Review: RadiO TEST #4

Two tracks by COLT (‘Magick: Systems of Madness’ and ‘Beyond Breconex’) and an excerpt from a recording by Pete Free and the SPG feature on RT#4. COLT tracks also appear on each of the earlier releases in the series.

RADIO TEST #4

I was fashioned in times long past,
At the beginning, long before earth itself…

M.R. of O.I, underground polymath, rarely photographed man of mystery, supporter of lost causes, embodiment of gold from lead, has gifted the world a final collection of eccentric soundscapes, metaphysical investigations, toe tapping tunes and post-surrealist mind fucks, birthed in Holloway Road and the suburbs of Tamworth, a Sheffield that never existed, and places that cannot be located on maps but converge on the parts of north Wales that are not frequented by tourists, in a time warp embracing the early 1960s, mid-1980s and that segment of the early 21st century that will colonise the furthest reaches of time, by the generous impulse to offer an invitation to people who would otherwise remain unknown to each other, and deploying advanced curatorial skills that he might not be aware of, for obscure reasons that relate to the enlightenment of the world and the ages that the sounds pass through, in the spirit of conceive, continue and complete, and for the profitable readjustment of the listening ear; he presents clear black text on a plain white ground, simple and direct: project name, brief mission statement; artist name in bold, track title in normal text. The word takes precedence. The image is absent. And yet the code embedded in the credits serves to prompt a series of lively visions in the all receiving mind.

Before we hear a sound, we can speculate on the location of the white city, conceive of human demons relaxing in rain and thunder, adopt youth shapes to go beyond Breconex, recall the vegetable action of the world circle jerk in the night of the vampire, inhabit the spirit of fuck the dirge, escape, and TV buzz. The disguised Minotaur and the beard of religion, the cubed nightmare of the medieval Satanisms, the raised ink of rural sex magick, systems of madness…It’s the call sign and outro that keep us grounded and unforced. It’s what passes between beginning and end that holds our attention.

The electronic needle lands on the invisible groove. We emerge 77 minutes and 58 seconds later, having travelled from one uncertain world through several others. It is hard to convey the meaning of many of the tracks on this collection with any degree of certainty, or to accurately describe the methods by which the messages are relayed. It often seems like we are dealing with transmissions from alien intelligences, which defy mundane categorisation. Our uncertainty is the result of tactics deliberately employed by the producer of the collection, who wants us to question the apparent reality of what is habitually assumed to be the here and now.

As on the three previous releases in the series, the introductory call sign consists of male and female voices repeatedly intoning ‘radio test’ over a shifting sine wave. They are letting us know where we are and providing a strong indication of what we are in for…

As it is… an electronically treated voice relates a series of numbers, which constitute a code that unlocks the subliminal substratum of a BBC radio broadcast and reveals the trance inducing harmonies that underlie what the unsuspecting listener hears as he tunes into his favourite programme… the sensation of dislocated being that accompanies the psychedelic experience, whereby time speeds up and slows down, is transcended or rendered inconsequential, leaving gaps in the time track and holes in consciousness, and where attention switches from internal experience to external stimuli, so that it becomes a struggle to locate yourself in space as well as time… a description of the core elements of the metaphysical system invented by “Crowley the cock nut, bourgeois reactionary / and gibberish spouting scag loving baldie” and promulgated by its founder and his slaves in the second decade of the 20th century… Blue Prince receives a message from his humanoid answering machine, informing him that there will be “…medieval vegetable action this Friday”… a sample from ‘The Girl with the Prefabricated Heart’, the most accomplished section of the film ‘Dreams that Money can Buy’, directed by Hans Richter… word play employed as a method of revealing hidden meanings that lie beneath the commonly accepted rules of grammar and constraints of language… it is strongly suggested that demons are humans who re-enter the world they have departed following their deaths… an apparently jolly combination of jangling acoustic guitar, bells and pseudo-angelic choir is subverted by an introduction and coda that suggest the song might have emerged from the mind of a psychotic fantasist… a whispered description of the sights, sounds, smells and feelings enjoyed by a film maker during a summer storm. We hear rain and birdsong, distant thunder and muffled traffic noise, and we’re transported to an unpretentious, everyday paradise simply by letting it in… an experiment involving a recorder placed in close proximity to a TV set to create an open channel for alien contacts to transmit messages that cause the receiver to remember dreams of profoundly significant radio sets on display in a fairground cum disco, which provides living quarters and office space, some of which is inhabited by the dream narrator, whose subconscious mind creates other similarly powerful if insubstantial environments… an excerpt from an interview with an audience member at an American talent show who is on the verge of revealing her favourite contestant when she is supplanted by sonic blast, which gives way to a whispered and cut up female voice intoning an arbitrary and meaningless list… subdued metallic grind supplanted by echoing drones, ending with a proclamation that the ultimate spectacle lies beyond second rate archetypes and state approved religion… a manifesto promoting the pre-eminence of the immediate experience of now, asserting the unreliability of external authority and condemning arbitrary systems, which can be countered by the refusal to accept their premises… a recording of a steam train with the microphone placed near the furnace and a storm in the background… an encounter with a sinister stranger who mumbles to himself and makes outlandish hand signals in a book shop… a fabulous Joe Meek production from 1961, which sounds like Sun Ra has been commissioned to deliver a guitar twanging instrumental showing The Shadows how it should be done. You can imagine this tune introducing a performance by The Fall if Mark E. Smith had a more pronounced sense of humour… a short documentary illustrating a radio phenomenon of unknown provenance followed by an examination of extraterrestrial Electronic Voice Phenomena… a teenage nihilist who urges us not only to fuck the dirge but also to fuck everything else that occurs to her deeply disappointed, hostile and snottily confrontational mind… a constrained melange of sub-bass, concrete mixer mid-ground and sharp high tones ending with a scream… a description of an emergency alert transmitted by the CIA following an alien invasion of the skies above rural America… tolling bells with a slowed down reiteration of the code voiced earlier in the broadcast, as cars speed down the wet road that runs through an abandoned town in a larger evacuation area, which is eventually occupied by chthonic forces… a superficially relaxed and pleasant idyll with an unsettling subtext, somewhat reminiscent of Psychic TV’s ‘Dreams Less Sweet’… a recording of a space ritual conducted on the edge of audibility, rendering the bass notes as an almost palpable heavy force and throwing everything else into obscurity; the participants become aware of the threat of unwanted intrusion and send out a protective audio field consisting of messages about death and Oscar Peterson… Flowers of Evil contribute a song from their self-titled 1988 debut audio-cassette, which takes the form of a curse against their enemies, who will be judged and found wanting, whose days will be few and whose children will be orphans, wandering in desolation… So be it.

