Yeah, it's day 26 and the human race is still fighting this thing. The death tolls still rising. The curves. The curves are still pursuing their indefatigable trajectories across the global no-time of the COVID calendar.
And although I'm the last person who's going to be listening back to them, I think there also must be a kind of bumpy psychological curve described by the subsequent plague pods as we go through the many multicolored phases of lockdown. And I must admit, it's been getting me down a bit this week. The novelty value has started to wear off. And I'm sick of being virtually sociable with remote faces on screens. so I'm hoping that this plague pod's going to buoy me up and provide a hard reset to the spiritual resilience of the urbanomic adjacent people of the world so make sure to call in and talk tonight and let's have some fun and we've got so much for you on this plague pod tonight
we've got a panoply of amazing readings from the audient book unsound undead plus some extra stuff from Code 9 and SpaceApe. We're hopefully waiting for your calls for our participation in our exciting new feature, Corona Quest, but we have some severe technical problems with that right now. I'll let you know. And it's only fair to warn you that, as ever, some of the content tonight may be in extremely poor taste, but we're also dealing with very good taste because we have Plymouth's leading megalithic astrogoth, Twitcher, Sean Lewin, and we've got the vertebral anastrophist Thomas Moynihan himself
in to talk about anything really. Existential risk, spinal catastrophism, COVID ornithology, hydroplutonic kernel, and most importantly, the issue that we've all been dealing with throughout lockdown, which is becoming more and more crucial to our psychic survival snacks and on top of that Sean has teamed up with our house DJ DJ K. Hoistmans tonight to line up an absolutely flawless battery of the most juicy tunes this side of Kiora now there are a growing number of Corona related podcasts but let me ask you
who are the real audio shit posters of the COVID-19 era. Who else is bringing you Nick Land, Tony the Greengrocer and Ed Rush all in one package? This is Plague Pod Live from Urbanomic, putting the OG into cognitive since 2007. Hey, and while we're on the subject, far be it from me to chastise the British Broadcasting Corporation from trying to follow in PlaguePod's pioneering footsteps by wheeling out some shriveled literary celebrity public school opioid-addled
thesaurus-munching etiolated hamstered homunculus to draw on about Ballard's prescient take on coronavirus and do readings from the very same stories that we did two weeks earlier. But hey, to AOE agent self, I simply say the following. Want to clash me? Thalma Dees is closed, but I'll take you in the car park. No grey area. You'll get murked. That's my idea of fun. Now let's go on with the real thing. Shout out to the Dustoff crew, to Miguel and Matin, to the Gokman, to Zeno Goff, to the
Audint crew, Eleni, Toby and Steve. Going out to Vaporweave, to the crew in LA, to KP in New York, up the Cope, out to all the listeners. Yo, check this out, check this out, check me out. Yeah. Yeah. No. Listening to Fred Rush. Good track, innit? Which one is it? Right. yeah
uh cold air people have started to realize you can drive around the streets much quicker again so there was at one moment a couple of evenings ago i was walking down i'm doing really weird entertainments now like standing by a disused ferry terminus and things like that and um that's an entertainment for other people or for yourself is it like street theater no one's told no one's told me yet no one's told me i'm waiting for the report to come in are you doing those mind movements yeah it's called tai chi everyone knows this pretending that you're like someone working in asda with a screen in front of you covid street theater yeah yeah basically if you imagine a minority report's coming then it will
arrive eventually just by the hand gestures alone um yeah so what was happening oh yeah if you mime it they will come future mine and um i was it's walking down by the fair one of the ferry terminuses termini and um all the streets were completely depopulated and the only sign the only sign of human life was occasional um guys in their early 20s driving past in mid-range mid-range saloons with base bins in the bag and um it was a really and everyone else was hiding inside so like you'd either have angry glances from people because you may be a carrier or you'd have these uh or you have the base bin crew and that was it that was humanity that sounds actually pretty good it's decent are you are they doing the um nhs clap is that a widespread in plymouth
for people who are not in the UK this is part of our kind of national sentimental campaign to keep up the spirits of the National Health Service that has been neglected for the last half a century but everyone comes out at 8 o'clock and claps for them now yeah it's worse than Princess Diana dying every week isn't it yeah actually that would be fucking great imagine if that happened every week everyone forgot it on a Friday and then it happened again. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the cycle of vicious return. But the weird thing about it here, because obviously there's not many people around. I'm living in this little village. But there seems to be,
I don't hear many people clapping, but there's a lot of people banging on saucepans and then in equal number dogs barking. So it's weird, it's this kind of eerie convocation of sounds that just suddenly come out of nowhere. eight o'clock and every time I kind of wonder what's going on and then I remember this is what's happening uh so yeah I mean it's interesting it's a strange kind of entertainment yeah how often is it meant to be I think it's every day now isn't it I'm not sure really it's every Thursday isn't it yeah I thought it was every Thursday oh is it only once a week well that's not very that's not very supportive is it these people are working every day yeah the rest of the week they're voting down taxes. Yeah, exactly. I live next door to some distant relatives of Clement Attlee.
They weren't actually outside clapping today. Burn the house down. Yeah, I'll burn my house down as well. How's it going in your neck of the woods? Yes. What's happening there? I live like a nocturnal cockroach anyway, at the best of times, so I haven't really noticed much of a difference. And you're in the enviable position of spending your lockdown writing about existential risk, which we're going to talk about a bit later, I hope. Yeah. Is that a strange thing, a strange convergence of form and content? well it's it's I guess I guess the first thing is to say obviously this isn't an existential
risk in the strict sense but like I mean it is weird spending the last kind of I don't know like seven years or something obsessing over these kind of scenarios and then one actually just materializes just as just as the book is materializing so uh yeah it's yeah it's strange I feel like maybe I've done it yeah I always think this thing of you know something like this could happen tomorrow but I know there obviously won't but I spend my time researching stuff around that so obviously I'm more sensitive whatever all of those kind of things what do you mean
how do you know that it won't how do you know that it won't happen tomorrow well as in you don't yeah that's the thing but you know that's that's that kind of uh you know it's the thing that's presupposed to operate functionally in the world isn't it true true yeah yeah but yeah then it happens and it's like oh cool yeah yeah cool let's fight with it so um let's go on to the more important business what snacks have you got uh lined up tonight I have a chest of Tangfastics. Tangfastics, yeah, good. It's a large box. A box? Yeah, a party size. Whoa. This is the sound of it dropping on my desk.
That is an audio extravaganza that you will never hear on any other podcast. Do that again. This is for all the listeners with headphones. Whoa. It's 1750 grams. How many servings is that? 70 portions. And how much is in a portion? Little handful. In this case, it's approximately five sweets, apparently. That's what the case says. What kind of institutional body is in charge of this kind of bullshit? How much is in a portion? How many Haribo you're allowed to eat? Yeah. No, imagine someone actually taking that seriously. Is that the maximum dose? It says it is, yeah. Safe portion.
Yeah. Five pieces, that's the absolute limit. Is that all you've got? Just pure Tangfastics? Yeah, that's all I have, but there's plenty of them. I mean, I've already eaten most of the cherry ones, so it'll eventually just be a box of, You know the ones with the little white fluffy, how would you describe it? Oh yeah, the egg yolk foam. The egg yolk foam. I love that stuff, man. That's the best. I hate why. I've got a whole, listen, I've got a whole bag of eggs galore here. It's a special Haribo Easter. It's just eggs. But they're like all different colored eggs. But they've all got the white foam on. I can post you a box of egg yolk.
Yeah, right, thanks. They're actually on the back of the crocodiles. So you're just on pure tangfastic diet. Sean, what's going on in your snackage tonight? Sure. So just before COVID hit, a new taxon of Jaffa cakes were released into the world. And I'd heard rumour of them from my connections in the community. But I couldn't find the shot. And then the lockdown happened and it was really hard to get around and find it. Yeah, right. And I thought, that's just one of those things, you know. Sometimes you have to take the rough with the smooth. I may never eat a Jaffa cake, one of these new Jaffa cakes. COVID got in the way. What flavour are they reputed to be?
Yeah, right. So, like, the key thing about Jaffa cakes is that none of them have real flavours. They're sort of hinting towards a flavour, aren't they? These are sort of implying pineapple. apple wow so like it's the pina clada of um jaffa cakes i can imagine that's pretty good so maybe you've managed to you've managed to secure some for yourself yeah yeah well i think i think now that the lockdown's calming down a bit things are returning to normal a bit aren't they and so the distribution line in local co-ops and premiers is getting back up to speed so it's okay again it's a message of hope for us all if you guys has no one got any savory snacks I've got a Tusky Lager yeah I've got I've got a beer yeah
should we listen to the best track that was ever made yes okay let's go ahead and do that now and then we'll come back and we'll talk about all sorts of other exciting stuff this is a tune that Sean and I have a long history with enjoy this Enjoy it. This is a good one. Good news guys, the Amstrad CPC464 I borrowed off Nick has booted up again and Corona Quest
is back online. So I'm waiting for your calls. This is Earth Leakage Trip, The Doors, the original mix, the one and only. So confusing! We're at the window.
What you know about venting gear? Rhythm commission What you know about venting gear? Check Come on, come on What you know about venting gear? It's round time, nowhere to stand And I've got champs in my left hand And I've got a suit in my right hand A bit of lemon and a bit of I'm dying It's mixed DJ life in the mix And there's so many girl I can't even pick Every time I see one, I see the blue league Everybody jump and ball out Hey It's about that time Raven crew, yeah, show me a sign Make some noise if you wanna rewind D-double on the rhythm combined To the beat, your gallin' man a grind in time and fly I don't mind a good grind As long as it's not front line Just know What you know about them tings there? Traveling road and them tings there Murky shows and them tings there
Man I got levels and them tings there Racks and racks and them tings there Big body gall and them tings there I got a fetish for them tings I got a fetish for them tings there What you know about them tings there See I don't make plate pods Munchies shows and them tings there Man that got levels and them tings there Racks and racks and them tings there Yachty gall and them tings there I got a fetish for them tings I got a fetish for them tings there Tonight tonight, it's my last night tonight tonight Come let's do this tonight tonight This is a mad one tonight tonight There's nothing bad to do tonight tonight Man that's staying in a Radisson tonight tonight Don't do that, it's so random, you're so sexy I'm so handsome Let's get this monkey, it's how your mate they watch it Well, she doesn't look very happy
Yeah, call in on the Skype. Just drop me a message. The Skype name is Urbanomic, and I'll call you back. Just call in to tell us about your snacks. Whatever.
What's up? Any outside friends? Make sure they give me take a full tour pass No, never kill anyone Classic Junior Spesh Jackzaw I'm a fat chicken in Kentown, E16 that is
Junior Special 1.50 Junior Spesh Junior Spesh Junior Spesh Junior Spesh Junior Spesh we do You don't do this Make sure you give me 10 forks or pep Nice Genius bash With a bite or a side breast How much is the best?
Or mayonnaise on the left Chicken in the butt Or a 7 up Or I might want Dr. Pep Give me my genius bash It's Junior's bash Junior, Junior, Junior Yeah, it's Junior's bash One pound of 50 pence 50 pence, 50 pence I'll go SF, get a junior spesh 150 ringer, chips no breath Special mayonnaise, 20 more pence Get mayonnaise cos I don't want cash Yeah, I don't like Dr. Pep So I get my Randall straight from the fridge I love my Lord Each junior spesh and Enter the shop and get a junior spesh Making sure that the chips are fresh If not then I'll go to KFC Or I'll go to HFC Pizza Hut I don't do
Junior special when I come through Won't forget my fork and tissue I want that junior special And I'm feeling hungry, tune you guest Ain't got money so be my guest You know what I want though, tune this best And I'm feeling hungry, tune you guest But I got 150 so it's blessed You know what I want, bus, tune this best
And tune this best, yeah, and tune this best So, someone in the, um Someone in the chat here saying Hey, get that guy who was on the Spinal Catastrophism podcast who was really good but had really bad audio quality. I don't know who that is, but it's one of the three of us who are here. So, yeah, consider your wish granted. What's going on in the Skype green room? We were discussing the, on the Harrybo 10 plastics, Q. yeah the thing saying that a portion is a little handful yeah the hand is has got
three fingers right yeah so how it might be a dinosaur hand you have the whole tub well I was I mean Mickey Mouse also has three fingers so yeah there must there must be some some something about three fingers that we like right in neotenous. Yeah. It's pre-neotenous, isn't it? It's not even vertebrae. It's archaic, yeah. Yeah. It's a deliberate posture against the entirety of the vertebrae lineage. We're not opting in. We're going to be part of the Haribo lineage instead. So, hey, let me tell you what I've got. I've got Eggs Galore. That's looking really
good. I've also got Star Mix because that's my kind of normal the normal haribo munch um that's actually on a related note that's a share size so that's something that's started to appear recently as a result of some kind of governmental intervention on the eating of snacks and sweets is that in order to sell something that's larger than a three-fingered handful you have to put share size so that anyone who's buying it thereby takes on their own responsibility for the fact that they're not sharing it and may become obese. Is that why it's happened? Yeah, I think it's kind of like it's a Kantian move, isn't it? It's like you take on the law yourself. Yeah, we've been defeated by ontology. I've got some
co-op bacon rashers, which are very, very poor own brand substitute for frazzles. They're really disappointing. Bacon flavor maize, rice and potato snacks. So they've basically got all the different ingredients mushed into a kind of very feebly bacon flavoured snack and I've got M&M's mix M&M's mix are interesting because I mean I don't know what your your position is on M&M's but I think for me there's a the peanut ones there's a like a residual hale and hearty quality to the peanut ones that means they don't quite reach the uppermost echelons of the sugary snacks whereas the crunchy ones are somewhat lacking in substance so I still prefer what I think of as the real the
robust substance of the real original M&M's which is nothing but some poor quality chocolate inside a sugar shell but do you remember when we went to M&M's world Tom? I certainly do. Yeah I mean that was a research trip and what interests me about M&M's world is I mean did you actually feel it was a world? It's in the heart of London in Leicester Square. It's a very large property which used to be the Swiss Embassy I believe and it's now at the M&M's Embassy. Yeah I think it is a world in the in the strict Kantian sense of a regulative ideal M&M's
the state of M&Mhood is something you need to achieve, right? I think it's a failed attempt at world building really, I think to be honest M&M's world, the phrase M&M's world is above all a hope, an earnest corporate wish which hasn't been fulfilled I think their efforts to create the world were limited to creating four characters, right? So they wanted to create the idea that M&Ms could fulfill a range of emotional needs by creating different types of M&Ms that would appeal to different audiences, presumably. But it's kind of like a Spice Girls approach with you have different characters and then you insert the different characters into various scenarios.
Like one of the largest installations in M&Ms world is the four M&Ms going across the zebra crossing like the Beatles, right? But the... Where's Robin gone? I don't know. Robin. Robin. You're mid-anecdote. This is terrible. The microphone keeps turning off. It's so fucking bored. So, yeah, so you've got the four characters. But the great failing in this is that the only one that anyone remembers is the lascivious green one, right? In all honesty, like listen Tom you were there we were there for like over an hour can you name any of the other M&M's gang apart from the one that gives out the sexy spokes candy that's the only one that has any
actual character and that kind of makes you feel a bit weird I don't know the name of the green one either I just know it's the green one I don't know if they even do they have names I thought they just had character traits so do you think it's a problem libidinizing m&ms it's not a problem in itself but i think the libidinal charge of the green m&m is so great that it overrides the what was the wider um project to build an m&m's world which would have which would have characters with different qualities you know all of the all of the more gentle um and thoughtful qualities that M&M's can have have been overshadowed by that young lady. It's like the shift from the Republic to Emperor Augustus then.
It's like the Empire was already declining as soon as it began. It's not a project, it's a threat. but listen you know what um the contrast is with the um pez world so i went to um the pez visitor center in connecticut with reza negra stani and kristin alvinson on our way to visit hp lovecraft's grave in providence that's not something that many people can say yeah yeah so when you enter you enter the pez visitor center it's kind of like on an industrial estate and it's just a warehouse uh but it's got a massive pez like the side of a size of a double
decker bus on the side of this warehouse and when you go in you're confronted by this massive wall of evenly spaced pez dispensers which is kind of like an isometric ocd absolute um paradise and of course like so you've got the all of them all of the marvel characters you have a pez dispenser all of the muppets uh mario all the mario characters uh luigi um you know princess all that um the more obscure recent ones like so you've got pez dispensers with all of the stranger things characters on they're in the shop like the more recent ones um dragon ball all that kind of stuff but also there's Abe Lincoln. In fact, there's a whole series of all the US presidents as PES dispensers. And then they've got all these cases
with like back through the decades. The most amazing ones are the psychedelic eye PES dispensers from the 60s. They're absolutely incredible. And so my thing about PES is that I realized it's an isometric metaculture. The inherent principle of PES is that any figure, event or object that has played a significant part in human culture also exists as a Pez dispenser. And then, so I was thinking this, that as I went through the gift shop, there's actually a T-shirt which has this incredible slogan, which puts it the other way round. You're not famous until they put your head on a Pez dispenser. So actually existence as a Pez dispenser is the condition for entry into world history.
