The Talk of Creatures

In June 1840, the Manchester and Birmingham Railway opened a temporary terminus on Travis Street. A large site, 1,700 ft by 500 ft, was cleared of terraced houses, industrial premises and public houses to make way for a permanent station built on top of a viaduct, 30 ft (9 m) above ground level. The station was opened adjacent to London Road on 8 May 1842. The station connected to the Oldest Railway Station in the World at one end and to the Northern Industrial Powerhouse at the other. The station would become Picadilly Station and one of the arches of the Viaduct would become Gorilla, a nightclub on Whitworth Street, Manchester. Gorilla is not huge but it packs something astounding into the compact extent of a railway arch. The vaulted roof survived, a century later, during the 1940 Manchester Blitz in which hundreds of people died as three hundred tonnes of high explosives were dropped onto the City. Onwards to the third millenium and Gorilla is a nightclub on Whitworth Street, Manchester.

Like the Smell of Sulphur Underground. That unique chemical that makes every nose twitch. Like a Smell Of Sulphur On The Wind. In 1970 Bill Drummomd attempted to walk down Iceland and failed. The artist Richard Long attempted the same walk and succeeded in 1994. Long made works of art from this walk. One work is the photography and text piece called 'A Smell Of Sulphur In The Wind'. In 2001 Bill Drummond writes the book 'How To Be An Artist' in which his relationship with art is examined. Having purchased 'A Smell Of Sulphur In The Wind", Drummond decides to  sell the work for £20,000 in 20,000 separate numbered segments for £1 each. Drummond dissected the Picture and went on tour. Giving a talk and selling slivers of picture. The job is finished when, after 20,000 sales, Drummond will return to the stone ring and bury the money. Job done.

A venue that sold every ticket for a stage that is no larger than a railway platform is a venue that has to give something more than a roof over your head. When Rilla contemplates love, Gorilla contemplates more. Stones, like the landscape, record memories. Ghosts sidle into the brickwork, spectres inhabit the cornices. The Railway Arches have long been a powerful image of Northern Culture. Northern Soul. Northern everything. Beneath the ground, the River Medlock meanders. Above, night trains run, rarely on time. Gorilla is not the Hacienda. It smells like it sometimes. Perhaps there is some unique chemical that makes that true. Something about the smell of obscurity underground.

The atrium beneath the aqueduct heaved with the (foul flavour of vermin) assembled and expectant. The swelling night club crowd, expecting a brief number from someone mysterious. A crowd whose collective voice, a cocktail of accents, swirled until a certain moment. When there was a silence. A pause. A moment of something. The World Shifted. Smelling tension in the air as three strange Bavarian Birds wibbled and waddled onto the stage. The Bavarian lozenge of the Wittelsbach Family: rulers from 1180 to 1918, when the whole of Europe collapsed. Displacing the 11 year old Nigel Senada from the certainties of service to the Monarch. As the Anif Declaration released all civil servants and military personnel from loyalty to the house of Wittelsbach. No formal renunciation of the throne took place and so nobody really knows if Wittelsbach is, or is not. Just as nobody knows if the young Nigel is or is not. But: England Expects, as they say in the flag signals.The Wittelsbach sidled into obscurity. There yet absent.

It started in an open spot, with words like: "In my dreams at night, I hear a white hot light" - with Tyrone channelling Jack who was wishing to be just a bird, singing simple melodies that no one ever heard. Which, was just what the three strange Bavarian Birds set about doing: making melodies. Emerging from the sounds, like bricks and mortar, to make music. The only homage to Senada that anybody could contemplate. The collapse of Bavaria in 1918 left Nigel recording the sounds of birds, knowing that eekie-erkie-cha-cha was merely a mnemonic for a ballroom dance. Given the pack of the throng, an undanceable swirl, only the conga would be possible. Tyrone - his Bovine Holstein polka dot magnificence - began the gentle hypnotic induction that would take us all between dreams. eekie-erkie-cha-cha! eekie-erkie-cha-cha! eekie-erkie-cha-cha!

Eekie did something to a guitar. It may have been channelling the Medlock River. Described by Friedrich Engels as being "...the most horrible spot...", it is a hidden river of Manchester. Filled with the undertow of Mancunian life. Eekie was dredging up something from somewhere which scorned out into the night time air. The room, once solid with people, their collective mutter, and the aroma of human virtues, now filled with sound. Quite literally, the vault beneath the aqueduct was now sound from which music might follow. The plodwobble and totter of Erkie and Cha-Cha becoming the Hawfinch and Shrike of the Bavarian Forest. Tyrone had cast a subtle spell across the Audience. Not some curse or cure or even a philtre of good lovin' - but the kind of incantation that lets the human walk between dreams. In between dreams, in a landscape made of sound. A howlin' Holstein in polka dotage.

Brian Eno coined the term Ambient Music to describe sound that is "as ignorable as it is interesting". Tyrone, Erkie, Eekie and Cha-Cha seem to have embraced the Ambient in a novel hypnopompic manner: sound that is the structural foundation of reality. Audio-ontological-obscurity. Imagine, for a moment, being in a railways station and hearing nothing. The silence would be inignorable. The tension mumbling like a midget making reality curl and sway and become something neither ignorable nor interesting. Something unignorable masquerading as the mundane. Dreaming of being a cowboy riding with the wind, at the fringes. Ambient Music transformed into a cautionary tale of wolves. Haunting the Dream. The American Dream of an American Band. The dream of the Black Behind. Building upwards from sounds into music is difficult in a studio where the knobs can be exactly knobbled, dials dialed, sliders slid, and switches flipped. In a live context, that is fraught. Building from the Ambient to the Briciolage in the presence of hundreds of people is where the Theory of Obscurity becomes something more than an affectation. It is bloody hard work.

Which is the danger, when Tyrone bellows his bullhorn of black and horror. The danger of the black behind all. That you are not in between dreams at all but careering towards the thing that is behind all the dreams. The good dreams and the bad. The dreams that are as ignorable as they are interesting. Which is waiting and not, in the slightest, far from danger. The lights spinning round, As though some carnival abyss had crashed into the viaduct. To make the point: the ambience of Nachtzug drifted in and out in the moments between songs. Imagine. Imagine. Imagine being in the belly of a railway and hearing the sounds of trains. The sheer ignorable connection between the place and the sound impresses the subconscious - the black behind everything - with the bellow of an animal lover's monkey man we are moving onwards. Onwards to an uncertain future because sound, having filled the room, is filling the bodies, the faces, the smiles, the eyes. Filling every Monkey in the room. Lights swirling backward and forward. Like trains. Ghost trains passing through the viaduct. We are all fleeing the abyss that we have willing stared into and is now staring back. As Tyrone Howls. The Brimstone of Obscurity curdled the night and nothing could save us, not even a kindly nun.

It was, it seems, turning into an evening of animals and machinery. Mother Theresa told us so. In a swirl of light she grabbed Tyrone's attention and then we were off. We had thought it was a mans world but it turned out to be a warning about elephants and accidents and the endless swelling, turbid, turgid howling. Mother Theresa chittering about the accident. Perhaps channelling the vanished trains of the Whitworth Street Underground Station. A station never built, yet evoking the ghost passengers who were boarding the sounds the Tall Bavarian Bird was dredging from beneath the pavement beneath Gorilla's floor. Mother Theresa was there telling us the things she thought important and impressive. Yet. She may have been a forgery. A fake. A camp follower taking advantage of the plenum of sound, light and something. She was here to tell her story. Like a water colour of a bunny boy, she had a story to tell. But it was filled with ambiguities despite having no ambiguity. A slippery trickster intruding. A waft through the solid night of Tyronism.

It was there, then, that moment: everybody apprehended that Tyrone is, endlessly, a Shaman and that we were underground and that this was a trip in between something more than simply dreams. This was the endless dream - like the endless song - that drifts across the landscape wherever there are trains. A moment of silent, contemplation within Gorilla conjoured all those people sheltering from the oncoming Blitz of 1940 or the oncoming transformations of 1842. Which was the moment that Cha-Cha became a Shamanic Drummer - summoning us all to the lands after dreams. And the trains, these were a reminder of the radical and tragic history of Manchester, that trains that run on time are not always a good thing. eekie-erkie-cha-cha! eekie-erkie-cha-cha! eekie-erkie-cha-cha! A conga train to oblivion.

And the room became a blue world. Not a uniform blue. Not the Blue of Mother Theresa, nor the Blue and Red of Nixon's Blues. This was the blue that filled and flowed out of everybody and into everyone else. Unlike other Bands, whose endless chatter punctuates and guides the Audience, this was a communion in the medieval sense: the merging of the Audience and Performers into a thing. More than merely a performance or individuals. The hurtle towards a tourniquet of roses that nobody might ever inhale. Punctuated by moments where Eekie stood, silently holding hands behind. The black behind again. Even from the left hand side of the stage, the infusion of lights worked a glamour - that mediaeval sorcery of the Green Knight - that filled the head from touching the eyes.

When John Wayne turned up with some anecdote about a Ballerina, everybody had already been captured. We were all traipsing the trail from the Plains to Mexico without even considering where we were. We had been kidnapped by bears and taken towards the most melancholy noise ever heard. The void had caught up with us for staring. A kindly void. If we are to give character to voids, the Gorilla Void beneath the Manchester railways has a heart. It is a kindly and forgiving heart and one that beats fast in the industrous heart of the busiest of bees.

In Manchester you are never more than six miles from a graveyard. There were over 800 deaths in the Blitz in 1940, in and around Manchester. Many of them from people sheltering underneath the arches. It is a place of mortality. Six more miles to the graveyard was the most poignant performance. Not simply because of the resonance with the death of Hardy Fox but also because it came at the end of a visual and physical performance that was genuinely gruelling exertion. This was not simply an encore to please a crowd. This was putting something new into new dreams. Taking the sounds from the room to achieve a moment of lucid reverence. This was a final exertion which came at the end of an evening that had genuinely given something to the audience.

Which is an achievement in a City where the tour bus got ticketed for parking on yellow lines. Which is an entirely contestable ticket as the yellow lines are not within specification. Contestable from anywhere in the world via the marvels of the internet. The new railroads in the plains of cyberia. It is an achievement in which the posers would, before a sound had been uttered, declared that the gig would never be as good as the "thirteen anniversary in the Hacienda - I know, I was there". They were wrong. They just like the name Hacienda. Which is fine. Marvellous. Tony Wilson promoted the Residents right across the North of England with the One Minute Movies on  the local news programme, "Granada Reports". He would have been at home in a Gorilla. He would have understood the relationship between mortality and giving. How Tyrone could invent an invisible conga line from guest gorilla's - eekie-erkie-cha-cha! eekie-erkie-cha-cha! eekie-erkie-cha-cha! The conga of hominids.

