“Tone is existence, without which nothing at all can be. Symmetry and Numbers are the manner in which tones exist, one with another. Emotion is the movement of our soul toward the wonderful world that is being created. Now, men when they make music are accustomed to build beautiful tones, because of the delight they cause. Therefore their music world is based on pleasure; its symmetry is regular and charming, its emotion is sweet and lovely.... But my music is founded on painful tones; and thus its symmetry is wild, and difficult to discover; its emotion is bitter and terrible.”
Earthrid, in David Lindsay’s A Voyage To Arcturus
Under the Internet, the literate (but everyone is seemingly literate now) have been divided into two groups – those who can still read books, and those who can’t. Even I, who used to read four books at once, and finish two a day, am lucky if I can fit in one a month. I think the books that still engage my attention are deeper, have more in them, but perhaps I’m just putting that “more” there myself because there’s only the once-in-a-month opportunity to put it anywhere.
One way of fighting back is to read books aloud, preferably to a loved one, and I’m lucky that Hayley, once we get the right book, is a great listener. It’s easy to lose the thread of a writer’s involvement when solo reading is interrupted, as joint reading is more likely to be. One has collected from the text what one needed in the moment to go on, and this collection may not make sense a week later. But read a book aloud, and everything is present; discuss it before and after with an interested listener, who is really a co-reader, and the fictional reality lives a long time – perhaps forever – and swarms with its ideas.
We began with Brave New World (Huxley) and got a fair way with it, but the ideas and the characters were too busy to sustain, and I hadn’t yet learned the habits of a perfect reader (the word “reader’ now having two senses). And anyway, this great book’s petty closure has rendered it unfilmable to this day.
Much better luck was had with Huckleberry Finn (Twain), A High Wind In Jamaica (Hughes), Billy Liar (Waterhouse), His Monkey Wife (Collier), and some stories by Fay Weldon and the Brothers Grimm. The key is that I know and love these works, they mean something to me from way back or more recently, and this makes them worth sharing, and helps to make the labour of reading aloud a pleasure.
Another of these books was A Voyage To Arcturus, which I’ve read several times across my life, despite never fully understanding it. It’s arguably the greatest work of imaginative fiction, meaning a blend of science fiction and fantasy bent into a semi-allegorical form, for adults that exists, admired by Tolkien and an influence on C.S. Lewis’s great sci-fi trilogy, even if not many others bought it at the time, and this post will contain some spoilers, but I’m not sure that makes much difference to a story that seems to change with each reading. Depends how good your memory is, I suppose. Anyway, you have been warned.
A Voyage To Arcturus was written by David Lindsay, a self-taught, self-contained mystic of Scots descent who tried and failed to succeed as a writer all his life. Most of his books involve glimpses of another reality intruding fatefully into the lives of more-or-less normal characters in this world, but in A Voyage to Arcturus, his first novel, we are taken directly to another world, the planet Tormance, which circles the double suns of Arcturus. The wonderful, impossible landscape of Tormance teems with life, always changing as Lindsay’s hero Maskull travels across it. The people of each new region have an extra sensory organ, or limb, or organ of digestion – Maskull grows this too. And from growing it, he grows like them, and tends to behave as they do, even in ways he found appalling before. The obvious inspirations are Darwin and Nietzsche, but there’s also a hint of Marx, perhaps derived from the sociologists of the Scottish Enlightenment, in the way that the material properties of a region define its social life. Most mysterious, is where Lindsay acquired some advanced ideas about gender – for example, this passage, written before Jung published his theory of the anima and animus - “I will explain the marvel. Every man and woman among us is a walking murderer. If a male, he has struggled with and killed the female who was born in the same body with him—if a female, she has killed the male. But in this child the struggle is still continuing.” Later in the book we meet an asexual person, for whom Lindsay’s choice of pronouns, ae/aer, seems preferable to today’s impersonal “they’.
Maskull’s quest gradually reveals a Manichean mystery, Tormance, standing in for our reality, is a world whose creator is prolific yet false. Krag, a blunt, unpleasant character who may have brought Maskull to Tormance and sometimes accompanies him there, stands for the harsh truths about reality, which Surtur, or Shaping, tries to hide.
Lindsay was an amateur musician, with a good understanding of the art:
“The mountains stood up wild and grand. They impressed him like a simple musical theme, the notes of which are widely separated in the scale; a spirit of rashness, daring, and adventure seemed to call to him from them” could be a description of Strauss’s Don Juan theme, which John Williams knocked off for Raiders of the Lost Ark.
A musical theme runs throughout A Voyage to Arcturus, finding its clearest expression in the chapters on Swaylone’s Island. Arriving at the shore of an ocean, he finds the stolid fisherman Polecrab and his sensitive wife Gleameil, who is tormented by the music played by Earthrid on distant Swaylone’s Island.
