Misc. Saturday: Nikola Tesla and 555

Boing Boing has a wonderful collection of links related to Nikola Tesla in celebration of his birthday.

I have finally completed a little 555 noisemaker project. I used an old tea container for the case and the rest mostly from other parts on hand. I had hoped for some older knobs, but these will do for now. I am having trouble getting the LED to light, but otherwise it is working nicely. Below are some pictures and a video.

James Blackshaw: The Glass Bead Game

It is kind of a startling thing to realize that underground music has become a most mercurial creature. Certain signatures used to be apparent across the board, so at least you knew you were listening to something that was created within an unspoken, yet agreed upon hermetic language. But the nature of that language is changing in a such remarkable way with the infusion of choral-like-voices, traditional American finger-picking styles, acoustic drones-- such a those produced with sitar, tambura, and voice, and in many cases, the absence of noise.

Many of these elements have been found in underground music for decades, but there is a peculiar kind of earnestness that recent musicians have brought to their compositions and it has made an enormous impact. There is also an emphasis on the Medieval quality of the acoustic instrument, which has given underground music both an anachronistic quality, but also a forward-looking vision, in the way that steampunk is also about both a romantically realized past and a love of technology.

Some of this music is akin to the early kraut-psych of folks like Popol Vuh insofar as their are vestiges of those early days of when prog was forking out, one branch growing into what would one day be the bombast of arena prog-rock, and the other dropping its seed into what would one day grow into New Age music. The problem with both of these genres is that they relied so heavily on production and dexterity that those more unpredictable and grounded aspects of kraut and early prog were lost.

James Blackshaw's new album The Glass Bead Game is something of a wonder. While all these things can be discerned from his music, it really is wholly original. I could also cite John Fahey, Steve Reich, and other modern composers as being part of his musical trajectory, but there is something much more inventive going on here than just a fusion of influences. What is important is that Blackshaw is showing how music can become not only a vehicle for re-imagining these influences, but also how it can transcend itself and become about something else entirely.

It's not just that underground music has recently been trading in noise and crushing drone for harmony and melody, but that there is something decidedly, dare I say it, spiritual going on. In the case of Blackshaw, it's also remarkable is how mature that vision of. I keep going back to this in almost every other blog post, but it's the difference between the hopeless black morass of certain underground metal and something akin to hope. Maybe art has a responsibility to be more than just a reflection of the world. Maybe art has a responsibility to remind us again how much beauty there still is, or if none can be found, then to bring it to us.

James Blackshaw-- Cross

Wolfe's exemplary literary fiction

There seems to be no better time to declare that the term "science fiction" used to describe a certain kind of literature is no longer viable than with the release of "The Best of Gene Wolfe." Gene Wolfe has long been recognized as one of the finest living science fiction writers, none of his many novels or short stories really can accurately be labeled that. Wolfe himself has suggested the term Science Fantasy for his work, but there is still something oddly contrived about trying to fit an author of such magnitude into any genre box.

Wolfe is probably best known for his work "The Book of the New Sun," a four-part epic that is one of the most exhilarating and challenging things I have ever read. Wolfe loves the unreliable narrator, and most of his fiction relies on the very fact that we can never really trust what we are told, as all experience is filtered through things like pride, desire, and the fickleness of memory. His novels are dense and filled with arcane language, heavy with double meanings.

Wolfe's short fiction, however, is an entirely different animal from his novels... Read More

Psychedelia Without Drugs (or Tears), Part 1

Sometime ago I had asked the question whether or not psychedelic music was a vehicle towards inducing psychedelic states of consciousness or if it was to provide the backdrop to pre-existing altered states. Is one an artifact of the other, or can music open up the possibility for experiencing consciousness expansion sans the chemistry?

In the 1960s music was a reflection of an entire generation's response to not only politics, but to religion, and through this response to religion there was the attempt to change personal and political consciousness through the use of hallucinogens. Other things provided fodder; Eastern mysticism, a little bit of the occult, and an embrace of the natural world. But drugs were the key, and I think we as a culture still do not understand completely how LSD in particular fueled the counterculture's spiritual dimension. (By the time Ram Dass returned from India and brought with him a spiritual path that was no contingent on drugs, that particular map of consciousness had already been drawn.) The music was merely a mirror.

But with the end of the sixties, psychedelic music underwent some significant changes. However it had defined itself previously, it was no longer part of the new spiritual movement, as that movement had become mired in new-ageisms, hard drugs, and, simply put, the growing up of the hippies. Psychedelia became a musical language that could be shaped and trasnformed in a number of ways. From the space rock of Hawkwind to the pop-psych of XTC, the 70s and 80s saw any number of musicians borrowing from a vast catalogue of ideas.

I won't go into the entire history of psychedelic music, but suffice it to say, almost fifty years later, we are living in a golden age of psychedelic music, and while some of it is creeping towards the mainstream, it is remaining a largely underground affair. And interestingly, there is a Renaissance of sorts regarding the use of hallucinogens (more accurately now called entheogens), and it would be easy to suggest that once again psychedelic music is a reflection of a new spiritual movement.

Nevertheless, there is even more experimentation than even was going on in the seventies (although much of it owes almost all its everything to that time), and so there is no one sound that dominates the underground. There may be some often used tropes, but for the most part, the best musicians are taking risks to expand the definition of psychedelia. And most importantly, it's in their music that it seems possible to actually find altered states of consciousness within the act of listening, rather than the music distilling a pre-existing state of mind into a musical form.

