No More Learning

Slaby and Arco, however, were conducting their research in the ser- vice of the emperor and his navy. But soon civilians, too, came to enjoy electrically transmitted records. A recording of Handel's Messiah is said to have been part of the first actual radio broadcast, hosted by Reginald A. Fessenden of the University of Pennsylvania on Christmas Eve, 1906. 178 Long before the St. Petersburg revolutionaries, Brant Rock, Massachusetts, had started its broadcast with "CQ, CQ-to all, to all"- but only wireless operators on ships179 were able to receive the call and the Christmas record.
A world war, the first of its kind, had to break out to facilitate the switch from Poulsen's arc transmission to Lieben or De Forest's tube-type technology and the mass production of Fessenden's experimental proce- dure. It was not only in Germany, where the signal corps created in 19 I I went to war with 5 5 0 officers and 5 ,800 men but returned with 4,83 I of- ficers and 1 8 5 ,000 men,180 that the development of amplifier tubes was given the highest priority. 181 Fighter planes and submarines, the two new weapons systems, required wireless communications, just as military command required vacuum tube technology for the control of high and low frequencies. Tanks, however, which were equally in need of commu- nications, kept losing their antennas in the barbed wire of the trenches and for the time being had to make do with carrier pigeons. 182
But the exponentially growing radio troops were also in need of en- tertainment, because apart from machine-gun skirmishes and drumfire of- fensives, trench warfare is nothing but sensory deprivation-or Combat as Inner Experience, as JUnger so succinctly put it. 183 After three years in the wasteland between Flanders and the Ardennes, the military staffs-
? 9 6 Gramophone
? De Forest's audion.
the British ones in Flanders184 and a German one in Rethel in the Ar- dennes-took pity on their troops. Though trench crews had no radios, they were in possession of "army radio equipment. " Beginning in May 19I7, Dr. Hans Bredow, an AEG engineer before the war and afterward the first undersecretary for the national German radio network, was able to "use a primitive tube transmitter to broadcast a radio program con- sisting of records and the reading of newspaper articles. The project, however, was canceled when a superior command post got wind of it and prohibited the 'abuse of army equipment' for any future broadcast of mu- sic or words! "185
But that's the way it goes. The entertainment industry is, in any con-
Gramophone 97
ceivable sense of the word, an abuse of army equipment. When Karlheinz Stockhausen was mixing his first electronic composition, Kontakte, in the Cologne studio of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk between February 1958 and fall 1959, the pulse generator, indicating amplifier, band-pass filter, as well as the sine and square wave oscillators were made up of discarded u. s. Army equipment: an abuse that produced a distinctive sound. A decade later, when the Cologne studio had at its disposal professionally developed audio electronic equipment and the record industry demanded that Kontakte attain hi-fi stereo quality, Stockhausen attempted in vain to reproduce the sound: as an echo of a world war it could not do without the abuse of military equipment.
And what is true microcosmically is also true macrocosmically. In November 1918, the 190,000 radio operators of the imperial German army were demobilized but kept their equipment. Supported or super- vised by the executives of the USPD (Independent Socialist Party), the in- spectorate of the technical division of the signal corps (Itenacht) founded a Central Broadcasting Bureau (ZFL), which on November 25 was granted a broadcasting license by the executive committee of the workers and soldiers council. 186 A "radio specter" that could have nipped the Weimar Republic in the technological bud triggered the immediate "counterattack" by Dr. Bredow. 187 For the simple purpose of avoiding the anarchistic abuse of military radio equipment, Germany received its en- tertainment radio network. Records that hitherto had been used to liven up military communication in the trenches of the Ardennes now came into their own. Otherwise people themselves, rather than the government and the media industry, could have made politics. In December 19 2 3 , two months after the first Berlin broadcast, Postal Minister Dr. Hi::ifle, a mem- ber of the centrist party, listed (in order of increasing importance) the three tasks of the "Entertainment Broadcasting Network" :
? 1 .
2.
3 .
Wireless music, lectures etc. are to provide the general public with quality entertainment and education.
It is to be a new and important source of national revenue.
The new installations are to provide a convenient means for the nation and the states to convey whenever necessary official information to the public at large; the latter may be of importance with regard to state security.
In the interest of state security it is necessary to ensure that only those citi- zens own and operate equipment who have secured an official license to operate radio stations, and that, in addition, owners of radio equipment only record that which is intended for them. lss
9 8 Gramophone
But what is intended for consumers is determined not only by state secu- rity but also by technology. "Even at the risk of losing to radio all they have earned with their records,"189 the record industry had to submit to the standards of the new medium. Struggle in the Ether was the fitting name of Arnolt Bronnen's novel dealing with the establishment of the ra- dio networks and the music industry-a novel that cunningly puts the de- sires of postal ministers into the mouths of the people and in particular into that of a Berlin typist: "'Records, gramophones, money,' she smiled, lost in a dream, 'if one could sit here without records, gramophones, money but still hear music . . . '''190
In order to fulfill these wishes, the major arms and communications technology corporations had to get rid of the old shellac craft. Pioneering tinkerers like Edison and Berliner left the stage. The vacuum-tube ampli- fier proceeded from high to low frequencies, from radio to records. In
I924, Bell Labs developed electromagnetic cutting amplifiers for recording and an electromagnetic pickup for replaying and thereby delivered sound recordings from the mechanical scratching of Edison's needle. In the same year, Siemens presented the recording studios of the media conglomerates with equally electric ribbon microphones, as a result of which grooves were finally able to store frequencies ranging from roo bass hertz to 5 kilo- hertz overtones, thus rising to the level of medium-wave transmitters.
