SORRY TO INTERRUPT

audio recommendations, podcasts, “horror vibes”

SORRY TO INTERRUPT

Clignotant absence.

Alarm bells never rise over the family compound. Installed and last maintained, tested, too many cycles ago. Now any law enforcement or nosy reporter can sneak their way in. A woodpecker establishes its dominance over the noon siren’s horn fixed to the telephone pole.

The sexual warp and woof of twitter would be enough to LD50 any mortal man. I was a digital agent tending/ministrating to the neurotic nerve endings of the hurt artist cube, who detects slights/vendettas in all six directions (four points of compass, plus “up” and “down”—whatever up and down are).

LD50 means “lethal dose 50%,” the dosage of poison sufficient to kill half the population, usually of lab rats. Used to be all about rats in mazes. I made lab rat fumetti with the rats doing quips in cartoon speech bubbles. Like water cooler talk amongst the lab rats. Most normal-ass thing in the world to be given cocaine and sent through a maze that only has left turns in it.

Absorbed into a caring machine.

As a child I used to throw tantrums of silence.

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Hot take: The next big thing will be audio. Audio pieces, radio plays, theater of the mind. Cooler take: I think audio pieces are what hit me personally on a satisfying level right about now. I will rattle off some examples of audio art I’ve heard lately that are sticking in my ear and try to explain myself.

Let me just start by saying that I love podcasts and I recommend them to everybody. The textbook example of the GOAT of podcasts is called Uhh Yeah Dude. Jonathan Laroquette and Seth Romatelli dissect pop culture, news, celebrities, food, music. It’s hard to explain. All I can tell you is that I’ve routinely gotten significant headaches from laughing my ass off so hard to this show. It’s been going since 2006.

Now that that’s out of the way, I have to talk about another favorite podcast called Alt-Write. This is trickier. Hard to describe. But this podcast is basically comprised of audio files of conversations and interviews that spin out of a certain sector of indie lit (outsider, transgressive, alt lit—no nomenclature works) that surrounds the individual writer known pseudonymously as bibles. bibles had a novel published by Expat Press a couple years ago and was (or still is?) connected to many people in this sub-world of literary culture, and they came on the show to discuss this sub-world in a hectoring, sarcastic way which still left room for insight and awe, if only on the part of listeners. Eventually along the way writers/gadflies/commentators D’urban Moffer and Derek Maine became recurring guests or core staff, if you will. The conversations they had were very funny and illuminating and alarming. Often they pertain to bibles holding forth on “currentivism” which is a difficult-to-define aesthetic theory a la Dadaism or Surrealism, where “everything is writing,” especially in online spaces such as Twitter or Telegram and decision-making in writing and editing have a near theological significance.

bibles’ “Kunsttheorie” of currentivism is, perhaps fittingly, delivered in fragmentary sound mosaics that need to be reintegrated and reassembled at some later point downstream in the digital flow. The coherence has yet to occur. I haven’t mentioned yet the distinctive audio format of the podcast whereby Durban Moffer would run the recordings through a ridiculous amount of effects processors and audio editing programs to create an eerie, sometimes hostile sound collage that could be frustrating but occasionally yielded shimmering, beautiful results. (Listen to the ending to the episode titled “Negative God” where bibles discusses currentivism with Moffer and Maine with a slowly building and creating ambient background.) No comment on the politics of Alt-Write. The title is supposed to be an obvious pun on “alt right,” and maybe venturing into this audio territory is flirting with right wing ideas, I don’t know. I didn’t necessarily notice anything like that and I’ve listened to nearly all of it. If anything there is a mocking self-consciousness and a quickness to poke fun at the perceptions of being on a political fringe. I haven’t listened to it lately. All I can tell you is that at times it was very funny, clever, absorbing. Sometimes it was obnoxious. Listen for yourself (it helps to have a guide to Expat and Expat-adjacent writers at hand—very little happens in the way of “welcome to _________, my guest on todays show is __________.” Fuck that. If you can’t deduce for yourself who everybody is and what they’re talking about, you’re lost and this was never meant for you, in true underground style.) The added value is the dizzying, hallucinatory sound production.