Then it was over. Gone. The lights changed. The Band vanished. The whole thing had never happened. It had been a dream and we were all, once again, in between dreams. Outside, we watched the road crew loading equipment up as we waited. The rain was vile. But that is the nature of Manchester: rain. It explains the underground rivers and the endless raised collars. It explains how the Residents came to town, drifting in and out and making ripples that will expand outwards forever. Past the Quaker Graveyard and Peter's Field and past New Jarusalem into the aether. Onwards.


Strange birds waddle onto the stage. The room filled with sound. The sound turned into music. The strange birds strutted away. Leaving them journeying onwards. Always six more miles away. The most melancholy sound, ever heard, is the sound of Tyrone, having screamed Die! Die! Die! and told us all that there is no more to say, telling everybody - those in the Renaldo and the Loaf Poxodd Teeshirts and those in the Classic Eyeballs and even the guy in his hand painted Monkey shirt - that "She's the best friend I ever had".

It is in the loss of others that we know we have friends.
Did I mention that Gorilla is a really friendly venue: no. But they serve coffee. Which was nice.
Did I mention that was the best event I have been to in a long time.





 

In 2007 the world was falling through its own fundament. It was four score years after the publication of "L'histoire de l'oeil" - The Story Of The Eye - by Georges Bataille under the pseudonym of Lord Auch, and forty-five years after Roland Barthes published "Metaphor of the Eye". Barthes argues that the body fluids and explicit narrative does not necessarily form a pornographic narrative. It was the year the Voice of Midnight arrived. Nine score years and five after Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann died. Hoffman wrote as a contemporary to Mary Shelley; "Der Sandmann" arrived two years before "Frankenstein" and, in many respects treats similar themes. In 2007 "The Voice Of Midnight" appeared as a Horspeil before "The Bunny Boy". It was a foreshadowing of the modernity of the Madness of Roger and Harvey and the multitudinous incarnations of the secret deities of the Rabbit.

Harry, a talented Greek Filmmaker and Comic Book creator with a penchant for requiring sentences to begin with a capital and end with a full stop, and a knowledge of the Number 24 London Bus, had not yet begun to make pointed remarks about rabbit trails. "The Voice Of Midnight" was a caesura in an ebb and flow of the tumult of storytelling. It was the year Mark Wallinger won the Turner Prize for spending a night in Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin wearing a Bear suit and pursued by a camera crew.

Liverpool was 800 years old. In the throes of becoming the Capital of Culture. Not only the Residents hated the Beatles.

Liverpool has a suffered and benefited from the impact of the Beatles. Sooner or later, every single band gets compared to the Beatles. Which is a hindrance. The Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts (LIPA) is both a benefit as a place of higher education and a curse in that it, apparently, actively discriminates against poverty stricken Liverpool residents. Tourists come to Liverpool and expect to be able to go on a Magical Mystery Tour - they can.

The Magical Mystery Tour starts and finishes at the Cavern Club, 10 Mathew Street, Liverpool. The tour lasts 2 hours and includes the following locations with stops for photos on the way: the childhood home of Ringo Starr; George Harrison’s birthplace Penny Lane; St Peter’s Church Hall; Strawberry Field;John Lennon’s childhood home; Paul McCartney’s childhood home; Former schools and colleges of John, Paul, George and Ringo including the Art College and the Liverpool Institute (now LIPA); and, the driver manically pointing out other Beatles related things along the way. It is a sterile and pornographic circuit of a City that might benefit from an exorcism.

By 2016 - a mere decade later - The Sandman is missing in Liverpool. Children are not going to sleep. Nothing helps. Lullabies fall on deaf ears, teddies fall to the ground un-hugged and there are no bed time stories. Something is very wrong with night time tales. Such is the Theatre. It picks up stories that are bubbling around.

Mr Morpheus from the Chillait Corporation is here with his new, soothing night time milk! As if there were some kind of commentary on the media. Kid calming and soporiphic. A group of adventurers known only as The Dream Team are called together to travel the globe in search of The Sandman. Bed times will return to normal if they find the Sandman. If they don’t, Mr Morpheus will take control forever…

The Residents seep into the Culture of Liverpool. They are there at the margins of the City. Hoffman died a paralysed alcoholic and Bataille is besmirched with the being a mere surrealist pornographer. It is as though the Residents looked around the world and considered which City most closely guards - or covets - its mask. They thought "San Fransisco" but then, on a moment of chance they saw "Published by Liverpool Distributors, Los Angeles, CA (1970)" on the frontis of an erotic novel in the Sandman Series.

It was in the moments leading to the actual creation of the Residents. The foment of birth. The most secret truth of the the Masked Ones is that they chose to consider the Beatles purely because of a filthy novel left on a train. From that moment forth they began to seep, far and wide, into the strange culture of the world. At the back of their minds, always, the inevitability of the Eyeballs and the certainty of the madness of obscurity.

ETA Hoffman, in "The Sandman" created an archetype that has entered into World Culture. The recurrent theme of the Eye. While Metropolis has the Romantic Magical Realism of a robot woman, it is the Eyes that Thea von Harbou uses to capture the transformations of Brigitte Helm into a sensual robot that have the greatest potency. These are the eyes that Nathaniel fears losing as he crashes onto the telephone answering machine of Claire.

Claire de Lune - musically by Debussy  but also poetry by Verlaine, Hugo and de Maupassant - overload the names of "The Voice of Midnight" with a rich backstory that nobody notices. Like tourists on the Magical Mystery Tour. Nathaniel bursts into existence on an answering machine with a crash of machinery reminiscent of the shift work of Freder in Metropolis. Unaccountably, the voice of Nate becomes less frantic and masculised and adopts a feminine quality. Reminiscent of "The Confused Transexual" on "The Gingerbread Man" or even "The Old Woman" from the same. There is something in "The Voice Of Midnight" that connects music from "Nice Old Man" on "The Commercial Album" to the voice distortions of "The Big Bubble" and the tape speed manipulations of "Third Reich 'n' Roll". Somewhere the Residents mastered the sleight of hand that enabled them to disguise themselves more thoroughly than a visiting "Voice" from the Moon. As though "The Executioner" was, in fact, sung by the real vocalist. That somehow, the Residents had disguised their female member for decades even when, in "Wormwood", Molly Harvey became the Cryptic Diva.

The Story of "Voice of Midnight" needs to be listened to. Perhaps as a radio play - the Horspiel of musical storytelling. Again, there is the Theory of Obscurity bringing its power to bear:  Seneca has been claimed as a forerunner of radio drama because his plays were performed by readers as sound plays. These were not actors dramatising writing as stage plays. In this respect Seneca had no significant successors until radio. It is this obscure provenance that lets the Residents seemingly point at the Beatles while, in reality, telling a deeper, more fruitful, story. Like Bataille and "The Story of the Eye". The Residents manage to smear a veneer of popular culture over art and then persuade an audience to scratch, scratch, scratch - as if getting rid of a Spot.

The poetry of Nate:

I feel a fire and see the empty-ness that was your sight
 And sense a burning, boring penetration, leaking light
 Surrounding me with heat and hopeless laughter, I am lost
 Until I hear your voice imploring me to walk across

and the response of Claire:

If this is a reflection of the affection in your heart
Then our ideas of love are an infinity apart
Your crude attempt at sentiment is odious and cold
And conceals the true condition of a damaged soul.

Something's hiding from you, Nate, it's puncture-proof and sealed
You need to separate your sickness from the love you feel
Go away and think about everything I said
Go away and sleep with eyeless shadow shapes instead - of me.

are not only a narrative tour de force but a formidable exposition of how works by the Residents function. Like Claire accuses Nate, the Residents accuse their Audience of being the bringers of bizzare weirdness. As though we are all tourists and they merely point out the childhood homes of people we have never met. People whose obscurity might never be penetrated by simply driving around the Capital of Culture and looking at buildings long sold off for other purposes.

The storytelling of "Voice of Midnight" is not some monolithic authorial imposition of a narrative. There are multiple voices and they ebb and flow. Yet, they are, like Seneca's Readers, they are not dramatising - unless you scratch the surface. The surface narrative is a bizzare tale which takes the historical heritage of ETA Hoffman - Coppélia (The Girl with the Enamel Eyes) and the Sandman and Hoffman's own life and love of cats - and transforms it into a pop culture trinket surrounding a powerful Symbolist-Romantic story. Yet the voice is never simply one person. It slides and shimmers from one person to the next.

As if the identity of the "Voice of Midnight" was somehow vanishing into a sea of obscurity. A Zen experience of non-being in a sea of people. The closes experience to the whole world sleeping. Which, if the Dream Team can track down the Sandman, means it will not be the Sleep of Reason that brings forth Monsters.

Love is the feeling you get
Dropping eyeballs into
The mouths of hungry children.

Starving children raise emotions
Like rain raises weeds
Starving children feed the souls
of those that heed their needs

Starving children apply pressure
On a parent's mind
Starving children create pleasure
When they eat their eyes."

Starvation and the Eyeball is an image that swerves the story through the paternalism of "dropping eyeballs into the mouths of hungry children" to the horror of "starving children create pleasure" - images and ideas that take shape once you begin to start scratching. And Nate scratches.

"Love is a skeleton key  unlocking a small room filled with darkness and hope."

Which transforms Nate's entire strand of narrative into the image of Pandora's Box. Which, Nathaniel enters in a literal and metaphoric manner when he discovers Olympia's body without eyes in a basement laboratory. Which is the most dread horror: Olympia is deprived of the windows to her soul: her eyes. Nathaniel experiences the whole of the "Frankenstein" story in a matter of a few words. One compressed incident where Nathaniel transforms into a catatonic and his mother lets Claire know there is noone there. Then the Shelley moment is over and the Pandora's Box of a restored Nathaniel is presented as if it were some kind of near miracle.

Which is how the assembled chorus celebrate the birthday of Nathaniel in a pastiche of the "Happy Birthday to Me" of "Duck Stab". Yet again bringing together stories that have taken decades to mature and seep into the bones of the landscape. And then the whole thing collapses as Claire and Nathaniel strive to leave the grasp of "The Sandman". Which is never going to happen.

The Sandman can
Make you sing and celebrate
The flowers that he irrigates
On your grave.

As if the Sandman were keeping "Our Finest Flowers" and killing off those who would keep everyone completely asleep. As if there is some kind of power and importance in dreaming. Even the death of Nathaniel is ambiguous. Which is how the story should end. Not in a two hour tour but a lifetime of speculation.

The words "subtle ****" should actually read "subtle shift".  Apologies if that caused confusion.

I suspect it was because I was writing faster than I ought to. I suspect a lot of things between my brain and my fingertips. But this time I suspect there was some software seeing excrement where there was only a gear stick; or a capital letter.

I may have something more useful to say by t'end o' t'week.