Edison's prototype had for good reasons preferred human voices to . orchestras. Only with electrical sound processing are records ready for Hbfle's "wireless music. " "At last," the Sunday Times wrote, mistaking frequency bandwidth for sensuality, "an orchestra really sounds like an orchestra; we get from these records what we rarely had before-the physical delight of passionate music in the concert room or opera house. We do not merely hear the melodies going this, that, or the other way in a sort of limbo of tonal abstraction; they come to us with the sensuous ex- citement of actuality. "191
And actuality itself can be produced once composers are up to date. For the third movement of Pini di Roma, Respighi wrote or rather de- manded the recorded voice of a nightingale played against the backdrop of composed-out string arpeggios. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's fictional Edi- son had already surrounded his woman of the future with metallic birds of paradise, who "by using the Microphone" make "an immense volume of sound" with their songs. 192 But only Bell Labs nightingales were capa- ble of outplaying entire symphonic orchestras. Thus, Arturo Toscanini was able to premiere Respighi's sound poem as a media link combining an orchestral score with phonographic kilohertz sensuality. 193
? Gramophone 99
And the band played on. In the same year, 1924, U. s. researchers hit upon the idea of applying to sound processing the technique of producing intermediate frequencies. Thanks to frequency reduction, bat voices out- side of the range of human audibility were caught on record. At least that is what was reported by newspapers in Prague; the same Prague in which a story was written immediately afterward entitled "Josefine the Singer, or The Mouse Folk. " "Is Josefine's art singing at all? " Kafka's mice ask.
Is it not perhaps just a piping? And piping is something we all know about, it is the real accomplishment of our people, or rather no mere accomplishment, but a characteristic expression of our life. We all pipe, but of course no one dreams of making out that our piping is an art, we pipe without noticing it, and there are even many among us who are quite unaware that piping is one of our characteristics. 194
"The universe of sound," Cocteau's radio theory concludes, "has been enriched by that of ultrasound, which is still unknown. . . . We shall know that fish shout, that the sea is full of noises and that the void is peo- pled with realistic ghosts in whose eyes we are the same. "195
In order to locate Cocteau's submarine ghosts, a world war, the sec- ond one, had to break out. Today realism is in any event strategic. An un- paralleled surge of innovations that from 1939 on filled land, sea, and air with noise finally provided us (beyond Bell Labs) with records whose fre- quency range approached both limits of the audibility range; that is, with high fidelity. In 1940, four years before consumers were also able to pur- chase "FFRR" (full frequency range recording) records and seven years before Ansermet's hi-fi Petrouchka helped drive up annual record pro- duction to four hundred million, the Decca Record Company succeeded in capturing the ghostly noises on shellac. Quietly anticipating "Yellow Submarine" and the sound quality of the Beatles,
the RAF Coastal Command had approached the English-owned Decca Record Company with a secret and difficult assignment. Coastal Command wanted a training record to illustrate differences between the sounds of German and British submarines. Such aural distinctions were extremely delicate, and to reproduce them accurately on a record called for a decided enlargement of the phonograph's capabilities. Intensive work under the supervision of Decca's chief engineer, Arthur Haddy, led to new recording techniques and the kind of record Coastal Command desired. l96
But the enemy was not left standing behind. German record compa- nies participated in the Battle of the Bulge. To avoid Allied suspicions when the chief of Army Communications ordered a sudden radio silence
? 1 00 Gramophone
for all areas of troop concentration south of the Cologne-Aachen line on November, 12, 1944, the enemy had to be fed simulated attack prepara- tions at other parts of the front. The Army High Command's propaganda division developed special recordings for army loudspeakers, "which, among other things, simulated: tank noises, marching troops, departing and arriving trucks, the unloading of equipment, etc. "197
The whole spectrum of sound from infra- to ultrasound is, as was the case with Kafka's mice, not art but an expression of life. It finally allows modern detection to locate submarines wherever they may be, or tank brigades where they are not. The great musicologist Hornbostel had al- ready spent the First World War at the front: sound location devices with huge bell-mouths and superhuman audibility ranges were supposed to en- able ears to detect enemy artillery positions even at a distance of 30 kilo- meters. Ever since, human ears have no longer been a whim of nature but a weapon, as well as (with the usual commercial delay) a source of money. Long before the headphone adventures of rock'n'roll or original radio plays, Heinkel and Messerschmitt pilots entered the new age of soundspace. The Battle of Britain, Goring's futile attempt to bomb the island into submission in preparation for Operation Sea Lion, began with a trick for guiding weapon systems: radio beams allowed Luftwaffe bombers to reach their destinations without having to depend on daylight or the absence of fog. Radio beams emitted from the coast facing Britain, for example from Amsterdam and Cherbourg, formed the sides of an ethereal triangle the apex of which was located precisely above the tar- geted city. The right transmitter beamed a continuous series of Morse dashes into the pilot's right headphone, while the left transmitter beamed an equally continuous series of Morse dots-always exactly in between the dashes-into the left headphone. As a result, any deviation from the assigned course resulted in the most beautiful ping-pong stereophony (of the type that appeared on the first pop records but has since been dis- carded). And once the Heinkels were exactly above London or Coventry, then and only then did the two signal streams emanating from either side of the headphone, dashes from the right and dots from the left, merge into one continuous note, which the perception apparatus could not but locate within the very center of the brain. A hypnotic command that had the pi- lot-or rather, the center of his brain-dispose of his payload. Histori- cally, he had become the first consumer of a headphone stereophony that today controls us all-from the circling of helicopters or Hendrix's Elec- tric Ladyland all the way to the simulated pseudo-monophony, in the
? ? ? Derby
15Kilometres ?
