HeadHole: Malfunctions and Dysfunctions of an FM exciter

(1996)

Published in Theater Drama Review (TDR Vol. 40 No. 3, Fall 1996), guest ed. Allen S. Weiss. An expanded version of the issue was published in book form as Experimental Sound and Radio, MIT Press, 2001. This essay is the same in both publications.

Quietly, let’s unplug everything, blindfolded. Ears plugged, nose clamped, tongue tied, let’s strip the hardware off radio. The exciter, heart of the FM transmitter comes last. Once off, the purring winds down and we find ourselves radiophilic without transmitter. Commonly, the resultant dead air spells anguish and panic. No longer can the signal signify the voice and radiate it with power. For the moment, however, we will dwell and even revel in the air dead. There are remnants and potentials in our voices hereto untapped that will be sufficient to carry this broadcast home. The regular hosts from the Center for Radio Telecommunications Contortions have decided to invite some special guests as co-hosts for this program: the Analphabête – an unbridled voice, the Wireless Wired -a posthumous telephone, and the Transpiring Transistor -a translator exercise.

Radio without Transmitter

Radio voices are dead on arrival. Upon entrance to the studio, they are trained to sync lips to accepted tastes and are delivered to the listener excited, but hardly less than moribund. There are several factors working to stultify this delivery. Foremost is the monopolizing of radio space as carrier of information. “Fact: radio as wallpaper” (Moss 1990). Voices on radio are well combed and articulated, not masticated nor salivated. They have been air dried and dehydrated. “After seventy successful years in the wallpaper business, radio has many of the powers to flatten, smooth out, disembody and trivialize the information it conveys” (Moss 1990). It is no surprise that radio as a creative tool is still strange territory. There is a molding of the voice that standard radio requires; a pre-determined format shapes the voice to its well-treaded contours. The mold is defined by a blandness that is crass, or alternately a crassness, that is bland. The cast of the voice is now an immutable crutch. Even college and community radio stations cannot pretend to be free of this sort of ossification. They have become a viable alternative and in so doing have suffered no small amount of institutionalization.

In a text entitled Speech, A Handbook of Voice Training Diction and Public Speaking, Dorothy Mulgrave states that: “the well adjusted speaker will conceal from his audience any sign of tension or discomfort”(1954:133). The result is radio where everything is false and nothing is permitted.1 The concealment of vulnerability is how the game is lost. Learning to hide can occur either via a subtle transformation or an overt mutation. All who possess a remunerating voice have come across alliteration exercises and articulation jaw breakers. One such exercise tape in diction repeats the mantra: “Learning to speak well is an important and fruitful task” (Learning n.d.). The tape then enumerates the voice types: No.1 Neutral Voice, No.2 Raised Larynx, No.3 Falsetto, No.4 Creaky Voice, No.5 Whisper, No.6 Whispery Creak, No.7 Whispery Voice, No.8 Whispery Falsetto, No.9 Creaky Voice, No.10 Creaky Falsetto, No.11 Whispery Creaky Voice, No.12 Whispery Creaky Falsetto, No.13 Breathy Voice, No.14 Harsh Whispery Voice, No.15 Tense Voice, No.16 Lax Voice.

We can only speculate what an inflation of the numbers will produce: No.795 Breathy Tense Creaky Neutral Whisper … No.9676 Wounded Raised Larynx Lax Vitriolic Falsetto … and finally No.126,789 Creaky, Breathy, Radiated, Harsh, Tense, Electrocuted, Fondled, Neutral, Contorted, Raised Larynx, Throated, Vexed, Whispery, Transpired, Articulated and Vehiculated, Incontinent, Vagabonded, Phantomized and Phased, Jaundiced, Relayed, Post-determined and Post-digital, Deregulated, Mellifluent, Erased, Manipulated, Fast forwarded, Battery operated, Synoptic and Phatic and Tonsilitic, Glottal and Colossal, Salivaphile and Expectorant, Lecherous, Licentious, Projected, Reverberated, Remote controlled, Vivisected, Transistorized, Modulated, Masticated, Animated, Assiduous, Analphabête Voice.

It is inflation, amplification, exaggeration from the HeadHole in to the HeadHole out that brings the voice alive. Stelarc once stated with a maniacal laugh that “the problem isn’t getting it in, the problem is getting it out” (1993). He was trying to get a sculpture out of his stomach. We are merely trying to let it out of the mouth. Once the voice is excavated via the mouth, you get recognized by strangers. I know you, I really know you … I know who you are (Migone 1996).2 The type of recognition alluded to here is the trademark of the Analphabête and is based on nothing more than a sharing of the air dead. A particular kind of kinship, where to unlearn language is the common gene, where the bel canto is infected by the pleasure of imperfections, and where nowhere is where it’s at.

