FT271



Felix Kubin is a Hamburg-based musician and multidisciplinary artist. His films, installations, electro-pop music, and experimental radio plays (called ‘Hörspiele’) are hyper-creative, challenging and unique explorations of phenomena both commonplace and obscure. Approaching his various projects from an intellectually rigorous yet playful angle, Kubin could be considered a neo-Dadaist.

In May 2010, I saw Kubin present the radio play Paralektronoia at the Mega­polis experimental audio festival in Baltimore. Paralektronoia was a dexterous meld of musical performance and lect­ure focusing on the parapsycho­logical effects of electronic techno­logies – an appropriate enough topic for an avant-garde electronic musician.

The Hörspiel surveyed audio medium­ship through Electronic Voice Phenomena’s spirit recording techniques (FT104:26–30; 194:26–30) and delved into the talented, tormented existence of recording engineer Joe Meek. I spoke with Felix about the play and his upcoming projects.


Mike Pursley: The Electronic Voice Phenom­enon (EVP) was an integral part of the Paralektronoia radio play. How did you become interested in EVP and what kinds of research have you conducted?

Felix Kubin: I wasn’t interested in EVP in the first place but in the (assumed) connection of paranoia and electricity. The invisibility of electricity, the magnetic field phenomena that Tesla discovered and the magic of information transmitted through the so-called ether always had a certain aura of paranoia for me. In my radio play, I am talking about the technological and human antennæ. My protagonist turns into a bodiless voice – which, for the listener, he was already. In the end, a female voice tells the listeners to become radios themselves by stretching their fingers into the air and picking up the encoded data that travels the ether.

In the early days of the technological revolution, many scientists and artists seemed to be interested in both the paranormal and the scientific side of media. Most of the technical terms we use today stem from the world of the occult. Television was the technological realisation of the magic mirror, the telephone was very close to the idea of telepathy and the word “medium” refers to the – usually female – medium in a séance who “channels” inform­ation from the great beyond or from remote countries. Those were the days when there was just one channel to watch instead of 128.

All these analogies fascinated me, and so I wanted to create an artistic work dealing with invisible voices, ghosts and electricity in a poetic way. I have to point out that I am not using the term paranoia in a patho­logical sense, but rather as a metaphor describing the symptoms of media history. I use it in a poetic way, from the perspective of art and philosophy. The fact that listening to disembodied voices on the radio is very close to hearing voices in one’s head makes radio a haunted – or para­noid – medium by disposition.

Just check out the amazing written notes of the paranoid patient Daniel Paul Schreber from the beginning of the 20th century. The way he describes himself as a radio that receives voices and commands from a complex invisible system is an interesting contribution to media theory and has been the subject of an essay by media philosopher Wolfgang Hagen (who is also chief of the cultural department of Deutschland­radio Kultur). Many patients who suffer from schizophrenia and paranoia experience their percept­ions in connection with technological media. Voices “pour” out of televisions or talk to them via FM frequencies. The technological media are often involved when it comes to hypersensitivity.

MP: Different methods for making spirit recordings were shared during the radio play. What are some of the various ways of documenting EVP?

FK: According to the Swedish artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff, the method of EVP was invented by Fried­rich Jürgenson. Hausswolff visited his widow in the 1990s because he was interested in the vast archive of tape recordings that Jürgenson had made of ghosts. The system that he describes is very simple: find a good radio frequency – usually in the medium or long wave spectrum – and turn the recording sensitivity of your tape machine up to the maximum.

The most fascinating part of Jürgenson’s work is his interpretation of what he heard. And I guess that’s the reason why von Hausswolff – who is running the “department of telemagnetic media” in my Hörspiel – exhibited Jürgenson’s archive in a museum in Frankfurt. He wanted to point out that Jürgenson is both an unconscious artist and an artist of the unconscious.

I am personally not familiar with EVP or any similar techniques. I use different tools to read my subconscious mind. As an artist or poet, I can claim that everything that has been said, written or created exists, especially when it becomes part of the collective memory. Legends live. Ghosts exist. And so does King Kong.

MP: In your opinion, are EVP recordings actual spirits or simply murky playbacks and a little wishful thinking?

FK: EVP is a way of reading the subconscious like art or automatic writing, one of many ways to connect oneself to the world of our imagination and the ghosts that dwell therein. Dreams and desires are part of our reality. But they are mostly less solid than a truck that runs you over.

MP: Paralektronoia also featured Joe Meek, a musician familiar to many Fortean Times readers (see FT201:54–55). Meek was not only obsessed with the occult and spirit­ualism, but on his great I Hear a New World album revealed a taste for ufology and space travel. What, if anything, connected Meek’s pioneering recording techniques and his fix­ations on spiritualism and UFOs?

FK: Joe Meek tried to find a musical equivalent to express his fascination for these subjects. This included the early use of electronic instruments and tape manipulation. But this was only new in the realm of pop music. The avant-garde composers of Musique Concrète – Nono, Ferrari, Stockhausen, Schaeffer, Pierre Henry – had already experimented with these techniques in a much more advanced and daring way a decade before. If you listen to the box-set Popular Electronics (Basta Music) featuring Dutch composers working in the Philips studios in the 1950s, you can already find amazing results of sound art going pop.

I don’t think that Meek’s recording techniques necessarily have anything to do with his fixations on sci-fi and spiritualism. He was just a playful character who loved to experiment. One of his first recordings was him screaming into the speaker of a gramophone. Every speaker is also a microphone, and with this method he could record his voice on a gramophone record. What makes Joe Meek so special to me are the special – and often terrorising – circumstances which he created in the studio. His musicians had to fulfil bizarre tasks like jumping up and down stairs while singing. Some were even threatened with a gun during the recording session.

MP: On a psychological level, what can ubiquitous electronics exposure do to us? Does it make a difference if the electronic bombardment is from analogue or digital technologies?

FK: What worries me about digital technology is that it doesn’t smell. But I am neither a scientist nor a doctor. I like to be surrounded by buzzing elect­ricity and I haven’t experienced any negative side effects apart from the wish to drink more alcohol. I even got a 110-volt electric shock once when I was in Mexico. For one hour, I was able to light bulbs with my fingers. Don’t try that at home, though.

MP: Your radio plays are an excellent means of investigating curious topics and artfully present your findings. What strange or little-known phen­omena have been of interest to you lately?

FK: In the near future, I am creating a series of six feature episodes for the Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona, Spain, about the underground music of eastern Europe. Also, I am planning to compose a piece about test signals for Deutschlandradio Berlin and Kunst­radio ORF Vienna in January 2011 – if possible, in cooperation with a dancer.

My last radio play was called Säugling, Duschkopf, Damenschritte (“Infant, Shower Head, Female Steps”) and it dealt with those audio library records of the 1960s and 70s that provided sound effects for film amateurs. I created my own catalogue of sounds and turned it from a straight format into Musique Concrète and chaos.

Before that I made a piece called Wiederhole 1-8 (“Repeat 1-8”) about instruction manuals, using a similar method. The whole Hörspiel is constructed like a giant instruction containing many small instructions, including the assembly of a toy brain and a gun, the orientation system of astronauts and the creation of the Earth. The latter instructions I derived from the Bible.

I like to explore a system, imitate it and then let it collapse by turning it into poetry. I am fascinated by subverting systems and showing their imperfection. That’s my way of contributing to the general paranoia.