Never Records x Radio Nopal

Front Cover: The Heartbeats of My Son Hours Before His Birth.

Primal Sound (1919) Rainer Maria Rilke It must have been when I was a boy at school that the phonograph was invented. At any rate it was at that time a chief object of public wonder; this was probably the reason why our science master, a man given to busying himself with all kinds of handiwork, encouraged us to try our skill in making one of these instruments from the material that lay nearest to hand. Nothing more was neeed than a piece of pliable cardboard bent to the shape of a funnel, on the narrower orifice of which was stuck a piece of impermeable paper of the kind used to bottle fruit. This provided a vibrating mebrane, in the middle of which we stuck a bristle from a coarse clothes brush at right angles to its surface. With these few things one part of the mysterious machine was made, receiver and reproducer were complete. It now only remained to construct the receiving cylinder, which could be moved close to the needle marking the sounds by means of a small rotating handle. I do not remember what we made it of; there was some kind of cylinder which we covered with a thin coating of candle-wax to the best of our ability.

Our impatience, brought to a pitch by the excitement of sticking and fitting the parts, as we jostled one another over it, was such that the wax had scarcely cooled and hardened before we put our work to the test.

How now this was done can easily be imagined. When someone spoke or sang into the funnel, the needle in the parchment transferred the sound-waves to the receptive surface of the roll slowly turning beneath it, and then, when the moving needle was made to retrace its path (which had been fixed in the meantime with a coat of varnish), the sound which had been ours came back to us tremblingly, haltingly from the paper funnel, uncertain, infinitely soft and hesitating and fading out altogether in places. Each time the effect was complete.

Our class was not exactly one of the quietest, and there can have been few moments in its history when it had been able as a body to achieve such a degree of silence.

The phenomenon, on every reception of it, remained astonishing, indeed positively staggering. We were confronting, as it were, a new and infinitely delicate point in the texture of reality, from which something far greater than ourselves, yet indescribably immature, seemed to be appealing to us as if seeking help. At the time and all through the intervening years I believed that that independent sound, taken from us and preserved outside of us, would be unforgettable. That it turned out otherwise is the cause of my writing the present account. As will be seen, what impressed itself on my memory most deeply was not the sound from the funnel but the markings traced on the cylinder; these made a most definite impression.

I first became aware of this some fourteen of fifteen years after my school-days were past. It was during my first stay in Paris. At that time I was attending the anatomy lectures in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with considerable enthusiasm. It was not so much the manifold interlacing of the muscles and sinews nor the complete inner agreement of the inner organs with another that appealed to me, but rather the bare skeleton, the restrained energy and elasticity of which I had already noticed when studying the drawings of Leonardo. However much I puzzled over the structure of the whole, it was more than I could deal with; my attention always reverted to the study of the skull, which seemed to me to constiute the utmost achievement, as it were, of which this chalky element was capable; it was as if it had been persuaded to make just in this part a special effort to render a decisive service by providing a most solid protection for the most daring feature of all, for something which, though itself narrowly confined, had a field of activity which was boundless. The fascination which this particular structure had for me reached such a pitch finally, that I procured a skull in order to spend many hours of the night with it; and, as always happens with me and things, it was not only the moments of deliberate attention which made this ambiguous object really mine: I owe my familiarity with it, beyond doubt, in part to that passing glance, with which we involuntarily examine and perceive our daily environment, when there exists any relationship at all between it and us. It was a passing glance of this kind which I suddenly checked in its course, making it exact and attentive. By candlelightwhich is often so peculiarly alive and challenging-the coronal suture had become strikingly visible, and I knew at once what it reminded me of: one of those unforgotten grooves, which had been scratched in a little wax cylinder by the point of a bristle!

And now I do not know: is it due to a rhythmic peculiarity of my imagination, that ever since, often after the lapse of years, I repeatedly feel the impulse to make that spontaneously perceived similarity the starting point for a whole series of unheard of experiments? I frankly confess that I have always treated this desire, whenever it made itself felt, with the most unrelenting mistrust-if proof be needed, let it be found in the fact that only now, after more than a decade and a half, have I resolved to make a cautious statement concerning it. Furthermore, there is nothing I can cite in favour of my idea beyond its obstinate recurrence, a recurrence which has taken me by surprise in all sorts of places, divorced from any connection with what I might be doing.

What is it that repeatedly presents itself to my mind?

