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BY SCOTT LEWIS |
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"I came to realize that thinking is pretty
superfluous," McKenzie explains in his light
Scottish accent. "Words are a pretty
ineffectual way of communicating. But on
the feeling level, we're all the same. We
give feelings names. And then what
happens is we say, 'Oh this is jealousy, this
is hate' — it has nothing to do with the
feeling whatsoever. I mean, a feeling is a
feeling — it's not love and it's not hate, etc.
etc. It's just a feeling. I realized that feelings
are the only way you can ever communicate anything.
Anytime someone tries to
actually do something with ideas it never
works. Because an idea is like a linear plan
in time. You say I am here now and I will be
there then, in the future. The future and the
past don't exist. There is no future. The
future and the past don't exist. There is no
future. There is no past. It's just another
idea. There's only now." To these esoteric ends, the Hafler Trio has been experimenting with sound — tape loops, electronics, on-site recordings, mixed together or presented separately — since 1980, when McKenzie and Chris Watson, formerly of Cabaret Voltaire, began experimenting with broken tape recorders in McKenzie's bedroom in Newcastle. They presented their recordings with diagrams and rambling about the "psychoacoustic" power of sound and on-sleeve fables about possibly phony sound researchers from earlier in the century. Take their first record, Bang! An Open Letter, from 1984. The open letter was supposedly written by acoustic researcher Robert Spridgeon to Edward Moolenbeek, the supposed editor of "Science Review," in 1934. The record claims to be a continuation of Spridgeon's work, with all the "original recordings compiled and mastered in Storbreen, Sweden in 1972 by ROBOL Sound Recordings." Bang! even includes an insert that presents a selected bibliography of Spridgeon's work, including pieces like "The Malevolent Ear, The Obedient Noise," from 1953. It's all bullshit. ROBOL is a name made up by McKenzie and Watson. They came across a company named Robal Nuclear Fallout Shelters Ltd. next door to Cabaret Voltaire's old office. "We thought, "We have to use this,'" McKenzie relates. "So we changed it to ROBOL and thought, OK, where's a good place where this could be — Sweden. So we open the atlas and just selected a place with a pin — Storbreen. It's actually in Denmark." As for Spridgeon and Moolenbeek, McKenzie claims they were real people. Then he turns right around and says, "A lot of people thought this whole Spridgeon thing was a joke. Look at the cover of Bang! It says on the cover, 'all material by the Hafler Trio.' We never said there was a Robert Spridgeon. You don't say, like with this William Gibson book" — McKenzie picks up a copy of Neuromancer lying on the table beside him — '"this guy's joking, because this isn't real.' He's a novelist — you can get away with it if you're a novelist. And also you notice, he writes this Neuromancer book, and a few years later, it all starts to happen... When you invent something it really does happen. You have to be very very careful about that. And a lot of things that we actually invented — borrowed let's say, came true." Which brings up another of the shifting levels of Hafler Trio reality: the coincidence stories, which demonstrate — if true — why McKenzie is now wary of on- site recordings. McKenzie claims that every track Hafler has done ties into an elaborate series of coincidences that he learned of only after recording it. Information about the more recent tracks continues to roll into Hafler headquarters in Amsterdam. The earliest centers on the first track of Bang! 'The album consists of tape loops, on-site recordings, and simple electronics. The first track, "Supressed Noise," begins with Watson picking up a telephone and saying, "Hello, ROBOL." Then a manipulated tape of a Russian woman on mid-'70s Radio Moscow about how the Space Shuttle is really an inter-galactic bomber kicks in. Watson used to work for a Newcastle television station, and processed these recordings through a machine there. "I then messed around with it a little more," McKenzie continues. "That sounded good. Underneath that — I used to live in a place called Darlington. It's a very small Bermuda triangle of the North [of England] — everybody goes to die there. I lived there for four years — I didn't die, I got divorced. In the railway station there was a cafe where we made some atmospheric recordings. There was a jukebox playing 'Sputnik' — space shuttle, Sputnik — alright? And it's slowed down to a quarter of its original speed. And in the middle [of "Supressed Noise"] is a woman shouting 'Ian,' in this little street in Darlington. This little kid was running away and she was shouting after him so he wouldn't end up in the cars. He nearly got run over. And in the end is a