The Ethic Pulse of Telharmonics

We must recast the civic function of organized sound in terms of telephonic connectivity. This is the direction for a new politics of pantopic dispersal, antidote to panoptic DARPA icons and all other triangular control systems of the Illumination. We bring out our cassettes and replay for the first time in almost thirty years warbling, half-melted echoes of “Requiem for the Media”, thinking that the time is now for that Baudrillard tribute album, the sonic endeavour of a shifting, networked band of improvisational broadcasters called Various Artists. This Telharmonic Choir attains a harmony of points distributed along telephone and cable lines, then darts across the invisible zones of wireless like sferic whistlers. Strange soundtrack to the Philip K. Dick novel we inhabit, tuned always to Radio Free Albemuth.

The horror of mainstream broadcast is precisely that of a Dickian protagonist: “I inhabit infinite multiple worlds, and in every one I’m doing exactly the same thing.” But Cageian frequency manipulation scripts underscore the political implications of telharmonics. Liminal zone broadcast blurs suggest nothing more simple than good old D&G lines of flight. Somewhere in the bleed and blur lies an opportunity to jump stream entirely, get into the tuning controls, and guided only by the messages of electronic voice phenomena engineering squads, slip out of this strange monotonous multiplicity into another stream entirely. Spinning PKD into Tel-SPAN’s MDK, we witness the psychedelicizing of the broadcast, the amplification of multichannel layering through FX processing in moments of artificially lucid teledreaming. In any case, telharmonics describes a scenario for leaving the entire platform of apparent political choice – henceforth known as the underlying objective of all commercial broadcast programming – and it will therefore be dismissed as a mode of anarchy, as an advocate of chaos in the name of choice, and noise by piano teachers everywhere.

A missive from the Bureau of Pharmakogeographical Surveying
Trace Reddell, Director