Twice-Found Sounds

For Lent I have, among other ascetic gestures, closed my Substack “Notes” application. It is the thing I hate most about this platform — it has reproduced all the pathologies of other social media, but unlike Facebook and Twitter has made these pathologies even more annoying by specializing in “writer’s lifestyle” content. Reading all your bullet-pointed tips on how to avoid writer’s block (“Have some friends over for board-game night!” “Have a nice tisane with lemon and honey!”) was making me deeply, deeply sad. It made me feel like a weirdo and a preterite, which is I suppose the real purpose of social media.

I found myself indulging comparisons with other writers too: why do I still have a white check-mark rather than a solid one? and so on. Pathetic. Sinful. I want to have no idea what you all are talking about. I want to drift even further into outer space, out beyond the Oort Cloud, away from all the writing nooks with throw pillows and bay windows. Ideally I would like not to know what my numbers are either. I am not strong enough, yet, to give up checking those. But still, it is my firm resolution to pursue writing and multimedia work here (more on that in a moment), in the months to come, that is even further from the cycles of discourse, and even less prone to audience-mirroring and to “carcinization”, as Sam Kriss has nicely described the process whereby all online writing comes to look the same, just as in the convergent evolution of non-crab crustaceans towards a shared and distinctly crab-like body plan. I might sound crabby here on the usual understanding of that word, but you all sound “crabby” in the sense just evoked. You all sound alike (not you in particular, just “you” as in tout le monde).

A couple things happened over the past few weeks that strengthened my resolve about this. A few weeks ago I shared a piece that reflected on my background in cable-radio sound-collage, vernacular musique concrète, and related creative endeavors. I mentioned I have a single cassette tape, which I still have not heard (thanks for offering to let me use your cassette-player, Chris, we’ll have to arrange that soon), that might feature some of my work in this area dating back all the way to 1989. The mere mention of that tape sent me looking, both in boxes down in the basement as well as in ancient computer files, for other such work still, some of which I managed to find. More on that soon, too.

Earlier this week, in turn, I recorded what I have described as a Hörspiel — which as usual with my experimental endeavors “fell stillborn from the press”, to riff on a line from David Hume. This again only strengthened my resolve to cultivate a certain je-m’en-fichisme as regards my numbers, and as regards whatever you all are talking about on Notes. In it I referenced, without credit, a line from Heiner Müller’s Hamletmaschine (1977). This got me thinking, too, as I was looking for some of my old recordings, about the potentials of working in that mostly Germanic genre, and about how in fact I always felt at home there, even though over the past several years I have been putting myself forward more or less exclusively as a writer. As I told the students in my ALP writing workshop last week: in the age of the internet there is just no good reason for limiting oneself in that way. We are working here with a tool that is naturally adapted to multimedia endeavors, like a great Swiss Army knife of creativity. So at least pull out some of its lesser-used blades, maybe even the little fingernail clipper and the magnifying glass, and find out what they can do for you! With just such a thought as this in my mind, earlier this week I followed through, as I had suggested I would do, and went out and bought a very expensive microphone. I also gave myself a thorough tutorial in new sound mixing and editing technologies. You can expect some more Hörspiele from me in the coming months, numbers be damned.

In order to find some of the old recordings I’ve mentioned, I had to dive deep into the hidden directories in my old Typepad account, which still hosts the old jalopy known as “jehsmith.com”. I started that website in 2005, and used it regularly until I came to Substack in 2020. Perusing it this week rather destabilized me when I saw laid out for me there, contrary to what I ordinarily think, how little I’ve changed over the years. I generally see my post-pandemic self as a different self, one who has finally “come out” as a person who most wants to be creative in this life, and who only fell into a track not of creativity but of mandarin argument-mongering as a sort of consolation prize, because I needed a steady job and, to tell the truth, was too insecure when I was younger to just come right out and bill myself as an artist or a poet or a littérateur. But the record over at jehsmith.com could not be clearer: I was already in outer space back then too, just doing and saying whatever, and that “whatever” was a reflection of more or less the same apparently life-long preoccupations that I’ve indulged here at Substack since 2020. I haven’t had a road-to-Damascus moment! I’m as stable a commodity as there comes. The only difference is that no one was reading me back then, and that with Substack I’ve finally hit a critical mass of people paying attention such that there is an appearance of a sort of break, from my old careerist line-toeing self, to my new “let it all hang out” persona.

I was both comforted and discomforted by this little excursion into “the archeology of the self”: comforted, because it is some indication that I have not “gone crazy” over the past few years, as I sometimes worry, but am only as crazy as I always was; discomforted, because this historical record I have examined, under a certain interpretation, might be said to show very little growth in the range and power of my self-expression. I am in this sense, too, I fear, a stable commodity: I’m not really getting better at the thing I most want to do (to be creative).

Fortunately, I do have at least a few new ideas, and one of them is that you don’t have to be good at the outset, nor do you have to get better at it as you go, in order for a life lived in the mode of creativity to be the life best lived. It’s the experience of creative projects by the creator him or herself that is most important. This controversial opinion of mine will be, I think, confirmed in the coming years by the rise of AI, which increasingly will be able to complete any creative task assigned to it, but will always produce work that is ontologically distinct from ours for the one simple reason that this work will not have been born of experience. Experience is all we’ve got. If you want to consume “content”, there’s AI for that now; if you like art, by contrast, well then, start making it.

You think you’re too old? You think it’s ridiculous that a 51-year-old should still be preoccupied with such things, rather than, say, with seeing his kids off to college? Well think how ridiculous it would look if that same 51-year-old were to wait yet another decade! The time for love is always now, as a dear friend is in the habit of saying, and the same goes for creativity.

Anyhow the files stored at jehsmith.com are not as old as the mixtape I gave my dad in 1989 (the one he compared to Billy Joel lol). As near as I can reconstruct their origins, I made them in the spring of 2001, when I was working at a university in small-town Ohio as an assistant professor, was deeply unhappy with my life and fate, and had both some cool new sound-editing software on my university-issued computer and all the vintage thrift-store records I had collected over the years and hauled with me from Sacramento, then to New York, then to Cincinnati. I recorded, sometimes, under the name “Legion, For We Are Many”, and sometimes with the gender-fluid moniker “Hélène Phlogiston”.

I’ll share some of what I was able to recover here. It gives at least some idea of what was on that tape I made in 1989 — just as I have not really progressed between 2005 and today, so neither did I progress between 1989 and 2001. The recordings give a good idea of where my head was, and where it still is — the most surprising part of this discovery, for me, is that my so-called “original” Hörspiel from earlier this week cryptamnetically reincorporates several elements and sound sources that I had also used twenty-three years ago, notably, the line from Die Hamletmaschine about wanting to be a machine, and also the very same recording by Boris Shtokolov of the popular Russian tune from 1911, Забыли Вы. I also make ample use of Richard Strauss, Lawrence Welk, Burt Bacharach: many of my points of reference remain the same, and it almost seems to me now as if my recent explorations in “experimental” metafiction are really only something like the textual equivalent of the musique concrète sound collages I once thought I wanted to spend my life doing, but was too afraid to do, because I needed a salary, because I craved social respectability, etc.

Anyhow, everyone, just do what you want to do! Here, below the fold, are some recordings, with short descriptions of the various elements in the mix, to the extent that I am able to reconstruct them.