one-arm bandit, somebody winning a lot of money in this same cafe. "This is all very fine and wonderful. So two days after the record comes out, the space shuttle blows up. We got a little freaked out by this. I won't say we caused it, but it was a weird coincidence. Then I found out the CIA have nicknames for a lot of things. The one for a big disaster in space is called 'A Payoff' — the one-arm bandit — alright? Later on I got involved in this whole Dream Machine business... about these audio frequencies that stimulate the alpha waves. (It was based on) mathematics worked out by a guy named Ian Sommerville, an early English computer mathematician — he died in a car crash after he'd been working on a computer program for the English space project. I'm getting a little freaked out, but then it gets even worse. I found out that Ian Sommerville comes from Darlington, and he was born on the same street as the one where the woman was calling Ian. I then find out that Ian Sommerville's father worked in the same railway station as we made the recordings. "I didn't find these things on the news, we just literally threw this (music) together. And that's when I realized I really have to be careful. Now if it had just been one or two coincidences, I just would have thought, 'Oh yeah, that's interesting.' But that's a lot of coincidences." Perhaps the biggest coincidence was falling in with "Moolenbeek" in the first place, whoever he might have been. McKenzie and Watson had not even named their group yet when Bob Pierce asked them to contribute material for his pirate radio broadcasts in London. "That meant we had to think of a name, and give everything we were working on titles," McKenzie relates. "And then this thing was broadcast. And somehow this Moolenbeek guy — I don't know how, but he heard it. And he wrote us saying you realize that the material in this radio broadcast, some of it is in pretty heavily researched areas — psychoacoustics bla di bla di da — and we were just like, what? "So he started sending us all these research papers, and our eyes were just falling out of our heads. So then we got to the stage where he said if we wanted to use his name, go ahead. Because we'd decided on this name — the Hafler Trio, but we'd only had two people. We decided to just include him because he was the handiest third person around. He was a real person. But I will explain that there were many Edward Moolenbeeks. There was the real guy, but he couldn't be around, because he was 85 when he died (in 1987), so he wasn't about to start jetting around just to go into a front room and start messing around with tape recorders. So when we needed an Edward Moolenbeek, we just got someone to be him. He was real. Same thing goes for this Robert Spridgeon guy," who died in 1983. "We made composite personas in some of the characters we invented," McKenzie explains. "And what we did was throw in a bit of this person that we liked, and that person that we liked — but then this person would actually turn up. See, truth is actually far far stranger than what people think is a joke. I'm going to write this all down at some point, because it's all more unbelievable than anything I ever could have invented." Ultimately it doesn't matter what percentage of Moolenbeek and Spridgeon was invented by Watson and McKenzie. Information about the physical effects of music came along, and McKenzie seized on it to further his own aims. Confuse the mind with babble while affecting the senses directly with sound. It's the old magician's trick: one hand distracts while the other deceives. McKenzie believes that sound can make people tense or relaxed and affect different parts of the body with some variation for the different kinds of rooms in which people will be listening to sound. "Different parts of the body have different resonant frequencies, so you can say with reasonable certainty what's going to happen," McKenzie says. On the first album, "We were interested in affecting people with sound." By Hafler's 1987 album A Thirsty Fish — by which point Watson had departed — McKenzie had his shtick down. The double set comes swathed in evocative landscape photographs and cryptic sayings. Rather than using any field recording that he thought sounded interesting, McKenzie focused on recordings from sacred sites, weaving the recordings together with his electronics. It's a busy effect, with sounds coming from everywhere, sometimes lasting only a few seconds before disappearing into the mix. The intent was "to confuse people until they couldn't think anymore, so they'd have to feel. It was conjuring. The idea was — and still is to a certain extent — watch this hand while the other hand goes into the pockets. The stuff that everybody sees is not actually the whole point. People can't see the whole point because it's like this covert action. |
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than what people think is a joke."
