Rapt in attention: Drugs and Sound
Douglas Kahn, February 2001

I'm not sure if I remember correctly. I was eight or nine years old, when my interest in innovation in the realm of sound and music was first expressed. It was expressed negatively, because I thought innovation was soon going to come to an end. I was upstairs in my bedroom, supposedly going to sleep; instead I was under the sheets listening to a really cheap (88 cents) transistor radio. It was shaped like a little red rocket, no doubt designed as a pre-pubescent prosthetic. I probably wasn't very ripe for radiophonic revelation. Cocteau's Orpheus makes his way out to the garage to sit in the car and listen to coded messages from Hades on the radio-this was the first underground radio. But even if I had been an exceptionally wise nine-year old, there were no important messages transmitted, in code or otherwise, from the little red rocket.

What I did hear under the sheets lead me to despair the fate of music. It was obvious that the notes wouldn't last, they would soon reach their limit of combinations, and all possible melodies would thereby be exhausted. New songs would cease to appear and the radio dial that relied on newness would then fall silent. It was a despair produced by the general poverty of pop music, channeled through the narrow focus and redundancy of radio programming, as encountered by a very unworldly boy growing up in Bremerton, Washington, a military town whose only redeeming quality was a fire department helmet which read BFD, the adolescent acronym for Big Fucking Deal. Unfortunately, I was too much part of the culture to tune in between stations to listen to the crackle and warbling of the static and heterodyning.

My despair was part of a fatalism shared by my twin brother. A few years later we each received gift certificates for use at a record store. He bought several records, the ones you would expect, the ones he wanted. But he still had money left over so he also purchased an Andy Williams record, Frank Sinatra, I believe, and another one along those lines. Why? I asked him. He said that he couldn't find anymore that he liked, so he bought Andy and the rest to store until later. He assumed that he would like them when he grew up. Why not plan ahead?

My early despair about innovation eventually put me, about twenty-five years later, in an odd position: on the floor of my flat on Page Street in the Lower Haight, rummaging around looking for something new to listen to. I grabbed an unmarked audiocassette on the floor. It was there among my papers, books, clothes, other cassettes, LPs and other smallish movable articles on the floor. Anything smaller than a bread box went directly onto the floor. I thought of my room as a distributed filing cabinet, a kind of conceptual interior decoration (much like this talk). That was the normal state of things. You should have seen it after the big earthquake hit, you know, the World Series earthquake. My room was definitely in an altered state. Here's the quake as greeted from four different rooms at a bar-code convention in San Jose.

<play cassette>

During that quake I was with the French art critic Pierre Restany, who afterwards kept talking about the Big Ass Quake. I thought he had adopted colorful California language. It was odd, he looked like a miniature Santa Claus, what was he doing talking like that? I eventually realized that it was just his accent: big erss-quake. And this is the point that I want to make. You can enjoy the world a whole lot more if you're a bit slow on the uptake. Being a bit slow, a bit deaf, not giving the situation the proper attention, requires you to pay more attention or, rather, a different type of attention where you generate a field of possibilities, an excess much richer and more provocative than any astute perception.

All my bookshelves fell over during that quake, and my room was literally knee-deep in books and papers and recordings. Normally, it was only ankle deep. And among this ankle-depth there were a number of audio cassettes which were unknown to me. My students at San Francisco State Univ. used to give me things to listen to. They were a very hip group of students; they had San Francisco itself to tutor them in the off-hours. One of them had probably given me this cassette, but forgot to label it. Before listening to it, I tested a botanical nutrient given to me by a friend with shares in a lucrative agricultural concern at an undisclosed location in a fertile county in Northern California. It is customary to roll small dried portions of this plant in papers that look like thin white post-it notes. The effects of this plant have been listed as:

Euphoria. Thought magnification all the way to thought animation; formal structures seen on their own terms; aesthetic experiences, personal and sexual experiences, all brought into high relief. Self and other mix and pull apart. Perspective.

I put on my headphones, rolled over and turned up the volume on the cassette player. It was quite incredible. The effect was immediate. I had never heard anything like it. Never.

