TGQTALKS

 
“’77 - “ON THE MATTER OF REPRODUCED SOUND”

Excerpts from Part One of a Public Dialogue at the Low Jinx Forum, Liminal Reserve Hall, Zurich, 1977
Participants: Colonel Boran, Klaus Vallis, Dr Watson.

COLONEL BORAN:

Gentlemen—if we can call ourselves that, considering the absolute delinquency of sonic ethics these past few decades—let’s begin. The topic before us is simple. Recording. Playback. Perception. Degradation. Salvation. All of it. We stand, as ever, at a new precipice. The studio has become an altar, a crime scene, and a womb. Let us consider this: prior to our century, music was vapor—it vanished with the final echo. Now it lingers. It sticks. It loops. It haunts. Is that progress, or is that curse?

KLAUS VALLIS:

It is both. Colonel, forgive my precision, but your phrasing already betrays a militarized suspicion of time itself. Music as “vapor”? That is a Romantic delusion. Even in the salons of Vienna, music was memory-traced, etched into blood and habit. What the phonograph did—what your so-called altar achieved—was extract music from context, yes. But more importantly: it collapsed geography. Thai ghost operas in Zürich attics. Haitian funeral drums in Sussex parlors. The ear is no longer local. The ear is everywhere.

Dr WATSON:

The ear is a mistake the brain keeps making. But yes… yes, Klaus, you are close. Recorded sound is not sound—it is shadow. It wears the voice like a cloak. It wears time like a bruise. I have heard a single tone re-broadcast through ten thousand speakers until it ceased to resemble anything but itself. And it wept. Do you understand? It wept for its original self.

COLONEL BORAN:

Ah. Okay. And what of control? The composers—we, the composers—once trafficked in singularities. One performance, one chance. Now? We stack and layer. We edit. We reassemble. That is a god’s work, not a musician’s. The four-track recorder was Prometheus’ matchbox. The twenty-four track? His inferno. I’ve seen Joy lost beneath overdubs like bones under a flood of mud.

KLAUS VALLIS:

And yet you overdubbed an entire flamenco ensemble over your last ambient war symphony.

COLONEL BORAN:

It was necessary.

Dr WATSON:

And you recorded it backward.

COLONEL BORAN:

Only because it had already happened.

KLAUS VALLIS:

Yes, and this is the disease: recording makes time negotiable. We remix memory. We audition the past. And we must ask: is a memory truer the hundredth time, or is it merely worn smooth like a counterfeit coin?

Dr WATSON:
The universe is a remix of something we forgot to believe. The studio, dear friends, is not a machine—it is a temple of the un-concluded.

COLONEL BORAN:

So let us be heretics. The question now is not how much can we record—but what should be recorded. And perhaps more crucially: what must never be played back.

(Pause. Unresumed?)


“ON TAPE, MIXERS, AND THE EROSION OF AUTHORSHIP”

PART II of a joint seminar in the fractured language of the future. [exerpt]

Dr WATSON:
Let me be blunt. The tape machine is the battlefield. The mixer is the weapon. Every knob is a vector. Every track, a front line. Every album, an occupation. Old-school composition? Now a quaint fiction. Letting a piece float down a pipeline from composer to conductor to orchestra to listener—like a damn aristocrat on a sedan chair. What I say is this: Burn the sedan. Carry nothing. Compose directly. Empirically. With your hands in the voltage.

KLAUS VALLIS:

Boran, as always, your metaphors are more militaristic than musical. But I agree with your premise, if not your posture. The classical composer, poor soul, had only ink and imagination—he worked with symbols, not substance. “F sharp, fortissimo.” How tragic, how limiting. As if trying to paint a sunrise using only legal briefs. But now? In the studio, I reach not for a cello—I reach for its timbre. I no longer write music. I sculpt it. A track is no longer a timeline—it is a terrain. For you bacchanalians, a terroir.

Dr WATSON:
And the terrain... forgets. Each pass of the tape erodes the original. The hiss accumulates. The print-through echoes itself. Music becomes a ritual of loss. But within that loss… freedom. The composer of now is not a writer, not a conductor. He is an alchemist. His ink is delay feedback. His parchment is magnetic dust. His syntax is silence, shaped.

COLONEL BORAN:

Exactly. On a 24-track machine, I can split the drummer’s exqusite corpse across eight faders. I can mic his left knee for a click track if I like—and I have. I can compress the cymbal so hard it coughs blood. This is not about documenting a performance. This is about designing an event. And then detonating it. At will.