David Moss once pronounced radio dead (Moss 1990). This leaves the field open for resuscitations: radio is dead, long live radio. “I’ve always hoped and fantasized that radio was the perfect medium in which to propagate subversive artistic activity, by its very normalcy radio would function as a sort of culture dish of art bacteria and it would grow its own audience” (Moss 1990). Conversely, the radio petri dish is also growing its own artists. Its size cannot accommodate the transmission apparatus nor does it need to, audience and artists having spawned from the same bacteria. The politics that espouse that everybody should arm themselves with a transmitter can now make the leap to the following scenario: radio without transmitter. Perhaps this is the required script to trigger the post-digital age. Skip the digits’ demands for detected errors and corrected codes. Skip the automation which “looks empty but sounds full” (Oakwood n.d.). Fast forward to the post-digital age, an age with a taste more savory than the antiseptic and a time beyond the accelerated. An age where the Analphabête will be spoken and heard through every orifice.

The Dead Line

Ken Charles Barger, age 47, accidentally shot and killed himself last December in Newton, North Carolina. Awakening to the sound of a ringing telephone beside his bed, he reached for the phone but grasped instead a Smith & Weston .38 special, which discharged when he drew it to his ear. (Hickory Daily Record)3

Telephones are so much a part of our lives. They have also become part of our deaths. Few of us, perhaps, face the spectacular pathos of Ken Charles Barger’s final call. Picking up the phone is dangerous. The phone is loaded and has become a terminal shock treatment connecting us to the beyond. In deadication to Mr. Watson -the first caller to the transcendent- we are suffocated by our own information web.

The telephone is increasingly without answer, increasingly without voice. You can navigate through the myriad choices of your touch-tone phone until you turn blue, a shade prior to expiring. ‘Larry King Live’ is in fact ‘Larry King Dead’. Before the show was cancelled, all callers to the syndicated North America wide program should have, once on air, shouted ‘King Asphyxia’ then revelled in some choking sounds and finally hung up. Thus, we introduce the posthumous telephone and its users the Wireless Wired not as phoenix rising but as living dead: “at once grotesque and familiar, banal and exaggerated, ordinary and on the edge” (Shaviro 1993:83).

Conversations are no longer the telephone’s principal calling card. What we connect are transactions and suffocations. Mimicking Barger, a caller reaches for the phone but grasps instead an ad: “Let my voice blow you away” (Phone Sex 1993). Enticed by the thought of a petite mort the caller then dials 1-900-XXX-XXXX, credit card at the ready. The little death ejaculates and the receiver gets messy. The telephone, as a panophonic device where sex and death are currency, engenders calls that blow you away.

Observing that many of his fellow citizens have cellular phones but are seldom called, entrepreneur Joachim Benz of Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany has launched Rent-A-Call. For a five-mark fee each time, he will call subscribers on their mobile phones whenever they want him to; hundreds of client have signed up. (The Independent 1994)4

It is only a matter of time before these subscribers suffer the fate of Ken Charles Barger. They should all be called and, once on the line, the caller should shout ‘King Barger is dead’ then revel in some choking sounds and never hang up. After all, happy to be finally wired and wireless they will be touched. Reach out and _ _ _ _ someone. With this evidence, it seems that if being ‘live’ is what we desire we cannot afford to wait for the call. Answering the phone is dangerous. We have to make the call. Obsessively, randomly, desperately, absurdly, let the phones ring! Let us begin with the progenitors. Glenn Gould’s line is busy. We’ll try later. Laurie Anderson has Moholy-Nagy on the other end. Avital Ronnel is conferencing with Martin Heidegger and Alexander Graham Bell. Try again later.