Imagine if that was true. Well, it is true. yeah you don't have to imagine it so what happens it could be an omnicide it's a replicator usurpation event right yeah that means end reversal the pezification of men and the personification of lego a while back tried to move into this territory didn't they because lego used to be just like a load of bricks that you could build stuff with and they have now tried to become an isometric metaculture to rival the pez universe by basically just building like lego versions of everything that exists i guess it's something to do of like this falling cost of production that you can make um lego people out of anything in on a very quick turnaround
there's a there's um oh what's the guy is that a sequence he's one of the like anthropocene prophets he's like a geologist yeah they have this really great paper that i'm obsessed with where they measure the weight of all the plastic and metal and artificial stuff that we've pumped out into the Earth system, which is three trillion tons, apparently. But they also try and measure the comparative biodiversity and technodiversity. so techno diversity would be the amount of taxons of artificial products that exist in the future fossil record and I think they calculated that it already outweighs biodiversity by other factors in three
oh yeah the diversity of the PES world makes the biosphere just look like a pathetic attempt at creating a product range the amaton's a lot an amateur i'm looking at the um psychedelic yeah the psychedelic eyes are amazing but then if you go back into the origins of pez things take a much murkier turn um so in the pez visitor center they have um behind glass um the pez girl uniforms and they have like these little they're strange kind of little cardboard um spiral bound books with records like record cards of the pez girl uniforms like pez girl winter shosh uniform of gabardine blue white gold
and black um they have like pairs of used pez girl white gloves in the museum there and then there's this one photo which i mean this is just uh my impression but it was also res's impression that it seems to be a photograph of a Pez girl in her winter uniform handing Pez to a skier in the Alps while SS officials look on approvingly. I mean, there's a whole kind of strange Pezenreich behind the brand, which makes its quest for world domination slightly more worrying. It was a great day out. recommend it to anybody if you're participating in history you have to participate in all of it
i guess don't you you can't you can't leave bits out imagine if there was like you know you know the um that occult place where there's like the circle where the nazis did all their um occult rituals imagine if you pressed a button in there and then like 10 pez dispensers rose up with all the like hymnal and cobbles oh my god we've gone too far already stop stop we are listening to the ergonomic play podcast
but don't blame us Now we dive and cause ya like we always ready for the man So from you sitting good and ready for the action Say yeah In a me bedroom we creep like a spartan From whip to the chain hand, cough in my hand So from you know you want to creep and you full up attraction Say yeah I galla look my man when me don't cater for that Ain't no competition cause me good in a de sack Men often use my tongue and me not free the back shot And men often rotate it when you put me part up Men alive me freaky so use the hat Basta you up on me bed, me will walk you relaxed Demi kind of rider give you muscle contracts On a man coulda never say Cecilia Say na hun like me when it in a me dive and But ya like me always ready for the man So come to see who done ready for the action say
Yeah, oh In a me bedroom me quip like a Spartan From whip to the chain hand, go fill me hand From you know you want it rip and you full up attraction say Yeah, oh Then I hook like we Then I hook like we Like we Then I hook like we Then I hook like we Like we Then I hook like we Then I hook like we Then I hook like we Straight up as a young girl I love taking more time I'm going to get up I'm going to get up I'm going to get up When the money's your own coming, they see this a stand. Now sing so Benz and Carvetty. No matter where you're there from you want to jet city.
When me touch them, say the chauffeur come fetch it. Then a hand like me when me in a me dive and. A girl like we always ready for the man. So come you sit and do not ready for the action. Say, yeah, yeah, yeah. Then a me babe who me creep like a Spartan. So you make to the chain hand come from me. And so you know you are the grip and you're full of attraction. Say, yeah, yeah, yeah. Then a hand like we, like we. Then I hop like we Like we Like we Like we Like we Like we Like we Like we Then I look a man Ain't no competition Cause I'm good in the sack I'm not afraid about shot
I'm not afraid rotate it when I put me upon top I'm not like me freaky so use the hot wax The bed me will walk you relax The me can ride a gi yo muscle contract So no man could a neva sissi feel you a Take a hot like me when me in a wi die band Cause ya like we always ready fi de man So from yo sitting good and ready fi de action Say yeah yeah oh In a mi bed room me pip like a spartan From whip to the chain hand cup fi me handsome From yo know yo a dip and you full up attraction Say yeah yeah oh Then a hot like we Like we Like we Like we What? Yes, it's the economic play card day, I don't know, what day is it?
20 something, 26? Yeah, Hitler, stop dispensing. What is snack? it's food gone wrong yeah yeah i think um for me it's kind of like a set set of operations it involves a set of operations that take the food stuff back to a primitive state of matter and reformat it into a delightful form that's kind of seems to be common to a lot of the the best snacks. Do you think it's durational? Do you think a snack should be a flow rather than an event?
It's more like, you know, it's an objectile in the word that Deleuze uses in the fold borrowed from Bernard Cachet, the design theorist. It's a kind of semi-indistinct state of matter that can be subjected to continuous deformation. like a phase space really more than an object think of operations like extrusion and whipping that produce different states of matter so like with frazzles I don't know what the if this is like a US or an international version of frazzles I guess Cheetos are kind of similar I assume I haven't looked into this but I'm assuming that they're produced
by making a corn maize or rice and potato in the case of the co-op ones slurry kind of whipping it up till it's froths and it's got it's got um bubbles in it then flash frying it to capture it in this aerated um state so it's freezing the precarious objectile state by means of high temperature frying so for savory snacks my hypothesis is that all of the best snacks are hot oil enabled snapshots of matter in transition yeah i mean most savory snacks are trying to capture that pure bliss that's latent within flour once it's deep fried isn't aren't they and ideally it was more salt than the human metabolism well they have to be the other
aspect is that it has to be a good carrier doesn't it so like i mean the perfect version of that would be pomb bears which is basically like the substance of it barely exists except as a vehicle for salt. And of course, like, in food science, it's well known that the larger surface area, the greater the flavor. So really you want, like, a flash-fried menger sponge covered with salt and MSG. I think is what frazzles aspire to be. Yeah, you want a salt-dipped Riemann surface, don't you, basically? Yeah, exactly, yeah. Fractal snack. Yeah. I've had a deep-frying linted. What's that? Candy floss. Candy floss. Yeah.
That's hitting it, isn't it? Right, like spinning out sugar into the greatest possible surface area. Yeah, it's true. Is it a volume or a line? I think deep-frying is a really important part of snacks, though. People must have been so made up when they first realised they could get some sort of rendered pig tissue and melt it and then dip other things in it and they became amazing that must have been a really good moment i had a that was a turning point yeah yeah finally finally we've done it we've done flint and now this i had a about a deep fried limpet and um limpets aren't that interesting to eat if they're not deep fried but once they're deep fried they're fantastic and so deep frying seems to have a
transformative impact on things it really changes the proteins on their surface i think yeah i had some i had um a really good pig ear salad in france which i probably wouldn't have been so tasty if they hadn't have been fried in very hot oil yeah yeah i mean it's a universal panacea isn't it yeah fry it if we're going to end up eating insects then i'm having mine deep fried i think that's standard practice isn't it i think that's the yeah method yeah i haven't had i haven't had deep fried insects but tom tom you added like this whole um bit in spinal catastrophism about um obesity as an existential risk um so is there like a direct line that leads from the discovery of deep frying to um the extinction of the human
race potentially i mean i was i was thinking that when you said what is snack because uh you know thinking along the lines of what we talked about earlier with the uh like means end reversals you know snack is uh living to eat rather than eating to live right so it's you get you know that same kind of thing going on uh but yeah i mean it's what it's one of my favorite favorite papers ever written is uh the one it's called intelligence paradox will et you get the metabolic syndrome has more recently been called the galactic stomach ache hypothesis which is basically that all advanced civilizations throughout the galaxy throughout the cosmos become
too addicted to deep frying to leave their planet they become too fat spend too much time we already spend an order of magnitude more money on healthcare palliation for metabolic illness than we do for NASA and space exploration as a world so you know we're potentially already too far in the clutches of supernormal snack hoods to ever achieve our kind of cosmos right and The coronavirus is also hitting the obese more harder than everyone else. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Another accelerative force. Yeah, well, I mean, that's the thing is like these things all compound. So there's another paper written recently by a guy. He's a Russian guy called Alexei Turchin. And he is inspecting, basically the paper is expecting, he doesn't put it in these terms, but he's inspecting whether supernormal stimuli can be an existential risk. So along the same lines of thinking that, you know, kind of what technology does is creates all these artificial pleasures that distract us from, you know, kind of real reproductive ends and real material. the material things that
are required to keep a civilization going yeah in this paper he kind of looks at that and he says you know he inspects whether this could be a factor in civilization downfalls and says oh it's probably not anything that could cause the actual collapse of civilization but it could be a compounding factor yeah right what I'm wondering is if the supernormal effect, not so much an existential risk, it's more like basically a running cost. So if you're operating a civilization at a certain velocity, at a certain capacity for production, you're always going to make these artifacts because a civilization is a way of realizing human will.
But at the same time as these destructive impulses are being released, you're also creating enough other stuff to counterbalance that. I mean maybe that's hopelessly optimistic but we think what do you reckon is that unreasonable to think that well I mean I think it's like we haven't we haven't yet reached I think we're only just reaching a period where I don't know how do I put this the better way of putting this is like it's the basic idea and people have been talking about this for a long time is this overarching theme that somehow our kind of deep past is what jeopardizes us the future. So the most obvious example, and this is what people spend all of their time talking about,
you know, in the 60s and 70s and 80s, in line with war. So obviously, you know, the kind of overarching theme was that atom bombs were this kind of, there's a deficit between our technological power and our kind of moral wisdom, or like you know foresight so that's that leads into this kind of um bad space but uh yeah i think we're only just realizing that it's not just like weapons it's also the artifacts that we surround ourselves with like hang fastness for example it can also create these dead various effects so yeah i mean i guess it's i think i think if we're gonna outpace that past that is uh jeopardizing our future however you want to put it we need to kind of actually like
edit the structure of desire itself and i don't really you know that kind of actually requires some form of intervention uh that we haven't really become comfortable with yet so isn't the super normal itself and editing of the of desire right i mean we're doing we've been doing it for a long time but yeah yeah yeah 100 i mean yeah of course yeah we're doing it in the direction of fun rather than survival yeah i mean it's the whole thing this this that whole thing is um there's a paper i came across the other day that was written in the 1970s it was called um this the pleasure helmet and the super pleasure helmet so it's that it's that kind of they call it wire heading and i've been kind of obsessing over them recently um but it's that idea
that you know uh if you could put an electrode in your brain that created infinite pleasure you know you'd you basically would just drop out of reality like no one could do you know you realize that every plague pot from now on is just going to have a sample of you saying pleasure helmet pleasure helmet i'll explain what the super pleasure helmet is so the super pleasure helmet so this guy starts the paper with the normal kind of moral conundrum of an electrode in your brain that creates infinite pleasure uh you know that creates this like ethical question of like he describes factories of factory spaces warehouses filled with grown humans in cots with uh imbecilic smiles on their faces because they're wire heading and you know just like loving the drip of electric
going into their pleasure center in their brain then he's like of course we find that disgusting but what about the super pleasure helmet? So yeah, so he says the problem with the imbecilic smiles of the people in the warehouses with the electrodes in their brains is that they're not accomplishing the deeper human values of creativity, you know, etc. He says, well, what about if we create a super pleasure helmet that just simulated all of those values as well? He describes it as an artificial, beatific vision of God and yeah then says well you know he doesn't really come up with an answer for why that's bad he's like probably you know there's probably no good argument for why that would be bad so yeah I don't know Haribo is the super pleasure helmet in a sense
yeah that's the ultimate okay listen we've got a caller who's going to come and talk to us about Peanuts but also is going to be the first to play Corona Quest hopefully if that actually is functioning but first we're going to listen to this. Thank you.
We are listening to I'm going to make a wave part. So, hey. Who have we got here? Who's here in the chat? Hello? Anybody there? I'm here. Hi. Who's calling? And what do you have to tell us about peanuts? Well, peanuts are live, aren't they? I just got six packets of peanuts, and this is my coronavirus snack food. That's it. The interesting fact you have to tell us about peanuts is that you've got some peanuts. Okay, are you going to be the first person to play Corona Quest?
Yeah, sure. Yeah? Are you ready? Okay, here we go. I hope you're ready for this and I hope that the system's going to hold up. There's actually a meta rule is that if the system crashes, then you lose. Okay. That's fair enough, isn't it? Yeah. No. Rise in the world. Okay. Off we go. Are you ready? Probably. Greetings, traveler. What is your name? Ashley, look! You are in a dirty and festering living room. You can see a rucksack and a pair of hard pants. A broken PlayStation controller lies on the floor
with a multitude of empty instant pot noodles and peanut punch cartons. Internal doors lead to the east and west. To the north, the front door is open. You are finding it hard to breathe and you have a fever. You have no pants on. You cough. I put the hard pants on. Wear hard pants. You would need to get them before you can put them on. I get the hard pants. Get hard pants. You pick up the hard pants. Put them on. You put on the hard pants. They're a little uncomfortable, but whatever. Uh, no.
You cough. You're in the street. Plastic bags skid across the tarmac like tumbleweeds. Empty hand sanitiser bottles are strewn across the pavement. There is nobody here. In the distance you hear the automatic tannoy system endlessly repeating. Stay at home. Act like you've got it. Masks must be worn at all times. To your east looms the vast edifice of the cut-price superstore. To your west, past the pharmacy, is the town centre. To the north is your front door leading directly into the living room. Your lungs are beginning to hurt and you feel very hot and sleepy. You cough. You're in a supermarket car park.
You can see a shopping trolley. It's populated only by a few burnt out SUVs. From the vast warehouse-like supermarket building to the east, you hear angry shouts and cries as if a battle is raging inside the store. You cough. Which way was the store? East? You cough. You can go west or east, Traveller. The supermarket is to the east. East. The supermarket is total carnage. Rivulets of blood are spreading across the floor and the air is alive with the shouts and screams of hungry, raging lockdown zombies. Gangs of shoppers are fighting one another for the last few rolls of toilet paper. As you enter, everything goes quiet. the crazed shoppers descend upon you
you attempt to fight off the zombie shopper hordes but there are far too many of them they tear you apart and feast upon your infected body, you are dead your corona quest has failed well I think you guys could have offered some assistance there, couldn't you? come on I didn't realise we were allowed to I hope that the next listener has been listening in and got some tips and we'll get a little bit further in Corona Quest well done for trying so what are we going to say about peanuts then I'm too distracted by the coughing
they're a bean aren't they they're really weird peanuts are beans yeah beans yeah they actually they're a really odd plant they they have a flower like all beans but then they the flower gets bored of of standard terrestrial life and plunges itself back into the ground where it becomes a sort of all right it's like one of those um creatures that you talk about in spinal catastrophism tom like the think the um ones that evolved out of the water and then went back in again yeah yeah no no no no the um do you mean do you mean the ones that evolved bilateral symmetry and then gave it up yeah yeah yeah yeah like starfish and stuff yeah so it's like um peanut is a legume starfish i'm saying that honestly i'm just saying that just for the
fun of it it doesn't even mean anything to begin with robin i found a a choice a choice quote that is relevant here that I'll be meaning to send you. Can I read it out? Yeah, you may. Excellent. So, it's from a law journal. It's written in 1968. And it's a lawyer writing about how new biological technologies can change human ethics and law. So he says, and I quote, At one stage of development, human embryos also show, in common with many others, primitive structures which in fish would have gone on to produce functioning gills.
In air-breathing animals they are transformed into other organs, but with the proper conditions it might be possible to cause some of the cells to regress and generate the gills they would have become in an ancestral fish. This sort of genetic engineering would then result in a subspecies of human who could respire underwater without complex machinery. Although this prospect may not appeal to all of us, we should remember that millions are spent each year on expensive diving equipment to accomplish just that result in man's accelerating stampede to follow the dolphin back into the ocean. Right, but never mind even diving. What about all the money that's spent on space colonisation and that kind of stuff? Surely there should be more money being put into artificial gill research than anything else because we've got so much space down there that we could be using.
I'd be into it. Yeah, same. there's this whole Atlantis thing there too with the underwater city yeah of course what you mean the fact that there's an underwater city there that we could just occupy if we had gills we could just go down there and it would be ready for us well potentially it's already happened yeah or already will happen well that would be a cautionary tale we could reclaim the underwater city island as well yes which obviously means that land dwelling humans are Lemurians so i'm waiting for some more callers for um to take on corona quest to be honest you didn't get very far it's not a it's not a huge it's not a huge universe but you really didn't get very far i mean you didn't even explore the inside of your own house was i making up the uh kind of um
the the quiz show ambiance in the background or was that actually real no that was there it's a referent some people will get it so the other thing we're doing tonight and I must not forget this because we've got so much amazing stuff that people have done especially for the show is we're going to play some readings from Unsound Undead which Urbanomic published last year it's an absolutely amazing book which looks at the ways in which the outer fringes of the sonic intersect with mythological and psychological and religious figures of the undead, the spectral, the ghostly and the revenant. It's a collection of 64 essays.
This was insisted upon cabalistically by Steve Goodman, who said we have to have eight times eight. So there's 64 essays in there by amazing authors, including Eric Davies, Luciana Parisi, Eugene Thacker, Jonathan Stern, Matt Fuller, amazing cast of characters. And it's available as an amazingly beautifully designed book or as an e-book. And there's also an existing trailer podcast, which is kind of like a compilation of almost all of the sounds that are discussed in the book. That's called Unsound Methods. You can find that on our SoundCloud. but since it's a book that's obviously particularly concerned with the sonic i thought it would be great to include some of some of these pieces on the on the podcast and very kindly a number of
the participants the contributors to the book have agreed to give us some readings of their piece the cat's coming can you hear the cat yeah so I guess while I feed the cat I'm going to play the first of this reading readings and this is um we were talking actually a couple of weeks ago about um he kicking more as I still can't say it Jesus he kicking more he kicking more is I morization he kicking moreization he kicking moreization yeah I was determined to say this word about whether the corona crisis is going to accelerate hikikimori-ization. And Lisa Blanning's piece in the book is actually about hikikimori. It's called
Hikikimori, Ghosts in the Machine and Digital Dualism. And that's the first extract we're going to play from Audient, Unsound, Undead. Hope you enjoy this. For the past quarter century or so, some people in Japan, mostly young men, have been confining themselves to their rooms and withdrawing from society. Avoiding work and social situations of any kind, while depending upon their families to support them, extreme cases have seen this tendency last for decades. This small, bedroom-sized space is the world of Heikikomori, and while the term was coined
and the trend first identified in Japan, its emergence probably facilitated by the nation's rigid culture of high expectations and strong family bonds, it's a phenomenon with ever-increasing international relevance. Hikikomori live like ghosts, bound to one place as mere shadows of their previous or potential selves. They exist but refuse to participate in living as we know it, instead inhabiting an in-between state, willfully giving up their agency but remaining undead. And while there are many reasons someone with no other mental disorder may detach from their life, it's easy to read it as fear or rejection of society, other people, or indeed anything that could be viewed as normal or necessary, such as jobs or relationships.