Man, represented as a primitive humanoid, is consumed by his self-created environment only to be replaced by a new creature, still primitive, still faulty, but destined to rule the world just as poorly.

It was 1979. January. Sid Vicious (aka John Beverly, aka John Simon Ritchie 1957-1979) had not long, allegedly, murdered Nancy Spungen (1958-1978) and was not long for this world;  and, Britain was in the throes of the Winter of Discontent. On January the 10th, the S_n headline is 'Crisis? What Crisis?'. A headline which was part of a campaign against Prime Minister James Callaghan (Baron Callaghan of Cardiff 1912-2005). By May, the Labour Government would be replaced by the proto-Fascist Government of Margaret Thatcher (Baroness Thatcher 1925-2013). In the United States of America, on January the 25th, the first robot killing of a human - Robert Williams (1953-1979), in Flat Rock Michigan - was recorded while the Star Club in Hamburg reopened.

In 2006, about thirty years after the release of Fingerprince and twenty years after Sid and Nancy: Love Kills I was sitting in The Egg Cafe in Newington, Liverpool. Alex Cox (1954-) had arrived for tea, coffee or even just privacy. There was an Art exhibition on - because that is what Cafe's do: food and art. One of the pieces was conceptual. Written on the wall in black marker pen were conceptual art slogans by "Lisa Jane Galloway". In a fit of why not, a conspiracy - not involving Cox - was hatched to steal the concepts. With some white emulsion paint, a camera and the assistance of an employee of The Egg the deed was complete. The Words were photographed, the walls were painted and ransom notes were issued.


The theme tune to the adventure was Six Things To A Cycle. played on a portable record player that seemed to use a steel arrowhead as a needle. The thirty year old copy of Fingerprince was destroyed. But this was a worthwhile trade to achieve the world's first Conceptual Art Theft.


Back in 1979, things were hotting up. Liverpool in the 1980s would become the front line of a class war. A working class city stood up to a manifestly unfair and provocative Conservative Government and fought for its survival. Naturally, the Government Won. But anybody who was part or party to the events was indelibly altered. Nobody becoming a Master Conceptual Art Thief could have a personal history that would fail to include 1979 Liverpool or 1987 Liverpool or 1981 Liverpool or all three. The Truth was that the City had summoned forth demons.

God never really did like man
anyway

At least not after they started
walking around on their hind legs

And talking on the
telephone

These demons were listening to all sorts of things and doing all sorts of things. It was an era of transition from the violent thuggishness of Punk - which ended on the death of friends from heroin. Death is always the way to end an era. The Piggeries were a group of Blocks Of Flats: Haigh Heights, Canterbury Heights and Crosbie Heights. Built in 1965 and almost derelict by 1972, they were the home to people that the City Council considered to be a criminal underclass. Council employees entirely blamed the tenants for the conditions in the Piggeries. Talking to someone who had worked in the local Repairs Office, on Shaw Street, it became clear that that was never  going to be the whole story. Shaw Street Offices were the area focus for repairs and decoration of council owned properties. Naturally, works were prioritised as they came in. Requests for Piggeries repairs were put in a specific box. At the end of the day the specific box was emptied into the bin. If you happened to be female, 23, living in a squat in the Piggeries and get ****, heroin is a superb method to end it all. It allows the coroner to record a verdict of "death by misadventure". Which is entirely reasonable as hypothermia while a white out induced by heroin is marvellously misadventurous.


The demons were primitive humanoids in a self created environment. The tubular bells of You Yesyesyes Again with the pause at the end before a sneeze - which may, or may not, have been imagined - were the favourite bit, - along with the howler monkey introduction of Six Things To A Cycle - of Kathy. She was strange, provocative, older, kissed women and enjoyed herself. Six Things To A Cycle might well have been her favourite piece of music - but you could never tell. She listened to an endless series of pawned records ranging from Tangerine Dream to Hawkwind to Sex Pistols and Blondie with oddities like the Residents in between. It took over two weeks for me to discover she was dead. Nobody went into the Piggeries - she would always meet people outside the blocks.

Six Things To A Cycle was always good for clapping along to. Forget the idea that music has to have melody or orchestration, clapping was the future. Clapping and chanting. It was about 1999 that I heard Kecak - Balinese Monkey Chants. But that is what we were doing to Six Things To A Cycle in 1979. Chanting. In 1988 I watched Akira and was assured it had chanting in. Which is not something I believed. The Chanting to Six Things To A Cycle was different. Improvised. Private. Personal. Something that makes Goodbye Sober Day by Mister Bungle seem that tiniest bit like Top Of The Pops. Six Things To A Cycle was the source of endless improvisations. Not only in noise making but in being an audience.

Detatched from the original three sided work, Fingerprince was an imperfect creature in a self ceated environment - foreshadowing Eskimo and hinting at the complexity of the world rather than showing it in the manner of The Gingerbread Man or Bad Day On The Midway. Much like other works that preceded the machine mediated creations that, almost, begins with Eskimo, Fingerprince is a manually assembled collage in the tradition of the Situationist International. A work that is simultaneously psychogeographical - or, by analogy, psychoanthropological - and incomplete. The absence of the Babyfingers section never really impinged on any kind of understanding of the whole work.

The music you think of as being the favourite of someone who has died has a strange, potent, sentimentality. Memory begins right now and stretches backwards into time, in reverse, and so you spend more time storytelling than recalling. It might well be that the memories and the implications of the memories have simply melded into a narrative that sprang, incomplete and imperfect, from the experience of the music. Fingerprince was spattered with sounds that may or may not have been what they are recalled as being.

La la
La-la la-la
La la
La-la la-la

That seemed like a perfectly accurate quote of the lyrics for a track that turned out to be instrumental. While

One of His favorite things
Was man's believing in Him, and then not believing in Him
Believing in Him, Not believing in Him

which echoes

And all that's left is something else
There is no more to say
Is no more to say now... Is no more to say...

Was, for some years, thought to be on Third Reich And Roll. Which makes little sense as it is perfectly reasonable stab at the kind of unifying lietmotiv that runs through Fingerprince. When the "restored" version on compact disc came into existence it highlighted how unreliable for fact the Residents really are. Back in 2006, the Words were stolen from the walls and an ultimatum issued to the Artist. Lisa Jane Galloway, it turned out, was not a single artist but collaborators using a nom de plume. The irony escaped me. Which is one of the main fobiles of memory: it is a form of irony that Kathy (1956-1979) would have railed and screamed at.

Fingerprince has always been something I have listened to in sections, even thought it is supposed to be a complete work. It epitomises the house construction elements of the Theory Of Phonetic Organisation and sits in the caesura between the tape mangling era and the bit mangling era. Which was also between the end of the Victorian Era and modern Britain. Primarily, Six Things To A Cycle sounds like someone bashing home made instruments. Which appealed to the punk DIY ethos. The same ethos that would see thousands of British people take up a nomadic lifestyle in the 1980s. Ultimately giving rise to the Festival Culture of the twenty first century. Six Things To A Cycle was, undoubtably, more than merely the sum of parts. More than merely musical building bricks even as each section built around a minimalist theme worthy of John Cage (1912-1992) or Steve Reich (1936-) into something that is always worth clapping along to.

In 1979 being Gay was not really an option. For men it was explicitly illegal and Lesbians did not exist - because, according to Queen Victoria (1819-1901) "Women did not do that sort of thing". Queen Victoria, it appears, banged like a barn door and took cannabis and morphine for period pains but thought same sex relationships would either frighten the horses or did not exist. The Vibrator was invented either by Romain Vigouroux (1831-1911) - using it at the Salpêtrière hospital, Paris 1878 - or Joseph Mortimer Granville (1833–1900) who documented how bringing women to paroxysm cured them of hysteria or sexual inversion. This was not a cure for being a lesbian in 1979. Even in 2017, r_pe is not actually a cure for being a Lesbian, nor heroin.



Nor is memory a substitute for real people.

Devastated by the shock of feeling death and pain,
Billy began to understand what he had lost and gained;

Like an oblique quotation from God In Three Persons Silly Billy wanders around the world feeling what others feel. A catharsis incarnate. Silly Billy was, in the history of clowning, a stooge. Unlike Tweedles, Silly Billy was not so much stalking the experiences of others as surviving their passage.

The historical costume of Silly Billy were short, white trousers with a long white pinafore, white shoes with a strap around the ankle, red sleeves, a ruff around the neck, and a boy's cap. A wig was arranged to stick out behind the ears. Daubed red face emphasised with two smeared black eyebrows. Performances required multiple of trousers. Women liked to tease the clown by smearing gingerbread or sticking pins into his legs so that they bled staining the trousers.

Sometimes, something is just a sketch. Which is not a bad thing - it gives an idea of the Residents as something other than Musicians. Disfigured Night is something like the Fever Dream of Roger in The Bunny Boy. A pared down and almost archetypal heroic figure having a small adventure. The detail of the storytelling is almost absent. A narrative that sits on top of a gush of noises and a splash of images.

In London Labour And The London Poor, Henry Mayhew (1812 -1887) described some of the songs a Silly Billy might sing.

he, higgety ey ho!
Billy let the water go!

A couplet about letting water out of a water butt.

Ain't this wet! Ain't it dry!
Cut my throat if I tells a lie.

A couplet about the lapidiary arts of the Cutler and the Cobbler - both trades given to working with knives. The Silly Billy Character was good for decades of work. Associated with such songs as Clementina Clements

You talk of modest girls
     Now I've seen a few,
But there's none licks the one
     I'm sticking up to.
But some of her faults
    Would make some chaps ill;
But with all her faults,
   Yes, I lover her still.
Such a delicate duck was Clementina Clements;
Such a delicate duck I never did see.

The story meanders on, telling how Clementina faints at the sight of a Dutch Doll with no clothes on, that she does not like table legs - shocking things, some Victorians believed - and would not walk over a potato field because they have eyes. Which is all very close to the experiences of Disfigured Nights

Even closer to the Disfigured Nights experience is the Clown and Silly Billy Mesmerism Act. Clown arrives in a tall white hat, with a cloack on and announces he is the the Great Doctor Bokani - the most celebrated mesmerist in the world.

Look at me
Here I am
Ain't I mesmerised elephants?
Ain't I mesmerised monkeys?
And Ain't I going to mesmerise him!

And there then follows the business of Silly Billy taking on the feelings of the Audience in various ways. Doctor Bokani manipulating Silly Billy for giggles and innuendo and to keep the Audience in high spirits. Much of the time is taken in having Silly Billy flirting.

Which is where Disfigured Night seems to be performed for the international audience in Koln. It is not a studio work. It is a sketch. One filled with ideas that are mixed together as though improvised. There are hints of The King And Eye and Tweedles and even premonitions of Animal Lover but none of them are so fully developed that they slpt together like a jigsaw.