KLAUS VALLIS:

Do you know what I did yesterday? I panned a voice so it circled the listener’s skull like an insectobot programmed to doubt. I equalized a bass track until it sounded like a tremor in the underworld’s heart. And then I muted the song’s spine. Just removed it. Like a surgeon—or a poet. Who needs form when you have control?

Dr WATSON:
The mute button is the first gesture of a god. The second… is echo. With echo, you create space that doesn’t exist. Time that doesn’t pass. Ghosts that never lived. I use it not for realism, but revelation. I once recorded the sound of a match being struck—and looped it until it sounded like eternity itself trying to start a fire.

COLONEL BORAN:

See? We’re not producers. We’re myth-makers with multitrack machines. And yet! The gear is not the point. It is the possibility. We must not worship the mixer. We must interrogate it. Twist it. Break it. Make it speak its true language. A machine in agony tells us more than any score.

KLAUS VALLIS:

And here is the heresy, my friends: music is no longer a message delivered. It is a terrain encountered. A labyrinth without center. No beginning. No resolution. Only an endless maze of modulation.

Dr WATSON:
Yes. And when the track ends, the listener must ask not “What’s it all about, Alfie?”—but: “Where is my mind?”


[Exerpted from:] PART THRE3:

COLONEL BORAN:

Let’s talk power. Let’s talk pulse.

Back in the 50s, you listened to a record and what did you get? Melody shoved to the front like a parade queen. The vocals screeched in your lap, and the rhythm section was mumbling in the back seat. Bass was a suggestion, not a weapon. The kick drum? A polite tap on the shoulder. And then... BOOM—Sly Stone drops Fresh. And the whole house flips inside-out.

The kick becomes king. The bass becomes architecture. And suddenly, the VU meter spikes with every thud like it’s measuring planetary shifts. You feel that thwack on the bass drum? That’s not an accident. That’s warfare. Equalized to slice through the mix like a scalpel. A thousand cycles of surgical intent.

KLAUS VALLIS:

Ah yes, Colonel. But permit me to translate your… pugilistic enthusiasm into more aesthetic terms. What you describe is a shift not merely of mix hierarchy, but of semantic authority. Melody once governed emotion; now rhythm dictates it.

We have moved from the opera house to the street. The melodic line has yielded to the timbral landscape. The “thwack” you mention is, in fact, a vocalization—the bass drum speaks now, with consonants and attack transients. The bass guitar becomes not resonance, but gesture. The groove is no longer the backdrop—it is the text.

Dr WATSON: 

The drum is not louder. The world is quieter.

In the era of playback, time has folded back in on itself.

You strike a snare in 1973 and it reverberates through 1982, 1999, 2025...

One drum hit, looped, becomes a cathedral of false memory.

Percy Jones plays once. But he plays forever.

COLONEL BORAN:

Exactly. Let’s get empirical. You’ve got this 35-second throwaway tape—a mistake, a jam. You copy it. You copy it again. You repeat the irregularity. Suddenly, that little fragment of chaos starts looking like genius. That’s how R.A.F. came about. A non-song, built into a myth. Why? Because the studio allows you to lie convincingly. You loop it, paste it, stitch it like Frankenstein’s bastard mixtape.

Then you drop a terrorist’s voice into the mix, cold and clipped—straight off the wiretap. You slam the echo off. BAM. You’re in a pressurized cabin of fear. Nowhere else in music could you contract space like that—suck the air out of the room with a filter.

KLAUS VALLIS:

Indeed. This is where we diverge from composition and enter cartography.
We do not write songs; we map acoustic terrains.

Let me offer an example: a single rhythm track—passed between artists like a reliquary. On one record it’s the banging opening track, on another the rapturous closer, elsewhere it haunts The Get Quick like a revenant.

The track migrates, recontextualizes. It speaks in new dialects depending on how you EQ its vowels, how you stretch its consonants. The studio becomes a language machine—an accidental Esperanto of ghost tracks.

Dr WATSON:
When the tape loops, it becomes aware.

When you copy a copy of a copy, it begins to dream.

You think you are producing. But it is the track that chooses its next incarnation.

Your hands guide it—but it breathes on its own.

COLONEL BORAN:

Right. And that’s why we never discard anything. I’ve got vaults full of abandoned beats, broken edits, hiss-heavy hits. I don’t call them outtakes. I call them future incarnations. Because you never know when the machine will ask for them back.

KLAUS VALLIS:
To borrow from the reggae tradition—which has been, I must say, centuries ahead of Europe in these matters—the rhythm outlives the performance. Dub is proof. A drum loop by Sly Dunbar becomes the spine of ten, twenty, fifty songs. The mix engineer becomes the author. The dub becomes scripture.