Dirutor &am
Fine X-Beams as set for Coventry 14/15. XI. 40.
50 100 ,SO 200
Kilometres
=-=:J
midst of the soundspace of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here, that once more wishes for the acoustics of targeted bombing. 198
The difficulty British intelligence had in countering stereophonic re- mote control is explained by its chief technical officer, Professor Reginald Jones. Because the Luftwaffe's radio beam transmitters operated in fre- quency ranges even beyond VHF, which in 1940 the Secret Service was in- capable of receiving and of which it had no conception, help could only
Gramophone
1 0 1
? Coventry _5Ki/ornetres
1 0 2 Gramophone
? Hughes microphone with recorded fly. The same fly whose footstep was amplified by Hughes's carbon microphone in 1878 to make it audible circles between the left and right channels in Pink Floyd's "Ummagumma. "
come from a profane illumination. An incident occurred on the Farnbor- ough airfield while testing a loudspeaker system attached to a fuselage, which, just as in today's Pentagon project, was designed to blast rebel- lious natives in northwestern India with divine voices. When the officer standing in front of the microphone heard his voice coming from the dis- tant loudspeaker two seconds later, he laughed about this acoustic delay. His laughter, in turn, was returned as another echo until the feedback af- fected all the participants and Farnborough resounded with a noise simi- lar to that heard when rock musicians lean their guitars against the speak- ers. A "system that laughed by itself," Jones called it. But instead of laughing along, he chose to understand: Feedback, the principle of all os- cillators, can also generate centimetric wave frequencies, something the experts refused to believe. 199 Jones ordered the construction of synchro- nized receivers, which, in turn, located the Luftwaffe's radio beam trans-
Gramophone I03
mitters and their targets. The Battle of Britain was won. (Even if the war- lord Churchill, not wanting to reveal to the enemy that his secrets had been revealed, disallowed the evacuation of Coventry, which had already been identified as a target city. )
Survivors and those born later, however, are allowed to inhabit stereophonic environments that have popularized and commercialized the trigonometry of air battles. Ever since EMI introduced stereo records in I957,200 people caught between speakers or headphones have been as con- trollable as bomber pilots. The submarine location duties of aspiring air force officers or the bombing target locations of Heinkel pilots turn into hypnosis, which in Stoker's I897 Dracula still had to be used to solve, without the help of radio technology, a very strategic submarine detection problem. 201 But in I966, following two world wars and surges in innova- tion, hypnosis and recording technology finally coincide: engine noises, hissing steam, and a brass band move across the walls from left to right and back while a British voice sings of the literal chain that linked Liver- pool's submarine crews to postwar rock groups.
In the town where I was born lived a man who sailed to sea and he told us of his life
in the land of submarines.
So we sailed up to the sun
till we found the sea of green and we lived beneath the waves in our yellow submarine.
And our friends are all aboard many more of them live next door and the band begins to play
"We all live in a yellow submarine . . . "202
The Beatles simply transported everybody to that impossible space that once concealed Count Dracula in his black coffin in the black belly of his ship, floating in the Black Sea until he was located, and subsequently de- stroyed, by hypnotic sound detection. Hi-fi stereophony can simulate any acoustic space, from the real space inside a submarine to the psychedelic space inside the brain itself. And should locating that space either fail or be a ruse designed to fool the consumer, it is only because the supervising sound engineer has proceeded as shrewdly as the disinformation cam- paign prior to the Battle of the Bulge.
