longer open the text file.

Make of all this what you will. It gave me an interesting track. Like Marie Ann, the Marquise du Deffand once said: “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I am afraid of them…”

Here’s how the piece eventually sounded: Incantation [mp3 file]

[To Be Continued]

This is a necessarily longish story for Joe about how, in spite of the fact that I don’t believe in EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena), it up and bit me on the bum.

EVP is the term given for the discovery on previously recorded magnetic tape of strange indistinct voices that weren’t there when the original recording was made.

This phenomenon was first ‘discovered’ in 1959 by philosopher and birdwatcher Friedrich Jurgenson while he was recording bird sounds in the backyard of his Swedish house, and later brought to greater attention by Latvian author Konstantin Raudive. The voices captured in this way are sometimes referred to as ‘Raudive Voices’.

Now I should say here that both Friedrich Jurgenson and Konstantin Raudive believed that these faint voices that appeared in the etheric hiss of the magnetic tape were nothing less than the spirits of the dead attempting to make contact with us living folk from ‘the other side’. Not only that, Jurgenson and Raudive were of the mind that they could actually communicate with these spirits by asking questions and then leaving pauses in which the voices might answer.

I don’t for a moment believe that’s so, but from the first time I heard of this peculiar phenomenon many years ago I found it deeply intriguing.

I was aware that Konstantin Raudive had written a book about his encounters with the voices (he made something like 70,000 recordings, believe it or not) called Breakthrough, and I had tried for many years to find an edition of it, but that turned out to be easier said than done. Not many copies were printed and it is an obscure work that probably held little interest for most people. These days, like so many arcane works, portions of the text are available on line, but at the time of this tale that wasn’t the case. It was a very rare book. Eventually I gave up the search and more or less forgot about it.

When was developing ideas for my CD Houdini, I wanted to include a piece based on EVP. I wasn’t quite sure exactly how I was going to go about it or what I was going to do, but earlyish one Sunday morning I lay in bed thinking about Breakthrough and how great it would be if I had a copy for inspiration or possibly source material. Then a thought popped into my head with such eerie clarity that I said it out loud: “Goulds!”

This is what a Sydney bookshop guide says about Goulds:

A Sydney institution, Goulds stocks mostly secondhand books – piles and piles of them, in dusty disorganised piles spread over two stories. It also has videos, vinyl records, and magazines. There are a pair of friendly twin cats which frequent the place.

Goulds is literally five minutes walk from my house and one of my favourite places in Sydney. It seems plain idiotic to me now that I hadn’t at least tried to find Breakthrough there.

There are few things I like better on a Sunday morning than to wander through the ramshackle aisles of a secondhand bookshop, so I got up, grabbed a coffee and made my way to Goulds. If you didn’t understand it from the description above, I should say that Goulds’ book classification system is eccentric at best and insane otherwise. That’s being charitable. And it’s a huge place. Looking for a particular title in there is not a task taken on lightly, or with more than an infinitesimal hope of success.

Nevertheless, it was worth a try.

This is what happened. In real time. I walked into the ground floor entrance. I thought “Hmmm, now where would the most likely place for such a book be?” I headed up the aisle where I thought my best chance lay, picked a shelf at random, ran my hand along the first three or four books, and pulled out a copy of Breakthrough.

Really.

It cost me $7.

[To Be Continued]

As threatened, more gems from the Innovations catalogue… This one the Portable Plasmaâ„¢ trumpeted thus:

Harness the Power of Lightning

Imagine, a wireless sphere of magical plasma light you could take anywhere!

Yep, it’s something I’ve imagined often: Oh, look at the time. I’d best be off to buy some wainscotting. If only I had a wireless sphere of magical plasma light to take with me!

Portable Plasmaâ„¢ creates a dramatic display of multicoloured light under a hand-blown glass dome.

Surely that’s a mouth-blown glass dome. Or a hand-made glass dome. I’ve heard of things being overblown or fly-blown but hand-blown? What the bejeezus does that mean. These Innovations copywriters are world-class language manglers.

Fascinating to watch, the dome begs to be touched – just watch the bolts of glowing light follow your every move.