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But I'm still talking around it, I'm not
going to put it in one easy bite-size piece
because that would destroy the whole point
of what I'm doing. I have a very definite
intent, but if I talk about it, it will evaporate.
If I put it into words, you'll just have an idea
again — and then it's gone. All the stuff you
see on the packaging, and the sounds in
fact themselves, all that stuff Is just the fluff.
The real stuff is actually going on somewhere else."
It's hard to imagine where the "somewhere else" is if it's not the packaging or the sounds on the records; the only other place it could be is in the listener. Trying to find it is like looking for the ghost in the machine — which is what A Thirsty Fish is all about. The title comes from a Zen parable. A man asks a Zen master to give him enlightenment. The Zen master responds, "You are like a fish saying that it is thirsty." "That's how I came up with the title for this album that I hadn't even made," McKenzie elaborates. "The whole album is about things sacred... One night I was sitting looking at the television, and this vicar came on. One of these modern vicars — they don't have the dark clothes, just a nice suit. "Good evening," he says, and starts talking about the weather. The telephone rings next to him, and he picks it up, 'Hello? Oh it's you God!' On the telephone. I thought, what? This is too good to be true — you can speak to God on the telephone, I mean the idea of it!" An old-fashioned telephone dangles on the album cover, waiting to be picked up and used for sacred purposes. A Thirsty Fish is a dense album, not as difficult to listen to as early tape loop records like Bang!, but as much work to listen to as it was to put together. All this effort made McKenzie feel he was going in the wrong direction. "With my new material I just sat around and watched it happen. And because it gave me this wonderful feeling, everybody else feels good about it. With earlier records, because I thought I was being difficult and intellectual, everybody else thought I was being difficult and intellectual. But now I've stopped being difficult and intellectual. I don't use material from the past anymore. I don't like to use found and archive recordings — I stopped collecting them." An example from Hafler's new phase is Intoutof (Soleilmoon), which is perhaps the most listenable recording McKenzie has made. It uses far fewer layers of sound than A Thirsty Fish, and while some of the same sounds appear on both, the abrasive electronic droning that goes on for about eight minutes towards the end of infoutof appears for about eight seconds on A Thirsty Fish, and then cuts to another electronic sound. The first six minutes of Intoutof is enveloping electronic drones that sound culled from a science fiction film soundtrack. It then moves into the strongest piece, a good fifteen minutes of eerie whistlings with various electronics in the background that sound like slowed-down bird calls over earthquake rumblings. After about seven minutes the electronics drop out, leaving only layers of whistlings which have a pure, ethereal quality that needs no accompaniment. McKenzie was a Whirling Dervish for six months, and it sounds like he's spinning around and around with those corrugated plastic tubes that toy stores sell as novelty instruments. The shifting layers, some whirling slower and at a lower pitch, others trilling high above, have an absolutely hypnotic effect rarely found on earlier Hafler work. It's almost like the previous recordings re-produce the bad connections and noise flitting across the surface of the cerebral cortex; Intoutof burrows straight into the soul. If McKenzie is trying to touch human feeling directly, a place where meaning cannot slip between the fingers, it seems he's headed in the right direction. This simplified approach works for both his art and for McKenzie himself. "I have to stop all this hard work, and putting things together," he says. "So I just stopped trying and now the records make themselves. I suddenly realized it's the only way to do it. I also realized that all these people who work really really hard to do these really detailed recordings — you're only hearing the work. What they should be doing is going for what they really want. It's so simple. It was such a great thing to realize. You don't have to try hard. Life was never meant to be a struggle." Soleilmoon, Box 83296, Portland, OR 97283
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