“In a far-back age,” began Gleameil, “when the seas were hot, and clouds hung heavily over the earth, and life was rich with transformations, Swaylone came to this island, on which men had never before set foot, and began to play his music—the first music in Tormance. Nightly, when the moon shone, people used to gather on this shore behind us, and listen to the faint, sweet strains floating from over the sea. One night, Shaping (whom you call Crystalman) was passing this way in company with Krag. They listened a while to the music, and Shaping said ‘Have you heard more beautiful sounds? This is my world and my music.’ Krag stamped with his foot, and laughed. ‘You must do better than that, if I am to admire it. Let us pass over, and see this bungler at work.’ Shaping consented, and they passed over to the island. Swaylone was not able to see their presence. Shaping stood behind him, and breathed thoughts into his soul, so that his music became ten times lovelier, and people listening on that shore went mad with sick delight. ‘Can any strains be nobler?’ demanded Shaping. Krag grinned and said, ‘You are naturally effeminate. Now let me try.’ Then he stood behind Swaylone, and shot ugly discords fast into his head. His instrument was so cracked, that never since has it played right. From that time forth Swaylone could utter only distorted music; yet it called to folk more than the other sort. Many men crossed over to the island during his lifetime, to listen to the amazing tones, but none could endure them; all died. After Swaylone’s death, another musician took up the tale; and so the light has passed down from torch to torch, till now Earthrid bears it.”
“To see beauty in its terrible purity”, Glaemiel tells Maskull, “you must tear away the pleasure from it.” Knowing that the adventure will likely be fatal, they travel to Swaylone’s Island.
Earthrid is in some ways a typical musician – he is found eating dirt – but has an adaptation peculiar to his occupation “His face was pale, weak, and vacant-looking, and had a disagreeable expression. There were thin sprouts of black hair on his chin and head. On his forehead, in place of a third eye, he possessed a perfectly circular organ, with elaborate convolutions, like an ear. He had an unpleasant smell.”
The ear-like organ, Earthrid explains, “is for rhythm, which is what changes noise into music.”.
And Irontick, a small circular lake about half a mile in diameter, is an electronic instrument, as Maskull discovers when he steps on it with both feet – “Instantly he sustained a violent shock throughout his body, as from a powerful electric current; and he was hurled in a tumbled heap back on to the bank.” Electronic instruments were novelties in 1920, the year Leon Theremin invented the first mass-produced example; by the time science-and-technology enthusiast Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931, he had heard enough from the new machines to know that the sounds of the future industrial-musical complex would be synthetic ones, and imagine a pop music much like todays, and there’s another blog in that.
I won’t reveal what happens when Maskull attempts a tune on Irontick – but what Colin Wilson and other commentators on A Voyage To Arcturus don’t seem to have noticed is that Earthrid’s third ear is the only extra, Arcturian organ that Lindsay didn’t allow Maskull to grow himself on entry into its territory. So how could this chapter have ended differently?
Re-reading the Swaylone’s Island chapter of A Voyage To Arcturus recently, the message finally made sense. “I know this music!” (and I also know the music of Shaping, my, is it ever popular). And, because I hear it now, I finally understand everything that Lindsay is trying to say about music (a word that appears 68 times in the book; his unfinished The Witch is similarly involved with music). Last year in Dunedin, noise musician LSD Fundraiser played Hayley and I a cassette of some noise that grabbed me in the right way. The packaging only said “Toll” and “No Doubt” and “BF50” and, figuring this was not Gwen Stefani’s band, I started looking for Toll’s music online. It wasn’t streamed anywhere, but I did learn that the tape was released on Broken Flag, the label of an outfit called Ramleh, and was perhaps their work (?). I managed to download its contents from Soulseek. It’s excellent, intense, and highly varied, stuff - here’s some extremist post punk in track ‘A4’ (see also ‘B2’)
Note how Toll’s commitment to noise doesn’t stop them coming up with a really neat riff to drive it.
And in ‘A6’, tormented vocals are exposed to what sound like gas explosions. Industrial noise music arose when artists were exposed to factories at a time when the factory worker’s exposure to mechanical noise and physical danger was beginning to become redundant, due to the failure or automation of British manufacturing industries.1 “We fetishize that which we can no longer take for granted” - Freud.
Ramleh’s music often includes guitar, bass and drums, which might be played through ring modulators or otherwise made less familiar and less pleasant. Their breakthrough work Hole In The Heart has a picture of Nagasaki after the second atomic bombing on its cover, and it’s characteristic of workers in this genre, who are often multimedia artists, to find such objective correlatives of the sounds they’ve composed to illustrate their intentions – notably similar to Penderecki’s choice of title for his famous, and not too dissimilar, threnody for string orchestra.2
There’s a relatively recent Ramleh album on Bandcamp, on which they’re much more of a rock band, but still in Earthrid’s style.