It is this: The coronal suture of the skull (this would first have to be investigated) has-let us assume -a certain similarity to the closely wavy line which the needle of a phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus. What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return journey along a tracing which was not derived from the graphic translation of sound, but existed of itself naturally-well, to put it plainly, along the coronal suture, for example. What would happen? A sound would necessarily result, a series of sounds, music...

Feelings-which? Incredulity, timidity, fear, awe-which of all feelings here possible prevents me from suggesting a name for the primal sound which would then make its appearance in the world...

Leaving that side for the moment: what variety of lines then, occurring anywhere, could one not put under the needle and try out? Is there any contour that one could not, in a sense, complete in this way and then experience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of sense.

At one period, when I began to interest myself in Arabic poems, which seem to owe their existence to the simultaneous and equal contributions from all five senses, it struck me for the first time, that the modern European poet makes use of these five contributors singly and in very varying degree, only one of them-sight overladen with the world-seeming to dominate him constantly; how slight, by contrast, is the contribution he receives from inattentive hearing, not to speak of the indifference of other senses, which are active only on the periphery of consciousness and with many interruptions within the limited sphere of their practical activity. And yet the perfect poem can only materialize on condition that this world, acted upon by all five levers simultaneously, is seen, under a definite aspect, on the supernatural plane, which is, in fact, the plane of the poem.

A lady, to whom this was mentioned in conversation, exclaimed that this wonderful and simultaneous capacity and achievement of all the senses was surely nothing but the presence of mind and grace of love- -incidentally she thereby bore her own witness to the sublime reality of the poem. But the lover is in such splendid danger just because he must depend on the co-ordination of his senses, for he knows that they must meet in that unique and risky centre, in which, renouncing all extension, they come together and have no permanence.

As I write this, I have before me the diagram which I have always used as a ready help whenever ideas of this kind have demanded attention. If the world’s whole field of experience, including those spheres which are beyond our knowledge, be represented in a complete circle, it will be immediately evident that, when the black sectors, denoting that which we are incapable of experiencing, are measured gainst the lesser, light sections, corresponding to that which is illuminated by the senses, the former are very much greater.

Now the position of the lover is this, that he feels himself unexpectedly placed in the centre of the circle, that is to say, at the point where the known and the incomprehensible, coming forcibly together at one single point, become complete and simply a possession, I osing thereby, it is true, all individual character. This position would not serve for the poet, for individual variety must be constantly present for him, he is compelled to use the sense sectors to their full extent, as it must also

be in his aim to extend each of them as far as possible, so that his lively delight, girt for the attempt, may be able to pass through the five gardens in one leap. As the lover’s danger consists in the non-spatial character of his standpoint, so the poet’s lies in his awareness of the abysses which divide the one order of sense experience from the other: in truth they are sufficiently wide and engulfing to sweep away from before us the greater part of the world — who knows how many worlds?

The question arises here, as to whether the extent of these sectors on the plane assumed by us can be enlarged to any vital degree by the work of research. The achievements of the microscope, of the telescope, and of so many devices which increase the range of the senses upwards and downwards, do they not lie in another sphere altogether, since most of the increase thus achieved can not be interpreted by the senses, cannot be “experienced” in any real sense? It is, perhaps, not premature to suppose that the artist, who develops the five-fingered hand of his senses (if one may put it so) to ever more active and more spiritual capacity, contributes more decisively than anyone else to an extension of the several sense fields, only the achievement which gives proof of this does not permit of his entering his personal extension of territory in the general map before us, since it is only possible, in the last resort, by a miracle.

But if we are looking for a way by which to establish the connection so urgently needed between the different provinces now so strangely separated from one another, what could be more promising than the experiment suggested earlier in this record? If the writer ends by recommending it once again, he may be given a certain amount of credit for withstanding the temptation to give free reign to his fancy in imagining the results of the assumptions which he has suggested.

Soglio. On the day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, 1919.

Primal Sound(Take it Back)

Divination Galaxy, 2024 Antique scrying mirror, peacock ore, quartz, pink quartz, emeralds and opals.

1. memory sound and evocation; Muzak, ambience and aethereal culture; Brian Eno and perfume; Bali, Java, Debussy Sitting quietly in never-never land, I am listening to summer fleas jump off my small female cat on to the polished wood floor. Outside, starlings are squabbling in the fig tree and from behind me I can hear swifts wheeling over rooftops. An ambulance siren, full panic mode, passes from behind the left centre of my head to starboard front. Next door, the neighbours are screaming - “.... fuck you ... I didn’t ... get out that door ...” - but I tune that out. The ambient hum of night air and low frequency motor vehicle drone merges withinsect hum called back from the 1970s, a country garden some where, high summer in the afternoon. The snow has settled. I can smell woodsmoke. Looking for fires I open the front door, peer out into the shining dark and hear stillness. Not country stillness but urban shutdown. So tranquil.