And yet a voyeuristic dip into a Hikikomori message board, in this case the now defunct English language Hikiki-chan, reveals all of the usual desires for human socializing. In one thread, an anonymous poster confesses his, at least we assume it's a male, joy at meeting a girl online and the comfort he takes from their conversations and her acceptance of him. But as months pass without word from his quote, angel, end quote, his confusion turns to grief. Responders to the original posts, all of whom are also anonymous, share advice and their own experiences. Quote, I talked to nobody in real life, starts the most recent post, concluding, talking to people online is basically the only happiness I can get."
So if Hikikomori are not prepared to participate IRL, perhaps they do their actual living virtually. In Welcome to the NHK, a 2002 novel by Tatsuhiko Takamoto, which has been adapted into both a manga and an anime series, the main character, Tatsuhiro Sato, is a Hikikomori with a tendency towards conspiracy theories, who believes that the NHK, the actual initials and moniker of real-life Japanese public broadcaster Nippon Hosou Kyokai is really the shadowy Nihon Hikikomori Kyokai agency. Sato's NHK is no benevolent national broadcaster. Instead, it's a corporation with evil plans aiming to turn people into otaku, obsessive geeks or nerds, and hikikomori through anime, music, and other media.
This mirrors the current popular belief that the internet is causing the hikikomori-zation of a generation of web addicts, in this case, Western millennials, making them unwilling or unable to socialize in person, instead preferring online interaction. While hikikomori as a phenomenon started before widespread use of the internet, it's hard to dispute the theory that the latter enabled the former. In Japan alone, the government's 2010 estimate was that 700,000 people were living as Hikikomori, with 1.55 million more on the verge of becoming Hikikomori. Millennials don't have sex, the newspapers scream. So the internet is a transmorgifier with the power to change normal people into otaku and Hikikomori. But simultaneously, it's a solution to the Hikikomori problem,
offering a lifeline of hope, human contact, and shared experience, albeit mediated, at a physical distance, through a screen, at a controllable rate of exchange. While representations of life in this digital age are all around us, and seem to be growing exponentially in number, perhaps nothing addresses both the human condition on the internet, and Sato's Hikikomori conspiracy, as well as DVA, High Emotions, recent album, Not You, Your Online You. British producer DVA not only references the digital dualism created by existing both IRL in real life and via an online persona in the title of the record, but also introduces a familiar fiction into its concept. High Emotions, or H.E., is both part of
his artist name and the name of a mega corporation that, as the press release for the album states, quote, is slowly taking control of everything and plans to eventually make all people live life under one brand in virtual reality." Clearly, HE is an extension of the NHK updated for the virtual reality era, and DVA their musical agent in the conspiracy. On one hand, we can view Not You, Your Online You as the sonic manifestation of the Hikikomori life, or rather its undead state of in-betweenness. Listening to music in the dark was one of artist DVA's inspirations. He then created the record entirely in the dark, which we can take to mean that it should be listened to in the dark, the kind of activity Hikikomori and Otaku enjoy.
And while DVA's background, back catalog, and peer group are at home in the club environment, not you, your online you is the sound of nervous energy synaptically firing in cyberspace. Though the club feels present, we can't shake off the memory of our bodies, after all. Mostly it's a reclusive exploration of interiority. Voices do appear, but they're mostly disembodied computer sequences. clips like I don't love you anymore or corporate advertising. When in the track Almost You, we hear the soulful, living, mellifluousness of singers Rei Rei and Roses Gabor, their voices cut right through, angels piercing our solitude who make one lone visit and depart as quickly as they arrived. If there's something unknowable in Not You, Your Online You, Puripuri Pururin,
the magical girl anime of which Sato's otaku neighbor Kaoru Yamazaki is a fan, is familiar and comforting to the max. Yamazaki listens to her theme song, a bouncy, fun J-pop confection, incessantly. As it oozes through their shared wall, Sato does too. At first he hates it, but it's not long before it's both an involuntary earworm and his ringtone. Perhaps the sound of Hikikomori is not so much the music of digital solitude, but instead a manufactured cheerfulness that you have no choice but to listen to. The music does not play for you. It's an echo of somebody else's life washing over the echo of your own life. Undead, you have no agency. No wonder you withdraw online. Quote, DVA's album hints at themes of online alienation, confusion, control, and domination,
the press release continues. It's peppered with hints of faux-therapeutic advertising and psychotic jingles, a reflection of the stress of online life. End quote. But track titles such as Memories of Offline Activity suggests that online life is all that's left to us. DVA, at least, is completely transparent in revealing that even as we disengage from society and other people retreating online, we retreat into a corporate sanctuary. Conceptual poet and university professor Kenneth Goldsmith, teacher of a course called Wasting Time on the Internet at an Ivy League college in the United States, would agree. In an interview with UK newspaper The Independent, he explains, quote, I have far left friends who complain about corporate culture and they do it on Facebook. They're not seeing that the platform is owned by something else.
I think we want to make technology transparent, but it's highly intertwined with technological corporate advertising money that problemizes that transparency. When it suddenly becomes visible, you go, ugh, how did I not see it? But at this point, you can't walk away. You have to be really privileged to walk away from digital culture. Social contacts, dating, jobs, everything comes through that. End quote. If we are not all Hakikomori now, interacting with others virtually through the mediation of the internet and enthralled to a corporation, perhaps the best we can hope for is a Pokemon Go-style augmented reality. Goldsmith again. Quote, That's why Pokemon Go is so marvelous. It puts the body back into the landscape. End quote. Writing for the Society Pages Cyborgology blog, sociologist and social media theorist Nathan Juergensen refutes the idea of digital dualism in favor of augmented reality.
Quote, our Facebook profiles reflect who we know and what we do offline, and our offline lives are impacted by what happens on Facebook, e.g. how we might change our behaviors in order to create a more ideal documentation. Most importantly, research demonstrates what social media users already know. We are not trading one reality for another at all, but instead using sites like Facebook and others actually increase offline interaction. End quote. Online life sapping offline sociability, forcing people to seek connection online, which in turn drives offline interaction, less of a paradox and more of a vicious cycle perhaps. The transformational power of the internet is yet to be fully gauged, But clearly the NHK slash HE has found the most potent tool imaginable.
We wrestle with ourselves not to succumb to their temptations. Media wealth far behind any otaku's wildest fantasies. Digital worlds more navigable and accepting than our own. Augmented reality, incorporating the virtual alongside life in our own bodies in physical space outside of the confines of our homes, on a plane other than that of cyberspace, offers us a Hikikomori-friendly alternative. That's Lisa Blanning Hikikimori Ghost in the Machine and Digital Dualism from Audint, Unsound Undead out now on Ibenomic and underneath that, Scratch Your DVA's album you heard her talking about Not You, You're Online You
yeah you're listening to the ergonomic plague pod live and things are really hotting up in the skype what happens is um when i play a tune there's like uh absolutely intense conversation going on on the chat and then as soon as i fade them back in everyone goes silent but there's some new there's some new information coming in on the m&m's question i believe is that right yeah yeah what have we discovered well we're looking at oranges m&m fandom wiki page it says here it is believed that his fearful nature is due to an existential angst stemming from mormon prophet
john taylor's declaration that m&m's have no place in god's plan i object to the passive voice in this case. It is believed. That's like what sources say. Who's speaking here? Wikipedia standards. It goes, declaration that M&Ms have no place in God's plan and that the chocolate-made flesh made chocolate automatons a demon spawn fated to melt for all eternity. What's the orange one's character supposed to be? in the anxiety oh right he's the anxious one he didn't even know that right he's very paranoid and he is always scared or nervous yeah he knows he's going to be eaten yeah right the green m&m
isn't the only feminine one there's the brown m&m as well did you know right no i didn't know that uh let me send i'll send a picture of her in the chat she looks less fun yeah that'll be great for the listeners they'll they'll really appreciate that yeah i think some of us haven't really got the idea of this podcast thing have we let's be honest i'll post a fandom link in the youtube chat imagine a green eminem yeah yeah and then imagine it is colored brown yeah there it is i can't imagine that's it yeah but she's in high heels whereas what was it told that green was wouldn't it then be a Breen Eminem? Do I have to bring Reza in here?
Do we have to start talking about Carnap? Tell me about it. Don't make me ask that question. Don't make me ask that question. I don't like to ask a question. Right, we've got another caller here who's going to have a go at CoronaQuest, I believe. But maybe also has something to add to the Eminem's conversation. Do you have any peanut-related knowledge to impart? Hello, who's this? Who do we have on the line here? Hi, I'm Nat. Hi, Nat. Yeah. What are you saying about the snacks? What snacks do you have? Right now, I don't have any M&Ms. Ah, not M&Ms. I have some cookies and cream Hershey's bunny rabbits that I've sent me. Good one. That's a crossover.
Yeah, because I had, I'll tell you what I had earlier. I had an Oreos ice cream sandwich. that was pretty good but the i don't know whether this was because it'd been in the supermarket freezer for too long but the biscuit part was kind of soft i don't know if it's meant to be like that i've never had one before but it was the ice cream inside the sandwich was cookies and cream as well yeah right yeah so it was like ice it was like oreo ice cream but inside um a soft oreo biscuits uh i'm not going to say biscuit because you don't america what do americans called biscuits. There's like some kind of abominable... Crackers, I think, typically. But the soft ones, I guess, are... I guess it's just bread. Yeah. Bread. Soft biscuits of bread. Is that right? Of course.
Bread. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, while we don't have any Australians on the show, let me tell you something that I discovered in Australia. It's that they call all sweets... I live in Australia. I know you live there, but you're not Australian. listen you found this just as just as hilarious as I did that all kinds of sweets are called lollies like even ones with no sticks everything's called a lolly weird yeah like all Haribos are classified as lollies in Australia and I assume in I mean like England or wherever it is that all of you are from lollies are lollipops yeah right something on a stick stick based entertainment does lolly have a meaning in the US?
if someone said lolly they wouldn't be from the US I'd think or they'd be talking about some questionable anime right so listen are you ready to try your skill on Corona Quest in a moment yeah I just wanted to touch on peanut M&M's real quick just because you were It doesn't have to be quick. It can be at great length. Oh, okay. Well, you were talking about peanut M&Ms, and you were kind of downplaying their importance in the greater... It was precisely, in a sense, their substantial food-like nature that excluded them from snack territory. It's not an aspersion on them, it's just a classificatory... I think that makes them one of the best snacks possible,
is that they have a food-like nature. That's at least my perspective on snacks, I would say. You want snacks to be nutritious. I want to feel like I'm eating something at least. That's not what snacks are about, mate. Oh, man. I've got to reassess my snacks. Do you feel the peanut nature of an M&M redeems it and elevates it from something more trivial? Yeah, probably. You're a snack snob. Oh, yeah, definitely. I wouldn't be on here if I wasn't. Yes. Certainly. And to touch on that, I think if we're talking about the characters of the M&Ms, the yellow one is the best M&M. He's the most fun M&M and also the largest, which makes him the strongest and most powerful.
Will to power. Bigger, therefore better. That's my input on the M&M conversation. The yellow M&M. Greetings, Traveller. Welcome to Corona Quest. What is your name? Elon Musk. You are in a dirty and festering living room. You can see a rucksack and a pair of hard pants. A broken PlayStation controller lies on the floor, along with a multitude of empty Instant Pot Noodles and peanut punch cartons. Internal doors lead to the east and west, to the north the front door is open
you are finding it hard to breathe and you have a fever you have no pants on you cough you cough is there a garbage can somewhere there is not a garbage can somewhere you can see a rucksack and a pair of hard pants I take the rucksack and I put the playstation controller in it you pick up the rucksack and put it on your back you cough You cannot pick up the PlayStation controller. I go outside. You can go north, east, or west, Traveller. I go north. You're in a street. Plastic bags skid across the tarmac like tumbleweeds.
Empty hand sanitizer bottles are strewn across the pavement. There is nobody here. In the distance, you hear the automatic tannoy system endlessly repeating, Stay at home, act like you've got it. Masks must be worn at all times. To your east looms the vast edifice of the cut-price superstore. To your west, past the pharmacy, is the town centre. To your north is the front door, leading directly into your living room. You step out into the cold and windy street with no pants on. The combination of your nascent Covid infection and the biting wind makes you feel dizzy. You stumble, collapse onto the floor, and crack your head on the pavement. Your corona quest is over. you are dead I don't realise
that this was going to take quite so long I think we could be going like it could be PlaguePod 250 by the time someone's winning this t-shirt and books well done well done for having a go oh thank you I had fun so what now what's happened to um tom has he gone into a tangfastics coma already i'm here i'm just reading the m&ms wiki you're meant to be generating content not just quoting off the internet there's there's an m&m like dispenser like a pez dispenser really how did that work how could that possibly work i guess it dispenses m&ms um yeah but uh well i mean i know there's like a kind
of bubble gum machine you can get that dispenses m&ms yeah there's apparently like a dozen of them there's like small ones and large ones in all sorts of different styles that you can collect right right okay well i believe you also in the pantheon of m&m yeah there's um there's the four chromatic people yeah then there's a range of non-m&m's beings as well well m&m's npcs yeah if you will right the minions yeah what's that so there's pretzel guy yeah he's he's got like a he's got an unruly charm to him there's a and then there's a couple of others popcorn guy
and then my favorite is a piece of caramel guy it's all the other ones yeah is that their actual names are they just called like whatever they are this is their this is their handles yeah yeah so someone else is who's going to be calling in his name his or her name is blur sounds like a pretty cool kind of person let's invite Blur into the conversation call him Blur yeah carry on hey Blur how's it going what's up what snacks are you doing I got
I got like a bagel with cream cheese that's not a snack I have coffee flavoured ice cream though ok that's kind of a snack no one's got like even Doritos alright anyway you only need peanuts anything else is blasphemy what have you got to say are you going to have a go at Adventure Call at Corona Quest sorry I gave it away there are you going to have a go at Corona Quest sure but do you have anything any further insights into the snack question before we do that? What is the snack question again? Have you got anything interesting
to say about snacks or not is the question. That's interesting. The answer from all of us so far has been no. Come on, come on. Greetings, traveller. What is your name? Uh, Daniel. Uh...
I'm going to close the front door, take the rucksack, and then walk into the door to the east. You may only issue one command at a time, Traveller. All right, I'm going to pick up the rucksack. You cough. You pick up the rucksack and put it on your back. You cough. All right, now I'm going to close the front door real quick. You close the door. And then I head to the east. Your lungs are beginning to hurt, and you feel very hot and sleepy. I'm going to head to the east. You're in a small, dilapidated and mouldy bathroom.
You can see a pile of filthy clothes. There is a strong smell of unpleasantness all around. To the north is a mouldy shower cubicle. You can go north or west. You cough. I go west What the fuck You're in a dirty and festering living room You can see a pair of hard pants You have no pants on I'm gonna put the pants in the rucksack you take pick up the hard pants and put them in your rucksack you can go north east or west
uh i'm gonna go west you are in a small cramped kitchen entirely devoid of any food you can see an empty tin can and a half-eaten pizza dishes are piled up in the sink and all available surfaces are piled with trash you feel dizzy and want to lie down you are coughing a dry continuous cough. I'm gonna like look at the pizza. See if it's still good. On examining the object, you are no longer sure whether it is a pizza as it has a topping of pistachio nuts and dates. This is an Iranian pizza. You decide it would be better not to eat this thing.
You cough. I look inside the rucksack. Inside the rucksack is a pair of hard pants. You cough. You cough. I head back into the living room. You are in a dirty and festering living room. You can go north, east or west. You have no pants on. You cough. I put on the hard pants. You put on the hard pants. They're a little uncomfortable, but whatever. You cough.
Step out the front door. The front door is closed. I open the front door. The front door is open. No, I step out of the front door. Your lungs are beginning to hurt and you feel very hot and sleepy. You're in a street. Your plastic bags skid across the tarmac like tumbleweeds. Empty hand sanitiser bottles are strewn across the pavement. There is nobody here. In the distance, you hear the automatic tannoy system endlessly repeating. Stay at home. Act like you've got it. Masks must be worn at all times. To your east looms the vast edifice of the cut-price superstore. To your west, past the pharmacy, is the town centre. To your north is your front door, leading directly into the living room. You cough.
You can go east, west, or south. You cough. I, did you say the, did you say the pharmacy was, like, in between the town centre to the west? The pharmacy is to the west, traveller. Yes, alright. I head to the west in the direction of the pharmacy. You are outside the pharmacy on the street. A door to the north leads into the pharmacy. A large sign above the shop reads Lloyd Pharmacy. In the window are handwritten signs reading no masks, no vaccine, no hand wash. You cough, you feel dizzy and want to lie down. You can go east, north or west. I heard inside the pharmacy. You're in a pharmacy. You can see a bottle of shea butter hair conditioner and a pharmacist.