Part 2 will offer some specific examples...
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Ulaan Khol: I and II

Much of contemporary music is an encyclopedia of sorts, a text comprising definitions on myriad entries with a consistent voice, at least stylistically if not sometimes ideologically. Encyclopedias tend to take their sources and distill them into easily digestible bits, often with just enough garnish (maps, photographs, charts) to give it the shadow of flavor. Experimental music, however, is a very different kind of encyclopedia. Sometimes its interpretation of the entry is even more like hagiography than an objective presentation, but it has the freedom to bend the definition beyond all recognition until you find yourself having to quickly flip back pages to make sure you remember where you started. This is what makes the listening often so exhilarating.

Ulaan Khol is like A First Encyclopedia of Tlön. Vol. XI. Hlaer to Jangr, the mysterious text in Borges' story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which purports to describe a world that can't exist, except that since there is a encyclopedia about it, it must exist. This tension is what drives the vaguely unsettling, but wonderfully strange, theme of the story. It is also the tension that pulses below the surface of two very beautiful and challenging first releases in a planned trilogy by Steven R. Smith.

To annotate a world, you have to first create one, but some would say you can't create in a vacuum. You need raw material, maybe even a precedent of some sort. Smith is certainly working in a tradition, but there is nothing derivative. Like Tlön, some things are familiar, but they are placed in a context that makes them appear like phantoms. Smith's Ulaan Khol is haunted by something, by some possible creation that moves in and out of the periphery. This is not creation ex nihilo. It's more like the construction of a dream, where what is recognizable is made new and a little bent, a little frayed around the edges. Like static. Or feedback.

Smith has some serious pedigree, having associations with a number of underground outfits including Thuja and Hala Strana. Ulaan Khol is of a heavier sort than his previous incarnations, layers and washes of guitar and percussion. It's not burdened by noise, but rather uses noise as a palette. Because it's underground music of a particular variety there is a tendency to want to attach some esoteric meaning. I wouldn't call it magic, because there is no sense Smith is trying to conjure something, and it's not quite mysticism because there is something too active and participatory. And yet it can't be ritual because there is something a little lonely here. I would prefer to simply call it art.

Ulaan Khol II: Untitled 3

A Field Guide to the Birds of Cambridge and Surroundings

I hope you love birds too.  It is economical. It saves going to heaven.
-Emily Dickinson

Birds are beautiful and graceful creatures. Not only do birds satisfy our aesthetic sense through their handsome plumage and their sweet voice, but they are marvelously adapted to their respective fields of activity.
-Red Book of Birds of America: Illustrated in Color, 1951.

From the corner of Oxford and Beacon Streets to the edge of Harvard Yard, this highly populated and congested area is home to a fair number of birds. Most are quite common, such as the pigeon, starling, crow and blue jay. But with patience and a keen eye, it's easy to spot some surprises, such as grackles, terns, and red-tailed hawks. I have, for the purposes of this guide, extended the area to include the Anderson Bridge that crosses the Charles River, as well as some portions north of the city so as to give a more complete picture of the birds of the area.

Before you venture to go bird watching, please take note of the following suggestions. When you think you have spotted an interesting bird, take a deep breath. Then, when you are centered and relaxed, follow it carefully with your eye and try and take note of its color, shape, and size. Listen for its song and begin to attach the sound to the bird so that later when you hear the bird again, its image will come right into your mind. Other times, when you see a bird in the distance, you will immediately hear its voice in your head. In this way, the bird will always be with you and you can bring it into your consciousness whenever the need strikes you, even when you are alone and there are no birds around. But if there is anything you can count on in this world it’s the birds. Wrap your heart in twine and clip it to the feet of birds. They will never let it go. Read more
(originally appeared in American Journal of Print)

Strange and Wonderful Discoveries at Project Gutenberg

The Project Gutenberg online library is a Wunderkammer of books in the public domain available in a number of different formats, some of which include images.

Some recent interesting discoveries:
The Planet Mars and Its Inhabitants, a psychic revelation, in which the author describes the various cities, canals, and moral principles of our red neighbor and explains that "Printed books are used, but mostly for the very young, as information is usually transmitted impressionally."

Electricity for Boys, in which we are given many hands-on experiments because, "A boy does not develop into a philosopher or a scientist through being told he must learn the principles of this teaching, or the fundamentals of that school of reasoning. He will unconsciously imbibe the spirit and the willingness if we but place before him the tools by which he may build even the simple machinery that displays the various electrical manifestations."

Of Natural and Supernatural Things : Also of the first Tincture, Root, and Spirit of Metals and Minerals, how the same are Conceived, Generated, Brought forth, Changed, and Augmented, in which we are taught that "the Magnet and true Iron perform almost a like benefit in Corporal Distempers, having almost one kind of Nature in and with them, as it is with it in the Celestial, spiritual, and Elementary Intellect, between the Body, Soul, and the Chaos, out of which the Soul and Spirit went, the Body at last was found out of the Composition."

Half-hours with the Telescope: Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a Means of Amusement and Instruction, in which we are warned that "The feeling experienced by those who look through a telescope for the first time,—especially if it is directed upon a planet or nebula—is commonly one of disappointment."

Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners: A Complete Sexual Science and a Guide to Purity and Physical Manhood, Advice To Maiden, Wife, And Mother, Love, Courtship, And Marriage, explains that "Dissipated single men, professional libertines, and married men who are immoderate, often pay the penalty of their violations of the laws of nature, by losing their vital power."