Across the sleeping city two strangers are locked in anguished intimacy. Their lifeline is the slender thread —a coil of telephone wire. Minute by minute two strangers are joined in desperate communication. One is a man fighting bitterly to save a life; the other is the woman…who wants to die. (Siliphant 1965)

Sydney Poitier and Anne Bancroft play the two tangled strangers in the film The Slender Thread. Their telephone link negotiates life and death and the coil’s tension provides the movie’s modus operandi. The apparatus seems to relish its role as bearer of bad news, as the anguished intimacy is heightened by the invisibility of the exchange. The telephone locks us in a state of imminence. “It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of the night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not” (Auster 1985:6). Sorry, wrong number. The advent of features such as call display, call trace and call block, render one’s phone a veritable fortress. A phone number is not only one’s property but has become inextricably tied to one’s identity. I am calling you. Sorry, wrong person. Dialing a wrong number: trespassing with a blindfold. Each dial could be the last, thanks to the suspense of imaginary barricades.

Cellular phones encourage traffic torticolis and remain economically prohibitive for most. Their cells have not yet undergone the inevitable diminutive plunge under skin. The inevitable, however, is near. With phones internally installed, they would become genuinely cellular and we would become answering machines. “Answering Machines: they are patiently training us to think in a language they have yet to invent” (Ballard 1992:277). With global telegeography grafted to our neurons, the phone companies would drive us insane, dialing up truly cellular damage. Ultimately, the Ma Bells would collude to have our offspring conceived and subscribed simultaneously. Bewildered, at first we would be answer machines with only questions. Once the telemicroscopic device becomes fully assimilated, we will be seen in the street talking to invisible people. Even the cellular clad today can be likened to the so called insane who wander our public streets having private conversations out loud. This type of activity is very much akin to the radio transmitter’s functioning. You diffuse something that any (passersby) can pick up if so desired, while talking to an intended audience (the person at the other end of the wireless line). Proto-FM behavior, radios without transmitter. Gould’s line is still busy.

The telegeography of the Wireless Wired is reaching radiophonic proportions. The call you place is broadcast in invisible ink all over the air on its way to its intended destination. Prince Charles calls with his pants down. “Let my voice blow you away”. The cell phone flaunts one’s private parts. The art of being everywhere is the same as the art of being nowhere (X 1993) … well, why did they hang up? I have no one to talk to. From 1988 to 1994, my radio program Danger in Paradise on CKUT-FM in Montréal regularly left callers hanging. Some of these calls were eventually weaved into the audio work Hole in the Head.5 Recounting telephone stories has particular poignancy on the radio, it multiplies the holes in the head until buoyancy is in question and you start to sink. From porous heads, protruding holes welcome the apparatus and we mainline, the telephone as capsizing neuroma. As with any self-respecting tumor it is malignant. We have become one of the Wireless Wired in the vein of Gene Hackman in the Francis Ford Coppola film “The Conversation”, Mark E. Smith in the Fall’s song “Totally Wired”, George Brecht in the performance “Three telephone events”, or Liam O’Gallagher in his audio work “Border Dissolve in Audiospace”. Just as the eavesdropper is precariously crouched on the eave as it drops, the Wireless Wired is strategically placed to become part of the conversation, even if there is nothing to say. “The answering machine is a democratizing instrument, but the kind of democracy that results is a rather odd one —a democracy in which everyone has an equal right not to participate” (Rosen in Kelly 1988:27).6

The non-narrative narrative in the radio/telephone space is a symptom and a cause. The calls made in Hole in the Head were never answered.7 The mere fact they were made weaved the narrative. Ay ay ay, it’s lonely out there in the middle of nowhere.8 “Telephones: A shrine to the desperate hope that one day the world will listen to us” (Ballard 1992:269). The narrative traces the attempts at making the connection. A narrative following the Wireless Wired on a line jagged and drunk, where en route I wonder who you are. I wonder where you are. I wonder whether you are. If you are, can you are, be you are, are you be? 9 The choice is in making the call the act and the site for an implosion of identities. An implosion where your story is no longer contained in a hermetic innervoice but is porous with strings and leads, weaving the mix.

The dead line ends the story by hanging up, leaving a trail of voices mixed up in a perplexing web. The neurotic posthume telephone threatens our ears. Why call in viva voce when you can whisper directly to a synapse? Once atrophied, the wilted appendages would perhaps be saved from amputation in order to lay idle as backup generators of audio stimulation should telephony malfunction or dysfunction. The ear is an appendix in the history of the technological human. All the while, the abundantly porous Wireless Wired is hardwired to a call which converses in perverted verse and remains ambiguous to the ears’ fate. The noise of the ring is deadening, off the hook.