? 1 04 Gramophone
? Once again, these deceptions were programmed by the admirable Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. By design or accident, his Edison places "his hand on the central control panel of the laboratory," whereupon the tele- phonic voice of his agent in New York "seemed to come from all the cor- ners of the room at once. " A dozen speakers scattered across the labora- tory-obviously modeled on the first soundspace experiments conducted between the Paris Opera and the Palace of Industry in 1 8 8 1-make it possible. 203
With the help of stereo recordings and stereo, VHF acoustic decep- tions can invade operas completely. When, in 1959, John Culshaw pro- duced Solti's beautifully overmodulated Rhinegold, the homelessness of spirits was implemented. Of course the other gods and goddesses, male and female singers, were each assigned their own space between the stereo channels. But Wagner's great technician Alberich, upon tearing the newly completed Tarnhelm out of his brother Mime's hands and demon- strating in hands-on fashion the advantages of invisibility, appears to be coming, like Edison's telegrapher, from all corners at once. "Thus, in scene III, Alberich puts on the Tarnhelm, disappears, and then thrashes the unfortunate Mime. Most stage productions make Alberich sing through a megaphone at this point, the effect of which is often less dom- inating than that of Alberich in reality. Instead of this, we have tried to convey, for thirty-two bars, the terrifying, inescapable presence of Al- berich: left, right, or centre there is no escape for Mime. "204
Culshaw's stereo magic simply puts into practice what the great me- dia technician Wagner had in mind for his dramatic doppelganger. "Everywhere now he lies in wait," sings Alberich, lost in acoustic space, making those he keeps "under guard" "subject to him forever. "205 In other words, Wagner invented the radio play, as Nietzsche immediately realized: "His art always carries him in two directions, out of a world of auditory drama into a mysteriously kindred world of visual drama, and vice versa. "206 The Ring of the Nibelung, that zero series of all word wars, could just as well be called Struggle in the Ether.
Gramophone 1 0 5
To broadcast the ethereal struggle, radio merely had to take over the innovations of the world wars and, in a move that reversed the one fol- lowing the First World War, adapt itself to the standard of records. Be- cause amplitude modulation did not leave enough frequency range, the old AM radio would have been unable to transmit hi-fi songs or stereo ra- dio plays.
The spectacular growth of FM is attributable to its technical superiority to AM, and relative cheapness as an investment medium. In the late fifties, it was found that the great range of FM channels could not only sustain a higher fidelity for single transmissions, but could in fact also be used to broadcast separate signals simultaneously in a process called "multiplexing. " This discovery made possible stereo musical broadcast. Stereo broadcast was particularly attractive to those au- diences discriminating and wealthy enough to prefer high fidelity music. . . . As the rock audience grew in size and sophistication, it came to demand the same sound quality which it could get from records at home (reflected in the tremen- dous increase in the middle and late sixties in the stereo component market), but could not get from AM radio. 207
Frequency modulation and signal multiplexing, the two components of VHF, are of course not a U. S. commercial discovery of the 1950S. Without "his ingenious technical decision" in favor of signal multiplex- ing, General Fellgiebel, chief of Army Communications, would not have been able to control the invasion of Russia, that is, "the most immense task ever faced by any signal corps in the world. "208 Without Colonel Gimmler of Army Ordnance and his refutation of the delusion "that very high frequencies (between 10m and 1m) propagate in a straight line and are therefore of no use in the battle field,"209 Colonel General Guderian, the strategist of the tank blitzkrieg, would have been forced to resort to World-War-I-era carrier pigeons. Instead, his armored wedges, "from the tanks in the most forward position back to divisional, corps, and army command," were, unlike his enemies, equipped with VHF. 21O "The engine is the soul of the tank," Guderian used to say, "and radio," General Nehring added, "its number one. " Then as now VHF radio reduces the leadership vacuum to zero.
On September II, 1944, American tank vanguards liberated the city of Luxembourg and its radio station. Radio Luxembourg returned to its pre- war status as the largest commercial broadcaster and advertiser of records on a continent of postal, telegraphic, and radio state monopo- lies. 211 But four years as an army station had left its traces: traces of a new way of storing traces.
I06 Gramophone
? Electl'o aimant
Basic diagram of Poulsen's telegraphone.
By the early 1940S, German technicians had made some startling advances. Radio monitors who listened to the German broadcasting stations day after day for British and United States intelligence soon realized that many of the programs they were hearing could not possibly derive from live studio broadcasts. Yet there were a fidelity and a continuity of sound, plus an absence of surface scratching, in the German transmissions that ordinary transcription records could never have yielded. The mystery was solved . . . when the Allies captured Radio Luxem- bourg . . . and discovered among the station's equipment a new Magnetophone of extraordinary capabilities. 212
It was not until I940 that technicians at BA5F and AEG had by chance hit upon the technique of radio frequency premagnetizing, thus turning Valdemar Poulsen's experimental telegraphone of I898 into an operational audiotape with a IO kilohertz frequency bandwidth. Up until then, the record-radio media link had operated as a one-way street. Transmitters and gramophone users replayed what Berliner's master disc had once and for all recorded, even if radio stations-in a late vindica- tion of Edison-made use of special phonographs developed for the spe- cific purpose of program storage. 213 But under combat conditions those wax cylinders, which, since I930, were allowed to record parliamentary sessions strictly for "archival purposes," were useless. 214 A propaganda ministry that turned radio into "the cultural 55 of the Third Reich"215 needed a recording and storage medium as modern and mobile as Gude- rian's tank divisions.