Now I’ve seen these plasma thingies, and I think it’s stretching matters just a teeny bit to call the little fluffy flickering tendrils of plasma bolts. A bolt is something that screeches from the sky like an express train on crack and splits telegraph poles in two, whilst simultaneously fracturing your eardrums with a kind of atmosphere-tearing-asunder kind of sound. These little wimpy finger tickling lighting effects are not bolts. There’s a word for that kind of exaggeration. It’s called bullshit.

And while we’re on the topic of exaggeration, is it a bit much to be claiming that with this gadget you’ll be able to harness the power of lightning. I mean this implies, surely, that you’re going to be able to get the awesome power of genuine lightning and do something with it, like strike down the febrile moron with the leaf-blower who lives across the road into a charred smoking mass of barbecue fuel.

Great for parties or gatherings or use it on any shelf as a mesmerising display.

Oh man, I’m really bummed that I don’t get invited to those kinds of parties.

“Hey Daddyo, this new Portable Plasmaâ„¢ is a gas! That Singing Troutâ„¢ that Maynard had at his clambake last week is so squaresville when you put it next to this!”

I also like to imagine the kind of gatherings it might be great for. I bet they involve robes and goat’s blood. Or even more unsettlingly: Tupperware.

Requires 4 “AA” batteries (not included).

And surely, after all the hyperbole, this is where the reality-check kicks in; we’re expected to believe that 4 AA batteries are going to give us the juice to harness the power of lightning.

Excuse my skepticism. Next they’ll be trying to tell us that a Lava Lamp contains real lava.

For your consideration, today a scent map of my tiny house. From front to back:

My bedroom smells of l’Occitane Pepper Rose. It is one of the best incenses I have ever found. It’s a dense dusky rose with smoky peppery undertones that stop it from being cloying. The scent lasts very well and if I burn it in the morning, it tones down through the day into a slightly musky pleasantly dusty after-image. To my immense disappointment, l’Occitane have discontinued it. I have about twenty five cones left.

My study smells very strongly of cardboard from the big piles of boxes that almost completely fill it up. They are the boxes that contain all the stuff I have removed from The Treehouse. Cardboard is an amazing smell. You’ve probably never thought about it, but if you were to close your eyes and I put some under your nose, you could recognize it instantly. Isn’t it incredible that something so bland as cardboard should have its own unique and powerfully nostalgic smell?

My loungeroom has a complex scent that is a combination of a hint of dust, of carboard from the study and cinnamon from a jar of Atomic Fireballs next to the tv. It is a comforting and restful smell. The Atomic Fireballs were given to me as a present by Mike Axxin and Bruce Lacey, the dialogue editors I worked with on The Ring. That was a few years back. It was a couple of pounds of candy. I don’t eat much candy, so it’s lucky it doesn’t go off in a hurry. I figure with that much sugar and the level of scorch in the cinnamon in those things, they may last for millennia. The scent of them is still so strong that if I take the lid off the jar, I can smell them for hours.

My dining room and kitchen smell, at the moment, of basil and garlic since I am just about to make some bruschetta for dinner. A little while ago the dominant aroma was curry spices from last night’s chicken curry. I didn’t grind my own spices, although I sometimes do since, as well as the other advantages of doing so, the smell is just incredible.

My bathroom smells of lavender hand soap and faintly of wet towels. Nothing is very dry, because it is raining outside.

My tiny backyard smells of rain on wet stone, and of murraya, faintly at the moment because the first few flowers are just starting, but as the summer draws on, it will become overpowering almost to the point of intoxicating. It is a smell that has an almost corporeal weight. The combination of wet stone and the murraya is astonishing. I reckon that if I could bottle it, I would be a millionaire.

As we age, the first sense most of us lose is that of smell. I’m trying to take as much notice of mine as I can while I’ve still got it.

For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it is a pity that you use it so little ~ Rachel Carson

Mr David Byrne is still not accepting comments on his blog. I thought I’d just post an update every now and then so we can monitor how long it is before he eventually gets it.

This is a Tetherd Cow Ahead Blogging Service Announcement