The end is in the beginning
and the beginning is in the end
and yet the beginning and the end differ
by virtue of that which has passed between them.

The outro features a brief snippet of Joe Meek talking about his earliest recording experiments, followed by something which could be a short work created using the method he outlines, then a reversal of the introductory callsign (as featured on the first three releases), before concluding the RadiO TEST series with a street recording of outsider artist Pete, composer of “serious songs with a spirit of happiness”, singing ‘A Peck on the Cheek’ to wildly oscillating toy organ before he makes his way down to The Moor.

RadiO TESTs #1 – 4 are available for free download by following the links on the ‘Miscellaneous ORB / OI Audio’ section of the ORB Editions website ‘Releases’ page at: http://www.okok.org.uk/Releases/releasespage.htm#Misc_ORB_OI

 

On the place name Crookes

From ‘The Sons of Amos Brearley’, one of the core texts of Cross of Light Temple:

Crookes, meaning ‘land of the magician’, is derived from Krekja (‘a magician’), a character from the Icelandic saga ‘Bard the Snowfell God’. The centre of Crookes is the hollow tree, situated near the burial mound of Krekja. The mound is planted with ash trees transplanted from Bakewell. That Bakewell was a Norse settlement is proved by the presence of the Tomb of Helga in the porch of the parish church, and Crookes is no more than a 12 mile moor trek from Bakewell.

 

Beyond Breconex

Revised version, 18/05/13:

1.
Everything is grounded in the immediate experience of now.
We are here and not elsewhere, and we act from where we are.
The immediate experience of now reasserts itself as reality no matter how often it is denied.

2.
There is no secret wisdom.
Everything is provisional. Nothing is certain. There are no reliable authorities.
All systems are arbitrary and only acquire meaning if their constituent elements are accepted as if they were true.
All supposedly valid systems can be invalidated by the simple expedient of refusing their premises.

3.
What people tell me I am is a fiction. I am beyond any definition given by the other. I am beyond any definition given by myself. I am beyond what I’m told I am.
I begin nowhere. I end nowhere. I occupy a space between beginning and end, which is constant but seems to change.
The mortal and corruptible body is absolutely linked to any notion of super sensible being with which it is associated.
We have the necessary resources within us and we do not need instruction from elsewhere.

4.
Form is a treatment of unfettered imagination.
The limited is a manifestation of the limitless.
Limitless being exists in the context of finite being; the endless is known by that which knows a beginning and end.
The end is in the beginning and the beginning is in the end.
The beginning and the end differ by virtue of that which has passed between them.

Waltheof Walks Notes 1: Frater Pheral

A guest blog from Frater Pheral, maybe the first in a series:

Waltheof Walks notes

Frater Pheral

These are walks with intent, and the intent was to explore history, both of the place as written and of the place as I remember it.

From The Hall of Waltheof:
In the spring of 1887 a baked cinerary urn containing human bones, a small cup, and a damaged bronze knife was found at Crookes. The urn is figured in the engraving. These ancient remains were discovered, as is usual in such cases, on the highest point of a hill.

I walk from the centre of town up West Street to Weston Park. My psyche has been wide open for hours already, the voids are near.