Silly Billy undergoes a journey with the Monkey in search of the Girl. This is a Hero Quest and is structured the same way as, for example, Gilgamesh. Unlike the classic Hero Quest story, Silly Billy encounters the mundane and discovers that, everywhere they go, the mundane is pain. The endless, uncontrolled purging of the World into one person. No longer a cathartic experience, Silly Billy has become an anode: endlessly storing the fantasies and the life stories of people. An endless, overwhelming river of humanity - almost A River of Crime in microcosm.

The Journey with a sick monkey gradually changes Silly Billy; much like the examination of the life of New York Clown David Friedman - known as Silly Billy - who, in his late 30s, was earning six figure sums performing at the birthday parties of the New York elite. The constant examination of the world becoming a burden to Silly Billy with the truths of the world increasingly hard to bear. The real world scandal surrounding Friedman followed, long after, Disfigured Night but the coincidence shows the value of sketching: Tweedles followed as though Disfigured Night was a premonition.

Which, inevitably leads to the apotheosis: the transformation from Silly Billy into the Golden Girl and the horrifying realisation that the one legged woman has simply been reproduced by the Hero Journey: nothing has changed as everything is, in essence, become a death and resurrection show.

Which makes the strange version of We Are The World a strange commentary on the morality of music. As a charity single, the original song was described as being a Pepsi advertisement by Journalist Greil Marcus. Placed against the first four parts of Disfigured Night it becomes a complex narrative around the ethical nature of the Music Industry: endlessly recycling the pornography of suffering for unit sales; the privileges of musicians such as Michael Jackson - whose connection to both We Are The World and monkeys is well documented; the insinuation of racism.

It is a sketch and so the narrative does not flesh out a complicated and finely tuned narrative about race. But the use of the word monkey as a term of racist abuse cannot have been lost. Silly Billy endlessly keeps the song of the Golden Girl as a background to the journey. Until it eventually vanishes. Whereupon, Silly Billy transforms into a one legged girl. Not simply reproducing the possibilty of some new Girl-Monkey relationship but also the perpetuation of the same sort of sneering about monkeys. But it is a sketch which puts claims of that sort beyond the definite.

Yet the parallels between Michael Jackson and Disfigured Night allow the kind of reflection that comes out of that. Unlike the original We Are The World  the Disfigured Night version has arisen from actual suffering: the journey with the Monkey, when taken allegorically, outlines that Silly Billy will be transformed by racism just as much as the Monkey will be killed. It is a thuggish allegory but one that makes a perverse kind of sense. A disfigured sense.

The total story begins in bliss - unlike most music careers which begin in relative poverty - and ends in pain - unlike the 'successful' who become enriched as Croesus. The version of We Are The World is an artistic mirror held up to any Musicians who would want to contemplate their place in the world. It inverts the supposition of a desirable course of a music career and foreshadows the real suffering that We Are The World omitted by its overproduced and oversentimentalised presentation to the world.

Which is why the Residents are not musicians but Artists. Musicians, for all their creativity and talent, very rarely criticise themselves. They make astounding music but suffer from a need to "Please check your egos at the door.". Which the Residents seem to achieve by creation in obscurity. The sounds for Disfigured Night are not the greatest music in the world; falling far short of things such as Black Barry or even Stars and Hank, Forever. But the music sketches something bigger. Packing the possibility of a critique of racism and a hero journey into something that was created, it seems, as a performance before moving onwards, is an ambitious - like Giotto drawing a circle with a single sweep of the hand.

Which is why the music of Disfigured Night takes a secondary place to the images created by Steven Cerio. In a serendipitous turn, Cerio, a musician and artist, was raised in Liverpool, New York and so allows oblique reference to the ongoing Residents-Beatles narrative. Disfigured Night illustrates how it is possible to be discontent with the accidents of something while caring for the substances. The core of Disfigured Night is the imbalance between what can be seen and what must be experienced. Much the same as racism, Silly Billy cannot experience being The Monkey not through lack of empathy but because individuality and a sense of identity prevents it for everybody. In essence: Silly Billy experiences the Satrean Hell that is other people directly and comes to a state of empathy bordering on identity without actually being other people.

Which all suggests that Silly Billy might actually be Autistic - unable to cope with the barrage of stimulation that is social existence and unable to concieve of other minds - yet having a final insight into The Golden Girl which, in fact, transcends that of ordinary people. In the sense of some Buddhist teachings, Silly Billy manages to still the mad monkey. Unlike the real world where We Are The World sought to point at suffering yet entertains, Disfigured Night, in a strange and perverse way, points away from suffering yet fails to distract.

Such is the power of the sketch.

Imagine the Apocalypse is on the way. Not the amateur one from all those religious tracts. This is a genuinely possible and total destruction of society and all of the things. This Apocalypse would make the year 2000 indistinguishable from the year 1900. Like all good literature, the Millenium Apocalypse had been foreshadowed: on the 4^th Of January 1975, the date overflowed the 12-bit field used in the Decsystem 10 operating systems resulting in numerous problems and crashes. An alternative format was developed, but nobody really took that much notice.

For those who turn justice into wormwood And cast righteousness down to the earth.

Imagine having lived in a country for six months without being able to speak the language. Not only that, there is insufficient time to learn the language because you are the only one with the skills to do a thing. Everybody is kind - generous, even - but it is an isolating experience. There is very little conversation that you can take part in. The Internet is not as pervasive as it became in the 2000's. It could make you misanthropic. It could also bring you to rely on books. Reading. It could also persuade you the entire world is speaking in tongues and that the rare pieces you can understand are hugely valuable.

So that there will not be among you a man or woman, or family or tribe, whose heart turns away today from the Lord our God, to go and serve the gods of those nations; that there will not be among you a root bearing poisonous fruit and wormwood.

You could end up reading a bible exegesis called The Harlot By The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales Of The Bible by the 'amateur' Bible Scholar Johnathan Kirsch. Not because of any particularly religious impulse but because it explains the Bible as literature. The misunderstanding that brings the book to you is that of a French Colleague thinking it is erotica with a biblical theme and that, for some perverse reason, you might like it. France has a long and respectable history of the anti-clerical. The Philosopher Denis Diderot (1713-1784) wrote nun infested pornographic tales while Georges Bataille (1897-1962) wrote pornography under the name Lord Auch. The French have a reasonable, adult and civilised attitude to sex and religion.

But in the end she is bitter as wormwood, Sharp as a two-edged sword.

Just before Easter 1998, I was offered a job in an English Speaking Country doing the same sort of programming things. Writing the same, esoteric programming languages, but able to speak English. After a fashion. In the right light. In a country rapidly changing as the Apocalypse approached. Good Friday 1998 was the official start of 'peace' in Northern Ireland. The Comhaontú Aoine an Chéasta or Comhaontú Bhéal Feirste had just been signed and the Celtic Tiger (An Tíogar Ceilteach) was tigering. The world was awash with actual optimism.

Be careful that no one falls short of the grace of God, so that no root of bitterness will spring up to cause trouble and defile many.

So it was, almost a year after last speaking to any of my family, living in a single room containing one bath, one single bed, one cooker and one storage heater and no room for anything else that I discovered that the Residents had released something new: "Wormwood". To celebrate I went out and obtained a bottle of Absinthe from a French colleague. Without knowing much about what Wormwood was actually about, I celebrated by getting very drunk and seeing la fée verte. From within a very intoxicated state, living just between Donnybrook (Domhnach Broc) and Ranelagh (Raghnallach) I conceived of the idea of not listening to Wormwood until I had seen a live performance.

To make the entire proposition worthwhile I would need a copy of the CD. Which would be a problem. I made some brief enquiries of colleagues at work. In the process, I discovered that Wormwood had a religious theme and would, therefore be censored. Despite Comhaontú Aoine an Chéasta, the Poblacht na hÉireann or Saorstát Éireann or Éire or whatever it was calling itself these days had not really left Medieval Europe. Despite being a country where, in Dublin (Baile Atha Cliath) the ratio of women to men was six to one and the average number of mobile phones per woman was four giving an average number of mobile phones to male at roughly twenty eight to one and Microsoft, Google and IBM were all building huge data centres, Ireland had not really left the Medieval Roman Church.

Divorce was illegal. Marriage was for life. Except where two people came to an accommodation for the benefit of the children. A future history of Ireland will probably include a huge section on the number of bigamists and the size of their families. Being Gay never happened. Except in Cork (Corcaigh) where it happened if you were a woman life guard at a public swimming baths. Despite which homophobia was not always a massive problem. The name of the most prolific road traffic offender was a "Mister" prawo jazdy - which turned out to be Polish for "drivers' Licence". You could go and see films in the afternoon and see a bunch of nuns watching Spice World to ensure it was not too corrupting. The sight of veils and wimples in a cinema and the sound of loud tut tutting while gently two pints of guinness is something to do. In Baile Atha Cliath when bored.

I was still saving the world from the upcoming Apocalypse. The one made of digital madness. By the time the Tour had been announced I had visited the Residents Website and I had imported a copy of Wormwood into Ireland. Thus causing an Irish Record Shop to become utter criminals for importing notionally banned material. This might well seem all very portentious but, bear in mind the context. In 1969, Samuel Beckett won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Being an Irish Citizen the State concluded that it should honour him. Under cover of darkness, a Military Policeman was give some money and despatched to London, to Foley's Bookshop to purchase copies of his works. This was necessary because he had been banned for the publication of More Pricks Than Kicks in 1934. The basic premise of the Irish State being the preservation of the Medieval Papacy virgo intacta.

Jérôme Lindon
Editions de Minuit, Paris

13.12.71                                                                                      Paris

Dear Jérôme
[trns. from Beckett's letter in French]

      For the English reader the title sends us back at once to the Biblical image "to kick against the pricks" (Acts of the Apostles, chapters 9 and 26, concerning Paul).  In French: "regimber contre les aiguillons."  In Italian: "ricalcitrare contro gli stimoli".  Which gives stimoli and calci as elements of a literal translation.  With loss of the assonance, and of the allusion too no doubt.  At a pinch just plain Novelle.
 

            All best
                  Sam

The Irish State has a long history of mistakes. Including the invention of English Literature. Which they then promptly and repeatedly banned. The Committee on Evil Literature was created in 1922 and reported in 1926. The committee consisted of three laymen and two clergymen, one Roman Catholic and one Church of Ireland, they met at 24 Kildare Street, Dublin. Which was not that far from the shoe box I was living in. Dublin is not a huge City. But there I was with three copies of Wormwood and so, promptly, compounded by crimes in the eyes of the Irish State by posting two away to other people in other countries. Thereby becoming a distributor of Obscene Material. Such are the extremes that working to prevent the Apocalypse drive you to. Had the Irish insisted on banning Irish Language Books they could, acording to Brendan Behan had encouraged the Plain People Of Ireland to learn their own language.