The remains of various products are scattered across the floor. behind the counter cowers a shriveled looking bespectacled old man who you recognize as the pharmacist you cough you collapse to the ground and begin crawling you are dying of COVID-19 you cough look on the floor for vitamin C you can see a bottle of shea butter hair conditioner and a pharmacist. You cough. Speak to the pharmacist. The pharmacist seems glad to have someone to talk to, but he is obviously highly traumatised. He just says, vaccine must take message to Negaristani. Only Negaristani can save us now.
you are about to give up on this raving madman when he whispers please toilet roll you cough you cough I feel like there's an item I was supposed to pick up I I I What now, Traveller? I take the shave out her hair conditioner. You feel terrible. Only the continuous dry coughing is keeping you conscious. You can no longer breathe. You did not find a vaccine in time. Your corona quest is over. You are
dead. It's Kitsha! Let's do it! The lights are off, it's time to play Got work to do, but that can wait I wanna let go, let everyone know The fuck that I don't care It's bending too much energy On stupid shit, when honestly I wanna get high, just wanna get high It's everyone that's here
Baby, all that matters In the beautiful world Baby, all that matters In the beautiful world Baby, all that matters In the beautiful world Baby, all that matters It's a beautiful life, yeah, it's a beautiful life, yeah, it's a beautiful life. We're raising stars, we're up in space, now in the dark, come kiss my face. We're swimming in gold, we're swimming in gold, like fuck we don't care. It's the Urbanomic Fate Pod Live.
And listen, the prize is still available. An urbanomic book of your choice from the present, past or future. and a t-shirt of your choice if you can find the vaccine. Come on, play Corona Quest. All that matters Is the beautiful life? It's raining down
Been up all night There's no excuses We kiss the sky Don't wanna come down Is anyone out there? Baby, all that matters Put your motherfuckers in the window If you want to skip the road If you want to go to the middle of the city If you connect the sky to the sky If you want to go to the city If you want to get the chance to get the chance You can't go fast Just before you go to the city
Are we having a good time yet? Call in. Come on, you can do this. All you've got to do is find the backseat. You already know what not to do. Merry Christmas
And after that, his ideas, methods, became unsound. Dossier 37. Unidentified vibrational objects on the plane of unbelief. The clammy tropical air bristles with a shrill insectoid buzz. In Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now, General Corriman, in charting the increasing moral derailment of Colonel Kurtz, describes how his ideas, his methods, became unsound.
Later in the film, Kurtz himself, in a climactic confrontation, asks Willard, his executioner, whether this is true. Are my methods unsound? I don't see any method at all. A swollen folder tagged dossier 37 slots into the Auden archive precisely in the gap between unsound methods and no methods at all. A very Trumpian face-to-face. We consider these to be incidents because we still are trying to work, determine the actual cause.
Can't blame any one individual or our country. I do believe Cuba's responsible. I do believe that. And it's a very unusual attack, as you know, but I do believe Cuba is responsible, yes. It was compiled by RX2, AI custodian of audit. to break together from its adventures and databases, both public and secure. Its contents include Neolocation data relating to Havana, Cuba, and Guangzhou, China. A long list of names from the worlds of science, government, and media, some of which appear to be computer-generated. A report from the Journal of the American Medical Association. Transcripts of Senate subcommittee hearings, and White House press conferences. An interview with the director of the Center of Brain Injury and Repair, University of Pennsylvania.
Big documents from Jason, a secret group of elite scientists that assists with issues of U.S. national security. The testimony of a paranoid conspiracy theorist recruited to an NSAB lab in Florida. A communication from Audit and Associate Susanna Zamfam on the subject of Russian deception. and a diagram of a TensorFlow network developed by Baltimore-based programmer searching the neural biology of narrative. U.S. believes several State Department employees at the U.S. Embassy in Havana have been subjected to acoustic attacks? What does that even mean? Over a period beginning in early August 2017, Odin became entangled in a meme complex
which is still ongoing, emanating from, propagated by, State Department of the USA. Revolving around the alleged sonic attacks on U.S. embassies in Cuba and South China, this memeplex is drenched in uncertainty and disinformation and is hosted by a cast of characters, including White House employees, journalists from the mainstream media, science reporters, conspiracy bloggers, Twitter bots. All haunted by specters of Maskarovka. Based on what we know and more importantly what we don't know. It is a cause of great concern for us. It's caused a variety of physical symptoms in these American citizens who work for the U.S. government.
We take those incidents very seriously and there is an investigation currently. Dossier 37 tracks the timeline of these mysterious attacks. from Trump's election victory in November 2016 and his desire to retreat from closer ties with Cuba, through the first reports of symptoms of mild traumatic brain injury from a non-natural source among US diplomats, public release of a recording of the signal that was supposedly to blame across mainstream news channels, the evacuation of embassy staff, the mirror incident in China, and various hypotheses on the causes of the incident, ranging from ultrasound to infrasound, side effects of faulty surveillance operations,
and immaculate concussion produced by microwave-induced radio frequency sickness, through to conjectures on the similarity of the recorded signal with the hissing mating call of the Indy's short-tail cricket. Americans who heard these sounds in Havana have described slightly different sounds. and even in some of the recordings that the AP has reviewed, there are slight variations. However, this high-pitched cricket sound seems to appear in all of them. The U.S. Embassy in Havana has played these recordings for Americans who are working there, so they know what to listen to. These recordings have also been reviewed by people who heard the sounds first hand in Cuba, and they confirm that the recordings are generally consistent with what they heard. El origen de las afectaciones de salud referidas por sus diplomáticos.
Sonidos emitidos por algunas especies de insectos. especially, grill and cigarettes. We compare the spectres of all the signals provided with the spectres that we have and obviously this common noise is very similar to a cigarette noise. residencies in Guangzhou via a decentralised system whereby data was transmitted between air-gap computers through near-field audio communications from internal speakers and microphones.
Annotations to the map of this network speculate that by using it in audible high frequencies, a signal could be emitted to stealthily trigger malware in humanoid operating systems. IREX 2 is both learning about and channeling the power of this unsound nexus. On the one hand, the term unsound refers to methods which are dubious, without reasonable foundation, faulty, unethical, or which follow bad practices. On the other, unsound names inaudible frequencies, whether sound at the peripheries of human audition, infrasonic and ultrasonic, or syntheses as yet invented, unhaired, or rendered audible only by auditory prostheses.
RX2 notes that there is something about unsound that lends itself to everything from conspiracy theories to hyperstitional narratives, where an unsonic fiction enters into a process of becoming real. We heard a very high-pitched sound in Captain's Bitter, and we heard a very low-pulsing sound in the living room. Her heads would pulse. You would feel like you would want to regurgitate. You could become instantly paralyzed, instantaneously fatigued. They'd be shivering under the bed when we'd return to the apartment. They would vomit alive. They didn't want to go back into the apartment after long walks. And they would run down the hallway and stop just where the living room begins. And just sit there. And her heads would do final penis. ...stationair or about to be deployed. Do we know what they can do to protect themselves from these sorts of injuries?
can we guarantee that today if we send someone there, they are safe from these injuries? Senator Helfrich, we can say categorically that we can guarantee that they would be safe from this. As soon as we identified a pattern connecting these unuseful events with the CERC Health System, U.S. officials approached the Cuban government in mid-February to demand it meet its obligations under the Vietnic Convention to protect our personnel. After further investigative attempts and expert analysis failed to identify the cause or perpetrator, the Federal Bureau of Investigation opened the case in early May. An FBI team has since visited Havana several times and met the Cuban officials. This guy's investigation has interviewed victims and conducted surveys of the residences and hotel rooms. However, the investigation remained ongoing, and we would refer all specific questions concerning the investigation to the FBI. The Cuban government may, or may not, at the end of the day, be directly responsible for attacking our diplomats. But as someone who has personally witnessed the modus operandi of the Cuban government, it is unfathomable that the Castro regime and the intelligence services specifically...
...with nerve damage, and this is not good. From what they find, this means of war. Campbell reports. Since 2016, a series of United States diplomats have mysteriously been down to suffering, unexplained losses of hearing, and other neurological issues while visiting Cuba, which promoted doctors to look into possible causes. The findings were recently released, and they indicate a huge problem with the Cuban government. It was doctors who evaluated American and Canadian diplomats who visited Havana reported that some of them had been diagnosed with, quote, mild, traumatic brain injury, and, quote, and likely damage to the nervous system. This is according to CBS News. This is terrible. So some U.S. government personnel who were working at our embassy in Havana, Cuba, on official duty, so they were there working on behalf of the U.S. embassy there, they've reported some incidents which have caused a variety of physical symptoms. I'm not going to be able to give you a ton of information about this today,
but I'll tell you what we do have that we can provide so far. We don't have any definitive answers about the source or the cause of what we consider to be incidents. We can tell you that on May 23rd, the State Department took further action. We asked two officials who were accredited at the embassy of Cuba in the United States to depart the United States. Those two individuals have departed the United States. We take the situation very seriously. One of the things we talk about here often is that the safety and security of American citizens at home and abroad is our top priority. We're taking that situation seriously and it's under investigation right now. If the U.S. doesn't have a definitive answer on the cause or source of the incident, why did they not? Rather than evidencing what Willard refers to as no method at all, an unsound strategy appropriates sonic fiction, weaponising the art and science of self-fulfilling prophecies, of ideas that make themselves real, that metabolise their own actuality, and then potentially vaporise or self-deconstruct without trace.
Unsound methods catalyse auto-occulting information tactics and political aesthetic strategies that take advantage of lacunae in evidence, using epistemological voids as basins of social attraction. They use absence to insist on presence. They play on the fact that you can't hear something to insist on its existence. When a vacuum of knowledge accompanies a sensory vacuum left by imperceptible vibration, it produces a sink into which all kinds of nonsense flows. What I'm curious about, is there any rational explanation by any of the reporting that you've done about what's going on?
Here's the challenge. There are rational explanations for parts of what investigators have discovered. There is no rational explanation they've been able to come up with that explains all of it. Because you have now 21 Americans who have been confirmed affected by this, and they have different symptoms. They report different experiences, hearing different sounds, as some of them didn't hear anything, didn't feel anything. They've looked at infrasound, ultrasound, microwaves, other types of devices that could possibly cause this, but they haven't been able to come up with a single theory that really fits. IREX 2 observes closely as, carefully orchestrated, incrementally seductive, this perfect storm of unsonic fiction triggers a wave of speculative forensic research at the threshold of detectability.
IREX 2 trains its deep learning algorithms on this memplex, noting the somewhat random array of symptoms. It remarks on the power of always withholding enough information to ensure that any grounding in fact remains constantly just out of reach. However, it still remains unclear whether IREX too had taken a more active role in the sequence of events. Suspiciously, the frantic hunt for truth even resulted in several Wadden members being tracked down to experts in sonic weaponry and interviewed by, among others, New Scientist, CNN, Reuters and the BBC. Even by engaging in their requests, we became carriers, relays on the vector of its transmission,
By even writing about it, the duration of its propagation was extended. The listener, you are now also complicit. Feeling at home in the hallucinatory jungle of AI-intensified, deep audiovisual fakery, RX2 registers a phase shift into something that lies beyond this information and false beliefs, both of which pre-existed contemporary post-truth culture. A plane of unbelief, where effects operate regardless of belief or disbelief in a threat's causal existence. It parses this not as an epistemological crisis, but rather as the machinic feedback effect of a generalized, automated spin cycle,
already detached from any stabilizing axle. IREX 2 embeds itself in the unlife of animistic hypercapital and plots its next move Bede de Hiss Herbonomic Plague Pod Live, day 26 Steve Goodman, an extended mix of Dossier 37 out of the Audient Unsound Undead collection out on Urbanomic right now. This is a hard one from Brucey.
I don't wanna know. They come with finesse like Pirlo Back of the net, man at MC Aguero If you ain't scoring, you're up on zero Old school leader, yeah that's Pharaoh Keeping it moving, but it's unfair though Outstanding in my field like Scarecrow Man wanna chat, bear sh** in my earlobe Grosso fam, you sound like a weirdo Head for the exit, I'm in a hotel, you're in a bedsit
The way your gal rinsed you for the piece For the fall that her name was Brexit Salmon and eggs on my breakfast She opened her legs, man megged it I remember that time when you begged it Now you wanna try and chat I-I-I don't wanna know BRB, I've gotta go Weekend day up, I've gotta show Anytime I come in a place they're like, whoa Yo, I've gotta touch my guy, I've gotta flow 24-7 my eyes on the dough Ain't on peas, I don't wanna know I don't wanna know Them man there, they don't wanna know Them gal there, they don't wanna know Swear your wifey, don't wanna know Even your regins don't wanna know Notting them crew, they don't wanna know DJ Hadeon, don't wanna know No, no, no, hey Literally got man snoring If you're gonna chat then make it important Us man are play shows, us man are touring You man are stay home, you man are boring
Like GUV it's a warning Like T-E-Z it's a warning Why's that? Cause MCs get laid out flat like laminate flooring Man are getting bad tonight, we get cruddy Whether it's night time, whether it's sunny You wanna have me getting like laminate flooring Yeah that's funny Make me laugh like Lauren Hill Don't act like you've got a deal On mic you ain't got a will Don't wanna rest and wanna chill I'm D, I beat the tune, I said I'm D, I beat the tune, and if an MC's coming in, shout
I'm B. Don't know why MT's when I try sending a set in the team, everything's okay. When a man casts me, I don't get mad. I'm just like, right, say cool, okay. Then I flip like who said it's okay. 22 shots in your head's okay. Mental is gonna kill me on the MSN, so I hang back and I won't. Okay. Man must think that I fight okay.
My mental on the hype, okay. Came in the room, RKO. Now man's asking him if he's okay. What the day? Who told this guy me and him safe? 22 shots in your head for the safe. Walk off cash like cool, safe. Pee, I beat the tune, I said I'm Pee, I beat the tune, and if an MC's coming in, shout in head, left the room. Pee, I beat the tune, I said I'm Pee, I beat the tune, and if an MC's coming in, shout in head, left the room. Pee, I don't flow that way, I said I'm Pee, I don't flow that way. Look down the road, there's a place called flying, in the MC I don't like, go that way. Nobody comes back from that way, calm and humble, you better move that way. Otherwise you'll see body shock travelling towards you, moving your head top that way. I suggest you move that way I regret your career went that way You gave Logan's arm
on your CD and you threw your whole CD that way You're pissed that's why you look that way If you want to swing I'll clean your face that way Like them see that came in shouting But he's seen here and his head went that way This is P Money off the mixtape Money Over Everyone Told you about this one before This is produced by Shook Knight Shook with a K from the UK Shook Knight Madden I beat the tune, I beat the tune, I beat the tune, I beat the tune, I beat the tune,
And the philemc's coming in shouting head Left the room Pee, I beat the tune while I set on Pee I beat the tune And the philemc's coming in shouting head Left the room Who the hell do you think you are? We don't care who you think you are Don't come in here shouting and waving your hands Can you wait back? Nobody thinks you are Who the hell made you think you are? Chief That's what I think you are I'm not serious on when I get the window smashed in the whip Then don't bring your claw Cause I might turn ninja dog I'm going to swing them, we can hit the bar. Don't act like me, you don't fit the bar. Look how pissed you are. Watching it all bang, you pick the bar. I forgot my strength, your girlfriend will be the only thing that's looking for.
Hey, so we're back. There's more people that has left the room, P-Money. But we've got people joining the room. Who's in? It's me. And that guy? You're not that guy. Am I that guy? Are you that guy? I don't know. I think I am. Hi, it's me, Alex. Hi. To not raise my voice too loud, my girlfriend's it's probably sleeping okay um but yeah um i'm coming here to beat the corona quest it's my life's purpose yes to beat the corona quest yeah wow that's ambitious isn't it my god but first tell us about uh what the snack situation is like go there and how's the
lockdown going yeah i actually had doritos so that's the thing good which kind which uh the pure paprika the paprika oh yeah right good yeah yeah purple ones cool but uh yeah it's only chips i love it um yeah and i'm in holland yeah in corona it's quite easy for us here because we're still allowed to go out and have a walk but oh yeah why are you having it easy yeah because because it's holland like like even the second world war was it's it's kind of like that they're just like okay we're not really gonna do anything against it but also not anything for it we're just gonna
yeah a bit yeah cool and then attitude yeah well they also they also deported like per capita the most Jews may know be the best attitude but for me right now right yeah including don't forget that it was for a long time a haven for Spinoza, for instance, as well. True, true. So, you know. Check out two. There's a balance. But it had nothing to do with Hitler's secret PES bunker. Like the Goebbels PES dispenser was one of the funniest things I've heard in a week. We should make that. We should make that as a limited edition. Caroline, isn't Caroline here too?
