Tetherd Cow Ahead

Speaking of seances – oh, we weren’t? Well we are now. Through the magic of YouTube I am able to bring you a clip that I made with some friends for my song ‘Float’ from the Perpetual Ocean CD ‘Houdini‘ (which you can buy in the iTunes shop if you are so inclined).The clip is a little dark for adequate internet viewing, but stick with it. It’s weird enough to be interesting…

It features the incomparable Jamie Leonarder, and the wonderful Robyne Dunn (who also did the vocals on the song). It was directed by Adrian van der Velde and shot and edited by yours truly.

Big thanks to jedimacfan for helping me sort out the @#$%$ technical problems with embedding YouTube vids. A Cow Blessing upon you!

Every year there is a tournament in which countries from Albania to Turkey, from Russia to the United Kingdom, from France to the Ukraine battle for honours of the highest accord. The fight for the prize is seldom pretty. The playoffs last for many months, and supporters display a fanaticism that would test the mettle of fully armed Middle Ages Crusaders.

Countries compete fiecely to have the finals held on their turf, and it is no exaggeration to say that the machinations to secure the prize, including full televisual rights for the subsequent year’s event, would put even Ted Turner to the test.

Yes, I am of course talking about the Eurovision Song Contest.

Every Spring since 1956, countries from all across Europe (including, bizarrely, Israel and Turkey, countries that are by most other international reckoning in the Middle East) have competed in the arena of Song and Extreme Tackiness in order to take home the Eurovision title and the rights for next year’s telecast.

I’ve been a fan of Eurovision for many years since one memorable night at a friend’s house in which I was so overcome by emotion (or was it a fit of hysterical laughter?) that I could not stop the tears that streamed from my eyes. After picking myself up from the floor and pouring my fifteenth glass of Drambuie, the epiphany hit me, and I realised that Eurovision was not an embarrassing parade of badly dressed European pop tragics, but instead, a work of sheer comic genius.

OK. I’m reporting live from the telecast. Norway’s team takes the spotlight. The lead singer, an almost iconic cliché of a Norwegian blonde is supported by a dancing troupe of girls dressed in radioactive white. She warbles away at an instantly forgettable number. What is not forgettable is the dancing violin-wielding chicks who accompany her in the last chorus. Ah yes, once again I am reminded why I watch every year.

Malta is on. The singer is fairly belting it out, relentlessly hanging an exact semitone under the correct pitch. Tell me that someone does that in front of 300 million people by accident!

Germany’s entry Texas Lightning, flanked by illuminated saguerro cacti, delivers an insipid and quite confusingly American piece of country pop that has almost exactly nothing going for it. It even throws up the last resort of the desperate songwriter, a key change in the final verse. I am embarrassed to note that the lead singer (described, surely with irony, as an enchanting virtuoso) was born in Australia.

The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia fronts up with a gorgeous woman with the most beautiful breasts who atonally tells us that “I wanna be with ya, I wanna give it to ya!” She is so energetic that I am very nearly convinced. She wants to give it to me! So what if she can’t hold a tune?

Lithuania scrapes to a new low with a lyric that says “We are the winners, we are the winners, of Eurovision, vote, vote, vote for the winners…” Guess what guys? Bzzzzzz.

Greece’s solo female performer has a lot of hair, and boy does she know how to use it.

The United Kingdom offers up some barely talented Cockney rapper supported by a half a dozen young women dressed as schoolgirls. Oh dear. Did I mention desperation a few sentences back? This bunch obviously remember the former Eurovision success of Russia’s pre-pubescent Tatu. I marvel that this time there is no lesbian tongue-kissing. (Yeah, see what you’ve been missing? Didn’t I tell you?)

Finland’s entry takes the stage. The… er… ‘hard’ rock band Lordi. Oh my oh my. What can I say? Remember the orcs in Lord of the Rings? Imagine them with guitars under a flashing disco lighting rig. Got that? I think the song is called ‘Hard Rock Hallelujah”. The lead singer is wearing demonic red contact lenses (unless that’s his real eyes) and… oh wait… he has an enormous pair of unfurling bat wings. Now there’s something you don’t see every day!

Oh my goodness. The Ukraine’s singer looks like Goldilocks all growed up. She keeps gesturing at her breasts. I have no idea what this means, because, unusually for the entries so far, she appears to be singing in her native tongue. She’s blowing kisses to the audience and her skirt is very short. Wow, if Ms Macedonia doesn’t deliver, I hope Ms Ukraine is up for a drink after the show.

France. Edith Piaf she ain’t. Don’t give up yer day job love.

The final entry swoops in from Armenia. Eeek! More hair action and some B&D Lite sets up an excruciatingly dull pop number that poses no threat to European political stability.

Oh, the thrills, the spills and the big hair!

But there has to be a winner and after the interminable Eurovision voting process, where many millions of viewers phone in their votes to be tallied live in what is a pretty formidable feat of technology, the numbers are stacking up. I had my money on Romania, but what’s this…? It appears that the ersatz Minions of Darkness, the prosthetically virtuosic Lordi seem to have romped in with the big prize.

It’s a shock result for Eurovision. The beautiful girls with the big hair, the short skirts and the amazing breasts have been left in the dust by a bunch of ugly trolls with bad teeth, bloodshot eyes and unintelligible lyrics (and they were singing in English).

More power to ya guys! That’s gonna look really impressive on a Heavy Metal resumé: Lordi: Satanic thrash metal rockers, worshippers of The Dark One, biters of the heads off chickens and winners of the 50th Eurovision Song Contest.

Talk about cred.

Pass me another Drambuie.

My first love.

Marina, Aqua Marina,
What are these strange enchantments that start whenever you’re near? †

Thanks for reminding me Chickie!

†Thanks Earthstation for the music. You guys go buy something from them and assuage my conscience…

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]