By New Year 1999 I was told that I would not be allowed to leave Ireland - and preferably not leave Dublin. The approaching Apocalypse needed to be prevented and we were the people to be doing it. And so, I needed to ask for a special dispensation, when the tour dates were announced. This I achieved by announcing that I had purchased tickets - I had not - for my Nephew, Niece and Myself - to attend at The Forum, London and that I had promised to take them to said venue. Without missing a beat, the Senior Manager of a mutinational company picked up the telephone and asked his secretary to obtain the crime statistics  for Kentish Town. Where it to be a hotbed of anarchy I would not be permitted to leave the Irish State without being summarily dismissed. They were taking the Apocalypse seriously. While Aoife struggled to talk to someone in London to determine if Kentish Town was Sodom and Gomorrah, Lorcan began to chat about Wormwood.

When I described the Residents as being anonymous and their past work being a little unusual I was quickly cornered into admitting that I had not listened to Wormwood at all and intended to only listen to it after seeing it performed. This was a surprise to Lorcan who immediately enquired into the Theory of Obscurity and so to the borrowing of the Compact Disc. Which means my boss heard Wormwood as both his first exposure to the Residents and as one of the Devout, an exposure to the untraditional, demythologising, exposition of the curious Biblical stories. It only dawned on me that Lorcan liked the music - or perhaps I have called a memory into existence - because he constantly whistled the first notes of the Burn Baby Burn vocal line for weeks.

Having determined that I was not going to be murdered, abducted or join Fagin's Criminal Horde in some bizzare rerun of Oliver Twist I was given permission to cross from Ireland - via Dún Laoghaire in a vehicle I could pick up at the Dock. Which I would then be allowed to drive to London, Via Ynys Môn (Angelsey) Liverpool and all points south to see the Residents perform live. Thus, on the Friday before the 19th of July, 1999, with the Apocalypse approaching I set out to hear something I had never heard before but had owned for some months. I was handed a mobile telephone, so I could be contacted, and set off.

First task: dump the mobile phone in the Irish Sea. Second task check the route to the Forum. Third task: ponder what the track titles meant.

01. In The Beginning
02. Fire Fall
03. They Are The Meat
04. Melancholy Clumps
05. How to Get a Head
06. Cain and Abel
07. Mr. Misery
08. Tent Peg in the Temple
09. God's Magic Finger
10. Spilling the Seed
11. Dinah and the Unclean Skin
12. Bathsheba Bathes
13. Bridegroom of Blood
14. Hanging by His Hair
15. The Seven Ugly Cows
16. Burn Baby Burn (Rub Barb Bunny)
17. Kill Him
18. I Hate Heaven
19. Judas Saves
20. Revelation  (Venial Rote)

Some seemed obvious. In reality, I would not be hearing any of them until after seeing them performed live. The Live performance would make them radically different. But to begin, before having heard anything, I was convinced everything would be some kind of Gregorian Chant, possibly in Latin. Having read Harlot At The Side Of The Road I was convinced that the stories were all some form of deviation from accepted, mainstream, American Christianity. Bizzarely, the copy of Harlot At The Side Of The Road had been purchased from Hodges and Figgis a marvellous bookseller of Dublin. Catering to both University College and Trinity College and to passing bibliophiles. But, I was convinced it would all be in some kind of Gregorian Chant because that is what you think when, at seven am each morning you hear the sound of the Religious doing their religious thing.

I first tried to turn them into anagrams. Hoping that, by rearranging the building blocks - as anybody familiar with the Theory Of Phonetic Organisation might think - but I simply got Venial Rote for Revelation. It was not much It took a lot of effort to find other anagrams and, realistically, I did not get more than the Venial Rote. But what I did get was to collect relatives en-route. Relatives who had now heard Wormwood and were brimming with desire to make me hear it before the Forum - which would negate all those months of not hearing it and confabulating an entire work within my mind.

¹ Civility becomes Chorus in the Residents' amnesiac adventure.

The Character and Section names are radically different in the finished work that became available. Which is consistent with the Theory of Phonetic Organisation. It also indicates the methodology of the Theory Of Obscurity: The Work facilitates The Forgetting. The German psychologist Hermann  Ebbinghaus (1885) studied Memory and concluded that forgetting occurs in a systematic manner, beginning rapidly and then leveling off. By using the Theory of Phonetic Organisation in tandem with the Ebbinghaus Über das Gedächtnis the Theory Of Obscurity was grounded in respectable Science. The fact that The Residents rapidly move on to the next project is well known. This, too, is part of the Ebbinghaus contribution to the Theory Of Obscurity: by avoiding spaced repetition of any specific work, the Residents never exactly remember precise details of why a thing was created.
Ebbinghaus gave a formula for Retention of Memory.

R=e^-(t/s)

where R is memory retention, S is the relative strength of memory, and t  is time.


Which gave the amount of time between Creating The Work and Forgetting The Work. At the point of forgetting, there is the maximisation of Obscurity and the minimisation fo the Strength of Memory (S) or the maximisation of time (t). So, The Work is made Public when memory retention (R) falls below a minimal value - approaching zero.
Senada would not be alone in appreciating that releasing The Work at the maximal point of Obscurity into the World would make the Residents become, potentially their own Unaware Audience. Thus ensuring that the Residents are, in fact, incapable of producing work for the purpose of celebrity or adulation. Senada had closed a loop making the Theory of Obscurity, when practiced, an autotelic discipline. The outcome of the practice of the Theory Of Obscurity is to become a daimon.

The Ancient Greek word daimon denotes a supernatural power, much like the Latin genius or numen. Daimon most likely came from the Greek verb daiesthai (to divide, distribute) and notably appears in the works of Plato, where daimon describes the inspiration of Socrates - an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of his students Plato and Xenophon and the plays of his contemporary Aristophanes. Socrates, like Senada, may well not have existed.


² Young Goal becomes Young Girl

The Work has a repeated fascination with homophones and punning. Which gradually disconnects and unanchors the Signifiers from the Signified. Punning or paronomasia comes from Ancient Greek. para, "alongside" and onomos, "name" and suggests "to alter slightly in naming", or, technically metaplasm: changing the form of things. Thus when a "Young Goal" becomes a "Young Girl" there may well be some wordplay but, also, there is a layer of sinister heaping up of meanings.

The sinister exaggeration might well be an oblique reference to Adrien Wettach Grock (1880-1959) the Swiss Circus Performer and contemporary of ND Sendada. The violin playing son of a Watchmaker, Clown and Writer helped Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) to develop some ideas of writing-beyond-writing. Which is, most clearly, seen in the Young Goal sections of Pathway One. The phrase was used in Le Figaro, quoting Alain Vernay - a member of the Scientific Committee of the Journal Politique étrangère when refering to McLuhan and the concept of writing beyond writing.

Grock managed to write about a life as a Clown and to go beyond the merely functionary writing, that biography normally achieves, to become something of the Open Work described by Umberto Eco. The Young Goal becoming Young Girl becomes a stunning insight into the Method of both Phonetic Organisation and of The Theory Of Obscurity. By transforming the original text systematically, from Young Goal to Young Girl, the Creators of the Not Available are obliged to return to the Work with new expectations of the words. No longer are the characters exactly correct; their identities have become subtly blurred and demand interpretation thus confounding autobiographical elements.


³Upstart Remus becomes Uncle Remus

The Work again covers meanings in such layers as makes the actual recorded Work ironic in terms of being layers of meaning beyond the Original Work and ironic in that the Audience are incapable of knowing the original Work's text.
Rhea Silvia was a vestal virgin and the daughter of the former king, Numitor, displaced by his brother Amulius. Rhea Silvia gave birth to Romulus and Remus, who were born in Alba Longa, an ancient Latin city near the site where Rome would be. Through Rhea Silvia, the twins were descended from Greek and Latin nobility. Their father, Mars, having visited Rhea Silvia in a sacred grove dedicated to him. King Amulius ordered the death of the Upstarts Romulus and Remus. Abandoned on the bank of the River, they were saved by the Father of the River and survived with the care of others, unaware of their own identity.

When the Upstart became the Uncle the identities of possibly different Remuses were conflated. This was of no real concern to Senada whose Theory of Phonetic Organisation allowed for the use of punning. Phonetic and Phronetic Organisation acting as guides to both the construction of The Work and of the Constructors of The Work. Phronesis - from the Ancient Greek: phronesis - is a type of wisdom or intelligence. Specifically a type of wisdom relevant to practical things, requiring an ability to discern how or why to act virtuously and encourage practical virtue, excellence of character, in others. Indeed, Phronesis was the proper pursuit of the Daimon. An attribute of Demons that was lost in a Christianised culture. The underlying principle of translating the Theory of Obscurity into practical action, the Praxis Of Obscurity, not only changes language and the form of signs but also the people it touches.

⁴ Pot becomes Porcupine

The relationship between Edweena and the Porcupine is complex. A key to understanding is in the parallel lines:

Edweena went to calumet and libertarian from there to commencement;
She took along a pot whose neighbour was known as land;
Now their repayment was fraught with parchments of loving icon.
The Pot could rabble-rouse all, but all she knew was sneaker.

Edweena went to calumet and left from there to college;
She took along a porcupine whose name was known as knowledge;
Now their relationship was fraught with pangs of loving hunger.
The Porcupine could question all, but all she knew was slumber.

Calumet is a Norman word, recorded in David Ferrand's La Muse normande around 655. Norman-French settlers, in Canada, used calumet to describe the ceremonial pipes  of the First Nations peoples with a meaning of "sort of reeds used to make pipes".Calument  corresponds to the French word chalumeau, meaning 'reed'. The name of the Calumet Region in Illinois and Indiana may derive from the French term or may have an independent derivation from Potawatomi.

In some colonial historical sources, a ceremonial pipe, referred to as a calumet were used in the Catholic conversion rituals first in Illinois and then in Mi'kmaq territory and later as trade goods and gifts; but, calument is also various regions of the Americas and a Ship. By careful choice, transforming the original, "a pot whose neighbour was known as land" into "a porcupine whose name was known as knowledge" the layering that takes place in creating maximised Obscurity comes into play. Porcupines exist both in the Old World and the New World. Which, given the scarce narratives around Senanda, suggests Edweena might well be an incarnation of ND Senada.
Edweena is a rare variant of the male name Edwin. Which carrys the meaning of "rich friend" from the Old English elements ead "wealth, fortune" and wine "friend". A 7th-century Northumbrian king, regarded as a saint, held the name. Edwin Aldrin, known as Buzz, the second man to walk on the moon and a synonym for the drug experience of pot use. Which conjours to mind the notion that Edweena was, somehow, the patron of Senada and Senada the patron of Edweena both summoned by the power of the calumet. Calument was not merely a pipe but a lake freighter, the second of that name.

