These are excerpts from the book Tape Delay by Charles Neal. Harrow, Middx, SAF Publishing, 1987.
Sleazy: Pardon? (laughs) The theory of all that stuff is that if you actually play something at a lower level or backwards or in flashes on the screen it's absorbed by the subconscious mind which acts upon it immediately. But I've never had any information or evidence that it works. People say The Rolling Stones album 'Their Satanic Majesty's Request' has reverse masking and it says, "Come to Satan", or something. I mean it's all bullshit, it doesn't work in my view.
J Balance: Records are very crude as far as recording and playback quality goes and there is no way that scientific experiments can be done in this medium. I think holophonics are far more interesting anyway. Stevo gets accused of doing a bit hoax an so does Zuccareli who developed the system. With holophonics we were able to get atmospheric subliminals and record a particular feeling including the espatial limits of a room or a cave and the movements of people in it. But I remain very dubious about back masking and inaudible sounds having profound but subtle effects.
Sleazy: Coil are interested in subliminals of another kind - delirium subliminals. Avatistic glimpses of a grand chaos- surfacing in flashes of black light -in darkest Dali, Jarry, the Moomintrolls, The Virgin Prunes, in the faces of Edith Sitwell, Boyd Rice's humour- emotional subliminals. Psychic information, partly deliberate, mostly instinctive.
Do you think that ghost images in a visual picture have an effect on people?
J. Balance: I think they possibly have more effect. Apparently 'The Exorcist' originally had dead animals subliminally put in and they had to take them out. I mean there was a huge reaction about people being sick because it was the first high class splatter movie. It has more chance of having an effect if you see adverts many times -and they're not subliminal. If you see adverts for ice cream, next time you're in the shop, you go, "I'll have one of them", because you've seen it on telly. It just works on a crass level like that. Sleazy: But there are lots of things that happen with films that could be exploited more, just things that you see in the background that you don't notice but are actually there. J. Balance: All of these subjects -subliminals, back-masking, cut-ups, the Industrial group's subjects- culled from Burroughs' "The Job" and "The Electronic Revolution", have been done to death.. And not very well. Sonic research is very hard to do properly on a Rough Trade advance or whatever. It maintains a pseudo-science, it has a wishy-washy quality that I don't particularly want to be associated with. I'd rather been seen as a perverse noise unit with decidedly dubious musical leanings. I admire the intentions of all these groups, but the purity or scope of the possibilities are diminished by huge amounts in the translation to vinyl. Z'ev and NON seem to remain pure -as do Sonic Youth, but they're coming from a different area as far as I can tell. In the end, the intentions alone can be appreciated -golden conceptualists and dull records type of situation.
Chirs: It varies a lot, it depends why you're using them or what you want to get across -if anything. Sometimes it can just be a train of thought that you want to start off in someone's head, or it could be an actual political message you want to get across. We don't want to say what ours are and we don't want to give anyone ideas of how to listen to them or what tracks they might be on. They're not on all the tracks, but we want to get some feedback from people and see what they think they might be.
Cosey: All we've had is people asking us what they are. We just want people to tell us if they can hear them, and if so - where. If they went trough each track on 'Love and Lust' and figured out what was going on and what they felt about it, they would probably come up with them anyway.
Chris: The other thing is to leave your mind open, you shouldn't be listening for them really. It's like when you've got the TV on and you're not really watching -it's suddenly there and you don't know you've seen it until a few minutes later. Subliminals don't work with all people. Some people don't get them, some people do. It can be a constant subliminal that's there all the way through the track and you have to disguise it in some way. There are various ways we've done that, putting things out of phase or just masking. They could be very short, it could be words or it could be sentences. But it's something that we're working on all the time and we're going to keep developing.
Could you summarise your reasons for using subliminals on a recors or video?
Cosey: It just adds texture to the whole thing and we forget sometimes that they're actually in there. We usually mix those to the fringes, but it does actually fill out the sound. And you get a thing where you can hear say four things going on, but you can't place what's filling it up. It's just like an atmosphere more than a sound. The thing with subliminals in sound as far as I'm concerned is that you've got a track and there are hidden depths to it and the deepest depth is the subliminal one. So all the time you listen to it, something else is uncovered and you never get tired of listening to it. There's something else coming out each time, and i think that's a really nice thing to do.
Can you use subliminals for dubious means?
Cosey: Definitely, "You will go out and buy our next album even if you don't like it". Yeah you can do a lot.
Chris: I'm not actually convinced you can make people do things against their will, but you can suggest things to people, I'm sure of that. But it depends what state of mind they are in at that particular time.
Cosey: There's the old one of the smell of bacon when you come to the meat counter. They have got those little things -like air freshener- that just give out the aroma to try to make you buy bacon.
Chris: But the Muzak Corporation in America have spent millions of dollars on research into different speeds and tempos of music that they play at different times of the day in supermarkets. In the morning the want to rush you through and in the midday they want to slow you down. So they use different keys and different melodies that they know will effect your pace. And for factories where people are working they use subliminals underneath the music as well. But they've done whole books for radio stations and TV stations on what type of music to use at news time and what type of music to use for children's programmes. Fascinating, it really is.
Did you find that if you used subliminals during a performance that people would respond as expected?