Major General von Wedel, chief of Army Propaganda, recounts:
We were also essentially dependent on developments of the propaganda ministry with regard to radio equipment for war correspondents. That also applied to the
FiI d? a. cier
? c? ,
d enroulemenl
Gramophone 1 07
appropriate vehicles. When it came to tank divisions, the Luftwaffe, or parts of the navy, the opportunities for original combat recordings were hampered by the fact that we could not obtain the stable and horizontal supports necessary for pro- ducing discs. At first, we were forced to make do with belated dispatches.
A significant change occurred after the Magnetophone was invented and thoroughly designed for the purpose of war reports. Original combat reports from the air, the moving armored vehicle, or the submarine, etc. , now became impres- sive firsthand accounts. 216
As Ludendorff had pointed out, it is a truth of Total War that "the mass usage of technological equipment can be tested much better in wartime than would ever be possible in peace. "217 The motorized and mo- bilized audiotape finally delivered radio from disc storage; "Yellow Sub- marine," or "war as acoustic experience," became playable.
But reaching beyond the acoustic experiences of the so-called general public, the magnetic tape also revolutionized secret transmissions. Ac- cording to Pynchon, "operators swear they can tell the individual send- ing-hands. "218 As a consequence, the Abwehr [German Counterintelli- gence Service], as part of the German Army High Command, had the "handwriting" of every single agent recorded at the Wohldorf radio sta- tion close to Hamburg before they went abroad on their secret missions. Only magnetic tapes guaranteed to Canaris and his men that it "was re- ally their agent sitting at the other end and not an enemy operator. "219
Inspired by this success, the Abwehr switched from defense to of- fense. Because the enemy was not yet in possession of magnetic tapes, the Abwehr was in a position to transmit its famous Funkspiele (radio games), which in spite of their name resulted not in the entertainment of millions in front of speakers but in the death of 50 British agents. The Ab- wehr managed to capture and turn around agents who had parachuted into the Netherlands. As if nothing had happened, they were forced to continue their transmissions in their own handwriting. The transmission of German Funkspiel messages to London (or, in one parallel case, to Moscow) lured additional agents into the Abwehr trap. Normally, intelli- gence agencies arrange emergency signals with their agents for such situ- ations, "such as using an old code, making absurd mistakes, or inserting or omitting certain letters of punctuation. "220 Each Morse message of the converted agents was taped, analyzed, and, if need be, manipulated be- fore it was transmitted. This procedure continued uninterrupted for years in the hardly civilian ether.
The world-war audiotape inaugurated the musical-acoustic present. Beyond storage and transmission, gramophone and radio, it created em-
108 Gramophone
pires of simulation. In England, Turing himself considered using a cap- tured German Magnetophone as the storage mechanism for his projected large computer. Like the paper strip of the universal discrete machine, tapes can execute any possible manipulation of data because they are equipped with recording, reading, and erasing heads, as well as with for- ward and reverse motion. 221 Which is why early, cheap pes work with at- tached tape decks.
In a far more practical vein, captured magnetic tapes aroused sleepy U. S. electric and music giants who had, naturally, taken on duties other than commercial ones between 1942 and 194 5 . 222 Inserted into the signal path, audiotapes modernized sound production; by replacing gramo- phones they modernized sound distribution. Tape decks made music con- sumers mobile, indeed automobile, as did the radio producers in the Mag- netophone-equipped German lead tanks of old. Thus, the "American mass market" was "opened up" by "the car playback system. "223 To min- imize the leadership vacuum and exploit the possibilities of stereophony, the only things missing were new VHF stations with rock'n'roll and traf- fic reports on the transmitting end and car radios with FM and decoders on the receiving end. Six-cylinder engines whisper, but the stereo equip- ment roars. Engine and radio are (to paraphrase Guderian and Nehring) also the soul of our tourist divisions, which under so-called postwar con- ditions rehearse or simulate the blitzkrieg.
The central command, however, has moved from general staffs to en- gineers. 224 Sound reproduction revolutionized by magnetic tape has ren- dered orders unnecessary. Storing, erasing, sampling, fast-forwarding, rewinding, editing-inserting tapes into the signal path leading from the microphone to the master disc made manipulation itself possible. Ever since the combat reports of Nazi radio, even live broadcasts have not been live. The delay that in the case of tapes is due to separate head mon- itoring (and that is now more elegantly achieved by digital shift regis- ters)225 suffices for so-called broadcast obscenity policing lines. It appears that listeners, once they have been called by a disc jockey and are on the air, are prone to exhibit an unquenchable desire for obscenities. Today everybody can and (according to Andy Warhol) wants to become famous, if only for two minutes of airtime. In the blind time to which media, as opposed to artists, are subject, chance is principally unpredictable. But the 6. 4 seconds of dead time the broadcast obscenity policing line inserts between telephone call and actual broadcast make censorship (if not art) possible in the data flow of the real.
