Since commencing a project of collecting sounds I find myself listening, hearing, opening my headhole to the endless luxury of silences and sounds. This newly-revived awareness re-opened my consciousness to the visceral experience of sound’s physical matter, and to the expansive presence of silence in our lives. Walking through midtown it baffles me, the silence. One thinks of New York City as noisy but when the broader ocean of ephemeral and non-temporal sounds flood the mind then the noises of car horns and obscenity-spewing bicyclists are but puny slivers of flotsam.
Silence, I think, is the umbrella under which sound flows, and its firmament.
Can you imagine existence without sound? Can you? Imagine being alive without vibrations, living in complete and unopened silence. Not even a vacuum, or a void, for those states suggest that sound exists but is absent. No, imagine that sound and vibration absolutely do not exist. To me this is death which transcends human mortality. To me this is nothing.
The sounds of a society, constantly hurtling into oblivion, are wholly unrecoverable. Sound performs on the mercurial stage of the human mind, a surface of randomness in discernment, making the experience of sound wholly irreproducible.
As a college sprig my chosen career path was radio, and to that end I pursued several opportunities after graduation. I tried for jobs in Tampa, where I grew up, but I expected to move just about anywhere in the world for to get an entry-level job as an announcer or programmer. The most memorable adventure was at KTPB Classical Radio in Kilgore, Texas, a brand new station staffed by radio veterans of great experience. I traveled by Greyhound to East Texas and heartily confronted the most grueling series of interviews ever, save for a day-long interview by a magazine writer who came here and sat on the couch while I sat on this very spot to talk about payphones and randomness. That article was never published. I doubt it was ever even written, and that day, along with the full day spent getting my picture taken at a payphone under the Brooklyn Bridge, was wasted.
But I digress.
All those efforts at finding work in radio failed, resulting in a years-long series of rejections (albeit usually encouraging rejections). Later attempts in 2002 to find any kind of job in radio also failed. If success is measured in popularity then the only real success I had in radio was when I set up an Internet-only classical piano music station, which stayed on line for about a year. It did well, became popular, and as a result I could afford neither the time nor the money to maintain it. I do not miss it, but with that little bit of accomplishment I decided to look once again for real-world radio jobs. When my application for a volunteer spot at a regional freeform station was completely ignored (not even rejected, just ignored — the ultimate disdain!) I interpreted that as a signal to either abandon the endeavor altogether or try a different direction.
I pursued broadcast radio mostly out of habit and some nostalgia — I greatly enjoyed my years in college radio, and my radio days there are among the few positive memories I have from my generally forgettable (or is it forcibly forgotten?) 4 years of college.
Alas, contemplating the horizon of a life spent reporting to a broadcast studio with playlists and talking points regarding music or current events strikes me now as entirely out of character for me. It is an honorable path, that of the radio personality, and I rely on these actors virtually every day to amuse, inform, and irritate. My heroes in that realm (and somewhat outside that realm) include Joe Frank, Danny Stiles, the Apology Project, and preachers Gene Scott and Gary Beeler. But the world of commercial broadcast radio, almost maniacally artificial, would have chewed me up and spit me out in no time. The very basis of commercial broadcasting units — divisible buckets of time into which programming is poured — is itself a conspiracy of superficial guidance. As I have re-visited my interest in radio I find that it never really was in radio broadcasting but in radiophony, telephone art, and a spaceless sound platform where I can be invisible — just like I always wanted, and just like I have always imagined myself.
A hazard of this endeavor comes from a temptation toward the metaphysical. I am not duly tempted toward phantasm, but the literature on the subject of radiophony lurches into that and other abysses. Sound is invisible (though its effects are not) and thus it occupies a space shared with certain faith-based entities. I think the temptation to associate radiophony with spiritual matters is at least understandable, but usually laughable. You will not find me stepping into an orgone accumulator (Wilhelm Reich) or claiming to hear whizz, gibber, jabber, frr, frrr, wooawooawoooon, gog, or magog, rise out of the air (Rabelais, Fourth book of Pantagruel). You may, however, find me listening for the din of a music that rises from the audio detritus and sounds among us.
I don’t know where this is headed, but it is good and enriching fun.
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I think we could all use some quality time in an Orgone Accumulator, don’t you? To better prepare us for Courstesan Jumping (though I’m not sure if we jump on the courtesans, or ride them over jumps, a la the steeplechase). Either way, we can only benefit from the pure energy of the accumulator.
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