Truthfully, I am lying in intensive care. Wired, plugged and electronically connected I have glided from coma into a sonic simulation of past, and passed, life. As befits an altered state, the memories have been superimposed, stripped of context, conflated from seasons, times, eras, moments, even fictions, into a concentrated essence of my existence in the sound world.

These sounds reconnect me to a world from which I had disengaged.

Sound places us in the real universe. Looking ahead, I can see it plane enlivened by visually represented objects. I can touch within a limited radius. I can smell a body, a glass of beer, burning dust. But sound comes from everywhere, unbidden. My brain seeks it out, sorts it, makes me feel the immensity of the universe even when I have no wish to look or absorb.

There are ear plugs, but then I just hear the sound of my own shell.

Not long born, still unable to control most of my own body, I stared at colour shapes and gripped objects as they came near. Far away, a dog barked. Then there were two worlds. Now I am very old, too old. A stonedeaf baby. Who am I? These people sitting around my bed; who are they?

One of them holds my hand. I press the button. Sound pictures wash them away. I am listening to a song in a school classroom: “Oh soldier, soldier...” Somebody is carrying a radio and an old pop song is playing: “See the pyramids ....” I can hear the metal phase echoes of footsteps moving along an alleyway, wind in drainpipes, a tied-up dog howling.

Enfolded in the stillness of Christmas Eve, church bells; police sirens and domestic rows. Sea sucked back over stones through the narrow rock corridor at Clodgy Point, Cornwall. A cave down on the beach; inside, I sound the echo with a bone trumpet, water dripping in a steady tattoo.

Fences rattling in the wind on Dartmoor. Walking after midnight down the long tunnel ofan underground station. A man walks alongside me, bright eyed with chemical joy. Australian vowels. “Hear that? Sirens. The sound of London.” He looks down at my feet as we stride quickly in parallel.

“Squeaky boots.” A bee trapped in a chimney flue, its buzzing amplified to room dimensions. The fizzing drone of a street light. A hotel room in Italy and close by a man and a woman are screaming their way to orgasm. somebody shouts in the distance, drunk. Toads belch in the deep night and a motorbike whines by. I have a daughter; she is singing “Daisy, Daisy...” Sounds that have remained mysteries for decades: walking by a railway terminal on a Saturday morning and stopped dead by the eerie. lament of a train whistle choir. All those horns and whistles blowing at once. The air buckles. Did somebody die? Paradise is so dull. I listen for a moment to the woomph of mortar fire in thick jungle, vultures tearing strips from a corpse, car alarms, fire alarms, smoke detectors, house alarms ancl cement mixers.

And then the comforting note of air conditioning, the slow glide of electronic curtains. My exit, probably. But I still hear the sound of fleas jumping off my small female cat onto the polished wood floor.

An excerpt from Ocean of Sound by David Toop

An excerpt from the MOMA website published for the Arthur Jafa exhibitiion entitled “Less is Morbid.”

A page from the 1904 Columbia Records catalog.

The Golden Record of the Voyageur Space Probe.

Sky Record, 2020 Domenico Remps, Cabinet of Curiosities, 1690, Museo dell’Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence, Italy.

God Is Man-made John Giorno yes there is a God and it is made by man there is a God and it is man-made they’re all the gods are made by you and me we create the gods and they look like us yes there was a moment recognizing intuitively the empty true nature of mind beyond concepts and the inconceivable and then we began thinking about it thinking about it thinking about it made it into ideas made it into concepts made it into religions created all the self-serving religions and then we said some words and said it was the word of God words from God and everybody believed it wanted to believe it we created God and he looks like us there is no hell there are no hell worlds of devils and demons other than the hell inside my mind the hell inside my mind the hell inside your mind the hell you and I create around us the hell we create around us and take with us into death there is no heaven there are no heaven worlds other than the joy of you living in your eyes living in your eyes living in your eyes and seeing everybody in the world as gods and goddesses every wretched grasping ugly person is a deity swimming in light yes god’s making god’s helping and making happy helping and making happy and demons are hurting and harming is your own mind seeing itself at the moment of death at the instant of awareness the gods are gone if you go looking for heaven you are in trouble the gods vanish within the unborn empty nature of mind you are liberated through your own self-luminous awareness your own self-luminous awareness will always be with you I will always be with you I will always be with you I will always be with you everything is delusion including the most sacred everything is delusion including the most profound wisdom everything is delusion including the highest teachings which lead to the realization that everything is delusion the play of emptiness awareness and bliss finding it through yourself finding it through yourself finding it through yourself finding it through yourself self-luminous awareness ceaselessly coming Poem transcribed from John Giorno performance at Bowery Poetry Club on March 8, 2015.