That is precisely the function of audiotapes in sound processing. Edit-
Gramophone 1 09
ing and interception control make the unmanipulable as manipulable as symbolic chains had been in the arts. With projects and recourses, the time of recurrence organizes pure random sequences; Berliner's primitive recording technology turns into a Magical Mystery Tour. In 1954, Abbey Road Studios, which not coincidentally produced the Beatles' sound, first used stereo audiotapes; by 1970 eight-track machines had become the standard; today discos utilize 3 2 or 64 tracks, each of which can be ma- nipulated on its own and in unison. 226 "Welcome to the machine," Pink Floyd sang, by which they meant, "tape for its own ends-a form of col- lage using sound. "227 In the Funkspiele of the Abwehr, Morse hands could be corrected; in today's studios, stars do not even have to be able to sing anymore. When the voices of Waters and Gilmour were unable to hit the high notes in "Welcome to the Machine," they simply resorted to time axis manipulation: they dropped the tape down half a semitone while recording and then dropped the line in on the track. 228
But neither is tape technology always an end in itself, nor does editing always amount to correction or beautification. If media are anthropolog- ical a prioris, then humans cannot have invented language; rather, they must have evolved as its pets, victims, or subjects. And the only weapon to fight that may well be tape salad. Sense turns into nonsense, govern- ment propaganda into the white noise of Turing's vocoder, impossible fillers like is/or/the are edited out:229 precisely the ingredients of William Burroughs's tape cut-up technique.
"Playback from Eden to Watergate" begins (like all books) with the word, and in the beginning that word was with God. But not only in the shape of speech, which animals, too, have at their command, but also as writing, the storage and transmission of which made culture possible in the first place. "Now a wise old rat may know a lot about traps and poison but he cannot write 'Death Traps in Your Warehouse' for the Reader's Digest. "230 Such warnings, or "tactics," are restricted to hu- mans-with the one exception that they were not capable of warning of the warning system of writing, which subsequently turned into a deadly trap. Because apes never mastered writing the "written word" mastered them: a "killer virus" that "made the spoken word possible. The word has not yet been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host," which now seems to be "breaking down. "231 Reconstructing the apes' inner throat, which was not designed for speech, the virus created humans, especially white males, who were stricken with the most malignant infection: they mistook the host itself for its linguistic parasite. Most apes died from sexual frenzy or because the
1 1 0 Gramophone
virus caused "death through strangulation and vertebral fracture. "232 But with two or three survivors the word was able to launch a new beginning.
Let us start with three tape recorders in the Garden of Eden. Tape recorder one is Adam. Tape recorder two is Eve. Tape recorder three is God, who deteriorated af- ter Hiroshima into the Ugly American. Or, to return to our primeval scene: tape recorder one is the male ape in a helpless sexual frenzy as the virus strangles him. Tape recorder two is the cooing female ape who straddles him. Tape recorder three is DEATH. 233
What began as a media war has to end as a media war so as to close the feedback loop linking Nixon's Watergate tapes to the Garden of Eden. "Basically, there is only one game and that game is war. "234 World war weapons like the Magnetophone have been put to commercial use in the shape of tape recorders, as a result of which ex-writers like Burroughs can take action. The classic rift between the production and reception of
books is replaced by a single military interception. 235
We now have three tape recorders. So we will make a simple word virus. Let us suppose that our target is a rival politician. On tape recorder one we will record speeches and conversations, carefully editing in stammers, mispronunciations, in- ept phrases-the worst number one we can assemble. Now, on tape recorder two we will make a love tape by bugging his bedroom. We can potentiate this tape by splicing it with a sexual object that is inadmissible or inaccessible or both, say, the Senator's teenage daughter. On tape recorder three we will record hateful, dis- approving voices. We'll splice the three recordings in together at very short inter- vals and play them back to the Senator and his constituents. This cutting and playback can be very complex, involving speech scramblers and batteries of tape recorders, but the basic principle is simply splicing sex tape and disapproval tapes together. 236
As simple as any abuse of army equipment. One just has to know what Shannon's and Turing's scrambler or the German Magnetophone can be used for. 237 If "control," or, as engineers say, negative feedback, is the key to power in this century,238 then fighting that power requires pos- itive feedback. Create endless feedback loops until VHF or stereo, tape deck or scrambler, the whole array of world war army equipment pro- duces wild oscillations of the Farnborough type. Play to the powers that be their own melody.