It was a very tight group of improvisers, so tight they became fluid. They were exploring a new type of spatiality or, more precisely, they were exploring a new way of dealing with an old spatiality: the frontal, planar space of the proscenium stage.

In most music performances, the fact remains repressed that the musicians and audience have simply squared off. Enough of the sound bounces off the walls to give the listeners the impression that they are actually being enveloped by the sound, while in fact they are in a paralyzed face-to-face relation, lock-stitched there in a circulating loop of utterance and audition. It is, in other words, a space configured predominantly by the trajectory of the voice, in which the utterance happens to be musical and gestural.

Auditoriums are designed to balance the clarity of the utterance with some sense of envelopment. An early commentator on room acoustics, a Mr. H. Matthews, said in 1826 that if a room in a church or chapel wasn't designed very well, Echo would seek her revenge on the preacher, whose every word would reflect off every inch of the walls. In such a room, she "mocks him as with ten thousand tongues." This is a room I would like to see, wallpapered with wagging obnoxious tongues, like the arms reaching out for Catherine Deneuve in Roman Polanski's Repulsion. Mocking preachers would be an added bonus.

There are a number of cultures which do not require the stark separation enforced by the proscenium stage. A number of composers during the twentieth century scattered musicians or loudspeakers throughout the auditorium, increased the volume so much that immersion was impressed upon the skin, and worked with acoustics in such a way that sound moves around a space as if independent of all sources-in David Tudor's words, it is as if space itself sings. I once went to an Alvin Lucier concert with a friend who didn't get it-a slowly ascending pure sine wave generator on one side of the stage, an oboe player on the other, interjecting at different points. "What's the big deal?" he asked. I asked him where the sound was, which at that time was rotating throughout the auditorium like a slow-motion tornado. He was transfixed for the rest of the concert. There are plenty of composers making space sing in amazing ways: LaMonte Young, Gordon Monohan, Ron Kuivila, many others.

But the group I was listening to on the cassette were doing something none of these composers have tried; they were taking the planar characteristics of the conventional performance situation, the plane set up by the separation, and they were concentrating on that fact above all else. I still know of no one else doing this.

They moved the sound from the left hand of the stage to the right, like the sweep of reading a sentence, from one instrumentalist to the next, about six of them, by means of a hocket, which is usually used to delineate a melodic line. You might have heard a hocket in pan pipes in an Andean group, where what sounds like one instrument playing a melody is in fact a quick alternation between two instrumentalists. But this hocket was across the breadth of the group, and flowed through the group in waves from trade-off to trade-off to trade-off. Also, it was not just in the service of melody but contained all attributes of music.

Yet, the movement from one musician to the next was more complicated than a hocket, which functions from the segregation of individual notes. Not only would each musician morph effortlessly from one attribute of the music to another, say, from a harmonic to a rhythmic one, they would start doing it before the other musician had finished. It's similar to coarticulation in phonetics, where the formation of one phoneme begins before the preceding one ends, and in that moment the two are related in a complex way, their identities mix and pull apart. So these musicians were trading down the line, not through the segmentation of a hocket, but in the slur of a
diphthong.

Each sweep across the face of the group seemed like a surrogate for a melodic line, yet contained everything, all the functions and attributes of the music collapsing into each musician and intricately carried over with each trade-off. What I'm trying to say is that, at any one point, the individual musicians were playing a mix; they were emulating a mix by picking a line through it, a VERY FAT line that would string together the perfect emblems of an implied totality, all the while styling it in that short duration from the trade-off they received on their right to the trade-off they passed it onto on their left.

The relentless sweeping signaled an almost yogic discipline. The incredible variation never threatened monotony, and the intensity was too great to be meditative. The repetitive sweeping set up a pulse, which at once related to the pace of the trade-offs from one instrumentalist to the next, and to the independent rhythmical elements submerged across the sweep from one moment to next. There were little recursive eddies, mostly at the trade-offs, which would mark time by almost imperceptibly backing up now and then, and these too were taken up in the momentum of the pulse. This pulse had little in common with the those used in some musics-popular and unpopular alike-where they are little more than a mushy metrical backbeat. This was more akin to Chinese pulses where the beating of the artery might be described as the "movement of water sliding over a crack, a man undoing his belt, or someone wishing to wrap something up, but lacking the cloth to go all the way around." (these were mentioned by an incredulous French physician in the 18th century).