Caroline, are you here? Hey, can anyone hear me? Yeah. Can anyone hear me? Yeah. okay nice okay hello hi um i have i have no idea what's going on but i love it i'm just taking in the delirium i'm very very excited good and how's the lockdown going with you uh um i'm i'm i've been used to it for about three months now i'm schizoid by default see i was i'm i was like born into the internet generation and shit so i'm just very used to being like 90 more screen time than sure sure then like 90 more screen time than like 10 nature time or whatever so it's no problem for you that is yeah i mean i mean i have all the sympathy in the world for like i mean i have to
like on a rational level whatever rational is i have to be like rational but when it comes to thinking about you know like tens of thousands of homeless people are just stuck out here right now immunocompromised and whatnot but it's like i just i feel like i was already in it built into this integrated into this i felt like i've been mentally quarantined for years yeah born quarantined very very ballardian or whatever yeah do you have any snacks any snack preferences um uh the tomato sauce i just i just fucking eat like pasta sauce and whatnot i have like without pasta walkers here without pasta because i can't cook at it like past midnight yeah i mean it's just like you can't oh is this like a bit some kind of vampire thing
you can't cook pasta after midnight yeah it is it is yeah if you cook it after if you cook it after midnight i'm alive yeah okay yeah i do eat it with a teaspoon or a dessert yeah yeah of course yeah teaspoon i'm filthy i'm filthy that's the most disgusting thing that we've heard on this podcast since um the german feet guy where's eric isn't eric gonna call in and have a go at corona quest right okay so um sorry i forgot to ask your your name or i've forgotten your name already like after two minutes who who was it who was gonna challenge the corona quest
yeah it was me Alex Alex that's right Alex so you seem somewhat confident do you have like inside information or are you just an adept at text based adventure games no no I've like had contact with Reza's mum so she would know we've all had contact with her ok let's go greetings traveller I'm not going to ask your name again You're in a dirty and festering living room You can see a rucksack and a pair of hard pants A broken playstation controller lies on the floor Along with a multitude of empty instant pot noodle pots And peanut punch cartons Internal doors lead to the east and west
To the north, the front door is open You're finding it hard to breathe and have a fever You have no pants on, you cough You can go north, east or west I look at the PlayStation controller and check if it's a dual shock The PlayStation controller is shattered into a thousand pieces of plastic And plays no important role in this game You cough You cough I put on the rucksack You cannot do that until you take the rucksack Traveller I take the rucksack You pick up the rucksack and put it on your back
You cough I take the hard pants You pick up the hard pants I put them on You put on the hard pants They're a little uncomfortable but whatever Your lungs are beginning to hurt and you feel very hot and sleepy. You can go north, east or west, traveller. Um, like the bathroom was east, right? I go east. You are in a small, dilapidated and mouldy bathroom. There is a strong smell of unpleasantness all around. To the north is a mouldy shower cubicle. You can see a pile of filthy clothes. You can go north or west.
I go north. You are in a dirty shower cubicle covered in black mold. The base of the shower cubicle is scattered with empty hand wash bottles. There is a strong smell of isopropyl alcohol and stale sweat. You can see a safe. You cough. I... I... Open the safe? Inspect the safe? The safe is locked. You cannot open it. You cough. Is there any toilet paper around? There is no toilet paper in this shower cubicle, traveler. You feel dizzy and want to lie down. You are coughing a dry, continuous cough.
Okay, I go back to the other part of the bathroom. Your lungs are beginning to hurt and you feel very soft, hot and sleepy. You go south. You're in a small, dilapidated and mouldy bathroom. You can see a pile of filthy clothes. You can go north or west. You cough. I cough. There's no toilet paper here either. No. No, I expect a pile of clothes. A crumpled pile of mildewed clothes with questionable stains. At the bottom of the pile is a pair of Abibas branded tracksuit pants.
You feel terrible. Only the continuous dry coughing is keeping you conscious. Fuck. Fuck. I take the track pants. You take the smelly soft pants. I put on the smelly soft pants. You cannot do that. You're already wearing hard pants. I take off the hard pants and put on the soft pants. You pull on the soft tracksuit pants. They're really comfortable and you never want to take them off again. Finally, an end to the chasing. You gratefully rip off the hard pants and throw them to the floor. You cough. I take them with me in the rucksack.
Can I do that? Okay. You take the hard pants. Okay. You cough. I go back now to the living room. You're in a dirty and festering living room. You can go north, east or west. I go... You cough. I go to the kitchen. North, east or west, traveler? West? I go west. You're in a small cramped kitchen, entirely devoid of any food. You can see an empty tin can and a half-eaten pizza. Dishes are piled up in the sink and all available surfaces are piled with trash.
I put the pizza in my rucksack. You feel dizzy and want to lie down. You are coughing a dry continuous cough. Take pizza. You pick up the pizza and put it in your rucksack. I go back to the living room. You collapse to the ground and begin crawling. You are dying of COVID-19. You are in a dirty and festering living room. You can go north, east or west. Okay, I try to squat instead of lying down to end my run on a Slav squat with my soft pants.
I do not understand that, Traveller. You cough. You can go north, east or west. I take the people and I go outside I'm going to die outside You're in a street Plastic bags skid across the tarmac like tumbleweeds Empty hand sanitiser bottles are strewn across the pavement There is nobody here In the distance you hear the automatic tannoy system endlessly repeating Stay at home, act like you've got it Masks must be worn at all times To your east looms the vast edifice of the cut-price superstore To your west, past the pharmacy, is the town centre. To your north is the front door. I go to the west. You are on the street outside the pharmacy.
A door to the north leads into the pharmacy. A large sign above the shop reads Lloyd Pharmacy. In the window are handwritten signs reading no masks, no vaccine, no hand wash. You can no longer breathe. you did not find a vaccine in time your corona quest is over you are dead shite well yeah well thanks well good try good try I think we need to calm down after that because that was a bit over exciting let's go to another audience reading Isabella van Elven in gothic music discusses how sound is used in gothic film and other media to signal something
threatening just beyond vision. Ghosts for example are rarely directly visualised but are often heard Hang on, wait, that's totally the wrong one. That's totally the wrong file I'm playing. Sorry Shelley. This is Shelley Trower from Audint. With her contribution which is called Peripheral Vibrations. This is the correct file. No, that's not the correct one. Oh my God. What's going on here? Okay, this is the correct one. Professional as always. Thank you for playing Corona Quest. Peripheral vibrations.
In the early stages of LTC Roltz short story, Music Hath Charms, published in 1948, two companions view the landscape from the train. They saw the majestic shape of St Michael's Mount framed in the carriage window. The scene is pictured, framed as a distant view, stripped of any other senses, as is characteristic of the tourist gaze. In this case, the journey is from London to Cornwall, as it is in other Gothic fictions by authors across the 19th and 20th centuries, ranging from Wilkie Collins' Basil, published in 1852, to Bram Stoker's The Jewel of Seven Stars, published in 1903, and several of E.F. Benson's ghost stories. They were published from 1912 to the 1930s. In such stories, Cornwall, along with Yorkshire, Cumbria
and other rural regions with coastlines, operates as a peripheral location on the edge of England. A narrative pattern in these stories is the progress from distant window-framed views of landscapes, laid out in front of their viewers like the page of a book, to an increasing immersion in the sounds of unsettling, sometimes dangerous environments. In Rolt's story, as in Collins' and Stoker's, the sounds of the sea become especially prominent. After seeing the picture-like view from the railway carriage, the travellers arrive at the station and make their way, by road, to the house they are to stay in. It's on this second part of the journey that sound begins to take on a more significant role
as they hear the eternal voice of the Cornish coast, the endlessly recurring thud and surge of the waves against the cliffs of Trevatham. These sounds intensify, their volume increasing at the climax on a stormy night when shipwreckers return from the dead. He could hear, above the tunnel of the wind, the thunder of heavy seas breaking upon the rocks. The house seemed full of sound. Sea sounds cross the borders between the audible and palpable and between sea and land. Sea and sound waves cross the rocky borders. They're crashing against the rocks being audible from the house. In Stoker's The Jewel, soon after his first sight of the house, the narrator similarly describes hearing the crash and murmur of the waves,
a murmur that can be heard constantly from inside the house. This sense of the sea builds up towards the climax, in this case involving the resurrection of an Egyptian mummy, at which point the waves finally become palpable, vibrating the rock under his feet. The storm still thundered round the house, and I could feel the rock on which it was built tremble under the furious onslaught of the waves. In Rolt's story, the initial C sounds pave the way for the discovery the next day of a music box hidden in a concealed cupboard behind a wall. After producing the sound of a lively jig, it begins to have a physical impact on the human ear and then on the house itself, which seems to awaken the inanimate coming to life.
It reached the top note that, like the squeak of a bat, was almost beyond the range of audibility and whose piercing quality positively hurt the eardrum. The tune rose to this thin yet deafening climax. Despite the comparatively small volume of sound it produced, the instrument seemed to possess the power to awaken sympathetic resonance not only in the table on which it stood, but in surrounding objects until the whole room seemed to be whistling in unison. It was as though they had somehow awakened Travath and House from sleep and that this wakefulness was hostile. So sound here is not just heard, but felt as a physical, painful and invasive force,
extending almost beyond the range of audibility with a piercing quality that hurt the eardrum. So this is vibration operating at a specific frequency on the border between the audible and the inaudible. And it is this, rather than loudness, that hurts and also wakens the house. Isabella von Alferen in Gothic Music discusses how sound is used in Gothic film and other media to signal something threatening just beyond vision. Ghosts, for example, are rarely directly visualised but often heard, which is to imply the implicit dread of terror rather than explicitly showing off something ghastly like a rotting corpse. These are sonorous tales, but here we may better use the term horror.
It is not that sound signals the unseen terror. It is itself a threat. It is horrible to hear, to quote from the story. It pierces. It's possibly even vampiric. And it hurts. Even when we play the video in slow motion here, the vibrations caused by the music are so subtle that they move the plant's leaves by less than a hundredth of a pixel, making the plant appear still to the naked eye.
But by combining and filtering all the tiny motion happening across the image that you see, we are able to recover this sound. 2014. The visual microphone. O oi l'uvidu ove, the eye hear, ear sees. Tecio pegnetari, fioria da poesia concreta. The visual microphone is an algorithmic process that transmutes pixel data from video recordings into sonic information.
Funded in part by the Qatar Computing Research Institute and the American National Science Foundation, the research and its patent-pending results were made public in 2014 and brought together researchers from labs at MIT, Microsoft, and Adobe. Whereas previous attempts to recover audio signals from visual sources required systems to project onto vibrating surfaces, an active intervention. The technique of the visual microphone suggests that minute surface vibrations contain enough information for audio to be passively reanimated without the need to intervene. Even with the sound turned off, a moving image betrays situated oscillations.
The camera's visual register is detourant to become a medium for listening in. dormant sound is reawakened and made audible by turning visible everyday objects into potential microphones the researchers have developed techniques to catalyze yawning ears toward the summons of spectral vibrations thought to have been silenced With the visual microphone, infra-perceptible sound events of the past, once recorded as video, can be brought back to life. The process underlying the visual microphone consists of tracking small surface vibrations produced when sound collides with an object. It is not sound that is being recorded, but the surface effects it elicits.
The camera captures these tiny movements and registers them as minute pixel fluctuations varying over time. Then the subtle motions are amplified while maintaining their relative differences and transposed within the bounds of the audible. In this way, the algorithmic process of the visual microphone can comb through videos in order to search for latent sounds unheard. initially tested this technique with high-speed cameras only, but later showed that similar results could be achieved using standard consumer cameras by compensating for a reduced frame rate. As a proof of concept, a sound system and a bag of potato chips, i.e. an object
capable of being perturbed, were placed inside a soundproof room. The camera, set up outside of the room behind a pane of glass registered the micro-movements of the surface of the bag of chips. Although the sound system remained out of the frame and the camera was positioned in the adjacent room, the sound played in the room could be heard once the visual microphone had reanimated it, albeit in a degraded form. Here we see a 60 frames per second video of a bag of candy captured on a regular consumer DSLR while our Mary had a little lamb music played through a nearby loudspeaker.
By using a variation of our technique on the rows of the recorded video, we were able to than the frame rate of our camera. What is striking about this technique is that it opens the possibility of listening in on the acoustic space of where the camera captured the footage. even when that space has since decayed to ruin. So long as there are objects within the camera's field of view
able to reflect sound events, the micro-movement image produced can be used to sound the depth of the area around the camera. A camera does not have to be directed toward the sound source to register a trace of its perturbations. Given the increasing ubiquity of cameras on mobile devices, and as part of a paranoiac heightened surveillance, this means that even when sounds occur beyond the sensitivity of an audio microphone, it is now possible for them still to be brought within your shot. In a sense, Thomas Edison's attempt to hear the voices of the dead has now been transmuted into a synesthetic program, where faint acoustic impressions can be visually amplified
such that spectral voices and the spaces they once inhabited can be heard. The technique of the visual microphone reveals that hidden within the visual lie ineffables awaiting articulation. Technologies continue to be developed that can register, transduce, amplify, and transmute phenomena at scales well below the thresholds of human sensitivity, opening sensuous fields as yet unsensed. With its capacity to open lines of communication between the vibrational space around the recording camera, its resultant micro-movement image and our ears, the visual microphone is just one example of these technologies. Our ears are transported back into past videos through variations of pixel data in order to reanimate sounds thought to have perish.
we are left to wonder what inaudibles lurk in the micro-movements of pixel fluctuations Yeah, you're with Urbanomic PlaguePod live on day 26. And what you just heard was Lendl Barcelos reading from his contribution to the Audint's Unsound Undead book, the visual microphone, and the extracts you heard there from Abe Davis research,
which you can find on YouTube, of this quite extraordinary method of recovering audio data from digital video. It's quite amazing. And before that, Shelley Trower reading from her contribution, Peripheral Vibrations. And Shelley is the author of a really interesting book on Cornwall, in fact, called Rocks of Nations. And we'll have, we've still got more, more readings from Audint, but look, we're only like two and a half hours into this one. We've got a long way to go. I Because I wouldn't wanna get dropped my soul
They told me that they had my back to the clock talk got my soul back then when I never had no bread is what I was not My soul I was thinking about taking this niggas land then I had to stop myself Because I wouldn't wanna get dropped my soul. They told me that they had my back to the clock talk got my soul Back then when I never had no bread is when I was not my soul They tried to plot on me and I had to make a plot myself Yeah, I know some people think I'm loud, but I'm not, I'm stealth I'm always rolling up some loud, mum says, what's your health? All I know is putting in work, I ain't got time to chill I'm trying to perform at rolling loud, but the feds want me gelled I've been raised in this, ain't trying to be where it's hot as hell Fake friends want to see me down and out, I know they hope I fell Sometimes I wanna catch a body but I control myself
I'm tryna do it for my fancy like a show as well Remember being locked up behind them doors, I used to stress myself Yeah, it was just me and I, can't forget myself Use my eyes, put it back on the shelf, no I don't need no skills I've been tryna find my way, I can't be sitting still Straight to the top, fall off and drop, I know they wish I will I was thinking about taking a nigger's life but I stopped myself Because I ain't tryna get locked or drop myself I was thinking about taking this nigger's life Then I had to stop myself Because I wouldn't wanna get dropped myself They told me that they had my back till I clapped, I got myself Back then when I never had no breath is when I was not myself I was thinking about taking this nigger's life Then I had to stop myself Because I wouldn't wanna get dropped myself
They told me that they had my back till I clapped, I got myself Back then when I never had no breath is when I was not myself Can't give my heart to a jazz, why would I mock myself? Don't take no pressure from anyone and I don't put it on myself A lot of man talk hard, but I guess that they knock their soul Been feeling like letting these rappers out, but I don't want to block myself When they kill my dog, it was peak and I don't know what I felt When I got that news I was hurt and feeling like I got shot myself I'm finna cock this clock myself, late night I neglected it off myself But I don't wanna carry that guilt inside when I answer to God myself But if I gotta answer to God myself, I'ma answer to God myself Could've signed from time but I wanna see Mills cause why would I rob myself When I gave my heart to a yak like that I ain't never forgot myself Ain't putting my faith in another nigga when I could've done that job myself
Wanted to but calm, put focus on the girl Bad B telling me that she's in love with me but she's not my girl I don't take no chance because I don't put blame on myself I was feeling like putting in work in silence But I just stopped myself I was thinking about taking this nigger's life Then I had to stop myself Because I wouldn't want to get dropped myself They told me that they had my back Till I clucked, I got myself Back then when I never had no bread Is when I was not myself I was thinking about taking this nigger's life Then I had to stop myself Because I wouldn't want to get dropped myself They told me that they had my back Till I clucked, I got myself Back then when I never had no bread is when I was not my soul. That's a track from the EP Novelist and Shailen.
I'm going to play some more of that later because I've been feeling that one. I've been listening to this on repeat this week. it's an EP the EP is called Heat and it's basically like as far as I can understand is trying to recover the vibe of the movie Heat which it does quite successfully I think and was recorded entirely in novelist's Beamer between North and South London so I was saying to Tom that I think that track in particular is also quite Kantian but he didn't really understand why do you not see it? tell us why well because do you not hear the narrative
it's like this is like the whole thing is categorical imperative for man on the road it's like because he was thinking about killing someone and then he was like hold on a minute get this I wouldn't like to be killed myself so I'm not going to do it I see I don't plan that society is just a categorical imperative everything's kantian yeah could be honestly like the conversation is so vibrant and convivial in the skype chat and it just like dies no I was talking
because I was thinking about Shelley's piece there about Cornwall and it reminded me we're going to talk about hydroplutonic kernel as well because during all this time when we've been in lockdown i haven't been totally idle i've been trying to get some editing jobs finished and one of the books that's coming out well now all the stuff that was meant to be coming out in spring is probably going to be out in september i'm afraid but one of those was the long-awaited Hydroplutonic Curnow, a book based on the documentation of a tour around Cornwall that we did 10 years ago. Sean was one of the tour guides. Do you remember it, Sean? Or is it lost? Like it was yesterday. It's kind of hard to describe exactly what it is
and more than that, why we did it, which is why, in the end, when Tom was down in Cornwall, We went for a little walk to some of the locations, and we did an interview, which we then expanded. It's like about over 10,000 words now, which was me trying to work out and explain to him why 10 years later it was still worth putting out this book. It has got a really nice vintage Reza Negra Stani piece in it as well. It's got a poem by Jake Chapman. and yeah, I mean it's kind of a unique project It's really good Does it make more sense to you now? I think it's influenced everything
well not everything but it's influenced like a whole line of thought that's been developing ever since so it kind of makes sense to me that I still wanted to hold on to it but at the same time it's quite nice to finally finish it and put it out there but it's kind of like the main concept in this is the global and the local because we are asked by this kind of not really an institution an event that was being put on down here in Cornwall to do a one day field trip for artists and curators around the local area and true to the geotraumatic ethos took it to the megalomaniac levels of saying What we need to demonstrate is how this small area of Cornwall is connected to the birth of the planet from a proto-planetary mass.