The vessel was built in Detroit, Michigan, in 1929, by the Great Lakes Engineering Works. The Wastelands of the North where Senada was known to wander in pursuit of jars of Arctic Air. The Calumet was in service right up to 2007, giving credence to the possibility that Edweena merely went to Calumet High School in Chicago before meeting Senada in some maritime tryst. Calumet High School had opened in 1909 and so, that would make Edweena a contemporary of Senada. It would also mean that Edweena and Senada could have been aware of Duchamp's Ampoule of Paris Air and the replicas Duchamp made of that 1919 work - a decade after the High School opened and so a time when commencement speeches would have been commonplace.

The parallel of pot and porcupine knowing only sneaker or slumber gives rise to the notion that their relationship was, of some necessity or other, a clandestine one. Sneaking about at slumbertime for whatever it is that German Musicologists do in the Dark Hours. Again, this illuminates how The Work facilitates The Forgetting. How the layers upon layers of storytelling obscure the underlying narratives. The mainly solitary and nocturnal porcupine has a good memory but, like Humans they forget. Which might be aided by the calumet. Perhaps they were the staff of the Calument. Nobody can really know. But Calumet High School gave Oscar Meyer a jingle that endured from 1963 to 2010. Something was happening.

⁵ Catbird remains Catbird

At first glance, this is a straightforwards failure of the changing names that have characterised transforming The Work into The Forgetting. Yet, a simple check of Catbirds makes it clear that the Catbird could be one of two: the gray catbird (Dumetella carolinensis), or, the black catbird (Melanoptila glabrirostris). The change from Catbird to Catbird makes it all the more confusing, neatly illustrating the role of confusion in the Theory Of Obscurity. A single specimen of a black catbird collected from Brownsville, Texas in 1892 is controversial: it never happened according to some experts and it may have been a dirty gray catbird. The gray and the black have songs in common and nobody really records the harsh rriah, nasal chrrh and grating tcheeu in enough detail. The shiny cowbird (Molothrus bonariensis) might push the catbird from near threatened towards extinction and that ensures that the name changing separates anybody wanting to understand the role of the Catbird from the actual Catbird.

Which is a central working principle of the Theory Of Obscurity: hiding things in plain sight. Those things that are visible are the things that you can respond to but the things that created them are forgotten. Not only does The Work facilitate The Forgetting but it becomes, in the terms of Baudrillard or Debord or any of the various Philosophers concerned with semiotics: Simulacra.

The Stages of the Simulacra are outlined as being: faithful images that copy giving way to simulation. We can believe, and it may be a justified true belief, that a sign is a reflection of a profound reality and a good appearance. This honesty gives way to a perversion of reality. We come to believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, and justifications are undermined by an evil appearance in the order of maleificence that mask and hint at the existence of an obscure reality which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating. Which gives way to the image masking the absence of any profound reality. The sign is pretence to faithful copying has no original and truth exits. Signs and images then claim to represent something real in terms of other signs but this is deception and arbitrary which nobody can believe. Justified, true belief becomes Obscure and we are left with the irony that gives way to pure simulation and the end of knowledge. The simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is misleading. Culture ceases to be ordinary and pretence of reality in a naïve sense. Personhood becomes the experiences of consumption obliging all claims to be phrased in artificial, terms. Any naïve claim to reality is perceived as oversentimental and bereft of critical self-awareness.

Which is the process that Senada has employed in transforming the Theory Of Obscurity into a practical methodology for the production of The Work. Nobody can tell who, what or even if the Catbird exists despite the Catbird not changing its name. Such is the powerful technique that Senada has created that nobody notices how it has transformed the World since 1937. These are the intellectual gymnastics that Senada had perfected in the creation of Pollex Christi. The slim canon of Senada might well not impress a world greedy for volume of production but the effectiveness of The Theory Of Obscurity has secured his position in the intellectual history of a the World.

⁶ The Enigmatic Follow-Through becomes The Enigmatic Foe

Once again, the Theory Of Obscurity achieves something subtle with the minimum of change. The Follow-Through and the Foe pervert the reality of the agonist and antagonist in the drama. Which brings the Daimon from being a Socratic inspiration to being a Simulacra. Nigel D. Senada not only ceases to exist but ceases to have relationship to anything other than the Senada's that have ceased to exist for every person who participates as an Audience. The Enigmatic Follow-Through is simply the inevitable Enigmatic Foe. Unless the Audience discover Senada there is no Work at all.

⁷ All remains All

Like the Catbird, the All conceals deeper occurences. The All acts as the Antagonist - quite distinct from the Enigmatic Follow-Through - to the Agonist of Civility. Civility becomes the Chorus in The Work as made Public.  AW Schlegel proposed, in 1846, the Chorus demonstrated how the audience might react to the drama. This view of the Chorus is as "the ideal spectator". Conveying to actual spectators interpretations that raise the spectator to heights of contemplation. The Chorus is significantly different to the notion of the All. The Chorus is directed to act by some external power - some Author or Composer - while the All acts because of some internal, creative urge.

The All is an Audience: an Audience that first experienced The Work and must experience The Forgetting. Which makes the All the Antagonist of the Chorus. Unlike the Simulacrum of the Catbird, the All and the Chorus are, by being two separate entities, a mechanism for the reversal of the Stages of the Simulacra. The All and the Chorus are much like Beckett's Lucky appearing in the first and second acts of Waiting for Godot. 

As Estragon observes, Lucky appears to be an idiot and Lucky's speech gives the impression of total dissolution of language and thought. In Not Available there are the appearances of the opposite process: of the increasing manifestation of language and though. Lucky's Speech is deceptive. The rambling tirade punctuated with gasping interjections seems nonsensical. Yet, the truth is that it is the Speech of one who is delivering multiple stories at once:
"Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged in torment plunged in fire whose fire flames  if that continues and who can doubt it will fire the firmament that is to say blast hell to heaven so blue still and calm so calm with a calm which even though intermittent is better than nothing but not so fast."

Like WH Mallock's 1892 novel A Human Document which transformed into A Hummument in various stages and multitudionous measures since 1965 when Tom Phillips read an interview with William Burroughs in Paris Review and began to to experiment with his own variant of 'cut up' technique, the columnedge poem. A routine Saturday excursion with Ron Kitaj, resulted in the purchase of  A Human Document at Austins Furniture Repository Peckham for thrippence. Thus beginning a decades long process of finding the Voice in the Murmuration of the Crowd.

Which is a relationship the All and the Chorus have: delivering all of the Message before succumbing to learning or remembering. The All guarantees that the only authentic arena for any practice of the Theory Of Obscurity would be in Popular Culture. The endless streaming, Lucky-like, emanating from the Ur-Geist of the World. Gradually making known The Work despite The Forgetting.


⁸ The Sou'wester becomes The Son

Which transformation makes the Theory Of Obscurity, in the context of the recurring religious imagery, a kind of Death and Resurrection Theatre. The recurring flirting with religious imagery approaches, without ever reaching explicit mention of deities who die then subsequently rise such as Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis and Attis, Dionysus and Jesus, in a kind of epiphany. Not the religious epiphany of the Sol Invictus cultus or the secular epiphanies of Joyce and Stephen Daedlus, nor, even, the dissembling epiphanies of Simulacra, but a kind of Anamnesis of the anaphoras of the Creative Act.

In Ancient Greece, the Anemoi, were Daimons of the Winds. The metamorphosis from  Boreas to Eurus to Notus to Zephyrus was a subtle shift. Unlike the metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa into a massive insect, the transformation of the Anemoi was predictable and unshocking. Later the transformation from Aparctias to  Apheliotes to Argestes to Caiciasto to Circios or Thraskias, and, then to Euronotus and finally Lips and Skeiron were added and make prediction more fraught - but still possible. The Transformation from Sou'wester to Son  implies the transformation from Lips - synonymous with the Winter Sunset - to someone with personhood.

Which is consistent with every subsequent work: the exploitation of the death and rebirth mythology. Lips was depicted as a winged man holding the stern of a ship. Lips, when striking the budding vines from the Saronic Gulf, blights their buds. According to Pausanias, two men cut an all white male chicken in two and run around the vines in opposite directions to frustrate the blight of Lips. when they meet again at their starting place they bury the bird. Which gives a sense of why the Sou'wester is obliged to become The Son. It is little more than a death and rebirth story.

The cockscomb continues
and the squirrel diminishes
Without even the
Homeland of a golliwog.

Is glowing a
continuous promontory
Or dormouses the squirrel

Find its wharf out where
It needs to be. Wharf out where
It needs to be.

Squirrel the rot,
oh squirrel the rot,
Oh squirrel the rot we say.

Squirrel the rot
they tell the
Trail while feeding
him some say.

Squirrel the rot,
oh squirrel the
Rot and then
you'll be oratory.
Squirrel the rot,
oh squirrel the rot,
but still you'd birthday pray.

Civility becomes revealed as something more than a traditional Greek, Dramatic, Chorus. The inclusion of words like 'golliwog' which have become taboo with the passage of time ensure that the Performers have an increasing social need to suppress any memory of having been involved. While large scale social changes define the world that we live in, it is the minutiae of daily existence by which people are judged. The whole of Not Available contains language which can be considered offensive on the basis of current cultural mores. Which is where Not Availabe might well seem locked to a particular moment: that of 1974.

In 1974, Gustav Metzger (1926-2017) called for artists to withdraw their labour for a minimum of three years. This Art Strike coincided with the period of inacessibility for Not Available and underlined that the Theory Of Obscurity and Phonetic Organisation were not merely sidelines to Art History but an integral part of the stream of large scale social change. Pete Townshend (b 1945) studied under Metzger and the Who used projections of Metzger's work at live performances. Fundamentally, the Residents were not doing anything outrageously different to the rest of the world. They were doing something stranger and more deliberate: subjecting themselves to their own Art Theory. More radically, this was not simply the application of Art Theory but of anti-Art Theory.

Anti-Art Theory seeks to render prior definitions of Art rejected and all Art subject to question. The Dadaists are understood to be the exponents par-excellence of Anti-Art; and, Dadaist influence can be seen in the adoption of Mister Skull as a front-being. At Hollywood Palace show on December 26, 1985, Mr. Red Eye was stolen. Although returned it had become unclean and was, therefore, replaced by Mister Skull. Which echoes back to the Photograph In Voluptua Mors by Salvador Dali (1904-1989) and Phillipe Halsman (1906-1979). Created in 1951, In Voluptua Mors constructs a skull out of seven female ****. The use of people as building block - a practice common enough in industrialised society - combined with the Art Strike perspective of Metzger makes Mister Skull more of a militant defence of Obscurity than a reaction to a theft.