There were some things this music didn't do. It didn't dramatically change direction, or settle in at one spot, or exhibit any real lateral dynamic. Although streams do not run uphill, they will settle into pools, plunge over a cliff, fade into other streams or violently take other streams into themselves, and some can even appear to gradually run uphill. Multiple lines have could have joined the sweep and the sweep could have angle out from the proscenium and added other dimensions. These limitations were good, because it meant that this group had plenty of other directions to explore. Having made a huge breakthrough, they had only scratched the surface. That seems to be the true test of artistic innovation.

I'd just like to mention the ability of the individual musicians. It was nothing short of remarkable, to keep so many attributes of the music in mind in the first place, let alone to take them over so completely and at the proper pace from the musician to their right. It was truly an example of how self and other could mix and pull apart. They were obviously musicians of huge technical ability, and had given themselves over to a collective enterprise of creating a new type of music, whereas they could have easily directed their immense talents toward more individual goals.

I wasn't about to argue with the terms of their dedication. I was ecstatic, so much so I glanced at the clock and about twenty minutes had disappeared in what had seemed like just a few minutes. Then I became a bit disconcerted. Although I was learning quite a bit from my students, I still prided myself on knowing what was going on and who was doing what. Why hadn't I at least heard of a group so innovative, so formidable in every respect? At that point in my life, I lived for moments like these, and spent much of my energy trying to hasten them. I spent much of my money, often more than rent, trying to hasten them.

This music was right up there with much earlier never-heard-anything-like-that-before encounters. But it had been awhile. The reputation of such an amazing group should have preceded them by miles, and I was certainly in a position to have heard the first murmurs. Maybe I wasn't in such a position anymore? Maybe I was totally out of the loop? Maybe the instincts for this type of predatory behavior had faded?

But that line of reasoning quickly passed and I was back into the music, that is, until I glanced down at the cassette player on the floor and saw that the volume was turned all the way up, to 11 on the Spinal Tap scale. It was very confusing in my tender state but I soon pieced together that what I had been listening to all along was not some new supergroup, but a tape of a record that had been bulk erased.

The record that had been bulk erased was John Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders in Seattle. Some people would think that the Coltrane/Sanders record was itself an exercise in noise: three sides of the double LP consisted of screaming and wailing. Some ardent fans of Coltrane will not follow him there. I was so ardent that I had an extra cassette copy around, one that found its way to my cheap bulk eraser. The noise that some people heard, the apparent abandon of Coltrane and Sanders, was actually stuck together by a deep-running logic produced by a monumental discipline. Perhaps it was this that survived the destructiveness of bulk erasure? Perhaps only something this strong could withstand the assault? Then again, I never tested this hypothesis. Perhaps anything could withstand the pressure. Perhaps everything contains a germ that will develop into something else, something new, given a proper break-down and amplification. Not so much composition, but composting: a breaking down which provides rich soil, where new life forms emerge and evolve.

Perhaps there are a multitude of new, bulk-erased genres just waiting to be had. If Konstantin Raudive and other hi-fi mediums could hear the voices of the dead and other spirits on vacant audiotape recordings, then the avant-garde could be reanimated by bulk erasure. The germ of new musics and new sound arts would be developed and matured into new art forms, full-fledged practices, and then bulk-erased again. It could go on forever. Weren't the good ol' days of the avant-garde propelled by a chain of incomplete erasures?

It wasn't the marijuana talking. Perhaps it was. Perhaps it added a certain type of amplification, to 12, that has nothing to do with loudness. But it may have more to do with some other type of gain. In fact, other effects listed are:

More humor and wit, attention to ideas and innuendo, in the conversation. Or if not, at least rapt attention while you listen. Or, if not, rapt attention for the brief moments you are attentive. Or, if not, at least rapturous inattention.

