Purportedly part of the soundtrack for the alleged Malvo sniper shootings, professing the 5% knowledge of holy black masculinity. With only the mind “free,” dualism of war/peace favors the former in the mode of Black complacency/suicide; put another way, survival becomes a “revolutionary war” unto itself. Seeking the “black nation” that can be “absorb[ed]”; submerging the necessity of taking arms in order to purify, but never exceed, the white supremacist state. To mind, much more has been taken in the name of purity. The ballot in this formulation, though, is the bullet.
The gift of the lament need not be representational in order to give (itself) over: bodies, decisions, and stockpiles); surely, the air-raid sirens, buildings imploding, and two tone-cluster passages mark time, but the destruction never creates a silence. At the zenith of this Penderecki piece’s zenith (twenty-five total seconds), a single violin sounds, sustained without adornment/ornamentation. Barren, all fifty two strings sounds approximate pitches and durations, holding at bay that memorialization which aggrandizes certitude. Like the 2003 Hiroshima commemoration, the generation (of shared listening) should compress distance while remaining proximate: close enough to the event for commitment.
Peter Sotos collage of voices of prostitutes, abused children, parents of kidnapped and murdered children, and the ubiquitous, soothing voices of social workers and media interviewers. Sexual abuse has been “hidden in the closet too long,” says one voice. While this taped testimony is “out,” perhaps, it is being disseminated within something else: a legal buyer’s market for the pornographic, under cover of a media-induced “therapy” of expression and positive thinking. In an abuser’s pecking order, the State and the media come first.
Powerful avatars for the idea of the indecipherable, numbers station broadcasts have existed for nearly fifty years. No amateur sleuth has ever cracked a numbers station code, even though the collating and curating of actual broadcasts has accelerated since the formation of the Conet Project. It’s widely presumed that the first numbers stations were sending messages to far-flung, state-based spy networks, and part of the pleasure of listening to numbers stations is vicarious: tuning in to something that’s not for you—spying on the spies. The Conet Project describes “Magnetic Fields” as a relatively new station, and “transmission quality is usually poor and schedule erratic.” The station’s moniker comes from the musical identifier that opens each broadcast: a short selection from Jean Michel Jarre’s Les Chants Magnetiques (1981). Thus, this particular numbers station is a highly self-reflexive, sonically commenting on the nature of radio wave broadcasting in general and on the potential for overlap and interference. And it’s true: the air is full of layered, disembodied, garbled voices, waiting for an ear. What we hear sometimes seems tantalizing: if only we had the key, we might learn that some world leader is about to be assassinated, or that some “false flag” covert op has been cancelled. But according to “scowl,” “Agents were told that if the first number is even or odd (depending on the agent), it was a real message otherwise they could ignore the rest.” Because everyone is monitoring everyone, all the time, “most of the time there was no message.” So, generally, when we listen to the numbers stations, we’re hearing someone signaling someone that they have nothing to say. Over and over. Empty of non-aesthetic content rather than indecipherable as such. Something meant merely to divert attention, like a pop tune. But then, of course, that might be precisely what they want you to think.