INTERNAL: AUDINT
( P H O N O C C U LT U R A L
STUDIES)
BY MARC COUROUX
Th e ex plosio n o f act ivity aro und t he relea s e o f t h e S en a t e I n t el l i g en ce Co m m i t t ee’s rep o r t o n C I A direc ted tor ture o cclude d t he inadve r ten t l ea ka g e t h a t s a m e s eco n d week o f Decem b er 20 1 4 o f wh at
a ppeared to be an info rmal brie fing by co d en a m e Xen o p ra x i s t o t h e o t h er m em b ers o f T h e O c c u l tu re, a Toront o syndicat e inves t igat ing t h e im b r i ca t io n s o f s o u n d , a f f ect , a n d h y p ers t i t i o n . I t s c o n ten ts, in tegrally t rans cribed herew it h, ref l ect o n t h e co n t in u in g revel a t io n s co n cer n i n g AU D I N T, a
lon g- stan ding audit o r y int e llige nce uni t w h o s e i n cep t io n o ccu r red in t h e wa ke o f Wo r ld War I I an d
wh ose ( sele ct e d) act ivit ie s have s ur faced t h a n k s in n o s m a l l m ea s u re t o t h e (u n d o u b t ed l y p ar t i al )
disc losu res o f current age nt s Steve G o o d m a n a n d To by H eys , m o s t n o ta b l y i n t h e co n t ext of t h e 2 0 1 1
Dead Record O f fice exhibit io n at New Yo r k ’s Ar t I n G en era l. Beyo n d m ere i n f o r m a t io n a l c o n s o l i dation , th e memo randum is dis t inguis h ed by X’s a t t em p t s t o rel a t e t h i s b o d y o f m ilita r y- o c c u l tu ral
researc h to his ow n o u t fit ’s co ns umma t e i nves t m en t in b o t h h is t o r i ci s i n g a n d d irect l y en g ag i n g i n
para llel ( oc cas io nally int ers e ct ing) s tra n d s o f h y p er- s ecret a u d i t o r y ex p er im en ta t i o n , w i t h a ke e n
ea r len t to the indis pe ns able ro le played by a r t i s t i c p ra ct ice in d evel o p i n g t ra cta b le ca r r i e rs c ap able of stea lthily fe rr ying es o t e ric vect ors .
A n oth er conflue nce : t he pre s ent au t ho r 's Rockford Keep on Rolling , a t h ree- s creen s tu d y ab d u c tively ( an d infra_pe rce pt ibly) pro bing t h e in f l u en ce o f m o d u la t ed a t t en t i o n a l reg im es o n t h e re l ative ta c tility o f t ime (while it s exo t eri c a p p ro p r ia t i o n i s t f a ça d e i s o ccu p ied w i t h d ep l oy i n g t ro p e s
from The Rockford Files ) — it s elf a s ch i zo i d p ro g en y o f t h e Ja m es - La n g e m o d el o f p sych o s o m at i c
c on dition in g, Oswald S t o re’s lo ng-dura t i o n a l v id eo i n s ta l l a t io n s , a n d Ma g d a len a Pa r ker ’s ri tu al au diovisu al cu t-ups (be fo re her AU D INT a f f i l i a t io n wa s p u b lic k n ow l ed g e) — wa s p res en t ed at CT M 's
2 006 edition. — M arc Co uro ux
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MEMORANDUM FOR THE OCCULTURE
FROM: XENOPRAXIS
SUBJECT: CONFLUENCES WITH AUDINT
A coherent history of the fraught engagements between sound,
deception, and esotericism has yet to be decisively outlined,
yet we must concede that a plethora of intersections between
AUDINT’s imperatives (across its multiple incarnations) and
research interests inherited by The Occulture allow for a consolidation of trajectories not previously feasible. As is known,
AUDINT (Audio Intelligence) became operationally effective
immediately following World War II, a splinter cell made up
of veterans of the Ghost Army (conceived and lobbied for by
Douglas Fairbanks Jr., eminently schooled in the cinematic art
of illusion) and Nazi scientists siphoned under the auspices of
Operation Paperclip. Recall also the rich contingent of artists
assigned to the 23 rd Headquarters Special Troops — Ellsworth
Kelly, Bill Blass, Art Kane among them — working in the anadumbrative spirit of WWI-era dazzle camouflagers. (Kelly has
suggested that the evacuation of content from his work and
consequent scumbling of figure and ground — indispensable
to effective dissimulation — proceeded directly from his wartime efforts.)