Bruts and Bruits 10

Most writers write in order to make a sound, even if their tree is falling in a forest where’s there’s no one to hear it. (Anshaw 1991:66)

Writing is a sound in silence; a sound is struck in the same manner a letter is scrawled. Writing is often the expulsion of a compelling inner force, a drive to create, which does not necessarily occur in conjunction with the drive to communicate. The sound of the tree is silent because it is not heard. This implies sound has significance only at the point of reception. The Bruts writers are strangers to the literary establishment and indifferent to the rules of grammar (see Thévoz 1979). Ecrits Bruts is an extension of the term Art Brut coined by artist Jean Dubuffet. This art is produced by people outside of the art world, people socially and mentally marginalized (hence sometimes the term Outsiders is used). They write but they are not writers. Hence, we can place them outside the culture of reception, which is a culture of commerce. They belong to the culture of the insane, where creativity is more likely to be seen as symptomatic of a “condition”.

As one might guess that these writings navigate the borders of sense (see Bruts sidebar below). But you don’t have to be crazy to write non-sense; I am not proposing a pedestal of insanity. The propensity of the writings for alliteration, solecisms, spoonerisms, catachreses, jabberwockies, anagrams, ellipses, pleonasms and portmanteaus all result in a prosodic chaos which invariably brings to mind sounds along with meanings. The reader acquires ears. What we hear are the sounds of our imagination interpreting the text, a process which exists in all reading to a certain extent. The Bruts writings, however, seem to really pick up the instruments and bang raucously away. Forget minuets, welcome the Nihilist Spasm Band.11

It is not the case that someone who is silent says nothing. The Bruts writings are authored by people who spent the better part of their lives in institutions. By and large, their silence is rather a silencing, not a choice, but a sentence. Although dissimilar to a Cageian silence in terms of intent (in that sense Cage’s silence is but a privilege) it is nevertheless “a silence full of noises” (Cage 1981:210). They write with abandon, because we have abandoned them. The texts are embodied, because we have straightjacketed them. These texts are bodies. They scream, masturbate, contort, fuck, defecate, digest, exercise, cough, sweat, etc. They are not necessarily or exclusively loud or scatological, but they are undeniably tied to the individual rather than untied and strapped to the body of an institution: literature. Operating with this distinction, the bruts become bruits (for noise is also an outsider, as it is usually considered to be the opposite or even the negation of music). The texts are not meaningless for the noise they emit and their status as outsiders to literature, but are part of what Jean-Jacques Lecercle terms the remainder. “The relation of grammar and the remainder is one not of opposition or inversion but excess” (1990:60). Thus, the remainder is language at work on the delirious construction of accidents. It is the living language rather than its prescribed version. They are the jokes, the puns, the rants, the hallucinatory ramblings which play with, or even “do violence to”, language (Lecercle 1990:60). The remainder is not an other, nor a marginalized obscurantism for, as Lecercle would assert, it is the method by which language becomes.

There is always something grammatical about delirium, there is always something delirious about language […] Language is material not because there is a physics of speech, but because words are always threatening to revert to screams, because they carry the violent affect of the speaker’s body, can be inscribed by it, and generally mingle with it, in one of those mixtures of bodies the Stoics were so fond of. (Lecercle 1990:58, 105)

Artaud’s relevance is obvious at this juncture. “Artaud’s terror was dark, filthy, emanating from the deepest recesses of his body, a body which his discourse tried, always unsuccessfully, to rejoin” (Weiss 1990:58). The body language in this case finds its recess in the anal tongue. A fusing of muscles which sparks the violence of the transgressor. A compulsive excess in vehement opposition to anal retention. The retentive is now a common analogue to depict those who willingly institutionalize themselves in constructs (the Moral Majority being an obvious example).

For us as readers/listeners, the approach to these texts must be without caution. The passive is pacifier, it numbs. It is anal retentive. The entry point is the act of interpreting/translating. For the reader to develop ears is only an introductory step, as Gregory Whitehead wittingly points out the ear is just “a hole in the head” (1991:141) . Furthermore, in this case we are referring to sounds from the silent text. They are not heard, they are thought. It’s the noise of the brain that I want to amplify.

yomart te i no te i no stat i o e cel chioz i zi vi vi zian vientse i e i niotsel e vi vi (Artaud 1978: 132)
[you mart tea i no tee i no state i one cell choice i zip viva Zio Viennese Eli nix tell a vivid]

broita sen erver brait esa orzin erva brait osa orzin ervu (218)
[brute seen revere brain sea erosion sea brat Rosa ursine revue]

maloussi toumi tapapouts hermafrot. emajouts pamafrot toupi pissarot rapajouts erkampfti (Artaud XIV:11)
[malaise tumid tappets permafrost. emaciated jowls permafrost toupee passport rap jousts errs camp fit]