Dr WATSON:
And when the mix ends, it echoes.

In the hallway of your memory, you will hear it again.

But changed.

Less certain.

More true.

PART FOUR: “THE CARVED ECHO AND THE HISS OF INTENTION”

Excerpts from a continuing joint dialogue between Col Boran, Klaus Vallis, and Dr Watson Recorded at the 1999 New Reverberations Symposium, unlisted session.

COLONEL BORAN:

Right. Let’s chisel away at this next bit.

We’ve talked about additive music—bricks on bricks, layers on layers, you build it up like a tower. That’s what your average rock band’s been doing since they could plug in a Les Paul. But reggae—dub reggae—flips the process. They subtract. They remove. They make room for ghosts.

Imagine you’ve got six men in a studio. They lay it all down—tight, clean, surgical takes. That’s your block. And then the dubman comes in, blade in hand, and starts carving. The guitar vanishes. The snare stutters out. The organ slips into fog.

Suddenly you’ve got dimension. Space you can walk into.

KLAUS VALLIS:

Indeed, Colonel. And if I may elevate the metaphor—reggae composition is not merely sculpture. It is negative space sculpture, as practiced by the Zen monks of Kyoto or the Deconstructivists of late Paris. It is what is withheld that speaks.
Lee Perry, for instance—he embraces what the Western engineer would deem unacceptable: tape hiss, distortion, sonic detritus.

Where the BBC engineer dials down, Perry invites the hiss to dance.

It is anti-cleanliness. It is ecstatic impurity.

Dr WATSON:
The hiss is not noise. It is memory.

It is the sound of all previous decisions bleeding forward.

What you call defect, I call time residue.

And in dub, time does not pass. It returns.

COLONEL BORAN:

Exactly! I mean, look at this—Eno’s first Music for Airports piece? He hears something he didn’t even know had happened.

Two pianists, blind to each other, colliding in slow motion. It’s an accident. It’s perfect.

So what does he do? He loops it. He slows it down. He shaves away the bass, axes the guitar. All that’s left is a glimmer of Fred Frith’s scrape bleeding in—he can’t cut it out. So what does he do?

He builds a composition around the intrusion. That’s the lesson.
You don’t conquer the mistake. You evolve with it.

KLAUS VALLIS: 

The scrape becomes the hinge.

We see this in all serious editing traditions—be it montage in Soviet film, or aleatory techniques in the works of Cage.

The unforeseen becomes the engine of structure.

Only dilettantes discard the anomaly. Masters orchestrate it.

Dr WATSON: 

A loop is a mirror with no face.

Play it backwards. Slow it down.

Listen long enough, and the loop begins to loop you.

COLONEL BORAN:

Right on, Watson. That’s what studio composition is about now. You’re not Beethoven at the desk anymore—you’re in there with your sleeves rolled up, reacting in real time to a landscape that’s shifting under your fingers.

And let me say something blunt: if you’re mixing only on pristine systems, you’re mixing for no one. I test my tracks in cars, in hotel radios, in a bar in Doncaster with one speaker hanging by a wire.

I want the echo to get lost, the bass to warp. That’s the challenge. That’s truth under friction.

KLAUS VALLIS: 

Bach never had to contend with factory-floor fidelity.

Our domain is not the concert hall—it is the interference zone.

As McLuhan would have it: the medium is the message. Or should I say massage.

And reggae? Reggae is massage with a blade.

Dr WATSON:
Every mix contains a future no one asked for.

Every silence hides a rhythm yet to be born.


Outslips from a joint lecture: The Magus Map and the Sonic Cartography of the NEW REVERBERATIONS Era (PART V).
Recorded in Berlin 2000

COLONEL BORAN:
Let us not delude ourselves—what we are speaking of here is not merely composition, nor cartography, nor philosophy, but a synthesis of all three: a praxis of sound-mapping capable of warping topographies, turning space into tone, and guiding the soul across frequency thresholds long suppressed by institutional science. You see, in the NEW REVERBERATIONS era, The Get Quick’s tours were more a series of off-grid transmissions. Sedona, Fingal’s Cave, Goseck Circle—these were not venues, they were ports of sonic ingress.
Now, the so-called “Magus Map,” attributed to Alex Magus but clearly the result of collaborative trance-cartography, was the band’s attempt to align their recording sessions with earth chakra sites, leylines, and what Dr. Watson once referred to as “subharmonic blood-vessels of the geomantic body.” The use of location recording wasn’t merely atmospheric. It was ritualistic. Improvised melodies became incantations. Playback summoned feedback loops in the air itself.