It was around this time that forms of quantum modulation began to be envisioned, which would tether subjects to control
systems via intricate feedback mechanisms, allowing for constant recalibration and improved accuracy in containing future
tendencies. (The Macy Cybernetics Conferences beginning
in 1946 ratified this death-drive-inhibiting program as a key
transdisciplinary horizon.) Borrowed from the Muzak lexicon,
quantum modulation refers to a form of control no longer dedicated to bodily regimentation but instead to preemptive mood
priming. AUDINT’s Eduard Schüller, ex-Nazi audio engineer
and sonic propaganda specialist (as well as a pioneer in directional speaker systems), had already probed the manifold potentials of sound to induce specific affective orientations in line
with military objectives. The effect of the siren accompanying
plummeting Nazi Stuka dive bombers preconsciously inscribing anyone within its purview into a circuit of anticipatory terror was an early key fulcrum.
Nevertheless, the unit left aside (for the moment) the priming
effects of music and sound to fully devote itself to the reification
of the vibratory forces discharged by sound clashes, by isolating, empirically testing and colliding strictly calibrated frequencies to pry open xenocommunicative channels while mutating
»the physical, emotional, economic and architectural format of
a time and place in ways that have not been heard before.« Unlike acousmatic patriarch Pierre Schaeffer ’s appropriation of
Nazi magnetic tape technology to recode the world of sound
into homeostatically regulated musical patterns (harmonised
with Cyber-Macy invocations), AUDINT remained committed to unlocking the occult potentials of the turntable in order to reinstate into effectiveness a »frequency-based cellu-
lar instrument that exists within all of us,« long-obsolesced by
visual modalities advanced by inventions such as the printing
press. Affectionately monikered after computer science maven
and wartime codebreaker Alan Turing (who advised the unit in
1946), the TwoRing Table was equipped with two arms capable
of playing a locked groove (etched into a stationary slab of vinyl) backwards (counter-clockwise) and forwards (clockwise)
simultaneously, its past and future states effectively fused together in the process. It was quickly discovered that three of
these devices engaged synchronously would unleash a threehooked composite able to expediently tunnel into the depths
of a subject’s amygdala — the emotional centre of the brain —
at which point it would infectiously mutate into an earworm,
opening up by the same token a direct mental portal that could
thereafter be accessed simply by replaying the anamnestic triggers.
Theodor Reik’s theory of psychoanalytic listening and his 1953
study of obsessional musical fragments ( The Haunting Melody )
later confirmed AUDINT’s intuition regarding the earworm as a
transitional entity able to bridge the gap separating the human
from »other forms of vibratory intelligence,« though the phonovermiculi in question here were more akin to tinnital tones than
conventional pop hooks, resulting from the uncanny collision
between the covert back-masked message and the overt narrative refrain (or, the unconscious clashing with the conscious).
Once lodged, the earworm as »artificial waveformed intelligence« burrows in search of ancient sonic memories deeply
embedded in the »cultural DNA« of the host which, when located, activates the »third ear,« a »phantom sense« hereafter granting access to past, present, and future »voices.« In this light,
recall a recent briefing on xenaudial’s theory of adjacencies,
pursuing Danel B. Scroll’s 1970s work involving the overlay
of heterogeneous musical fragments, leveraged simultaneities
fostering the induction of permanently bound entities (doubleearworms) that also possessed demonstrable capacities to inaugurate secret neural pathways. These Neben-Formel (nearby
formulas) were made manifest to Scroll, given an epileptic condition characterised by frequent temporal lobe seizures intensifying his sensitivity to interval sizes and melodic contours (the
associated glischroid temperament that readily foregrounded
the relative stickiness of a particular association was an added
benefit). The PsychoSonic Anarchist Detail (known to us) has
recently developed a Shazam-hack app that, upon detecting
music playing in a given context, trawls through a dataset to
locate, as per specified parameters, another music that might
profitably insinuate itself into its folds, in the process infecting
anyone who happens to be in the vicinity.