Here, the objective correlatives are track titles like ‘Racial Violence’ and ‘Religious Attack’, which suit the music but also suggest an accelerationist sense of humour. From Simon Morris’ sleeve notes.
“RAMLEH never ever give you what you think you want and as such they are one of the very few bands on the planet left in this state of true and always gorgeously sinister and malevolent independence. Quietly watching so many fucking chancers come and go, and it must feel good.”
There are scores of cassettes of Ramleh and related music, and it could take me the rest of my lifetime to listen to it. Their discography’s very proportions contribute to a sense of Lovecraftian unease, that the thing is too big in space and time, that it can only be populated by giants or monsters. Is there not perhaps some place where we can hear as much of Irontick in a single short song as we can stand? Just a single to put in the jukebox? For this I nominate Zheani’s ‘Maenad’, from the haphazard collection ‘The Line’ (2019), which still contains some of her best work (including the first fairy trap, and her first stab at hyperpop).
In ‘Maenad’, the music’s symbolism is internal, the sacrifice is oneself, the atrocity isn’t a serial killing or atom bombing but the singer’s own tormented longing to be one with the Great Mother, to be reborn at terrible cost. An interest in esoterica is common to most, probably all, of the great industrial bands, but here the chthonic is being invoked as furiously and subjectively as possible. Deconstrukto’s production is ordered into a wild, asymmetric discipline, and every blast of speaker rattling sub-bass serves a purpose, satisfies an appetite for destruction; the clanging metallic chimes and insistent drums at the start anchor the piece in the industrial tradition.
Some music is worth listening to without being pleasant, just as there are plenty of unpleasant films people find worthwhile. But for some reason known only to Shaping, unpleasant music is far less respectable than unpleasant films, which win prizes and go in the 100 Best Films lists (the only real exception to this in popular culture is in the music of the 90’s, when grunge and nu-metal bands were on TV and riot grrrl bands should have been. Something interesting was going on in those days, please explain). We’re talking about an underground scene, but a huge one, with its own historians and philosophers.
I’m not one of those, I’m not highly versed in the music I’m mentioning here, I’m just interested in its existence and have come to like some of it a lot. If you’ve liked it for a long time, you almost certainly know more than me, but what I see is something growing out of a conjunction between the punk DIY ethos at its most abrasive and antisocial, and serious electronica; the first example I heard, back in the late 70’s, was Throbbing Gristle, who gilded the lily by singing about serial killers and horrible accidents. My friend Bob Sutton suggests ‘Persuasion’ as best showing TG’s aesthetic – Wiki says “they maintained that their mission was to challenge and explore the darker and obsessive sides of the human condition rather than to make attractive music” - at its most creepy.
Mostly, my aesthetic, corrupted by early exposure to Romanticism, can’t easily stretch to pleasure being torn from beauty, or pity from tragedy, by Genesis P. Orridge’s type of unpleasantness, even as I understand the philosophical justification (reverence is often falsely evoked to stop criticism or block progress, e.g. “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”). But I’m open to persuasion, and I do have fond memories of Bob playing me ‘Blood On The Floor’ back in the day, an unforgettable tune, very appealing in its awful directness. Bob also suggested the Abba sampling ‘AB/7A’ from D.o.A.: The Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle (1978), in which attractive music is made the stuff of nightmares.
Being Throbbing Gristle was existentially interesting, and Cosey Fanni Tutti’s autobiography Art Sex Music is high on the list of books I need to read this year if I can read at all.
Another old friend of mine, Bryan Spittle, who I worked with in Mink back in the 90s, and from whom I had my first exposure to sequencers, etc, is a Coil enthusiast, and recommended Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil as Coil’s most brutal work. Instead of the foundry sounds of Ramleh, we have purely synthetic sounds driven to the extreme; the highly, and increasingly, distorted sequences of ‘Tunnel Of Goats’, the totality of Side 2 on LP, are brutally satisfying.
And therein lies the rub; for certain degraded souls, pleasure has not been torn from the questionable beauty of such works. The objective correlation may be the symbolic representation of a migraine aura, but I seem to have listened to the whole thing, and the joke’s on me.
What music was David Lindsay influenced by? I’m sure he rated Beethoven and Wagner, and I think I’m right about Richard Strauss, because how could he resist Also Sprach Zarathustra, but I also suspect he had a special attraction to the music of Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915), the apocalyptic Russian mystic, megalomaniac and mixed-media theorist who created the most weird and challenging, indeed Arcturian, works of his day.
Algorithmic Disco – Side T2W202 by LSD Fundraiser
The Industrial Revolution began, , and industrial sounds and rhythms began to be heard around 1760, a year when Haydn’s 25th Symphony was top of the pops and Mozart was only 4 years old and just starting his career as a composer.
Note how much less familiar a picture of Nagasaki is, compared with those of Hiroshima. The hills near ground zero meant that fewer people died in the blast, good news if you live near hills.