Another big one that is too much territory to cover in just a few paragraphs is L’étranger on Radio Panik 105.4 FM out of Brussels, Belgium. Real quickly: every other Sunday this mysterious DJ and selektor named Dr Koper (?) puts together a two hour program of industrial noise, avant garde music, field recordings, miscellaneous sound, and AI voices reciting snippets of writing from the darkest corners of the literary culture where I have found myself. I don’t know how Koper sifts through all this stuff. Listening to two hours of it is an ordeal, and that seems to be part of the point. Sometimes the ordeal is very mysteriously pleasant like the trance states achieved by devotees walking over hot coals or passing wires through their lips or tongues. In those situations, the body is just clay to be played with, something “apart” from the devotee, likewise the eardrum while listening to L’étranger is for stretching and testing and subjecting to stress. It’s a sensual stress-test. I first really became aware of the show when out of nowhere he picked out a thing I wrote on this very substack and inserted it into a British AI voice in the latter end of one of his shows. No asking for permission, no discussion, it was just there. He does things like that. It’s an exclusive honor, I believe. My friends Unity, Gabriel Hart, Derek Maine, and quite a few others have all been excerpted on the show. Eris was in there a bunch of times. Koper seems to have a thing for writers clustered around shadowy, underground publishers, basically any publishing venue cited in this interview with Louis Armand here:

“What's going on under the Big Daddy radar (keeping a certain kind of writing bad for business, as they say in the classics) is Amphetamine Sulphate, Inside the Castle, Alienist, Schism, Expat, Sum, Apocalypse Party, selffuck, 11:11, Prototype, Equus, Raw Dog Screaming, Paper View, Sweat Drenched, Orbis Tertius, Miskatonic Virtual University, Erratum, Centre for Experimental Ontology, Urbanomic, Anti-Oedipus [the list goes on, you just have to look for them].”

L’étranger is, I would guess, the underground. It’s not easy listening by any means. Like I said, some of it is harsh torture chamber music but that’s where I found Cucina Povera which is one of my favorite recent listening experiences.

Here’s a randomly selected recent example of L’étranger, you can easily find other episodes this way:

https://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/l-etranger/show-458-faint-hansoms-withernam/

The mysterious auteur Jake Blackwood, coiner of the term “cyberwriter” and source for all things authentic, does disturbing audio visual art pieces for the underground like this, SPARAGMOS. Jake Blackwood can’t be questioned. He’s a node that the areas of cultural influence arrange themselves around.

Music recommendation: Burial Grid. Look them up on bandcamp. Synth soundtracks for horror movies. This doesn’t do it justice.

But the thing which served as the impetus for this substack newsletter was recently hearing the interview done between Joe Bielecki and Logan Berry on Bielecki’s Writing the Rapids podcast. This is another one of my favorite podcasts as the host routinely talks with writers from Inside the Castle, 11:11 Press, Cloak, and this area. (Literary cartographers, are you starting to sense a motif?) Twice I tried to listen to this interview but it was very late at night, I was tired, so I fell asleep, and on the second try I awoke at the end of the recording to hear this very frightening noise-collage, audio play piece. Joe later told me it was something Logan put together. Berry is a writer and a theatre guy and at the heart of a group of writers toiling in this “literary experimental horror” vineyard which seems to be everywhere right now, or at least everywhere to me (did I take a left turn in the lab rat maze somewhere?) I really want to read his 11:11 Press book Run Off Sugar Crystal Lake and whatever he’s working on lately which includes a piece of fiction that was on Ergot Press called “21 TikToks Before the Dismemberment Event” but which now reads “404 File Not Found.” I hope to one day read whatever longer work that was an excerpt from.

There must be so many audio productions of this kind that I’ve been missing. Just like with so much art currently coming out, it’s staggering to think of all the sound, conversation, recorded language being edited together out there to effect. Sound effects.

I am trying to formulate my feelings on the “horror vibes” which, like pseudopods off the blob living in the basement of the haunted hospital, seem to be everywhere I turn these days. It’s all throughout literature. I called it a maison maudit or a necropolis in an earlier newsletter. Part of me rebels against it, and part of my is fascinated by the darkness. I write it too, in a way. I am implicated. There are some gothic particles which seem to have infiltrated the genetic material of all life around. Is it COVID-19 reflected in the artwork? I have often thought of myself as a “stealth goth,” or one who is a goth but doesn’t have the outer coloration as it were. My feathers are middle-aged. I love that music, or did during a certain phase of my life. My favorite record labels for a while in the late 90s early 2000s were 4AD and Projekt. Darkwave. I spent hours listening to Dead Can Dance, Lycia, Corpus Delicti, Mephisto Walz, Raison D’etre, I forget all the names of the bands. That is not even scratching the scratch on the surface, and a true goth would know that. If I had an inner tuning fork it would, when struck, produce a dark unsettling tone. I have dreamt of having my poetry chapbook Handcuffing the Venus De Milo reviewed by some goth publication. Goth is notorious for being a breeding ground for sub genres and sub sub genres as absurdum. But maybe this is like an acknowledgement of its capacity for mutation: every goth down to the individual, could carry the mutation down into its own unique sub genre of individual.

I’m getting off topic. That whole “goth” discussion for another day, or more probably, for never. If you know of any audio productions that go in this direction I’ve described above, or have any recommendations for podcasts that aren’t too on the nose and catch you off guard, let me know in a comment here.