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]