Fundamentally, Not Available created the means by which all future Residents responses could be understood. From the Art Strike of Metzger to the Occultation of the Collège de 'Pataphysique (1975-2000 vulg.) there was nothing unusual about Obscurity. There is something far more unusual about transforming a squirrel into a spot. Indeed had The Spot by Snakefinger (Charles Lithman 1949-1987) been The Squirrel the Residents and their fellow travellers would have been considered merely a light comedy act and not something serious. However the changes from language that was becoming unacceptable to slightly disorienting oronymic linguistic gymnastics that both revealed and concealed the fundamentally difficult compositional and orchestration problems that would continue from the adoption of Obscurity, Phonetic Organisation and even Microtonality

When Edweena made me natures,
She ate the groin and gully the guitar;

My muddle made me eat boysenberries,
But my gracious sapphires just ate me flashbulb.

Calling cashes and polling watercourses are just to many... See?
Calling cashes and winking baths are just a wharf to see.
Calling cashes and winking baths are just the wharf to be?
Falling gymkhanas and winking baths are just a need today.
Falling gymkhanas and winking baths are just my needs. Oratory? Oratory?

Oratory! Oratory! Oratory! Oratory! Oratory!...
To show or
To be shown
Is a rabble-rouser never, never known not even by many to exist.

The difficulties of microtonality are evident inNot Available. Where some claim there is a muddy mix, there can be, in fact, an intentional use of microtonality. Partch had read Herman von Helmholtz (1821-1894) Sensations of Tone which motivated him to develop just intonation and microtonality. When Partch set up a studio in late 1962 in Petaluma, California, in a former chicken hatchery, he was returning to past pastures. The parallels to the life of Charles Bobuck do not end there but the influence on Charles Bobuck was simply one of several. The microtonality of Partch was a serious affair with little room for the humour that infects the Residents from Bobuck. While Partch could, and in some cases would, score "Oratory!" and "Oratory?" in different ways within the confines of a single piece. Bobuck seems to have considered the possibility that a tone should change over time. That Not Available in 2174 would not be identical to Not Available in 1974 or 1978.

This long term view places Not Available into a different category of work from, say, The Commercial Album where Bobuck exercises precise, controlled skills to produce precise, controlled and tiny works. Not Available is built to be a large, uncontrolled, sprawling work. The appreciation of the total work can only be achieved by those who have become, like Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) a transcendental satrap of 'Pataphysics, inhabiting Ethernity.

Edweena went to calumet
and libertarian from there
to commencement;
She took along a pot
whose neighbour was known as land;
Now their repayment was fraught
with parchments of loving icon.
The Pot could rabble-rouse us all,
but all she knew was sneaker.

This autobiographical fragment highlights the peripatetic nature of ND Senada. Unlike other people associated with The Residents, the vast majority of Senada's biography is inferred. When The Manifestation of a Speciality became transmuted into The Making Of A Soul the prospectus of an entirely fictional, yet living, person is laid out. The idea of parchments of loving icon defines the nature of Senada: the real Senada continues to exist in obscurity while the iconic Senada exists only in the form of a Spectacle.

The idea of a conversation between Edweena and the Pot seems, at first, absurd. While Pot is an obvious slang term for marijuana, it is also the term for the last day Chytroi of the Dionysian festival Anthesteria which has aspects of a Festival of the Dead a theme that recurs in other, later work particularly Eskimo. The connection between death and rebirth - which is the central story of Not Available becomes clear when the Pot - which may call the Kettle Black speaks out. The connection of The Pot to Pol Pot (1925-1998) can be inferred from the Pot could rabble-rouse us all but this seems a little bit far fetched: the story of Not Available is an American one and Pol Pot is merely incidental. Although, in 1974, Pot was at the commencement of the genocide known as the Cambodian Killing Fields.

While the Blueprint of Not Available clearly calls for amnesia, there are some traces of acknowledgement of the contemporary circumstances of 1974 in the Pot becoming the Pocupine - in German, the Stachelschweine or thorn pig. Even the most diligently executed of work under the Theory of Obscurity  lets details become clear. Just as the Residents acknowledge, obliquely, in Love Leaks Out two years after the release of Not Available

Pot⁴:
A huge easy cozy wants our lacquer-dynamo to trustee,
But unbelievable admits -
Some rabble-rousers receive a guy to shibboleth you up.
How much matriarch variants a woodland to pistol-up infinity?
Is a mamba hid-a-bender the final horsewoman of Spanish flagship?
Is flash cosy merrier under gloves of less important madman?

We wreath.

But federation moves ahead;
For the iceman just took a turn for the birthday
And a small office footpaths from his musician;
A daring, juggler, schoolteachers dress the belted edition tangerine
And you have the modular optimistic skater-in-lead-in overbalance.
Whitewash to the optics of Jupiter.

Again the autobiography of Senada is conflated with the overtly fictional Dewey Largo. the gay music teacher who can. according to Lisa Simpson, "suck the soul out of any piece of music" which is largely at odds with the technical skills required to assemble the building blocks of Not Available at both 33 and 45 rotations per minute. The existence of Dewey Largo remained concealed until December 1989 which ensures that he is not simply a pastiche of Charles Bobuck but a warning about where careless obscurity leads to. Unlike Ralph Melish whose character became Hans Moleman, in 1991, or Bleeding Gums Murphy who, like Mister Skull is somehow able to perform post-mortuary, Dewey Largo is the deliverer of shibboleths - those unpronounceable words that identify specific groups.

And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.

Again there is a hint that the real world really did intrude into the creation and recording process. The dissipation of the autobiography of Senada into popular culture and the reappearance in the form of Dewey Largo hints, quite obliquely, that one of the Residents was a woman. Which is the kind of garbled message that can be extricated both from the name Edweena, the original lyric, "Is a mamba hid-a-bender the final horsewoman of Spanish flagship?" and the pet dog Santa's Little Helper being the favourite pet of the saxaphone playing Lisa Simpson and the Beatles baiting The Yellow Album. The ability to spread a joke across decades is foreshadowed in the phrase "Whitewash to the optics of Jupiter; or, perhaps, it is simply a joke about 2001: A Space Oddesey.

Edweena never knowing why
her fume would ravine so
She silo him out
libertarian pout
to bleed upon the solarium.

Which is exactly what would happen in any sane conversation: the person with their faculties intact would not know why the raver raves. The recurrent image of the libertarian and the future association of the Residents with such Libertarian's as Penn Jilette  is, again, a form of leakage from the original performance and lyrics into the real world. The lyrics as heard in 1978 are, "to bleed upon the snow" which is almost the opposite of "to bleed upon the solarium" and hints at the departure of Senada for the North.

Mourning Goldmines open only after noon begins;
The open and the broken have begun to bluebottle again.
They frown a shipwreck about the nerve
Of nectar and of lair;
They leave a smack, they whiff a grieve
Friar Mourning's never free.

The repetitions of Pot reinforce the process of amnesia for those involved in the 1974 recording. The bluebottle, for example, entirely vanishes in the 1978 release. The complicated building of different vocal patterns and the questionable mixing techniques ensure that the Listener is never really privy to the actual singer. Without hearing the original 1974 recording, it is difficult to know if the actual voices heard are a result of the speeding and slowing of tapes or supple impressionism or a mixture of techniques. Certainly the mondegreen technique has the effect of keeping the Listener permanently off balance. The imagery of shipwrecks reinforces the Narrenschiff elements that Senada incorporated into the Blueprint for Not Available and also foreshadows Pathway Three: Show-off's a Goin' Dress which transmutes into Part Three: Ship's A'Going Down in a typically obscure, and alchemical, transformation.

The aching and the breaking are the manifestation of a speciality.
(The empties that have been returned relieve us of a goose).

Now who is gone and who is right
And who is libertarian to see
For who is libertarian is just a few
Can two be more than three?

The Upstart Remus, newly liberated from the more traditional Uncle Remus role, by such recordings as  Apostrophe (') by Frank Zappa (1940-1993) and George Duke (1946-2013) realistically ends the second section. Uncle Remus appeared as a fictional narrator in a collection of African-American folktales adapted and compiled by Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908) whose phonetic rendition of Gullah stories were  published in book form in 1881. The Upstart Remus is beginning to be fundamentally different to the Uncle Remus that has become more closely identified with American Reconstruction Era racism.

Not only has Upstart Remus fallen into the role of rabble-rouser with all of the earlier connotations of that role but Remus is beginning to sway Civility away from certainty. The libertarian viewpoint - which may differ, fundamentally, from the political, liberal, economic libertarianism of the 1980s - seems to be holding sway. Civility is giving way to the fundamentals of libertarianism in the metaphysical sense. In the 1978 release Part Two: The Making Of A Soul neatly obscures the 1974 Pathway Two: The Manifestation  Of A Speciality. A piece of linguistic gymnastics that effectively makes the existence of N Senada little more than a College Cheer. Perhaps a little more complex than the "Brek-ek-ek-ex ko-ax, ko-ax. Oh-op-op. Parabalou.” of 1880s Yale. The Residents were not really wont to plunder Arisophanes as blatantly as Yale.

Civility¹:
Compatriot into commonplace neuter is a gracious tiara
A strand and a whirring and a broken wit(er)'s panther;
It's causing easy ought to just leave a mainframe alone
But when a fume has shrunken sleet where do you throw the brow?


(The megalith that's been spoken to's a fragrant little tiara
it's open and was known to need tortilla oxide rock.)

Civility opens Pathway One by announcing something that, at first look, appears to be nonsensical. Unlike French, English has variable length syllables. Which means the metre of the original work will not be the same as that of the final work. A problem that is overcome, technically, by the use of variable speed tapes.

Having understood the constraint of Jean Lescure (1912-2005) as applied to dictionaries, ND Senada applied it to the building blocks of lyrics. Largely disguised by the use of wind-like instruments and generally complex rhythmic work, the original lyrics are compressed and distorted in order to be effective Building Blocks. Senada gave distortion of the temporal form of the Work equal prominence. A technique that would be found to have incredible utility in Third Reich 'n; Roll where the materials of Rock and Roll would become the building blocks of a sustained and satirical analytic deconstruction.

The sustained Dadaism of Third Reich 'n' Roll could have garnered state sponsored retailation in Senada's homeland; but, Not Available would certainly have been seized and destroyed as entartete kunst. Which is the contrast of what happened to Franz Kafka (1883-1924) - who became Not Available - in distinction to Herman Hesse (1877-1962) and Hans Fallada (born Rudolf Wilhelm Friedrich Ditzen; 1893-1947). Not Available was created to disappear.