Which is exactly what Burroughs does after having described "a number of weapons and tactics in the war game":239 he joins Laurie An- derson in producing records. Which is exactly what rock music does in the first place: it maximizes all electro-acoustic possibilities, occupies
Gramophone III
recording studios and FM transmitters, and uses tape montages to subvert the writing-induced separation into composers and writers, arrangers and interpreters. When Chaplin, Mary Pickford, D. W. Griffith, and others founded United Artists following the First World War, a movie executive announced that "the lunatics have taken charge of the asylum. " The same thing happened when Lennon, Hendrix, Barrett and others started recording their Gesamtkunstwerke by making full use of the media inno- vations of the Second World War. 240
Funkspiel, VHF tank radio, vocoders, Magnetophones, submarine lo- cation technologies, air war radio beams, etc. , have released an abuse of army equipment that adapts ears and reaction speeds to World War n+I. Radio, the first abuse, lead from World War I to II, rock music, the next one, from II to III. Following a very practical piece of advice from Bur- roughs's Electronic Revolution,241 Laurie Anderson's voice, distorted as usual on Big Science by a vocoder, simulates the voice of a 747 pilot who uses the plane's speaker system to suddenly interrupt the ongoing enter- tainment program and inform passengers of an imminent crash landing or some other calamity. Mass interception media like rock music amount to mobilization, which makes them the exact opposite of Benjamin's dis- traction. 242 In 193 6, only the unique "Reichsautozug Deutschland, a mo- torcade consisting of eighty vehicles," was able to "broadcast party con- gresses and mass rallies without any local help by setting up speaker sys- tems on a giant scale, erecting stands, and so on":243 today, the same is achieved night after night by the trucks and kilowatt systems of any rock group. Filled to the brim with electronics or army equipment, they carry us away to Electric Ladyland. The theme of love, that production secret of the literature for nonreaders, has run its course. Rock songs sing of the very media power which sustains them.
Lennon and McCartney's stereo submarine is not the only postwar lyric in the literal sense of the word. The Final Cut, Pink Floyd's last record, was written by Roger Waters (born 1944) for Eric Fletcher Wa- ters (1913-1944), that is, for a victim of a world war. It begins, even be- fore the first sound, with tape cut-ups of news broadcasts (on the Falk- lands, NATO fleet transporters, nuclear power stations), which all simply serve to point out that "postwar," both the word and the thing itself, is a "dream," a distortion made to mollify consumer ears. "Post War Dream" is followed by "The Hero's Return. " The cut-up returns to its origins: when army communication equipment, the precursor of the mass me- dium radio, cuts up the symbolic and the real, orders and corpses. A com- memoration that is the flip side of postwar, love and Muzak.
I I 2
Gramophone
Sweetheart, sweetheart, are you fast asleep, good 'cos that's the only time I can really talk to you and there is something that I've locked away
a memory that is too painful
to withstand the light of day.
When we came back from the war
the banners and flags hung on everyone's door we danced and we sang in the street
and the church bells rang.
But burning in my heart
a memory smoulders on
of the gunner's dying words
on the intercom. 244
Interception, chopping, feedback, and amplification of war reports: "Sympathy for the Devil" means nothing else. Legend has it that the Rolling Stones used cut-up techniques to produce the lyrics for Beggars Banquet. They cut out newspaper headlines, pasted them to the studio wall, and shot at them. Every hit was a line. Anticipating modern statis- tics, the precondition of cut-up and signal processing in general, Novalis remarked: "The individual facts are random events-the combination of random events-their concurrence is itself not subject to chance, but to
laws-a result of the most profound systematic wisdom. "245
Thus, the random distribution of newspaper headlines results in the law of information technology and a martial history of rock music. The devil, whose voice is immortalized by "Sympathy for the Devil," was there when the revolutionaries of St. Petersburg killed the czar and, with their radio transmission "CQ-to all," turned army equipment into global AM radio; he was there when television broadcast both Kennedy assassinations, turned "you and me" into murderers, and exorcised all ra- dio magic. But above all, Lucifer screams out that radio specter, ghost
army, or tank general which VHF and rock music are indebted to:
I rode a tank
held a gen'rals's rank when the blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank. 246
The blitzkrieg, as is well known, raged from I939 to I94I, when Gude- rian rode his lead tank. The bodies stank longer.
From "War Heroes" to Electric Ladyland: a mnemotechnology of rock music. Nietzsche's gods had yet to receive the sacrifice of language;
? ? ? The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Electric Ladyland, 1968. (Courtesy of Authentic Hendrix, LLC, and MCA Records, Inc. )
"
Tyrnp . Tymp .
1 . 5
Pistol shot
( Let us know when we go {emit erom eno K . O .
(slow speed)
0 . 0 0 . 6
7 . 0
13 . 6
(slow speed)
AND THE GODS MADE LOVE
jet whistle ----------
By
JIM! HENDRIX
I('\t'r['
21 . 0 backward & forward tapes of speech
29 . 8 Harmonics run up and down at high speed
? ? 5. 6
Tyrnp.
I I4 Gramophone
cut-up techniques have done away with that virus. Before Hendrix, the paratrooper of the IOIst Airborne, cuts his machine-gun-like guitar to the title song, tape technology operates for its own sake: tympana, jet engines, pistol shots. Writing can write nothing of that. The Songbook for Electric Ladyland notes the tape's forward and backward motion as well as its changing speed and the test points of a blind but manipulable time. 247 The title on the cover-that which does not cease not to write itself.