Chris: Sometimes we knew how people would react in advance, particularly with TG. Live, we knew that if we put a certain tone through, people wouldn't hear it but they would feel it. It was the same when we used brilliant white light shining out at the audience as well, just to disorientate people -totally throw them off. We were just using the audience to experiment on for our own purposes really. And we used a lot of mirrors to put people off.
Cosey: So the audience could see themselves as they looked at us, you know? We thought, "It's the music they came to listen to so why the hell do they want to see us doing it?" So we played behind a screen or we put the mirrors so they couldn't see us because the bright light was shining in their faces.
How would you use a subliminal visually?Cosey: It's all suggestion, but suggestion is quite powerful really. If you do it repeatedly during whatever you're watching and you flash up an image, or a certain product is spoken of, people go out and recognize it without ever having seen it before. So you could flash up an album sleeve a few times in the video and they subconsciously see it. And then when they go out and see it in a shop they recognize it. It's like Deja Vu, you think you've seen it before or you've seen a certain person before.
How did Throbbing Gristle incorporate audio frequencies?Chris: We used audio frequencies in a live situation, like very high powered low frequency audio signal to make people do things they wouldn't want to do -making people feel ill and dizzi and stuff. Like four hertz or something, but at incredibly high power -like a thousand watts. It's so low that you don't hear, you just feel it. And high frequencies as well, we used to use those quite a lot.
What effect do certain visual frequencies have on a person?Chris: You can bring on epileptic fits and things like that. Different frequencies just trigger it off different people. And you can make people vomit with certain frequencies.
Tibet: On "Lashtal" the synthesizer buzz is at the correct frequency noted in The Grimoires to raise up Malkunofath. So that's an obvious frequency. On "Nature Unveiled" frequencies are used but not in a theoretical way. We haven't decided that you start shitting yourself at minus fifteen kilohertz or whatever, mainly because the technology is not there to do it properly. There are slowed down subliminals on it, but not in a sense where we're trying to get subliminals into people's minds. It was more playing around with the tape recorder and just putting down phrases that I liked which had an atmosphere to them and seeing if it increased the atmosphere.
What are some ways to disguise a subliminal?
Tibet: For example, putting it fairly up in the mix, not massively prominent but noticeable, and then slowing it down until it's just putting is so low in the mix that you're not aware you hear it. Obviously you hear it, whether your conscious hears it as well or whether it just dissipates through your system nobody is sure about. I think that subliminals are interesting, but a lot has been made of them and I still hold that if you're searching for a specific atmosphere you don't need subliminals at all to do it, there are much better ways. It might not sound as impressive or arty but it's a lot more practical.
David Ball: I've got some details and some information about frequencies and levels, and that's really what it's about. There's this New York company that installed these little black boxes into supermarkets saying "Do not steal" or "I will not steal". They reckon when they install those, the shoplifting goes down by about seventy percent -and yet you can't actually hear it consciously. And Gen (Genesis P. Orridge from Psychic TV) told me something interesting too. The CIA, I think it is, have their suits impregnated with a particular scent that an animal produces when it's afraid, ad it has that effect on people. Like, when a CIA person comes near you, you're frightened, and you don't know why. It's because the suit is actually impregnated with this musk. I'm sure that Michael Jackson's albums have got subliminals on them. I'm convinced about that. Have you listened to those albums on headphones? A lot of the grunts and groans are very sexual, but just the frequencies; there is something in the sounds that you actually can't decipher. When I was doing the soundtrack for the film "Decoder" with Gen, we were doing some experiments with muzak tapes, which we shouldn't have had but we got hold of, ad we analysed them on a spectrum analyzer and the levels all stayed the same -just straight. With normal background music, the LEDs were just going up and down. Muzak is just straight across, it didn't move. Basically it's just totally compressed because it's music put together by scientists.
Andrew: We did go into that in a very technical way and actually tried to see if it would work, but it's not as effective as people might think. A lot of the sting has been out of their usage because you can now go and buy subliminal cassettes for stopping smoking or something like that. People know that the sound is going to influence them but they don't know that everything else is doing it as well. Subliminals are much more effective when presented with an image, the linking of sound with image. The image can distract from the sound, so the sound goes in, or it can be the other way round. You can show a really gripping film sequence and have a subliminal soundtrack which nobody will notice at the time, or you can have very dramatic music and very opaque visual.
Do people actually recall and remember subliminal messages?
Andrew: It's not as specific as people think. It's very powerful, but not in a direct sense. You can encourage people to do things, but you can't bring them to the pool and make them drink. You can't say, "You will buy an ice cream" -that won't work. But you can say "Perhaps it would be a good idea if you went and bought some ice cream". You can insinuate in much the same way as most of the media does anyway. They did try something a long time ago in America where every fourteenth frame was a single frame of "You will buy an ice cream", and at the interval quite a few people did actually buy ice cream. But the reason we abandones it was because basically there was not much creative use for it other than for stopping smoking and that kind of thing.
Is there any way to gauge how well subliminals have worked?
Andrew: You can do various experiment and that is why it comes back to feedback -just seeing and checking people's reactions which can be an interesting little project to do. But you actually create subliminals unconsciously which is probably a more interesting area. They are very hard to define because you have no control at the time with what's happening.