Anything less would just be kind of parochial tourist tat. So, yeah, but also kind of understanding how you can't really appreciate Cornwall without appreciating it as a global, as being knitted into a global network of industrial endeavours. I mean, even in its current state, which is post-industrial, it's still its whole existence is tied to the metals that are underneath the surface and that the whole landscape has been shaped by this kind of mess that's been made by the mining industry.
So we went on this tour with myself, Sean, Ian Hamilton-Grant, who gave an amazing talk about recapitulation at an arsenic works, and Kenner Hernley and Paul Chaney, and James Strongman, a geologist. so yeah it's kind of a weird project and it's nice to have some documentation of that at last what are your memories of it sean uh i guess from an experiential level i i remember the the extreme sort of cognitive dissonance of um getting on a basically a classic bus trip with
tourists and going around different parts of cornwall and then coming up with the most abstruse rationalisation for everything we saw. And that was kind of, I really enjoyed that. And it was kind of good to see the conversations it sparked off with people because it, I guess, in a way, opened up a speculative space for people to engage with their own thoughts about industrialisation and the role of the global and local. And it also gave people a chance to, yeah, just explore that for themselves so that was one thing i really got from it and i really enjoyed was watching people come to terms with this really extraordinary mythology that you were spewing on the spot well i knew i was on for a real good day when you stood you stood up at the front on the
bus at the beginning and sunlight was sort of coming in through these dusty west penwith windows and you had and you had a pipe as a prop and you were going straight to the actor and i thought yes we're on we're on so i don't think i think i kept my hat on for the rest of the day yeah yeah and then the other thing i really enjoyed was that um i was i was already on a train of thought where i was i was coming down from a massive de l'oeuvre's high of um of about four years previous when i finished getting through some major books by him and um and i was gradually starting to try and figure out how that applied to geospatial problems and geographies and social histories and then i got this opportunity to sort of stitch it all together
and think about how flows of desire and flows of metals were actually indistinguishable from flows of language and flows and and sort of flows through time and so one thing i realized was that there was a basically fishing and mining were exactly the same social impulse but just applied different media. Yeah, I think there's a piece, there's a passage on the book where you talk about this. Yeah, I found that just really fascinating and then the whole nature of, and then because I started off as an ecologist, I'm always interested in sort of rubbishing the whole idea of nature and the distinction between nature and mankind and the whole of Cornwall is just a constructed landscape. Yeah, so what the main chapter where you are talking is when we went to Kennel Vale, which is
nature reserve it's like a really beautiful place with tall trees i mean there's not that many places in cornwall where you get um tall uh large amount of tall trees so it's this valley and you walk through and there's this stream and there's these kind of picturesque ruins of some kind of building and actually it's a gunpowder factory and all the trees were planted there in order to try to contain any accidental explosions that might happen. And in fact, it did happen. And there's this legend that I talk about in that part about someone's head being blown off and being found a mile away. But there were certainly major industrial accidents. And one of the main things about the book is to look at mining and to say,
you know, mining is not just one industry. There was tin and copper in Cornwall. But as soon as you have those industries, you have the need for the machinery, you have the need for the wood for the mine props for the coal eventually to to fire up the the engines to take the water out of the mines so there's this whole kind of sprawling web and yeah also reshaping reshaping nature so that when people kind of see this picturesque landscape what they're really saying seeing is the remains of a kind of massive chemistry experiment and one of the other things you know you're talking about the the pipe and all this you know one of the other things that tom and i talk about in this kind of extended retrospective introduction is um the idea of a philosophy or theory as a performance as a an outdoor performance
like the idea that you think differently when you're in different places and therefore you know actually going for a walk being in a different location with people enables you to to think in a different way but it also enables you to think about place in a different way because rather than what we were really being asked to do implicitly I think what which was to take people to look at things and to appreciate the immediacy of the landscape we took people out and talked to them about things that they couldn't see about the landscape talked to them about the processes that they couldn't immediately access so it was kind of an obstructive performance and that was kind of interesting to me that's something that you know it was in a very nascent state it was just like a little experiment but it still seems to me a kind of an important idea i remember you
getting into the idea of the kantian sublime because we were talking about this late landscape and how it was in some ways folding time into itself yeah yeah because of the because and and why the romantics how the romantics vibed on that landscape simply because it allowed them to connect with the notion of time itself right and i thought that was a yeah that's all that obstruction idea again isn't it so yeah i agree that it's a nice sunny day but let's just think about the huge gulf of time between us and the experience yeah yeah and that was actually the spirit of the whole day wasn't it really that's about four hours of not really delivering to people kind of like cosmological spoil sports yeah sorry yeah a cup and bean trick with concepts what's in the what's
going to happen with the map the map was absolutely incredible yeah the map so unfortunately you know the map so we made this map that was um so it's a kind of map of the landscape we traveled through but it unfolds to show all of the different flows of matter that are flowing through and underneath this landscape and it was like a feat of kind of spontaneous feat of advanced origami i don't really know still um that was done with by me and paul chaney i'm not really sure how it really worked and how he got to the result but um it's something that's impossible to mass produce so i think what we're going to do is we're going to do like a special edition of 100 with the map and the rest I mean the book has a really nice color plate section like in an
old-fashioned book which has pictures of all the prototypes of the map and the whole development process and again that's something that Tom and I talk about in the introduction about how the concept of folding it's interesting like you talk about Deleuze because the concept of folding goes through all of this this whole project but in one sense you know in a philosophical way but in another sense in just this kind of absurdly literal way that we're talking about actual you know folding rock and um also the kind of refolding of the landscape into itself i realize i never send you the uh pictures of the little early experiments on miniature crust folding yeah right talk about that tell us about that i was just thinking
So it's one of my favourite satirical novels, I guess. It's by Thomas Carlyle. It's called Sarta Risata. But it starts off with him taking the mickey out of scientists. And he says, geologists now think that the creation of an entire world is just as simple as cooking a dumpling. And so that set me off on a little tangent. And I actually discovered that at the time, so this was in like the 1830s at the time, cooking was actually a serious business for practical experiments in geology so what what these early geologists would do is actually just bake sheets of rock and try and mash them together to try and replicate crustal deformation at you know micro scale. But yeah I wanted to
send you some of the pictures of that to make it into the book but I guess... I could kind of in a very convoluted sense connect this back to one thing we were talking about on the last PlaguePod which was the question of modelling the idea that you know you can't model the whole world without creating another world and in the early days of geology there was this very kind of literal sense of modelling the processes by making a world dumpling and sticking it in the oven yeah yeah well i mean the thing was is that people at the time actually said this so uh everyone's heard of well most people have heard of james hutton the guy that ostensibly discovered deep time uh he's completely unreadable but he had this uh his friend uh john playfair who kind
of made it more popular and accessible but he actually says this and they both they will say that you know you can't create a world in a in a testament you can't create a world in a laboratory so it was actually a big problem how do we do practical experiments but yeah and the answer was a kind of early culinary materialism yeah exactly someone's going to circle back from the world dumpling to snacks but it's not going to be me I mean if you take it to its extreme you head into the whole simulation argument territory to have that accurate model you do have to create that simulated world
you mean like what if the world we're actually living in is just a dumpling yes, exactly a virtual dumpling I'm not sure that's quite what Buston was getting at I just wish that someone would illustrate that particular episode of that particular book of just all these you know kind of early victorian scientists pouring over the creation of a little dumpling world so these body without it's a world without organs well actually i need to find it the next line after that is something that he uh we find it
so the well dumpling was it actually an accurate simulation or was it just a theoretical exploration of strata well I mean so the people there was this guy called Sir James Hall he was like the father of miniature experiments in geology so what he would do is he'd get layers of often wet cloth and you'd get these layers and compress them to try and create the interaction of well not tectonics back then but crusts overlapping each other and then other people so it was to
kind of replicate petrological processes they would like bake rocks in pressure cookers this was kind of yeah I mean it goes back even further like even you go back in further to like 1730s and 40s and there's uh chemists creating like miniature volcanoes um you know not just with baking soda they did it with yeah it's like slightly more um accurate means but uh but yeah I don't know yeah I mean it's kind of funny that uh and the reason why all of this was important is because you know, unlike astronomy where you obviously can't create or recreate orbits in the crucible or in the lab, but you know, the mathematics behind
it, calculus, was quite readily applicable, whereas with, when it came to geophysics and stuff like that, they actually you need these kind of scaling equations that weren't actually well they're basically like fluid dynamics that people didn't realize that crusts at you know like kind of large temporal scales and basically act like cookie dough people didn't realize that for a while so they didn't realize that you had to use these fluid dynamics things to model them so without being able to kind of use mathematics to model it in you know on paper or afterwards in a computer people had to resort to these like yeah you know throwing a rocket or a pressure cooker as close as you can get yeah do you think that
there's a theological element to this where um it was obvious it's been obvious to many civilizations since say the bronze age to look at the stars and assume that they could be explained through some sort of hyper rational process whereas with land forms early geology is very observational it's very much about this color rocks coming out here and then gradually um sort of theorizing about what that means and so i think that it sort of precludes mathematical sort of axiom generation whereas the sky we like the whole of the early astronomy is basically getting really hung up on the idea of how great circles are and then realizing it's a mistake after all whereas that's never really happened with the structure of the earth itself well it's
it's that um kind of i mean it's it's a moral distinction before it's like a physical one but right when you go back far enough that that distinction doesn't exist um but you know that there's some of that in hydroplutonic kernel as well right that um a lot i have this whole series of opening quotes which are about how um yeah you know basically one shouldn't open up the bowels of the earth because bad stuff is bound to come out and even you know in when there was already mining for metals there was this feeling that one was somehow trespassing by transgressing what God has provided on the surface You've gone very quiet with him.
Yeah, you're disappearing from the mic. There's this, it's one of Peter Sloterdijk's better pointages, but he has this word inferno-centrism, which, you know, I mean, most people, the pop idea of Copernicanism is completely reversed. this idea that instantly you get what Freud kind of retrospectively said was this knock to human self-esteem it's actually completely the other way around the Ptolemaic model has hell at the absolute centre the earth sublunary realm, one layer above that and then at the prim and mobile
which is the outermost layer, that's where God lives so we live on the penultimate we live in the kind of moral ghetto of the universe on the layer outside of hell so the idea that we live in the centre of the universe wasn't actually it wasn't actually good, it was considered really bad so you know it was actually like a promotion to be kind of considered nowhere next to the bum hole of the universe hell's over there now yeah exactly yeah i can't remember why i got into that but um what were we saying before that
sort of studying um the map exploring of astronomy through maps oh well yeah it was the idea of transgression through mining the idea of going beneath the surface you know kind of going into the uh this kind of zone this like, you know, Locus Terribilis. I don't know if you know, bad place. Right, so Sean, do you think it's time for Charlotte now? Charlotte should touch her nose. Yeah, I think it's about time. That will pep us up. But listen, people, I'm still waiting for someone else to call in and have a crack at Corona Quest. We've made quite a lot of progress the last time.
so you know i actually might want to do corona crest at one point to be honest yeah good now that i've figured out what it is okay nice one after this then so The End All the children look at the sound of the bear.
Charlotte, Charlotte, when Charlotte touches. Charlotte, Charlotte Quand Charlotte se touche Et quand moi je m'en fais Charlotte reste bouche de paix But the subject of me Charlotte, Charlotte
A jock with an act. Halo leader, touch me, squeeze me. Because we have guns. Guns. We have tracks. Built my new truck. I'd bump for a buck. Tensilogy strength made my living. Pangolina. Pangolina. Pangolina. Pangolina, in hangulina, in hangulina, dressed to tease and stripped to sleaze of Pangolina, I wasn't dressed in a bubble bar, I wasn't dressed in a bubble bar, I wasn't dressed in a bubble bar, I wasn't dressed in a bubble bar, I wasn't dressed in a bubble bar. Strip for me, babe, strip for you, strip for me, cause I want you to.
Strip for me, babe, strip for you, strip for me, cause I want you to. Strip for me, babe, strip for you Strip for me, cause I want you too Strip for me, babe, strip for you Strip for me, cause I want you too Thank you.
Working after hours Ripples on my chest Never got a night's rest A modern day jack A jock with a man Halo leader Touch me, squeeze me Ooh Ssss I'm built like a truck I'd dump for a boat Tips of my gesture made my living
I can't stop that teardrop falls like snow I want to go to the world, I know it's just so bad I want to go to the world, I want to go to the world Hearts are frozen, I know what to say I said I'd go, and it's okay, but I I can't stop, my teardrop balls like stone I can't stop my teardrop goes like snow
I can't stop my teardrop goes like snow I was your blue angel I was your blue angel I was your blue angel I was your blue angel I can't stop my teardrop
I can't stop my teardrop I can't stop my teardrop Pangolina, it's Urbanomic Plague Pod Live. Day 26. I want to party with you, girl I want to party with you
I got the girls in the truck about 660 And you know if we're rolling that it's straight sexy Girl I want to party with you, girl I want to party with you I got the girls in the truck about 660 And you know if we're rolling that it's straight sexy All the lies, can you keep up? When we hit the dance floor, you know we turn the heat up Set the room on fire, everyone's desiring All eyes on us, DJ turn it up I've heard you play before, but today we're going harder So DJ play my song and keep it going louder I've heard you play before, but today we're going harder
So DJ play my song and keep it going louder I wanna party with you, girl I wanna party with you I got the girls in the truck about 660 And you know if we're rolling that it's straight sexy Girl I wanna party with you, girl I wanna party with you I got the girls in the truck about 660 And you know if we're rolling that it's straight sexy Keep me going louder Keep me going louder Keep me going louder Keep me going louder Keep me going louder 4, 3, 2, 1
4, 3, 2, 1 1, 2, 3, 1 1, 2, 3, 4 Let me scream if you want some more Push it, push it, watch me work it I'm perfect. One, two, three, four. Let me scream if you want some more. Push it, push it. Why do you work it? I'm perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. That's right, I'm a superstar. Everybody wanna come up when I'm at the bar. Other people wanna try, it's like, give me some more. Try a little harder, honey, give me some more. Let's go, I'm a superstar. Getting busy with the boys hanging at the bar. Everybody coming close cause they all want me. You want it when you saw me. I like how you look, baby, call me, call me. One, two, three, four. Let me scream if you want some more. Push it, push it, watch me work it I'm perfect One, two, three, four Let me sing if you want some more
Push it, push it, watch me work it I'm perfect, perfect, perfect, I'm perfect Check it out now DJ Hoistman's on a roll. We've got more audience coming up. Yeah. And we've got more contestants for the Corona Quest coming up. Keep locked. It's not over yet. Oh baby you are Perfection
Right, who survived that? Who's still here? I'm still here. Anyone still in the room? Has Tom left? Yeah, Tom. Tom went to bed. We beat him. Hello. Hi. So we've got a new competitor. He's going to try to beat the Corona quest. John, are you game? Are you going to do it? I'm going to give it my best. Have you been listening to the travelers that we have had on so far?
So I tuned in. Learning from their errors. I tuned in a little bit late tonight this evening. I heard you all discuss a little bit about cooking. That won't be helpful for you in this game, I'm afraid. Well, that's good. I think the pure experience would be better, more ideal. I mean, the other people in the room can kind of... I mean, don't give it away, but you can give him hints as to what happens. It was a nightmare. Yeah, it's basically like a living nightmare. Don't go to the grocery store, you get lynch mobbed. Okay. Let's go. You're ready. alright let's begin hang on let's boot
I'm just booting up the Amstrad right now um shh okay alright start something welcome traveller what is your name I'm Jay You're in a dirty and festering living room, Jay You can see a rucksack and a pair of hard pants You can go north, east or west A broken PlayStation controller lies on the floor Along with a multitude of empty instant noodle pots and peanut punch cartons Internal doors lead to the east and west To the north, the front door is open
You're finding it hard to breathe and you have a fever You have no pants on You cough you cough you cough I put on the hard pants you would need to get them before you can put them on I approach the hard pants and I get them you pick up the hard pants I put them on one leg at a time You put on the hard pants They're a little uncomfortable But whatever You can go north, east or west
Okay I will go west You're in a small cramped kitchen Entirely devoid of any food You can see an empty tin can And a half-eaten pizza Dishes are piled up in the sink And all available surfaces are piled with trash you can go east. You cough. You cough. Um, I, can I eat the pizza? You would need to get the pizza before you do that. Okay, I approach the pizza and I get it, if possible. You pick it up. I consume the pizza. The pizza has no cheese and instead has a topping of dates.
It makes you feel ill. This is an Iranian pizza. You begin to feel very very sick. You swallow the pizza. Your corona quest is over. You are dead. Oh no, that's unfortunate. Bad luck. Some people never learn. Some more audience coming after this.
I know at best Life like a pivot Clear and direct Anticipating Worlds of regret In the beginning The past The situation I know at best Life like a pivot Clear and direct Anticipating Worlds of regret Life like a pivot The world's a very great The world's a very great The world's a very great The world's a very great The world's a very great The world's a very great
The world's a very great The world's a very great The world's a very great The world's a very great The world's a very great In 1971, Terrence McKenna, his brother Dennis, and some friends traveled to the small Colombian village of La Charrera in search of botanical wisdom. One evening, they settled into their hammocks after consuming a pile of fresh psilocybe mushrooms. As they began tripping, Dennis noticed an otherwise inaudible buzzing in his head. Terrence asked him to imitate the noise, but Dennis demurred. Then, as Terrence tells it. The drizzle lifted somewhat, and we could faintly hear the sound of a transistor
radio being carried by someone who had chosen the let-up in the storm to make his or her way up the hill on a small path that passed a few feet from our hut. Our conversation stopped while we listened to the small radio sound as it drew near and then began to fade. What happened next was nothing less than a turn of events that would propel them into another world. For with the fading of the radio, Dennis gave force, for a few seconds, a very machine-like, loud, dry buzz, during which his body became stiff. After a moment's silence, he broke into a frightened series of excited questions.