VALLIS:
Indeed. One must acknowledge that the Magus Map defies Cartesian structure. It is not Euclidean. It is not, strictly speaking, a map. Rather, it is a sonic palimpsest layering Druidic pathways, mound-builder geometry, Vedic sound-harmonics, and Schliemann’s stolen coordinates of Troy. At its core: the void node, marked somewhere near Staffa—beneath the basalt arches of Fingal’s Cave.
A site sacred to Romanticism, yes, but more importantly, a natural acoustic chamber that predates humanity. The Get Quick’s 1976 Fingal performance was never officially recorded. But Watson claims the vibrations were captured in a medium we no longer recognize as “audio.” This is not mysticism. This is psycho-acoustic archaeology.

Dr WATSON:
Maps are dreams fixed to paper. Cartography is a theory of memory.
The Magus Map is an extraction protocol in the guise of a guide.
You see, if we consider sound as a material entity—not a wave, but a sentient filament—then its propagation is not bound by air, but by meaning. The Great Serpent Mound. Boynton Canyon. Nazca. Each is a receiver tuned to ancient, forgotten stations.
At Goseck, Mae sang backwards to the sun. In Mississippi, Mitch recorded underwater, low-frequency rituals. In Sedona, Erjk used a de-tuned 12-string and reversed pickup polarity to induce synesthetic trance in local witnesses. The Magus Map merely charted where the music wished to go.

BORAN:
And to be clear—the music did go. We had reports from remote viewers in Hokkaido, in Dubrovnik, in Novaya Zemlya. They heard Children of the Ritz before it was released. They described Pendulum two years prior to its studio birth. Temporal leakage. Geosonic bleed. These are real phenomena.

VALLIS:
The real question is not how we recorded. The real question is: what was recording us?

WATSON:
A cathedral hum. A sidereal ear.


TITLE: PART VI - THE RESONANT MERIDIAN: A VISIT TO THE MOUND [exerpt]
Location: Great Serpent Mound, Ohio - 2020
Participants: Colonel Boran, Klaus Vallis, Dr. Watson
Dialog via headset transceivers, transcribed in part here:

BORAN:
You hear that hum? That’s not wind, gentlemen. That’s the land remembering.

WATSON:
No memory is ever silent, Colonel. Only displaced. The Great Serpent is a transducer. Coiled intention mapped to frequency.

VALLIS:
As always, your metaphors obscure as much as they illuminate, Watson. Still... the geomantic alignment is uncanny. This ridge is precisely in phase with the Cathedral Rock node in Sedona.

BORAN:
What matters is that it’s on the Map. The Magus Map doesn’t traffic in accident. This is a resonance corridor—what the Apache might call a Spirit Line. What we used to call an Audio Meridian in psy-ops. You walk it, you carry sound across realities.

WATSON:
Note the granularity of the soil. Magnetically responsive. Ferric grains arranged as if by sonic sculpting. I suspect long-wave instrumentation... or a ritual confluence.

VALLIS:
There were rumors in 1939... experiments in sonar-based topographies, yes? The Vril Society thought these mounds were terrestrial tuning forks.

BORAN:
Rumors. But look what stands: a mile-long serpent aligned with the solstice. That’s not superstition. That’s a cipher. We decode it, we find the gateway to the next site.

WATSON:
This segment here, near the apex of the serpent’s coil. I detect embedded harmonics. Latent audio signatures. Klaus, your field modulating equipment.

VALLIS:
Of course. I’ve configured the S.I.N.T.A.R. to scan subterranean frequency pools. One moment...

BORAN:
Holy hell. What was that? Did you feel that glitch? Did we just slip half a second?

WATSON:
Time is porous in places like this. A rehearsal for deeper crossings.

VALLIS:
We’re reading what appears to be a harmonic bleed from the Troy axis. I’m seeing a surge in the Heinrich-Schliemann vector. The Serpent Mound is acting as a sympathetic transmitter. It’s echoing a buried frequency from Turkey.

BORAN:
Ha. So Schliemann didn’t find the treasure. He tuned into it. Absurd.

WATSON:
Precisely. The Treasure of Troy was never gold. It was the signal.
Do you detect that? The chirr of insects is now modulating unnaturally.

VALLIS:
No. But if this mound responds, others might too. We may be able to create a standing wave across the Map.

BORAN:
Then gear up, grunts. We walk the coil at dusk. No lights. Only tone. The Map is listening... to us.