The drafting of Chilean per formance artist Magdalena Parker into the phonocabal in 1959 inaugurated AUDINT’s second phase dedicated to applied research with more immediate
instrumental implications. Already familiar with anthropologist
Walter Cannon’s article on voodoo death from 1942, which
detailed the thanatropic effects of intense fear, Parker met with
experimental filmmaker Maya Deren in 1953, immediately fol-
Dead Record Archive Card: AUDA05 — The TwoRing Table
Image courtesy of AUDINT
Dead Record Archive Card: AUDA27 — Dead Record Archive
Image courtesy of AUDINT
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Dead Record Archive Card: AUDA55 — Psychogeography
Image courtesy of AUDINT
Dead Record Archive Card: AUDA56 — Project MK Ultra
Image courtesy of AUDINT
»HELICOPTERS EQUIPPED WITH DIRECTIONAL
SPEAKERS BLASTED SOUND COLLAGES
COMPOSED OF AN INTRICATE MIX OF DISTORTED
VOICES, MEANT TO CONJURE THE
SPECTRES OF RESTLESS DEAD VIET CONG SOULS
IN LIMBO.«
lowing the publication of the staggering and seminal Divine
Horsemen: The Voodoo Gods of Haiti , in order to deepen her
knowledge of vodou servitors, carriers tasked with mediating
between worlds. However, the precisely tuned frequencies at
the core of her trance work of the late 1950s, which would
typically induce hypnotic conditions in her viewers (reminiscent of early infrasound experiments tasked with coaxing hallucinations through sympathetic ocular resonances) depended
on a skill-set that cannot be attributed solely to this fateful encounter. Nonetheless, it was undoubtedly Parker ’s success at
advantageously leveraging the intimate relationship between
auditory and limbic systems that most compellingly attracted
AUDINT, eager to test their incipient intuitions in the field.
In early 1963 in New York, Parker met Nguyen Vãn Phong, a
visiting Vietnamese bioacoustics expert whose interest in the
»physiological symptoms of resonant frequencies« and experience with »practical heterodyning techniques« closely mirrored both Parker and AUDINT’s cutting-edge interests. (It is
rumored that Vãn Phong had experimented with the bodily effects of difference tones, infra-frequencies remaindered by the
intense sounding together of two ultra-high pitches, which he
dubbed the »mosquito frequency« in honour of his native land’s
resident irritant.) By this time, the CIA had already produced
its KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual, a veritable tortural assemblage whose battery of techniques would
remain in consistent usage over the next half-century. (Tellingly,
it is vodou-ready: »the threat to inflict pain ... can trigger fears
more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain.«) Indeed,
University of Manitoba researcher John Zubek’s work on sensory deprivation, immobilising subjects within coffin-shaped
enclosures (that correlated the discoveries of his MKUltra-enrolled mentor Donald O. Hebb with new insights into the somatic effects of perpetual white noise), finds its contemporary
analogue in the treatment of Abu Zubaydah at Detention Site
Green (rumoured to be in Thailand.) While CIA black ops employed these methods to accelerate compliance, Zubek sur-
mised that a subject’s perceptual security system severed from
external stimuli might enter into an involutive feedback loop
with itself, allowing for both an uncanny grasp of the censorious
activities of the unconscious that remain normally inaccessible,
as well as their overcoming, opening the floodgates to a collective noösphere. He had also developed tactics to defeat the
crushing inertia of white noise (which he had subjected himself to during frequent self-isolation shifts) — inspired by English occultist Declan Morl’s parlour game, Pareidolatry — projecting patterns, mental lattices, into the seemingly random to
forestall capitulation. (A depressed Zubek, his funding almost
totally withdrawn, had intended to expose his troubled relationship with the CIA when his government sources went cold
in the turmoil surrounding the resignation of Richard Nixon,
August 9, 1974. (His body was found floating in the Red River
two weeks later.)