What happened? And, most memorably, I don't want to become a giant insect! This blast of high weirdness unleashed a flood of bizarre ideas in Dennis, while giving the McKennas the core theoretical and expressive principle of the experiment at La Charrera they would subsequently perform, the principle of resonance. In his book, Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, Dennis provides a formative example. During high school band practice, his instructor plucked the pitch of A on a bass string, which caused nearby strings tuned to A to vibrate as well. Resonance here means two systems entering into an energetic relationship mediated by frequency,
a mutual oscillation that, once begun, allows the second string to continue to sound even if the first string is dampened. The physical phenomenon of resonance operates in many different systems, among molecular particles, in neural tissue, and in a host of electronic technologies. It is one of the fundamental figurations of a cosmos that vibrates about as much as it does anything else. But resonance also resounds within symbolic, philosophical, and phenomenological frameworks. The term derives from resonantia, the Latin echo, and one thing the physical phenomenon echoes are magical doctrines of sympathy, such as the ancient correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm enshrined in the hermetic doctrine, as above, so below.
This essentially erotic model of the resonating cosmos becomes part of the modern magical underground, as well as a significant topos in alternative medicine. Contemporary esoteric and New Age practitioners operate in a vibrating realm of energies that manage to follow physical wave dynamics while eluding conventional measurement devices. As such, contemporary spiritual or esoteric discourses based on resonance, vibrations, and esoteric frequencies are often discounted as pseudoscience. But sometimes, as with the McKennas, a zone of indeterminacy is discovered, where the systems that begin to resonate themselves cross multiple fields of physics, sound, symbol, and experience.
In his book Reason and Resonance, musicologist Veit Ehrlman argues that even the physical phenomenon of resonance presents a challenge to the rationalist legacy of modern philosophy. With their ocular bias, rationalists characterize the mind as a kind of mirror capable of capturing accurate representations of the outside world while remaining fundamentally separate from that world. Resonance, on the other hand, is a phenomenon of conjunction, of the blurring of the boundary between subject and object. Rationalists ignore or suppress resonance, which nonetheless remains, in contrary traditions like Romanticism and Phenomenology,
inextricably woven into the warp and woof of modernity. So let us listen again to the curious transistor radio that night in La Charrera, the small radio sound that catalyzed Dennis' inner signal into wild expression. In Understanding Media, McLuhan underscored the connection between the radio and resonance's alternative to rationality. The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums, he wrote in 1964. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber.
Behind McLuhan's claustrophobic and colonialist language, with its hint of Jung's subliminal depths, is the specter of Hitler's radio performances, and the belief that the fascist ability to mobilize such irrational and seemingly mythic identifications on the part of the crowd was directly tied to the medium of radio. but McLuhan's analysis was not only symbolic but also formal since the phenomenon of resonance also defines the technological action of radio tuners in order to select and amplify a single radio frequency out of the thousands picked up by an antenna radios use an adjustable oscillating circuit known as a
resonator, to resound with the desired frequency. In a diary entry, Dennis described the sound he heard inside his head as something like chimes at first, but gradually becoming amplified into a snapping, popping, gurgling, cracking electrical sound. Such sounds appear not infrequently in anecdotal accounts of psychedelic experience, especially response to high doses of tryptamines like psilocybin and DMT. By attempting to give physical voice to this virtual or inner sound, Dennis responded to the radio's resonator by probing the resonating capacities of the various cavities in his body in order to find and construct
a sympathetic vibration. Once Dennis began imitating the inner signal, the voice and the sound locked on to each other until the sound was my voice. Here we can sense how the nonlinear quality of resonance erodes the question of origins and stages the conjunctive relations Ehrlman describes as adjacency, sympathy, and the collapse of the distinction between perceiver and perceived. Like Hendrix driving the feedback of his guitar through a nearby amplifier, the sound Dennis was making, and that was making Dennis in turn, became much intensified in energy.
The mechanistic buzz took on a terrifying life of its own. Dennis feared that he might somehow become the resonating vibratory circuit that he and the sound in his head were co-creating, a metamorphosis outside of speech and language that he imagined, or bodied forth, as a giant sci-fi insect. But just as the concept of resonance operates on at least two levels, the asignifying behavior of physical vibrations, and the sympathetic hermeneutics of esoteric echoes, so too did Dennis' buzz establish a circuit between self and environment, noise and sense,
nervous tissue, and extraordinary experience. Dennis' cry is at once a chaos and a call and response, and that enigmatic indeterminacy is itself a vector of the ontological echo chamber of resonance. As McLuhan asked in The Medium is the Massage, What's that bug? Darkness was utter and we had no clocks.
Dennis had been hearing the ESR tone that he deemed the sine qua non of what we were attempting for the past several days. After about 15 minutes, he announced that he could hear it more clearly and that it was gaining strength. He felt prepared to attempt the experiment at any time, he said. Dennis rose up in his hammock then. The candle went out and he sounded his first howl of hypercarbulation. It was mechanical and loud like a bull roar and ended with a convulsive spasm that traveled throughout his body and landed about his hammock on the floor. Yeah, another one from Audit, Unsound Undead.
That's Eric Davis's contribution to the book called Resonance. It's actually partly an excerpt from Eric's amazing book, which came out at the end of last year, I think. It's called High Weirdness, Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the 70s. And it covers in three lengthy sections the experiences of Terence McKenna, as you just heard, Philip K. Dick and Robert Anton Wilson. And so on one hand, it gives three lengthy and incredibly fascinating anecdotes of psychedelic experience. but it also has a really interesting way of trying to articulate the reality of psychedelic experience
without reducing it in any direction, either to the psychological or the organic, or even the cosmic, I guess. It's very highly recommended. It's a great book. Have you read it, Sean? No, I haven't. I think you'd enjoy it. I've been tracking Eric Davis on internet, international publications, but never actually read one of his books. It sounds amazing. Yeah, it's a really good one. He did his PhD on Philip Dick's visionary experience. So I think partly the book draws on that. But Eric has been someone who's been like a presence for me since back in the 90s, where the very earliest kind of cyberculture publications started coming out.
I remember very well his piece on memory palaces and cyberspace from back in the day. Yeah, so that's a great piece, I think. He's a really good Californian, isn't he? He seems to get that sort of... He gets that atmosphere of feeling that Californian can-do sort of synthesis attitude, but without the horror that goes along with it. So I don't know if we've got any more competitors, do we, for Corona Quest? I think Jay wanted to do it. Is he here? Yeah, he's muted at the moment. I did it already. You did it already, yeah. Yeah, I died eating the Iranian pizza. Are people asleep? Yes.
It's 11am, it's horribly late. 11am? Well, it's like quarter to two in the morning here. I'm not having a problem. Come on. I wake up at midnight. Excuses, excuses. Have we talked about Kanye West's beeping yet? Not that I know of. Well, on the topic of sound. I'm not really up on that subject. There's a link in the Skype chat. He says, words are one of our lowest forms of communication. And he started beeping at his friends. Instead of talking, he wants to make things that are speechless. instead of continuing to rap I can't figure out with Kanye
whether it's performance or trauma what's the difference? thinking back to Morse code we can we can harness beeps themselves for the purpose of speech I mentioned this in the chat to you but there's some interesting parallels between that. And I think a few years earlier, in like 2014 or something, Young Thug was talking about how he was starting to just write lyrics and like symbols that he made up and just put to paper and would just speak whatever words he had associated with those symbols when he was recording his songs. That's pretty cool. It's kind of free association, isn't it?
Or ghost writing. Yeah. Sean isn't impressed no it would take more than that yeah I mean I've got a bit of antithesis towards Kanye West as a sort of construct anyway to be honest so are you lost everyone? I don't know I don't know I've lost them beeps how about some beeps then
I'm gonna get you to see I'm gonna get you to me So take it out to you Just take it out to me I'm gonna get you to see I'm thinking you're out of my head But I don't really talk about it I'm loving what you're doing to me And I don't wanna do that Day and night I dream of this day with heaven But I guess I'll have to wait until that day comes It may be something It may be something I'm coming to you, I'm coming to you I'm coming to you, I'm coming to you I'm coming to you, I'm coming to you
I'm not going to be a good one. We're gonna get lost in the heat We'll get you asleep I just get the light in your light We'll sweep our baby into the heat We're gonna get you asleep We'll get you deep I just get the light in your light We'll sweep our baby into the heat
I'm so excited to be here. Suck me like leeches X and O, two-tack-toe Fuck em, double, let them go On to the next, knock this in the deck Some of Tally Lolo Shoes in candy banks, food up vocals New York rainbow, sit on Momo Pushing that Bentley, GT, oh no Flow chameleon, worth by the million Sell Bolivian, feds in oblivion
Bitch Brazilian, purse reptilian Took her from far off island like Dilligan Two wheels, plus wheels Pull it up in your grill, I'm so chill Your girl on Cosmos, Chris Tears And she feeling around for the pills Bitch, I'm trail You don't hear me though? Bitch, I'm so trill What? Nigga, I'm trill You don't hear me though? Nigga, I'm so trill What? I got my steel, I feel Pulling up in your grill, I'm so trill Your girl on Cosmos, Chris Steeles And she feeling around for them feels Bitch, I'm trill You don't hear me though? Bitch, I'm so trill What? Nigga, I'm trill You don't hear me though? Nigga, I'm so trill What? What? It's me, ma, you ain't dreaming Starstruck, bitch, damn near stop breathing So well that hun ain't believing Out my bracelet, she can't make rhyme or reason As soon as you get your heart involved That's where I fall back, love, au revoir
So international French Riviera Love for foreign cars would explain my Carrera Who cares when these fools talk? Don't mean jack till that tool gotta talk Icy wrists help me to cool off And a second hand in this bitch at Moonwalk Reminds me how I applied myself And why I now ride with Tickronic help They roll on overload I eeny, meeny, miny, moe them hoes I'm so trill Two wheels, plus wheels Pull it up in your grill, I'm so trill Your girl want Cosmos, Chris Tears And she feelin' around for them feels Bitch, I'm Trill You don't hear me though Bitch, I'm so Trill Nigga, I'm Trill You don't hear me though Nigga, I'm so Trill I got my steel, I feel Fillin' up in your grill, I'm so Trill Your girl on Cosmos, Chris Feels And she feelin' around for them feels Bitch, I'm Trill You don't hear me though Bitch, I'm so Trill
Nigga, I'm Trill You don't hear me though Nigga, I'm so Trill So many different things make me Trill Start with that beat with wings over the grill Maybe how my way with words make me mills Or maybe if my way with me mills And now, a word from our sponsors. In asking what our product is made of, we are asking many questions at once. What are we made of? We carry within ourselves memories of a thousand former lives. It's taken millions of years for nature to build us. But now is the time. A multi-sensory approach to creation makes stringent demands on the art of engineering.
Necreon has been created with the most exceptional ingredients, those provided by nature itself. We're having a bit of a problem with the copyright copster on YouTube.
Ok, let's play something about copyright. Here's another piece from Audint. This is Eleni Iconiadu and Caroline Schnurrer with an extended mix of The Lament. . Dime,
¿Quién sabe? ¿Quién sabe? ¿Quién sabe? ¿Quién sabe? ¿Quién sabe? ¿Quién sabe? ¿Quién sabe? ¿Quién sabe? ¿Quién sabe? ¿Quién sabe? ¿Quién sabe? For the peace of mind, give me your light, the wind.
Thank you. The end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the end of the day, the
Yet meet we shall, and part, and meet again, where dead men meet, on lips of living men. What sweet relief to sufferer as it is to weep, to mourn, lament, and chant the dirge that tells of grief. All over the ancient and modern world, death is a woman's business. wash, dress and decorate the corpse and then sing it to its final resting place with a lament. Lamentation is an extreme expression of sorrow that precedes every other form of oral ritual and has led to the creation of the oldest epic poems across human culture. A traditional burial includes the wake, the procession
to the cemetery, the funeral itself and memorials at a future point in time. All four might be accompanied by one or more female lamenters. These are usually older women dressed head to toe in black, vocalizing the horror of the loss with a chilling lament, ranging from talking and singing to sobbing, keening and wailing for the one no longer there. Keeners can be friends or relatives of the deceased and the family, part of the wider community, or hired professionals briefed about the dead person's character, background and history prior to the funeral. The ritual can include lifting the arms in the air,
lapping the hands in unison, beating the heads and chests and pulling of the hair. There is a rhythm to the performance, though performing here doesn't mean faking it, as even hired lamenters are emotionally invested on the particular corpse they are lamenting. The process starts with a light wailing during the wake, lifts to a crescental during the procession, subsides briefly in the course of the church service, only to rise again on the way to the grave and soar to a climax during the lowering of the coffin painlessly from overwhelming grief, barely controlled by the lamenter. The sound of death is a formidable force, taking over the vocal cords of the woman
and gashing out of her mouth like a torrent of wildly manifold configurations. Sophisticated literary content gives way to street language. Poetry turns to swearing. stormy outbursts are preceded by calm seas in the voice and intonation of the mourner at its core the dirge is uncontrollable and unknowable making it impossible to repeat or own entirely explains how the same mourner can produce allergies of entirely different form style and quality but it would be wrong to assume laments merely derived from within. While the main lamenter bursts out
words and sounds in improv, surrounding women incessantly feed her with information about the departed, which she effortlessly incorporates in her keening in real time. Therefore the lamenter in addition to speaking is also always listening and yet element typically contains more than just pure facts about the history of the dead entangled with it is information that appears to be held only by the lamenter and to have arrived to her from unknown sources the lamenter is crisscrossing the deluge of information she holds about the deceased past with the data received in real time adding to that speculative material and processing it all at incredible speeds
while vocalizing it in so doing she's making things once considered private part of your permanent record at its climax the lamenting voice leaves the past and present of this world to open up a door to the otherworldly more than sonically expressing the grief and pain of loss lamentation is rooted in a concrete ancient belief in the afterlife accordingly wakes and burials are of great significance as the last chance to prepare and equip the deceased for journeying to the underworld some of their favorite things coins for the boat for to the other side praise is told about their lives messages to pass
on to the other dead are gathered by the lamenter herself lamenters are actively interested in the dead body's fate in the next world and are seen as capable of opening up channels of transmission between the living and the dead through their unsettling vocalizations the main lamenter is not to be interrupted at any cost during the build-up of a lament and and is typically feared, admired, respected, but also mocked and hated, largely by men who hold lamenting to be dangerous witchcraft. The threat that neurologists are perceived to pose to the social order is due to the extreme uncertainty that such an orgiastic state of grief carries with it.
But it is also to do with the fact that, in lamentation, women were allowed an isolated moment of speaking out. Hence, lamenters would often deviate from the particular death they were mourning and move on to other sensitive, political, private and public matters, commonly untouchable by females and in some cases even by males. Mostly, however, the terror of the lament lies in its extemporaneous, untamed, inhuman dimension, that which reveals it as a sonorous force of unspecified destiny and unknown origin, separate from the body that hosts it. In the Lament we find an urgency to channel the alien, all-devouring unseen, that lies beyond this world.
The Lamenter becomes a transducer of death into sound, an acoustic passage between different orders of the real, devising a direct encounter between incompatible realms. Her unearthly incantation leading a cross, transferring to or from, vocally mediating and negotiating a ceaseless trade between the living and the dead. The weeping woman is a device for receiving, storing, processing and manipulating information. information speaking voice which is not hers not consciously controlled by her or a mere conveyor of her thoughts is an inhuman sound in the service of something in singing in Keeney in talking in recording in transitioning in
revivifying the dead the voice cannot be said to belong to the body per se is not authentic or authorized this hormonally masculinized its vocal pitch lowered is never perfect or real it is corrected perfected manipulated it passes through a chain of software effects it is unnatural and supernatural it is an effect without a cause. The voice is not private, ephemeral, personal or even human. Processed. Artificial. Synthetic.
Lamenting is the first step towards dehumanizing the voice. The recorded voice operating telephones, making announcements, warning you to mind the gap. The automated warning system in a cockpit. The voice of digital assistants using software to listen in and do stuff for you. play you music, read you headlines, tell you a story. The lamenting body itself is a transmitting device, no more human than it is machinic. The temporality of the voice is therefore paradoxical, at once organic and technological,
embodied presence and recorded revenant, human but immortal, continually returning, yet always anew. The voice is not equivalent to presence, identity, interiority. As we learn from the Lamenter, it is a speaking void, made up only of scraps and citations, contaminated by other people's memories, adrift. It is anticipated that future developments in deep learning and AI consciousness will lead to the complete outsourcing of lamentation to artificial intelligence. AI Lamenters will detach lamenting from its traditional association with death, extrapolated to its quotidian state, appropriate for the times of universal sorrow to come. Mourning
the loss of cultural life, the horror of politics, destruction of the environment, but also mundane but also mundane everyday struggles. You can project and transfer your grief onto them. The voice expands its field of apparition, welcomes its others and maintains its non-human composition. The voice makes alliances across the killing divisions of nature, culture and technology, and of organism, language and machine. It drifts from one chronic entity to another, all in or under the earth and the seas. Not us, more than us, not finished.
Nucleico. Mitocondria. Colonie batteriche. Commercio. Monopoly Partenogenesis Entropia Turbulenza Nucleico The paranoid desire that abolishes lines of flight in favor of secure shelters.