The above translations of Artaud are interesting because they are not translations per say, they are machinations.12 They do not pretend to find universal meaning in a hermetic language but rather intrude, corrupt and disarticulate the original. There is a certain paradoxical faithfulness in this approach for it does not strive for accuracy, nor does it fabricate a neutral voice towards a literaturization of the embodied text. Translation connotes a professionalism which perpetrates this chimera of objectivity. Traducson is the French term for translation via sound, and perhaps a more appropriate term for us to try to apply here. Lecercle’s The Violence of Language provides us with an edifying example of traducson in the story of Leonora (1990:72). A native of the French West Indies, where creole was forbidden at school so she instinctively retranslated the Latin from the Bible she had to learn by heart. ‘Ave Maria’ became ‘lave lari la’ (‘lavez la rue là’: wash the street); and ‘miséricorde’ became ‘mizire kord’ (‘mesurez la corde’: measure the rope). While it is through sound that the creolizations were performed there are poetic correlations between the two ends. So, to isolate sound as the new currency of exchange is not satisfactory. It would signify the replication of the institutional model, it would become the norm. Where the tried and known fail us and for the sake of irreverence, let’s adopt the term: Transpiring Transistor for a trial run, as the new translator.

The Transpiring Transistor is naughty by nature and always noisy. It performs a kind of reading/listening that is inseparable from writing/voicing. In its desire for a herniated body of text it utilizes all senses to ferret its subjects. So writing is not a sound being silenced, just a sound in silence. And the sound in silence can be a noisy affair.

With regards to the Bruts writings and radio, Michel Thévox director of the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland makes the link effortlessly:

Radiophonic expression is of particular interest and perhaps more akin to the Bruts writings than intimate communication. I am suspicious of intimate communication and its mirror effect. The effect is of a mutual complicity which tempts us strongly to subjugate ourselves into the image the other has of us. It is an aspect of conjugality which does not favor expression. I believe that love has never inspired any poet, it is rather conflict, confrontation, and jealousy which reveal Proust’s genius and not affectionate sentiments. Thus, expression is truly freed from the constraints of this complicit intimacy when it can address more anonymous subjects. I have the impression that through radio one can be less susceptible to prejudice and more one’s self. It might be paradoxical to have such a public medium the site of more honesty, more nakedness but as I said being in close proximity is constraining and stifling, thus perhaps the act of addressing none in particular might free up tongues (as was the case with Artaud). The Bruts writers had no access to radio but I would imagine that a microphone would have interested them greatly. They are often characters of parade and spectacle who invent a public for themselves -in the theatre the public is too present whereas with radio the guarantee of an audience without the usual face-to-face confrontation would surely have stimulated them. (1992)

In Hole in the Head I placed calls to the Bruts writers and in the routing I, as a novice Transpiring Transistor,13 found a simultaneous series of cacaphonous stammers, sentences and screeches emanating from my mouth. The bruts microphone connected the delirious voice to the discordant radio. Thus, the calls (although unanswered) transpired and became the noisy affair that a silent text can be.

The Naked Parade

The FM exciter gives the audio signal the frequency of modulation, the rest of the transmitter boosts the signal and gives it power. When the exciter is not excited, we are bored.

Today, the artist knows he can actually express himself less than others. Always and forever every day, he probes the elusiveness or the absence of expression which, if it manifests itself, does not reveal itself in him but leaves to him the bitter task of giving it voice. (Paolini 1992:75)

Today, we find that we emit continuously, even in silence. The danger is neither in what we speak nor in what we hear but simply in what we fear. Nietzsche dubbed the ear as the organ of fear (Nietzsche [1881] 1982:143). While I would contend that fear is more pervasive and awaits at our every pore, the ear does function as an early detection system and the more naked we be the more it comes in handy.

As the HeadHole heals, the guest hosts fade with ears nevertheless perked and mouth resolutely vociferous. Rapidly, let’s find the loose wires and reconnect the studio. No longer naked nor dead, the machinery hums merrily oblivious to the damage done. The Analphabête makes an encore appearance, promptly losing the radio station’s licence to broadcast. The Wireless Wired is diligently learning how to solder intimate memories to neural synapses. And the Transpiring Transistor reaches for Louis Wolfson’s Le Schizo et les Langues and never returns.