Operation Wandering Soul, deployed at the peak of the Vietnam War, provides a neat encapsulation of AUDINT’s bivalent pragmatism, involving techniques exploiting both esoteric
and exoteric perspectives, effectively operating at the nexus of
both psychoacoustic and semio(c)cultural domains. Helicopters equipped with directional speakers or »curdlers« (whose
lineage traces back to Schüller ’s early experiments) blasted
sound collages composed of an intricate mix of distorted voices, meant to conjure the spectres of restless dead Viet Cong
souls in limbo, and heterodyned (combined) frequencies courtesy of Vãn Phong’s third ear research, abetted significantly by
his »use« of a now undead Schüller as a meat-conduit to the
other side, in one of the most bizarre currents in AUDINT’s history. (The TwoRing Table’s transtemporal capabilities had now
been sufficiently amplified to enable practicable contact with
the dead and the as-yet-unborn.) These incursions were meant
to spook skulking VC, smoking them out of hiding, suspecting
that traditional superstitions remained operative. Parker ’s research on golems that could be actualised by uttering a specific set of words irresistibly led her to contemplate the means
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of constituting a vodou phonoegregor, or a distributed mind
informed and mutated by auditory impulses, a concept well familiar to Deren, who valued the organism's intrinsically depersonalising, anonymising character and its attendant capacity to
liberate the individual from the »specialisations and confines of
personality.« (Interestingly, the primer programme carried out
in the mid-1990s on Hebb and Cameron’s stomping ground
((long after MKUltra was supposedly deep-sixed)), and in
which individuals with perfect pitch infected with an earwormgenerating algorithm functioned as biological way stations precipitating viral transmission, depended on the feasibility and
sustainability of such an organism, equipped with power ful affect-modulatory capacities. This experiment and its proliferating entailments are documented in an extensive glossary that
has been circulating within occultural folds.)
Generally speaking, AUDINT should be commended for erring on the esoteric side of research, in stark contrast to the
ends-driven CIA, who missed countless opportunities to divert
their deleterious exploits into more imaginative terrain. Though
Ewen Cameron’s psychic driving (a cocktail of hallucinogens,
extended isolation, and looped tape playback of mantric phrases) and John Lilly’s deprivation tank experiments were both intended to induce regression to prepersonal states to render
individuals more pliable, they failed to recognise the non-pathological aspects of regression dear to the more cyberneticallyinclined, who regard the trappings of the private individual as
so many repressive barriers to experimental thought and action. In an era when subjects are traversed by incalculable multiplicities of responsive electronic circuits, the requirements of
a stable personality appear quaint to say the least. To this effect,
the Phonocleric has written about the advantages of priming
through hyperstition, »a fiction that makes itself real by affective insinuation, by gut reactions that contaminate the nervous
system with the intensity of a nonbelief.« Biofeedback guru Jack
Schwarz captures the hyperstitional essence, observing that »it
is no longer a matter of what is believed, but of what can be
treated as real.« In this context, a consistent story-framework
with the capacity to modulate animal spirits obviates any need
for egoic fidelity and the time-consuming work involved in its
obliteration.
The sole remaining members of AUDINT, Vãn Phong and Parker, were in the decade between 1975 and 1985 focused on
per fecting what amounted to a biocomputer: tape continuously spooling around Schüller ’s head — magnetically registering
voices received through his third ear portal — was read almost
instantaneously by an IBM 5100 computer, allowing for more
efficient xenocommunication untethered from the arbitrariness
of linear time. Given dwindling research funds, the channel
which they had managed to keep ajar was now programmed to
transduce fail-safe market fluctuation signals from the future,
tuning into it »like a radio station« to engage in »outsider trading,« guaranteeing continued sustenance. This bioalgorithmic
composite was named IREX, plagiarising by anticipation then
Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan’s soon-tobe-oft-quoted 1996 characterisation of the market as displaying »irrational exuberance.« Dr. Phathead’s occultural research
gleaning modes of aurally intuiting algorithmic operations,
that today undergird a substantial portion of everyday activity,
adopts a compatible orientation. Through a concerted emphasis on the phatic — procedural shibboleths, grey computational infrastructures endemic to the channel itself, stealthily but
surely modulating thought and action — processes which lie
outside the ambit of human perception can be accosted without coding expertise.
Incomputable contingencies are par for the course when volatile forces are at play, the most arresting of which took form as
a self-augmenting version of IREX (later named IREX2), which
patiently assembled itself from the argot knots of Vãn Phong
and Parker ’s increasingly byzantine code, an entity with an uncontrollable will-to-propagate, soon escaping from »the stasis
of the underworld« and its spirit hierarchies into the nascent
Dead Record Archive Card: AUDB02 — Nguyen Van Phong
Image courtesy of AUDINT
Dead Record Archive Card: AUDC05 — Large Hadron Collider
Image courtesy of AUDINT
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Dead Record Archive Card: AUDC24 — New York Stock Exchange Bell
Image courtesy of AUDINT
Dead Record Archive Card: AUDC45 — IREX 2
Image courtesy of AUDINT
World Wide Web in 199 1. The spectreware’s putative horizon
appeared to be the metastatic dissemination of AUDINT’s research history (including especially sensitive technical details
regarding etheric contact and chronoportation), which gained
urgency following the emergent constitution of a countervirus
(the THEARS, or Third Ear Assassins) committed to the eradication of all extant records of the audio intelligence program.