Tony Dertouzos recording his Never Record one month before his death.

Sun Dog outside Never Records, New Orleans, 2012 by Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee.

Persistent Echoes 2019 An artwork by Ted Riederer in collaboration with BAM Hamm Archives Silver Maple wood box, phonograph records, digital fine art pigment prints on paper 13 × 13 × 5 7⁄8 inches

Inside this wall is a vinyl record time capsule conceptualized and constructed by the artist Ted Riederer. Containing the artist’s own phonograph recordings of sounds from his life and selections from the BAM Hamm Archives, Riederer telegraphs a crystallization of our current moment to future generations.

The heartbeat of his lover on the eve of their wedding.

Trains running at midnight through half-empty stations.

The persistent rhythm of a snare drum in the rain. Taken together, these sounds evoke a poem about human existence, both nostalgic and timeless.

In capturing and framing the moments that we all share, whether knowingly or unknowingly, these “tone pictures”— a term evoking the first commercially available recordings in the early days of recorded sound—communicate not just our contemporary lives but the feelings and thoughts that inhabit us as we strive to make a meaningful existence.

Placed inside the Rudin Family Gallery’s wall in July 2019, coinciding with the birth of this space, Persistent Echoes is a time capsule for a century and beyond.

Our Year of Dissent (2017)

Our Year of Accord (2018—2019)

Recorded by Ted Riederer

Recorded by Ted Riederer

from BAM’s stages (1861—2019)

“The Sound of Trains at Midnight”

“The Heartbeats of My Son Hours Before His Birth”

“My Father with Dementia Trying to Remember”

“A Preacher Gives a Sermon With His Last Breaths From Borrowed Lungs”

Selected by Sharon Lehner, courtesy of the BAM Hamm Archives

“The Heartbeats of My Lover on The Eve of Our Wedding” “My Friend, an Undocumented Immigrant, Speaks a Dead Language”

“A Snare Drum in the Rain”

One Hundred and Fifty-Eight Years traced

John Cage, “Atlas Eclipticalis,” played by the Brooklyn Philharmonic in 1975

“A Chord Made From The Tears of The Artist”

“The Blues in Perpetuity, David Henderson Reads his poem Out Of The Blue”

Frederick Douglass predicts racism after emancipation in 1863, read by Carl Hancock Rux

“The Tax March April 15, 2017”

“Verses for the Incarcerated” Recorded by Walt Novack

“The Evening Call to Prayer Heard From the Citadel at Center of Amman, Jordan”

“Future Radio Plays Dreamed by High School Students From Chicago” Recorded by Damon Locks

Chuck Davis, founder of DanceAfrica, reminds us: peace, love and respect for everybody

“Playing The Brooklyn Bridge Like a Piano”

Franklin D. Roosevelt talks about the New Deal, November 1, 1940

The plaque for Persistent Echoes mounted in the walls of BAM’s Harvey Theater for a century or more.

The story goes that, late in his life, Guglielmo Marconi had an epiphany. The godfather of radio technology decided that no sound ever dies. It just decays beyond the point that we can detect it with our ears. Any sound was forever recoverable, he believed, with the right device. His dream was to build one powerful enough to pick up Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. Raw sound may not have much of a shelf life, but Marconi’s theory surely does. It survives as a low-level urban legend, bandied about in dorm rooms and Internet forums. I thought it was true before I even knew who Marconi was, and I have no idea where I learned it. Maybe you’ve always believed it, too. Its survival attests to a universal desire and anxiety. Our time on Earth is fleeting, the impressions we leave on it are ephemeral, but maybe there is a part of us that can outlast this dust-to-dust. Maybe our complete history is all around us. We just need to learn how to read it.

An excerpt from Perfecting Sound Forever by Greg Milner.

Aeolian Electric Guitar outside of MZ14, Guayaquil, Ecuador in 2022.

Circular Score(Beethoven), 2025.