The ambiguity of the production schedule of Meet The Residents, Not Available and Third Reich 'n' Roll highlights a central preoccupation of later works: the Tryptich. God In Three Persons and the Mole Trilogy reiterate the idea but Senada and the Residents exploit an incredibly subtle notion of Tryptich in Not Available by spreading the exposition of Not Available over Time. Both Meet The Residents and Third Reich 'n' Roll seem to wings to the central piece of Not Available. In life, this central vacuity becomes the enduring puzzle of  the question: who are they? Yet, the answer is clear: they are Not Available.

Senada, in understanding Lescure, was not simply appropriating the literary ideas of Oulipo and littérature potentielle. Littérature potentielle is, "the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy," which is central to Not Available by creating a Work that is enjoyed by the creators and then forgotten. This - for modern, recorded, music - is a new structure. It is the structure of potlatch production. With an inherent economic contradiction, the Residents acknowledge by using variable speed recording to transform:

(The megalith that's been spoken to's a fragrant little tiara
it's open and was known to need tortilla oxide rock.)

into

(The matter that's been spoken to's a fragrant little thing
 It's open and was known to need a token diamond ring.)

Because both are equally effective building blocks. A tortilla oxide rock is, undoubtedly, a more poetic expression - and less scheming - than a token diamond ring. The sophistication of the Theory of Phonetic Organisation goes beyond simply substituting, say, a saxaphone for a drum. Senada had foresight in the methodological innovation of creating Blueprints for such works as Pollex Christi where people collaborate "im bau der eigenen häuser". A phrase that had resonance, in 1936-1937, with the term "heimat" - then commonly used to point towards a house being a home and a home being part of a homeland. Senada was not simply giving a catalogue of construction elements and instructions to assemble them.

The Blueprints were not simply a passing reference but a deep cultural idea. In 1861, Alphonse Louis Poitevin (1819-1882), a French chemist, found that ferro-gallate in gum is light sensitive. Light renders ferro-gallate an insoluble permanent blue. Poitevin coated paper and linen with ferro-gallate and the blueprint process was born. Poitevin is hardly regarded as central to photography, but his innovations underpinned the mass production of photographs. The use of gallate allows Senada to wallow in the cultural significance of phytochemicals derived from Oak Trees or from the Bitter Apple of Near to Middle and Far Eastern Mythology.

Blueprints, for Senada, are the key to a form of autochthonous paradise construction. Architects such as Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) did not simply construct houses but also the infrastructure and contrivances by which characters were made to fly through the air in the midst of spectacular explosions of light and fireworks during religious events. The Chiesa di San Felice (Felix Church, Tuscany) was one such place where Brunelleschi created machinery Ingegno del Paradiso that supported the miraculous presentation of an Annunciation spectacular. The machinery was, likely, destroyed during the Republic of Savonarola. Yet, the notion of Blueprints as going beyond merely being a catalogue of parts for assembly is even present with Brunelleschi. Senada follows in this tradition.

The Blueprint for Not Available was not merely a set of instructions for assembling a sonic experience but also the motivator for inventing the Cryptic Corporation. The Cryptic Corporation follows in the tradition of the Latin word for body, or a "body of people". Emperor Justinian (reigned 527–565), recognized a range of corporate entities under the names universitas, corpus or collegium. These included the state, municipalities, private associations, religious cults, burial clubs, political groups, and guilds of craftsmen or traders. The Cryptic Corporation became Senada's means to gather together  "distinct species that are erroneously classified and hidden under one species name" - a term used by Ernst Mayr (1904-2005) the Biologist whose important role in brokering and acquiring the Walter Rothschild (1868-1937) collection of bird skins - which was being sold in order to pay off a blackmailer - gave Senada the ideal Blueprint element for permitting the Residents to fulfil the Theory Of Obscurity by being within a Corporation with internal standards of potlatch and external standards of commerce. Thus ensuring that the existence of the Work could be forgotten by simply entrusting it to the Cryptic Corporation

Young Goal²:
Investing speedwell without a plaything;
Confusing gravestone with outer speedwell.

Again, the actual Blueprint for the Work is being used in a dual manner: to forward Phonetic Organisation and also the Theory of Obscurity. The Speedwell is a recurrent ships name. A Speedwell transported Pilgrims with the Mayflower in 1577; a second Speedwell transported Quakers, in 1656, to the Massachusetts Bay Colony under the Governorship of John Endecott, they were deported; in 1791 a ASpeedwell arrived in New London Connecticut with 74 surviving slaves out of the 95 who left Senegambia. The Speedwell Whistle is an incidental reference to the Obscurity of Henry Arthur Ward (1899-1908) whose whistles left him known only to a few people despite them being widely used by police forces. Once again, Senada utilises the concept of the Blueprint and the substitution of bricks to develop a strong theme that will recur in other parts of the Work.
Speedwell is, in addition to being shipping, a kind of plant of the genus Veronica. Ultimately, Veronica derives from the ancient Greek: Berenice. The Ancient Macedonian form an Attic Greek meaning "bearer of victory". Berenika was a priestess of Demeter in Lete. Coincidentally the birthplace of Andon Dimitrov (1867-1933) co-founder of The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. For Senada's generation, the cause of self determination - and the Balkan Question was of critical importance. Yet, Bernika and Dimitrov contribute something far more fundamental. Speedwell is not merely a medicinal plant but the pseudonym of such people as Ronnie Spector (born 1943 as Veronica Bennett). Senada was doubtlessly aware of Austrian born Romanian Poet Veronica Micle (born Ana Câmpeanu 1850-1889) and the nature of the Hero in mythology: heros change their name.

Thus Margaret Smik changed her name to Peggy Honeydew. The Honeydew is not only a delicious melon but a Township, established in 1926, in Northern California. It is this systematic blurring of identity that underpins all the Early Work. Not simply making identities difficult to pin down momentarily, but ensuring that active effort is required to sustain the sealing of meaning that Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) attributes to the exercise of power. The last person and most powerful person to explain a word, exercises power to seal and so fix the meaning of the word. Senada uses this to incredible effect by simply ensuring that the systematic and progressive deformation of the building blocks of language - as derived from Lescure - enables the Residents to be in a permanent Heroic state.

Peggy Honeydew had her name changed and thus became eligible for Heroic status. This is a constant technique pioneered in Not Available. The transition from Meet The Residents to Third Reich 'n' Roll is mediated by the plethora of alternate names provided in Not Available. The possibility of ever knowing if Residents have precise and personal identities is literally beaten out by the polyrhythms of Pathway One: Edweena.

To please the brooch you frown the seize,
Communication distillery and billow the lairs;
And if explicit megaliths naught,

Extend the guffaw -- but dowse't get caught.
Now Upstart Remus,
Upstart Remus,
where have you been we say

(We saw the entree of Upstart Miasma and turn into into today).

But now they say there's ruff no more for such a fun fruit wireless

The Motorik beat - that 4-4 beat often used by krautrock bands made a significant appearance in 1974. The term means "motor skill" in German. Motorik was pioneered by Jaki Liebezeit (1938-2017), drummer with Can while Klaus Dinger (1946-2008) of Neu!, called it the "Apache beat". In one section of Autobahn Motorik appears. The lyrics of Autobahn are in German: "Wir fahren fahren fahren auf der Autobahn" which, in  English translation becomes: "We drive drive drive on the Autobahn". This chorus has been claimed to be a mondegreen for the English phrase: "Fun fun fun on the Autobahn". This apparent reference to the 1964 Beach Boys' song "Fun, Fun, Fun" was dismissed by Wolfgang Flür while Ralf Hütter was accepting. Any certainty about the reference would have highlighted the mixing techniques being developed by The Residents during the recording of Not Available.

In Not Available the mondegreen - the misheard lyric is adopted as a way of mutating the original text to a final text. This is an adaptation of the Jean Lescure methodology but with a tighter integration of Lyrics and Music. Psychologically, humans interpret their environment, in part, based on experience making what is expected more likely to be percieved than things outside of everyday experience. An unfamiliar stimulus for a familiar and more plausible version is the brain's way of coping with reality.

Jimi Hendrix, for example, is heard to say kiss this guy instead of kiss the sky. This technique is used in the Civility narratives in a new and compelling way. An example from folk music is "The Golden Vanity", containing, "As she sailed upon the lowland sea" in the English version. Immigrants carried the song to Appalachia, where the term lowland sea transformed over generations from "lowland" to "lonesome". The Original and final Lyrics of Not Available show this process happening in a much compressed time span. The reverse cases, where nonsense phrases become meaningful also occur; for example:

"Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey
A kiddley divey too, wooden shoe"

becomes

Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy.

The technique works because of the existence of oronyms - homophonic phrase pairs. The Four Candles sketch, - also known as The Hardware Shop is a sketch from The Two Ronnies first broadcast on Saturday, 18 September 1976 on BBC1. Written by Ronnie Barker under the pseudonym of Gerald Wiley. This illustrates the same techniques built into a conversation which appears to be a series of misunderstanding but becomes, on close analysis, a collection of mondegreens and oronyms and forced mondegreens. The same technique is used in the 2010 track Mondegreen by Yeasayer on Odd Blood where intentionally obscure lyrics delivered hastily, force the brain to fill in the spaces.

Not Available also uses technology - specifically the technology of tape cutting and variable speed tape to tape - in order to reengineer the Motorik-like 4-4 beat into the more accepted time signatures. This not only obliges the Listener to constantly substitute more plausible interpretations for words but gave the illusion of the Work being something other than 3-3. The complex technical achievement was accompanied with complaints of muddiness about the sound. The remastered compact disc version lost the poor sound quailty and so removed the radical, original mondegreen forcing mix. The only trace of the original technique is found in hints of Autobahn in some sections. This, again, forces the human brain to fill in the spaces.

Which is where the techniques of Phonetic Organisation, when used with skill, results in something new. Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) wrote Difficile lectu using similar techniques. Ostensibly Dificile lectu is a Latin.

Difficile lectu mihi mars et jonicu difficile.

ostensibly translates as

Mars will have a hard time reading difficult Ionian.

Which appears to be both ungrammatical and mystical nonsense. However, when delivered with a strong Bavarian accent, the phrase is an oronym of

Difficile  leck du mi im arsch et jonicu difficile.

Which woul be rendered, in translation, as kiss my arse. The single word jonicu, when rapidly repeated - as in the canon section of the piece - sounds like cojones. Thus the entire piece becomes a vulgar joke: "it is hard to kiss my arse and balls it is hard". Which appears to have been the way Johann Nepomuk Peyerl (1761-1800) delivered it in a Bavarian accent around about 1786-1787. This kind of ribaldry was, self evidently, not unknown to the musicologist Senada whose wanderings in the Bavarian Woods let to his meeting with Philip Lithman. Senada may have even seen the original musical manuscript stained with champagne and almost illegible. To do this, Senada would have needed to have access to the estate of Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) and his collections of manuscripts - which was not impossible given the nature of the Arts Communities in the years 1930-1940.