Sonic Warfare by Steve Goodman

Author:Steve Goodman [SPi]
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780262013475
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2017-04-02T04:00:00+00:00

1971: The Earworm 27

It’s 3.09 a.m. You were asleep, dreaming. Eyes closed, pulsing with inverted activity, ears gaping, vulnerable as always. You spasm up from the darkness. Your eyes open, focusing on the fluorescent digits of the wake-up machine. Something has changed since you went under. You are no longer alone. Something has arrived and entered. You think you saw it, or them. A pack of them, wriggling through the radio waves. Maybe that was just the motion blur of the digits on the clock radio display, as you jolted your head to hunt the intruder. But no sign. Just a chain of sounds, muffled, wordless, timbreless from deep down in the throat chamber. Perhaps less than a sound, a string of resonance effects. Not yet a tune, but with some divergence in frequency. Unnamable, an entity has folded itself into your gray matter. It has hooked you, staging a pirate attack on your vocal chords. It needs you to replicate, and it’s begun already, sounding you out. What happened? You’ve been infected by an earworm: a tiny microbe or rather micro-riff—a spiraling, coiled vibrational loop. Later today it will be spending your money while you’re singing its tune1

In 1984, Klaus Maeck’s and Muscha’s paranoid, low-budget, post-punk movie Decoder explored the potential of sonic weaponry deployed against the forces of Control. Against the backdrop of immanent nuclear annihilation, the film describes a world where all that is left for youth to do is to dismantle it. In the film’s Manichean vision, Muzak, as the concoction of doctors, musicians, and marketing experts, aiming to stimulate productivity and employee morale alongside generating a pacifying glow of comfort in the consumer, represented by the ultimate, insidious musical agent of evil.

The film develops a number of sonic concepts revolving around a confrontation between Muzak and a kind of counter-Muzak. The lead character, FM, experiments with sonic techniques to intervene into the piped musical environments of consumerism. Set in Hamburg in the early 1980s, FM is a reclusive, alienated youth who spends his time experimenting with recording equipment in his studio. The film follows the awakening of FM, who one day grows very suspicious of the ever-present Muzak played in his local hamburger restaurant. He suspects that the Muzak is controlling consumers and starts to hear subliminal messages within. He begins to record the Muzak to analyze it and starts producing his own form of “anti-Muzak” by manipulating his recordings, changing their speed, reversing them, or layering them with the sound of riots and animals. While roaming the city, he meets an underground cultish group named the “pirates” engaged in dark-side “black noise” rituals. FM ends up joining forces with the “pirates” and conducts attacks on Burger Kings and McDonalds equipped with their cassette players loaded with anti-Muzak, inducing nausea and rapid evacuation of the fast food restaurants. In response the Muzak Corporation sends a secret agent to hunt down the sonic terrorists. Meanwhile, social disorder escalates as FM and his allies in the “pirates” reproduce and distribute their anti-Muzak cassettes.

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