SIDEBAR Bruts (selected writings)

He said you speak softly now and you don’t want to speak out loud kelanelstikikosti postirmaisi secret police of madmen secret police also to prove that the makalam of promakalam prokalastarrokala-remsbrokelaisstrrmmakalaistostemarlokerster melaokester copy for me what you said a national sick person Monsieur in the end he said that the brain registers just that yesterday we were really persecuted but here we’re still at least among madmen who says Jacqueline why do you always speak of something else when I answer you well was it to pass the time because I can no longer Cyrano de Bergerac Bergerac out loud.

Jacqueline (Oakes 1991:165, translator Sophie Hawkes)

Ive lost tutch with mye selph Ide bee blyged iff yoo cood spair a pockit ahnker cheef for Jools Duddin. who evry wonn thynk Stynk. Tooby Plucky saye Hang onn Eye cood Boase toff havvin skraipt throo bye the skninner mye teath. They diss pize mee they shitten mee. Iff yoo confined any whun nose smudgers mee bough tittall juss sendem upp too seamy inn the king derm Of heavy earn Thattle semmy upper bitt Nuffter grabber thatt littall Dar lingh jest gonn parst.

Jules Doudin (Oakes 1991:127-8, translator Roger Cardinal)

Emile Hodinos Josome – Son of Emile Jean Hodinos – Locked up in Ville Evrard for no good reason. Moulder – Modeller – Inventor – Typesetter – Compositor – miniaturizer – Engraver of Medallions. Baths – Showers – Straightjackets – Several Baths During the years 1877-1878-1880-1881-1882-1883-1884-85-86-87-88-89-90. During the years 1891, 1892, Bathing suspended. Bathing regularly each week. During the years 1893-1894-1895-1896-1897 approximately – Fed – watered – clothed at the Ville Evrard. Make my bed quite regularly. Empty out my chamber pot. Drawing – Writing – The – Brushing of my shoes – Cleaning my Combs – Hair fallen out.

Emile Josome Hodinos (Oakes 1991:133-5, translator Roger Cardinal)

NOTES
1. A paraphrase of William S. Burroughs famous dictum “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”
2. Unidentified caller from audio work Headhole (1996). Original call came from the program Danger in Paradise on CKUT-FM in Montréal, hosted by Christof Migone.
3. uncredited news item from The Independent. In Globe & Mail (1994: A20).
4. Unidentified caller from audio work Hole in the Head. Original call came to the radio program Danger in Paradise.
5. Hole in the Head is a radio work by Christof Migone commissioned by New Radio and the Performing Arts for the 1992 season of the New American Radio series. It was released as a solo CD by Ohm éditions/Avatar in 1996.
6. From “An Equal Right to Inequality: The Sociology of the Answering Machine,” by Jay Rosen. In ETC: A Review of General Semantics, quoted in Kelly (1988:27).
7. The calls were made (metaphorically) to the Bruts writers (see “Bruts and Bruits” section and sidebar).
8. Unidentified caller from audio work Hole in the Head. Original call came to the radio program Danger in Paradise.
9. Gregory Whitehead from audio work Hole in the Head.
10. This section is a revised and expanded version of an article which appeared in Sub Rosa, vol.2 Spring 1992, Peterborough, Ontario.
11. Name of a music group based in London, Ontario. In the printed info of a record release they state, unequivocally, “We are always loud”.
12. Translations by this author, inspired by Jocelyn Robert’s “Art against temperance”, a text produced by running the “Front de Libération du Québec” (FLQ) manifesto through the English spellcheck of Microsoft Word. Excerpt: “Five le Quéebec limbered, five legs camaraderie priestliness poleitiques, five la revelations queebecoise, five Art against temperance.”
13. The accompanying TDR CD features “Emile Josome Hodinos”, the piece is part of The Transpiring Transistor series of works derived from écrits bruts. Several pieces of this series appeared in 1994 on the CD Radio Rethink: Art, Sound, and Transmission, published by the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff, Canada.

REFERENCES
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Ballard, J.G. 1992 In Incorporations, eds. Jonathan Crary & Sanford Kwinter, 269 & 277. New York: Zone.
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Migone, Christof 1995 Headhole. On the accompanying CD found in this issue of TDR.
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Oakwood Audio Inc n.d. Advertisement for the “Media Touch” system which automates radio stations.
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Phone Sex 1993 “Let My Voice Blow You Away”. Advertisement found in the Adult Personals section of the Montreal Mirror, 26 August.
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