? ? ? FILM
? ? Media cross one another in time, which is no longer history. The recording of acoustic data was accomplished with sound tricks, montage, and cuts; it is with film tricks, montage, and cuts that the recording of optical processes began. Since its inception, cinema has been the manipulation of optic nerves and their time. This is proved, among other ways, by the now-prohibited trick of repeatedly splicing individual frames of a Coca- Cola ad into feature films: because its flashlike appearance for 40 millisec- onds reaches the eyes but not consciousness, the audience develops an in- explicable yet irresistible thirst. A cut has undercut its conscious registra- tion. The same is true of film. Beginning with Eastman in r887, when celluloid superseded Daguerre's photographic glass plates and provided the material basis for feature films, such manipulations became feasible. Cinema, in contrast to sound recording, began with reels, cuts, and splices.
It is said that the Lumiere brothers documented simply and inces- santly what their lens could record and what the type of projection they developed could reproduce. Legend has it, however, that Georges Melies, the great film pioneer, ran out of celluloid while shooting a street scene. He left the tripod and camera in position and loaded a new reel, but in the meantime so-called life naturally went on. Viewing the fully spliced film, its director was consequently surprised by the magical appearance and disappearance of figures against a fixed background. Melies, who as former director of the Theatre Robert Houdin had already projected many a magical trick onto the technological screen,l had accidentally also stumbled upon the stop trick. Hence in May r 89 6, " before the eyes of an astonished and dumbfounded audience," he presented "L'Escamotement d'une dame, the disappearance of a woman from the picture. "2 Techno-
logical media (following Villiers and his Edison) liquidate that "great
II5
? 116 Film
? Jean Cocteau, Le Sang d'un poete, 1930.
Lady, Nature," as it had been described, but never viewed, by the nine- teenth century. Woman's sacrifice.
And castration. For what film's first stop tricks did to women only re- peated what the experimental precursors of cinema did to men. Since 1878 Edward Muggeridge (who changed his name to Eadweard Muy- bridge to commemorate old Saxon kings)3 had been experimenting with twelve special cameras on behalf of the California railroad tycoon and university founder, Leland Stanford. The location was Palo Alto, which later saw the invention of the vacuum tube, and the assignment was the recording of movements whose speed exceeded the perception of any painter's eye. Racehorses and sprinters dashed past the individually and sequentially positioned cameras, whose shutters were triggered succes- sively by an electromagnetic device supplied by the San Francisco Tele- graph Supply CompanY-1 millisecond for every 40 milliseconds. 4
With such snapshots (literally speaking) Muybridge's handsome vol- umes on Animal Locomotion were meant to instruct ignorant painters in what motion looks like in real-time analysis. For his serial photographs testified to the imaginary element in human perception, as in the positions of horses' legs on canvas or on English watercolor paper. To speak of cin- ema as Muybridge's historical goal would, however, be inaccurate, since celluloid was not yet available. The technological medium was meant to modernize a venerable art form, as indeed happened when impressionists like Degas copied photographs in their paintings. Hence Stanford Univer- sity's fencers, discus throwers, and wrestlers posed as future models for
Film 117
painters, that is, nude-at least as long as they turned their backs to one of the twelve cameras. In all the milliseconds of frontal shots, however, Muybridge reached one last time for the painter's brush in order to prac- tice (long before Melies) the disappearance of the male anatomy with re- touched gymnastic shorts.
Had they been copied onto celluloid and rolled onto a reel, Muy- bridge's glass plates could have anticipated Edison's kinetoscope, the peephole precursor to the Lumieres' cinematic projection. The astonished visitors to the 1 893 World's Fair in Chicago would then have been witness to the first trick film: the jumpy appearance and disappearance of moral remains, which in the age of cinema approximate the condition of pure image-flickering.
The trick film therefore has no datable origin. The medium's possi- bilities for cutting and splicing assail its own historiography. Hugo Miin- sterberg, the private lecturer at the University of Freiburg whom William James called to the Harvard Psychological Laboratory, clearly recognized this in 1916 in the first history of cinema written by a professor:
It is arbitrary to say where the development of the moving pictures began and it is impossible to foresee where it will lead. What invention marked the beginning? Was it the first device to introduce movement into the pictures on a screen? Or did the development begin with the first photographing of various phases of moving objects? Or did it start with the first presentation of successive pictures at such a speed that the impression of movement resulted? Or was the birthday of the new art when the experimenters for the first time succeeded in projecting such rapidly
passing pictures on a wall? 5
Miinsterberg's questions remain unanswered because the making of films is in principle nothing but cutting and splicing: the chopping up of continuous motion, or history, before the lens. "Discourse," Foucault wrote when he introduced such caesuras into historical methodology it- self, "is snatched from the law of development and established in a dis- continuous atemporality: . . . several eternities succeeding one another, a play of fixed images disappearing in turn, do not constitute either move- ment, time, or history. "6 As if contemporary theories, such as discourse analysis, were defined by the technological a priori of their media.
Methodological dreams flourish in this complication or implication. Theory itself since Freud, Benjamin, and Adorno has attempted to pseudo-metamorphose into film.