The intensity or gain is due to the fact that marijuana makes you slow on the uptake: the effect of rapturous inattention. Jazz musicians have historically commented on how marijuana gets in the way of timing, but no doubt this pertains to a certain type of timing in a certain type of jazz. I've seen Cecil Taylor and his group emerge onto stage from the back room in a monstrous cloud of marijuana smoke and do just fine. In my episode on the floor of my flat on Page Street, if I had had my wits about me, I would have noticed the fact that something was wrong from the very beginning, and never have stumbled into the experience. I would have never been so distracted as to turn the volume all the way to the top in order to hear things I had never heard before or since. What I'm saying is that it's good to be a bit stupid.

Much has been written and chronicled about art and attention, and the attentive states of different types of drugs, as a whole they pay very little attention to hearing and sound. Probably more frequent are mentions of instances of hallucination where large scale actions are entirely silent! Now that's really bizarre.

This can be explained in various ways.
1. nothing out of the ordinary happened in terms of the sound
2. people couldn't tell the difference if it was happening
3. they wouldn't have the ability to describe it if they could tell the difference
4. the proper words to describe it don't exist even if they had the ability
5. even if one could describe brilliantly, what then? what sense would be made of it?

This, you will have noticed, would plague all writing on sound and music, not just reports from the drugged-up front, or other encounters of privatized sound. You can certainly see it operating in music journalism, and that's why there is such an epidemic of hip journalism. This glibness is merely a product of denial, and it is immediately counterproductive. I'm not just saying that it is written with a sense of superiority, or at least privileged arbitration, which it is, but the lack of humility is a sign of not allowing stupidity to the space work its magic.

Here's Aldous Huxley in the Doors of Perception recounting his investigation of mescaline: "Listening to the recordings of my conversation under the influence of the drug, I cannot discover that I was then any stupider than I am at ordinary times." He misses the point, probably because he was thinking about doors to "other realities" as one would think of different rooms in the manor. If he had wanted to have a truly fruitful experience-he should have been more stupider than normal; then he would have to had worked harder to figure out what's going on. If you are at the cusp of being ostracized from this reality, you will do a double day to either conform as best you can, or work up some pretty good reasons for your exile. In that process, you generate a wider range of readings or, rather, misreadings. You necessarily give yourself more options because you're really too stupid to close them down with a decision. And with all those options, then you can do what We in the West do Best: shop. This is our pragmatic plenitude. But instead of racing down the aisles or thumbing the bins of mindless consumption, you'll be shopping for the products of your own stupidity, the one you have worked so hard to overcome.

What this means is that natural talent, natural intelligence: they're huge handicaps to doing anything interesting. Any philosophy of education that does not have a notion of productive confusion at its very core is rationalistic and doomed to boredom. The naturally talented and the naturally intelligent are further handicapped by their ability to make exceedingly persuasive excuses. The depth of their intuition is at the root of their power of unwitting self deprecation and demobilization.

So I think this is what many drugs do. They dumb you down and provide a sense of obligatory curiosity. You took this, you smoked that....what happens now? What profound mystical motivation moved René Daumal to try carbon tetrachloride? "To see what would happen" When you repeat it too much, curiosity fades, and then it becomes the same old same old. As they say with drugs: when you get the message, hang up.

Then again, there are drugs which may override any lack of curiosity and impose unique auditory experiences. I'm thinking specifically of an encounter I had with nitrous oxide (the dentist's "laughing gas"). What happened was that the sound of the total environment congealed into rope which went in one ear and out the other, like mental floss, in a wave-like motion. Visually, the entire surrounding world was squeezed down into a pronounced myopia. Not much was left. In contrast to this depleted state of tunnel-vision, the tunnel-audition was quite remarkable. Closing down produced an intensification, where a multiplicitous, agglomerate sound world was channeled transparently through a warbling tube through the head, in one ear and out the other, like some pneumatic transport system in a painting by William Blake. "Intracraniality" is a "problem" in virtual audio systems; it should be an asset.

People in dentists' chairs experienced this type of listening only momentarily as they passed into oblivion. Allen Ginsberg has a poem called "Laughing Gas" where he describes the sound he left behind.

the odd vibration of
the same old universe

the nasal whine of the dentist's drill
singing against the nostalgic
piano Muzak in the wall
insistent, familiar, penetrating
the teeth, where've I heard that
asshole jazz before?