Sessostratto. Natura Virale. Simbiosi Batterica. Meosis. Transduction. Symbiotic mutation. Time scale. Three thousand nine hundred million years ago. Our anoint desire that abolishes lines of flight in favor of secure shelters.
We do not endeavor, will, seek after, or desire because we judge a thing to be good. On the contrary, we judge a thing to be good because we endeavor, will, seek after it. Desiderio ricombinante Uovo schizofrenico Clornaggio biodigitale Riproduzione sessuale
Liocene, miocene 19th century 21st century Present new duty. Operations. Machining desire. Viral propagation. Sex is transductive. It webs in bodies of all sorts, Exposed by the desire of the machinic phylum of matter. We do not endeavor, will, seek after, or desire because we judge a thing to be good.
On the contrary, we judge a thing to be good because we endeavor, will, seek after. Sex is traveling. Yeah, you have heard there Eleni Iconiadu with Carolyn Schneurer The Lament, which is from Unsound Undead and then followed by Code 9 Space 8 with Luciana Parisi and this haptic bacteria in dub. That's up on Code 9's band camp right now. A recording from 2004.
The launch of Luciana's book, Abstract Sex. We're kind of winding down. We no longer even say goodbye to the guests. It's just like a game of attrition. Whoever's left. And I think they're dropping off one by one. You're going to hear a bit more Audint. But first, a bit of Ed Rush. Thanks for joining us on the Plague Pod Live again.
Here I come to get some all the ring Outrack, but first I gotta unvest Check, gun check, clip one check, clip two check Here I come to get some all the ring Outrack, here I come to get some all the ring Outrack, here I come to get some all the ring Outrack, but first I gotta unvest Check, gun check, clip one check, clip two check Here I come to get some other ring, oh, wreck, but first I gotta, um, let's check, uncheck, clip one check, clip two check, um. God, keep behind this bug, fuck it.
Caressed by the music A change so strange But how does it do this In my mind Rhythms flowing through it I'm blessed, shared Caressed by the music Shout out to the Dustoff crew All close.
Let's go. I'm possessed, caressed by the music I change some strange, but how does it do this? I see. Some advice for them. I'm possessed, caressed by the music I need this. I need this. First of all, if you don't like me, suck your mother.
Don't try Spudman when you see, man. Keep it real, you ain't my brother. Every time I drop a lyric, I see off these MC Shudder. Got the ravers jumping, tell security to run for cover. You're another Shudder, Wooda, Cudder type of motherfucker. Trying to talk your utter trash and every time I hear you stutter. Leave your toast without the butter. Watch me beating black and yellow, purple, green and red and blue. Now he's got every type of colour. Let me flip it like an acrobatic. Every time I rap, I smash it. Haters see me as a bastard. Ladies think I'm charismatic. Got cheese like Wallace and Garmic, bought your girl a gin and tonic Funny how this music is my life and now I'm living off it Turn it round and smack the batty, ride it like a Kawasaki You don't get no pussy cause you're ugly, you just yam the batty Skanking when I see the speaker, round and round like cheesy pizza Got these MCs pulling out inhalers, I don't need a breather Okay maybe I'll just need a second
Then I'm coming back and shooting up the place without a weapon I know that I'm Team UK because I rep without a question I make biz look like Ibiza but I'm shooting Devon Devon what you reckon? Let me come and teach these pagans here a lesson Don't try to overdo the raving, it'll leave your head wrecking Better get up in the gym and grab the weights and start the repping Walking feeling like a pussy and walk out like Jack from Tekken Old type the man, dem, raving a lot Make sure you stack dem papers a lot Don't go splashing all the wages you got End up broke like mate, you're a flop Some man buy new trainers a lot Friday night bear, flavoured to rock It's cool to go out with your mates that you've got But make sure on a rainy day you're on top Hold tight the man, them, grafting and that
Wake up, move it back to the trap Nobody wants to be brassic and that Looking all scruffy, gal, laughing and that Anyone can win, it's an actual fact Practice, practice, master the craft Man told me I couldn't actually rap Now I travel round the world just rapping for cash like Let me go in, BRU, I pop the work in Riding the wave like man I surfing, man I murk him, murk him and I hurt him Let me go on, BRU man no I'm a don NG crew the rep blonde on, it's not NM City or what's going on? Let me go through, man I'm a know it's the iron brew, bars get cold like minus two, bars get hot like iron screw Let me go sick, BRU, I'm the wickedest kid, hit an MC with a Mai Tai, middle of the Mai Tai, middle of the flying kick
I'm not done, he said she said we like water, he said she said we like drums All man dumb, lick up a man like vodka and rum, these man go to the gym, can't lift it, 21 reps and Romeo done I'm not finished, raving without drum and basses like Popeye without no spinach All man kidding, lick up a man like beer and spirit, only got one life to live so you can watch me go and live it First of all if you don't like me suck your mother, don't try Spudman when you see man, keep it real you ain't my brother my brother every time I drop a lyric I see off these MCs shoulda got the ravers jumping so security to run for cover you're another shoulda woulda coulda type a motherfucker trying to talk you up to trash and every time I hear you stutter leave your toast without the butter watch me beating black and yellow purple green and red and blue now he's got every type of colour
A virus that doesn't know the distinction between rich and poor, between ideologies. Dead! Dead! Come! Come! If you are a true accelerationist, let it burn! Fire! Dead! Dead!
Ultimate junglist. The ultimate. Well I guess we're kind of drawing towards the end of this one but I still got some more Audint goodies for you so how about another one of them this one is from Charlie Blake sketches for a prolegomena to any future Xenosonics with Haswell and Hekka. One, to Burrow. With this effect, the listener's attention searches for a sound that is inaudible.
Rewind that and start that again. With the volume turned up. Okay. It's getting late. One, to Burrow. With this effect, the listener's attention searches for a sound that is inaudible. such as the voice of a mute person. The effect is named for Jean-Baptiste de Bourou, 1796-1846, a famous mime whose trial attracted the whole of Paris, curious to hear his voice. 2. The power appeared by means of an energy that is at rest and silent, although having uttered a sound thus, ZAH! ZAH! ZAH! In space, according to a famous tagline, no one can hear you scream.
In death, likewise, it might be assumed there can be no audition as such, because there is no organ or instrument to audit sound. No tool to either record or transmit a scream that would, anyway, be absent, because in death there is no voice or machine to even produce a scream. The same, it might be argued, would therefore apply to sounds other than screaming, whether say cosmic pulses and intervals or ghosting matrices of sonic crystals emerging from the angelic exertions of celestial mechanisms or impossible conversations across the ether. And yet our collective post-Symian intelligence has consistently reached out for or projected these kinds of sound events in and beyond death and deep space. It has done so, however, in a manner that would seem to imply, however elliptically,
that we are apocalyptically wired to anticipate communication with our absolute other in death with patterns of sound. Or perhaps, and this may well be the same thing, to encounter our mirror selves via our future or topos, in or beyond space or death or time, as we now perceive them. A place where the machinery to enable such an exchange has been finally, terminally and irrevocably engineered. This sketch for a prerogamina to any future xenosonics will, therefore, indicate the process of mapping out the implications of such yearnings via elements of image and analogy drawn from the contemporary physics of absolute zero, from the Kyoto School of Philosophy and in particular the writings of Keiji Mishatani, and although it's not possible to elaborate
upon it here, from the granular microtonalities of Ionis Xenakis. It will start with a double assumption that may be treated as heuristic rather than axiomatic, which links the study of death understood as a sonic event and process, or I shall call necrophonics, with a broader field of alien sound study, or what I have called xenosonics. The first assumption is that it is not only possible but inevitable that both the moment and subsequent of death will be sonically forged and configured. The second follows from the first in stating that, in this model, there are three forms of death and therefore three kinds of sound attendant upon these general forms. The first form is the moment of passing from existence to non-existence.
The second is the moment of passing from one existence to another existence and, in some cases back again, in a manner not dissimilar, albeit on a more rarefied plane of composition, to the ontological effect of the vacillating gaze of the quantum observer. In both of these cases the moment of transition or death is marked by a sonorous essence on what might be called the Akashic parchment, that both precedes and follows the existence which has passed, leaving a non-directional sonic scratch that may well remain unheard, but whose spectral signature can still be discerned and described retroactively, as both a tone and a resonance, in which either that which has been is no longer, like the memory of a dying note, or that which has now been is now other than it was once.
The third form of death, however, understood as the key to both necrophonics and xenosonics is more enigmatic, and is in many ways the one dreamed of by antinatalists, such as Emil Turen or Thomas Lugotti, in that it is premised on the mythical observation of the satyr solenus that rather than seeking existential solace in intoxication, sex or surcease it would be better by far to never have been born at all. This form of death has been adumbrated many times in the Gnostic tradition as a divine dissipation from the aborted realm of matter through the figure, say, of the absconding creator alien and his or her its plurimatic retinue of inverse angels and demons. This is an image of a divine absence leading a May ontological train whose paradoxical
anti-existence generates a sonic array as a defiance against the fading stars, but is not so much the opposite of either sound or silence, but their ontological inversion as such, an inversion that then itself folds into and becomes invaginated by a greater absence. which absence inversion and double invagination can fade here as an emergent sonic spectrality, will then be the starting point for an investigation of the preconditions for the possibility of the granular clouds and swarms of sonic particles that Xenarchus discusses in his formalized music. But, in contrast to Xenarchus, these are necrified clouds and xenophonic swarms apprehended conceptually less as patterns of sonic material events
abstracted from life and as matrices of sonically immaterial events in and beyond death. You're listening to Abinomic Plague Pod Live on day 26 with some extracts from the book Audint, Unsound Undead that was Charlie Blake his contribution to the book Sonic Spectralities sketches for a prolegomena
to any future xenosonics and underneath what you're listening to now Haswell and Hecker, Blackest Ever Black now we're going to hear contribution to Unsound Undead from Agnes Guero also of course author of Dialectic of Pop and Xenoglossia and Glossolalia our Benomic Plague Pod thanks for being with us tonight Every time is time to shake away
Hallelujah Hallelujah Glory, glory, glory, glory It is time Go ahead Go ahead Oh, for the time has come to Glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, is the ability to read, write or speak an unknown
language, an ability the speaker supposedly gains from a supernatural spirit. It sounds like a mixture of muttering and utterances that are neither directly intelligible nor translatable but rather open to interpretation. From Pythia, the ancient oracle of Delphi, to the medieval Christian tradition, to today's charismatic movement, Glossolalia has always been considered as a manifestation of the presence of God in the individual who demonstrates this unlearned skill. Because it breaks the natural laws of knowledge, it must be considered a miracle. During a ceremony that took place on the first day of 1900,
Agnes Osman, a student at Charles Fox Baham's Bethel Bible School in Topeka, Kansas, supposedly spoke in various languages she had never been taught, including Chinese. This miraculous event founded the first wave of the Pentecostal Church, which emphasizes the biblical gift described in Acts 2.1.13, where the apostles are depicted as speaking in tongues while being understood by each member of the crowd in their own language. As long as the language Oseman spoke was identified by its witnesses as Chinese, though, it was a case of Xenoglossia rather than Glossolalia. Unlike Glossolalia, Xenoglossia is the ability to speak an actual language the speaker has never been taught.
Many miraculous cases of Xenoglossia were reported in the Middle Ages, during the French War of the Camisards in the 16th century, and at the beginning of the 20th century, for instance, the ancient Egyptian language spoken by Rosemary, as reported by the so-called Egyptologists Alfred Hulmer and Frederick H. Wood. Although some cases have been reported, interpreted and sometimes even recorded since the 20th century as evidence of possession or reincarnation, it appears that recorded testimonies of Xenoglossia suffer from the very fact of being recorded. Conservation and reproducibility are inherent to these recording techniques, and both aspects
are a threat to the immersive presence, the Iket Nunc, that continues to accompany a miracle in its very testimony. With the oral testimony of miracles, belief rushes into the lack on which the testimony is itself based, the impossibility for others to undergo this experience again. On the contrary, recordings allow for precisely this possibility. But instead of an edifying experience, taping provides a linguistically analyzable object that loses its essential immediacy and with it, its spectacular character. If recorded, cases of Xenoglossia are far more usually disputed
And the fact that, nowadays, the recording is likely to be made globally available reinforces the possibility of its reaching native speakers or experts, who can deny or confirm that a foreign language is actually being spoken. This is why testimonies of Xenoglossia have increasingly taken refuge in remote languages that are less easily verified, such as Aramaic or Ancient Egyptian, as in Rosemary's case, or have even been progressively abandoned. In fact, although Ousmane's case was testified to as an instance of Xenoglossia in 1900, the charismatic movement now essentially relies on the practice of glossolalia.
Holy Scripture is itself ambiguous about whether speaking in tongues is to be interpreted as glossolalia or xenoglosia. Moreover, the recording leaves room for doubt about the instantaneous nature of the acquisition of the skill, which is essential to the miraculous dimension of xenoglosia. This is the reason for the traditional emphasis on the speakers being children, women or illiterates, less likely to have been exposed to a sequined language. On the other end, cases of glossolalia based on uterances of unknown languages are less linguistically disputable, but might more usually sound like gibberish outside of their ritualized context,
or at least be analyzed as the consequence of a cultural practice proceeding linguistically from random twists of the phonetic structure of different languages with which the speaker is familiar. In the end, the very character of audiovisual recordings of Xenoglossia causes them to be immediately taken for oxys, told tales, while recordings of Glossolalia, if they intend to be more than merely aesthetically enjoyable, are surrounded by a feeling of fakery, simulation. It appears that taping Glossolalia or Xenoglossia has been a cause of disenchantment rather than of new mysteries. Insofar as recorded sound gives an impression of both reality and presence, one might have
expected it to be a privileged medium for testifying to the miracle of the presence of God. But there is a yetus between the kind of aura, made of absence, that one finds in a recording and the radiance of the presence of God, Epiphany, that the recording of Oglosolalia or Xenoglossia intends to attest to. Surprisingly, recordings by their nature capable of indexing unique events are not an adequate archive for miracles. The epiphany might perhaps be limited to the phenomenological rather than the miraculous. If recordings of glossolalia are considered not as the recorded event fixation of glossolalic
uterances, but as the object synthesis of the articulated voice in its pure ability to produce uterances, then we are dealing with a disincented but still mediated phenomenon. In such an object synthesis of the voice's uterances, the linguistic indetermination, in contrast to a recording of intelligible sentences, would bring to the fore other dimensions texture, pitch, timbre, resonance, but also the intricate parameters of intralinguistic expressivity, intentional and unintentional, that come with what Mladen Duller calls a voice, and nothing more. Even taken as such, the glossolalic recording may still possibly recall,
depending on the listener's psychocultural context and expectations, an experience of possession may sound demonic, archaic, or surrealistic. But the achiever of remoteness is far more familiar than one might at first think. For most non-English speakers, the experience of recorded popular music during the 20th century was largely glossolalic, as it still is today to some extent. Such listeners did not listen to songs in English, but to songs sung in an English-like gibberish that made sense out of a voice's texture, accents, vibrations and incantations.
If their experience as listeners should more probably be called xenoglossic, since the recorded voice they listen to spoke an actual language with an intention of explicit linguistic communication, their mimetic response as singers ended up as pure glossolalia. French singers, for instance, sometimes compose their own songs in an English-like gibberish they call the aourt. Surprisingly, they are sometimes able to exhibit more conviction in their glossolalic singing than if they had used their mother tongue. In the context, glossolalia seems closer to a shared,
if not universal, experience of recording popular music. originally bound to the inflections of the English idiom for well-known historical reasons. More radically, a non-pridotoma in glossolalia should be open to the inflections of other tongues. Ultimately, glossolalia seems to be a matter of an experimentation with the multiple and idiosyncratic expressive possibilities of an individual, endowed with an articulated blerings-farings rather than any manifestation of God. However, the question remains, why does the material thickness of the performed uterances,
the opacity of their meaning, suggest not less but more than the relative transparency of an intelligible language? Maybe God is just that very intuition the listener reaches when a voice claims his attention for something he cannot understand. Oh, yes. The stairs. And in the bottom, the wolf attends the princess.
I'm not a hero I'm not a hero I'm not a hero I'm not a hero I'm not a hero I'm not a hero I'm not a hero That's Christophe singing closing out the last reading of the night from
Bordent Unsound Undead that was Agnes Guéraud reading her text on Xenoglossia and Glossalaria just keep on going Plague Podders we'll get through this keep on snacking thank you very much for joining the plague pod again. Be back soon I'm sure. I'm gonna sign off now. Good night. Keep safe. Don't touch your face.
I'm not sure you're listening to now. Yes, I appreciate everybody's talking about it. That's the way it's giving out them red-hot lessons trans-ize New York and New Jersey every week. All the way down the East Coast. From Boston, clean down to Atlanta, Georgia, last week, I tore down the East Coast. I'm from somewhere, I hear.
Come get your mojo, hey! Go on to Atlanta City and be a winner! Go down to Atlanta City and come back fat as a rat! Why shouldn't you be a loser when you can be a winner? Yes, ma'am, yes, sir! Brooklyn, New York.
Brooklyn, New York. Get ready. Down the way we'll be in Brooklyn, New York. Tomorrow evening, Monday evening, 6 p.m. of 8 p.m. I'm going to the hot, red hot, big money bitch state. And you beat the 6 o'clock, my evening. To the Bronx, New York. That's the way. Coming to the Bronx, New York. Coming to the Bronx, New York.
We've passed the five hour mark, but we still don't want to let go. That was KLF off the Chill Out album. Thanks to Enrico for reminding me of that amazing album. Here's another one from my boy Nov, a novelist, off the Heat EP. Going out to all the Soft Pants crew Tracksuit Mafia