On the way, it occurs to me to walk through the University then to go in the Students’ Union, for the first time in many years. It’s all changed – the bridge to the entrance is gone, is part of the inside of the building. Downstairs, where the bar is and was, memories flood back – I lived in this area in 1971 and frequented that bar. The social scene I was on floated on a small ocean of LSD. I found exactly the spot where I had a time-warp experience in May 1971, a version of myself that lived in eternity gave me a message that is still working itself out. I complete a circuit in time.

In Weston Park Museum: The burial urn mentioned above is not instantly impressive in appearance, but then I notice the pattern cut into it, similar entoptic grids to those on the drinking vessels of the ‘Beaker People’, the sheep-herders who, some anthropologists say, drank psychedelic sacraments from such vessels.

I walk down Broomspring Lane, remembering the places I lived round here in 1970-71. I walk past the end of Holberry Place, which used to be called Havelock Square at that time. Ironical that the street is renamed after a local Chartist hero, in light of the existence of Sheffield’s very own anarchist Commune in the years 1970-73.

I stayed at no. 4 Havelock Square for 6 incredibly intense months. When Tikka invited me to move in, in May 1971, the Commune’s first stage was over, and the owner of the house and founder of the Commune had been alone for a short while. I’d met Tikka at anarchist meetings in the Albion pub, somewhere behind the Brookhill shops, on a road that no longer exists.

From ‘The Hall of Waltheof’:
The remains lay within two feet of the boundary of an old lane called Tinker lane or Cocked Hat lane leading at right angles from the top of the village street at Crookes and pointing towards the Rivelin valley.

For my next walk I went up to the top of Crookes, in time for sunset. The dry, bright cold called bracing. I take a bus into town first. The boards at Moorfoot go green, orange, green, Venus-Mercury-Venus, the latter predominating. Another bus to Crookes and I’m looking at a memorial plaque as soon as I get off the bus. It’s all about death today.

I walk up the hill. Smells of fried fish, laughing people, the atmosphere of a market. I go up Bole Hill Lane, Tinker Lane, to the Bole Hills park. The sunset is pink and takes up 2/3 of the sky. The view is stunning, I got here just in time.

Whether or not Waltheof had his hall here, I bet someone did. A good place to defend your home from – it must be the biggest view in the Sheffield area. A good place to live, and a good place to die.

Water is turning into slush underfoot, it’s getting really cold. Death is indeed the theme today. Not surprising, in view of recent bereavements. As if to underline that resonance, a police helicopter dips over, beating wind of apocalypse.

I walk down through Walkley, then Upperthorpe, where a long-dead friend once lived. I salute the memory of the man known as Big Ben, who taught me that dead ideas make a fine bonfire.

The Hall of Waltheof: Sheffield Patrol Group Manual

The first stage of the S.P.G. project is complete. The S.P.G. manual, which collects all Hall of Waltheof posts to this point in one handy document, can be downloaded here:

The Hall of Waltheof SPG Manual

 

The Hall of Waltheof: Was the Lay of Righ written or sung in Hallamshire?

“The old Northern poem called the Lay of Righ…attributed to the eleventh century, describes the characteristics of the three orders of men, viz., thralls, yeomen, and gentlemen. The Earl, according to the poem, lived in a hall facing the south. He began to be a warrior, and:

“He began to waken war, he began to redden the field, he began to fell the doomed; he won himself lands. He ruled alone over eighteen townships” Messrs. Vigfusson and Powell, the editors of the poem, say that it is “clearly of Western origin,” in other words that it originated in the British Isles. Now Waltheof, or Val-þjófr (put to death in 1075), was the acknowledged chief and leader of Danish or Northern England. According to the Doomsday Book he not only had a hall in Hallamshire, but “ruled alone over eighteen townships” there. These were the townships of Sheffield and Attercliffe, which were “inland” of the manor of Hallam, and the sixteen unnamed berewicks, mentioned in the Survey. In the second line, and perhaps in the alliteration, the poet seems to be punning on the word val in Val-þjófr. Can we not, therefore, say that the lay was sung at Waltheof’s court, and was intended to flatter or please him? It belongs to the class of genealogical poems. It contains a description of an Earl’s house, and of the food, clothing, personal appearance, etc., of its noble inmates.”

The Hall of Waltheof: on the place name Hathersage

“…I have said that Stanage may be Stein-eg, stone-way, paved way, and it will be seen that the Roman road between Stanage Pole and Hathersage is known as Giant’s Causey. Now if that were so, it may be that the termination eg occurs also in Hathersage, anciently Hathersegg, which we may divide as Hathers-egg, meaning Hather’s way. The O. N. Höðr, genitive Haðr, was a mythical being of tremendous power, who seems to be identical with the Hotherus of Saxo…Hather, then, seems to be the name of a mythical being or giant who, according to the old legends or popular tales of the neighbourhood, made the great causey or paved way. Little John, the mythical companion of the mythical Robin Hood, is said to have been buried at Hathersage, and the exact place of his burial is still pointed out in the churchyard. Hather or Höðr (Hod) was the being who, according to Norse mythology, shot Balder with the mistletoe, so that “he fell dead to the earth.”…”