The nitrous oxide sends him into a snowballing parade that gathers up the likes of Christ, any number of Buddahs and cartoon characters, including "Woody the Woodpecker's hindoo maniac laughter in the skull." You know the sound, finishing up like a harassing jackhammer (if the skull is a poorly designed room, then Woody will mock you with 10,000 beaks). He thought that laughing gas transported him to death's door, and that the reason that sound played such a prominent role was because hearing is the last remaining sense to go before death. This is a common conviction although it is unclear how it might be substantiated. The biggest regret of Luis Buñuel about the deafness of his final years was that he would not have music to usher him into death. This may have something to do with the celestial music people are said to hear at the moment of death, angels with horns sounding like Kenny G., while the living around the death bed hear only the death rattle of sphincters being relaxed throughout the body. That's why people cry and wail at deathbeds: to mask the sound of sphincters. Many of you would feel the same way about Kenny G. May I suggest you go to one of his concerts and cry inconsolably throughout the whole thing.

The fact of the matter is more figurative. When you are bedside as someone very close to you dies, it is the collapse of something that has always been so manifest into something forever ephemeral. The inverse of that- the substantiality of each passing moment-which can certainly occur while listening to music, is nevertheless trivial when compared to a dying. This, at the scene of dying, is which is where I in my capacity of barroom philosopher think Western religion, with its fear of death, probably originated. It's pretty specious, therefore, when people start associating music per se and religion, or spirituality. Working up the endorphins with a good trance-n-dance is another story altogether.

But Ginsberg was not dying, he was merely going in and out of consciousness, aided by his dentist who was playing along. What Ginsberg heard was at the doorstep of death, or at least a liminal state of existence with all its warbling and marbling of illusion and reality. He transcribed these episodes as a form of poetic research. Ginsberg was into transcription generally. He transcribed his dreams, his daily life, often using a tape recorder. My good friend Chris Schiff saw him gathering his mail in a post office in Boulder, Colorado; all the while Ginsberg saw Chris seeing him and murmuring ALL THIS CRAZY POST OFFICE SCENE into his portable cassette recorder.

There's a way to regulate the nitrous oxide with air to control the dose. And that's what the faculty member at the hippie college I was attending had done. The college, The Evergreen State College, was new so they were throwing a big party. It was being christened, but instead of champagne, this guy had a box of balloons and a nitrous oxide tank in his office. Students filed into his office to fill up these balloons, go off somewhere and inhale. People were used to inhaling balloons for comic effects, the way helium would make you sound like Donald the Duck and Woody the Woodpecker. Deflating one of these balloons of laughing gas would render you motionless for about 20 or 30 seconds, as all the surround sounds of the world wormed their way in one ear out the other. A couple dozen people were filing through his office, wandering off, inhaling, for 20 to 30 seconds they would stand petrified, then they would inexplicably move along. The plaza of the school had people standing isolated here and there, facing different directions. It looked like a scene out of Last Year at Marienbad, just add the topiary.

The college was being officially inaugurated, so the Governor of Washington State, Dan Evans, was there. I stood behind him in the lunch line, listening to him converse with his companions, and then I emptied a balloon. The Governor's chitchat congealed with all the other sounds of the lunch line-you can imagine what they would be-and then pulse through my head in a gentle whiplash.

Don't get me wrong. This was not some wolf-child version of Ommagio a Joyce, Luciano Berio noodling with Cathy Berberian's voice. There was a long line of tables with a spread of all different types of food, Ommagio a Joyce would merely equate to one dish, a nice one, say, the gazpacho. The auditory smorgasbord was made up of a meandering trail of tables, each with its courses, each course with its dishes, each dish with its ingredients, with all the people on either side, all their monologues and interactions and innuendoes, and all the surround sounds, all twisted up with the Governor in a giant taffy pull. So much unity in diversity, maybe vice versa, you are what you eat: it was democracy in action. All political speech should be heard this way.