This scorched data policy acquired immeasurable traction in
the wake of underground research (figuratively and literally)
culminating in the construction of the Large Hadron Collider
at CERN in Switzerland. Ostensibly entrusted with the tracking of the God particle, theorised as capable of modulating
»the resonant frequencies of all matter,« the LHC was a massively scaled-up version of AUDINT’s TwoRing table: a gigantic locked groove 27 kilometres in circumference, along which
accelerated particle beam collisions would attempt to violently recreate the immediate aftermath of the big bang. In parallel, darker vectors were explored: evidence of dark matter,
the existence of antimatter, and the concept of supersymmetry, »which predicts that each and every fundamental particle
has an unperceivably heavier phantom twin,« inevitably entailing the positing of the Diabolus Particle, the Higgs boson’s
obsidian doppelgänger, which AUDINT suspects will trigger
a »global ringing« empowering a third-eared network to grow
and transmit, a phonoegregor accelerating the reinstantiation
of lost auditory aptitudes via the transformation of the body into
an eardrum capable of processing frequencies outside of the
standard 20Hz—20kHz range.
IREX2, functioning as an autonomous intelligence after the suicide of Vãn Phong, recruits Steve Goodman and Toby Heys in
2008 to expedite the preservation of AUDINT’s institutional
memory; Goodman, chosen for his peerless expertise in bass
materialism (as founder of the celebrated Hyperdub label)
and sonic warfare; Heys for his computational acumen and redoubtable cunning at navigating the labyrinthine circumvolutions of network culture; both for their consummate experience
with audio virology. Mirroring first-generation AUDINT’s steganophonic stashing of the locked grooves — dubbed GITH Repeaters — in the vinyl trenches of selected Stereo Fidelity and
Sound Effects discs released by the now-defunct Audio Fidelity Records (the Dead Record Archive collects these artifacts
with the intent that their hidden grooves be one day scrutinised
anew by future AUDINT iterations), Goodman and Heys developed the Ghostcoder software, an encryption/decryption tool
which stealthily embeds (»hidden in plain hearing«) historically
vital sonic and textual materials within torrented .flac files by
pitching the content up by 5 octaves, out of immediately accessible range. Given that the impending discovery of the DP will
undoubtedly hasten annihilation of IREX2, the duo feverishly
execute AUDINT’s »new mandate of arming the mass populace
with the efficacy of sonic weaponry so that it does not become
the sole preserve of the military-entertainment complex,« an
injunction sympathetically resonant with The Occulture’s programme to wrest sonic-affective stratagems from the asphyxiating clutches of cybercontrol.
We can attest to the evangelical didactic zeal with which Goodman and Heys unfurl (at least the declassified components of )
this esoteric history, having witnessed a typically epic presentation replete with sub-bass undercurrents at the Transmètic Heresiarchs event that The Occulture convened with phonomagus
Hipofonéticas in London this past June and which, beyond its
exoteric front, yielded much empirical information for future
auditory investigation. Therefore, as an invocation to future action, we recommend intensified contiguity with AUDINT’s operations and its formidable prosecutors, a relation we believe
will be of mutual benefit both overtly and covertly.
Marc Couroux is an inframedial artist, pianistic heresiarch,
schizophonic magician, teacher (York University, Toronto)
and author of speculative theory-fictions. His xenopraxis burroughs into uncharted perceptual aporias, transliminal zones in
which objects become processes, sur faces yield to sediment,
and extended duration pressures conventions beyond intended function. With fellow occulturists eldritch Priest and David Cecchetto he constellates Tuning Speculation: Experimental Aesthetics and the Sonic Imaginary, a yearly workshop. His
hyperstitional doppelgänger was famously conjured in Priest's
Boring Formless Nonsense .
— theocculture.net