Before trying this at home, a friend of mine told me how, when he was in Vietnam, his squad was dismantling a field hospital and took the occasion to attach gas masks to a few tanks of laughing gas. Pure gas will simply suffocate you. The gas they were inhaling was regulated but improperly regulated, and the amount they inhaled was probably more akin to a weather balloon. He thought he was going to die or, worse, be trapped in mania forever. Laughter turned around to a horrid mocking of base existential distress.

The latter was a feeling I had once when something I ingested was laced with something else. Whatever either of them were, they produced temporary aphasia, or at least that's what I later surmised after having run across some medical literature on experiments which sounded remarkably similar to my experience. Although I blacked out, I had nevertheless been talking and carrying on for about three hours. Coming to with my usual self I found myself talking to my girlfriend. I had known her for years yet I still could not understand a word she was saying. This instantly filled me with a paralyzing fear. She was talking but the only things I could hear were what could be called little passages in syntax, tiny leaps of logic. My horror relaxed a bit with each passage, because I felt that language was revealing itself to me. Any hope vanished when I recognized that one of these little passages in syntax was, in fact, a question. The fear increased so much, that I had an image of a mainspring which was so tight it had become a solid metal puck. Not language I had no response. I eventually tried to respond but could only muster up two classes of words: hard-wired cuss words, such as when you burn your finger and your instant reflex is "shit!", and words signaling grand cohesion, cosmological glue: Mother is a favorite among aphasics (I left my mother out of it), although other words can get pretty peculiar. The effect has been described as:

Dark night of the soul with the light turned on, the harsh glare revealing impenetrable surfaces and unlivable spaces; panicked appeals to specious cosmologies conflated with knee-crawling, blithering nonsense; legitimate fears of permanent institutionalization with regular visits from gloating enemies, disciplining field trips to the glue factory.

The drug wiped out a good part of over two years of memory. It took months to reconstitute. What little social grace I had previously vanished into a blank chicken stare. This is the caveat. Drugs only work when they make you a bit stupid. The experience ultimately proved to be beneficial. As they say-if it doesn't kill you it will make you stronger-but this is just another appeal to a specious cosmology, less panicked, better philosophical pedigree, just as specious.

I prefer sounds in dreams. They're safer. My favorite one took place on a hill facing a forest of fir trees on another hill. These were the firs of Washington State, not the gums surrounding me in Australia. The whole forest was emanating sound. Vibrations were being transmitting separately from each needle on each branch on each tree, millions of separate transmissions. I perceived each transmission independently, directly and simultaneously, not in my ears, but into each cell of my body. Each needle in the forest of firs transmitting directly to a specific cell in my body. In the dream the perception filled me with light. It was a beautiful feeling, similar to being pervaded by love, with the sun streaming in from every angle. The only thing I can relate it to was the first night my new-born daughter was home. While going in and out of sleep with her in the room, I heard the sounds she made that night not in my ears, but right where the spine disappears into the skull. It was straight out of Michael McClure's meat science.

Much of my talk here has been about hearing things in an altered state and by "altered state" I don't mean Florida (it's not true that Elian's absentee ballot could have swayed the results). The topic belongs to the larger topic of privatized listening among exceptional psychological states- drugs, dreams, mysticism, ritual, psychological and neurological states (e.g., among synaesthetes), psychopathological states, and combinations thereof. They all amount to things heard by one person alone. They cannot be dismissed easily because millions of people hear thing heard by one person alone. Many of these things disobey acoustical, semiotic and cultural laws, or they lobby to have them overturned. I am hoping that the qualities of privatized listening might reach further than one suspects. Perhaps while others are hearing the same-old same-old, it is possible to mishear it. Kenny G. and death rattle mix and pull apart. A halting, incomplete senility imposed upon the culture. Bulk erasing. Who knows?

Sy, my three year-old son, recently informed me that he had one brain in his left ear, and 31 brains in his right ear, which were placed there by a robot who walked like a duck with both hands on his knees. He put his hands on his knees because he didn't have any knees, so he had to walk like that. The robot puts brains in people's ears because he ate too much ice cream, the size of a house, and chased it with just a little bit of wine. It would be good to hear with 31 brains in one ear and one in the other, for awhile at least, but there I'm a little slow on the uptake on that one. It's going to take some time.