https://subrosalabel.bandcamp.com/album/the-voices-of-the-dead
Konstantin Raudive : the Voice of the Dead
Ask Raudive. Talk via radio? Kosti, you are the door.
This disk was ensured continuity, since Raudive’s method was perpetuated by Gerhard Stempnik (1924-1999) in Berlin, as he delivered it to Brett Dean, in the fall of 1994.
Once Raudive has introduced himself, he lets us hear a sample of voices – specifying that these examples belong to group A. The sounds perceived in this session date back to July 17, 1965. They are presented in two parts. In the first part, Konstantin Raudive introduces himself and explains the basis of his experiment. The second is a series of other examples resulting from the same session. The session concludes with the following words: here is the land of soul.
The Raudive celebration
This, however, is not the be all and end all of the disc; Raudive’s method is kept alive in the experiment carried out by Gerhard Stempnik (1924-1999). Stempnik was an oboist in the Berlin Philharmonic – therefore many an allusion is made to the music and his colleagues. The pieces heard here date back to the early 80s. Stempnik uses the following technique systematically: he plays a recording and asks himself questions before a radio device between two frequencies – he generally does this alone or with his daughter, Astrid. Then, he listens to what has just been recorded once again and discovers various voices – afterwards, he endeavours to uncover their hidden meaning.
Lastly, we were interested to hear what the integration of these fragments in voice or musical compositions would render, curious to see what they would inspire to musicians, after having integrated them with William Burroughs’s body of written works and the sound of these voices, scratches and radio interferences.
Discovering the reality of these archives
For many, the first traces of the Raudive taped experiments were found in William Burroughs’s works of fiction, his routines or articles (recurring interests as for other topics – The Hashashin, the old man of the mountain, etc). The fact is, these mysterious magnetic tapes which capture the voices of the dead and which were recorded by the Baltic scientist, Konstantin Raudive, are not fiction but reality – we are not here to judge their scientific objectivity, but wish to point out the fact that we have these tapes in our archives.
By a strange coincidence in 1994, a few months after I’d had a long conversation with my friend Brett Dean about Burroughs and Raudive, Brett (an Australian musician, and a violist in the Berliner Philharmonic at the time) met an old colleague, Gerhard Stempnik who had already left the orchestra. In the course of this meeting, Brett found out that Stempnik had been a close friend of Konstantin Raudive in the 60s. Better yet, he himself had also experimented with the principle. Brett had been granted autorisation to make copies of these works and to submit them to us, for our archives, to be used for publication. The idea took shape and, after having spoken with a few musicians, the likes of Lee Ranaldo or Genesis P-Orridge, whom were closely related to the world of William Burroughs, we decided to publish these experiments: the Raudive archives, the Stempnick material and some pieces of sound and music inspired by these tapes – noise, voices, echoes…
Some history as to the diffusion of the name
Raudive’s name and his methods mainly became known after the publication, in 1971, of his book/LP, Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment In Electronic Communication With The Dead. Subsequently, Burroughs immediately notices and uses it in his quest for the de-structure of language. He perceives in Raudive’s publication a structure inherent to a dreamlike, schizophrenic language– what he discerns here takes him back to that which he discovered 10 years earlier by applying the “cup up and fold in” method. This type of language is emitted in his works of fiction. In fact, he wrote article on the subject of « That Belongs to the Cucumber », a written piece on the specific work of Raudive (in Essais). Consequently, Raudive’s sound work became some kind of cult; one finds traces of it in the works of Coil, Carl Michael von Hausswoolff dedicated an entire records to Friedrich Jürgenson released by Orchard; in the 80s, Genesis P-Orridge took to experimenting with said piece with no one other than Burroughs in the bunker; and finally, those who bought Rubber Ring by The Smiths, were unknowingly in possession of it – at the end of the piece, Morrissey inserted en extract from the Breakthrough vinyl: You do not want to believe. You are sleeping.
In between : books and records
« Bitt Raudive. Runat Radio? Kosti, du varti » (Germ, Latv)
« Ask Raudive. Talk via radio? Kosti, you are the door »
Dr. Konstantin Raudive, a student of Carl Jung, was a Latvian psychologist who taught at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, before devoting the last ten years of his life to researching electronic voice phenomenon (EVP), and thus publishing it in his book Breakthrough in 1971. His early collaborator, Jurgenson, whom he met at the very beginning of 1965, awakened Dr. K. Raudive’s interest in EVP research. Raudive spent endless hours making a thorough study of Jurgenson’s books (« Voices from Space », 1964, and « Radio-Link with the Dead », 1967) from an overwhelming database (an array of about 72000 samples!). Here are a few dozen examples…
Here is the Land of the Soul
At the beginning of the tape, Raudive introduces himself – his accent is fairly peculiar in that it is a German accent from the Baltic States. He says: « This is Konstantin Raudive, you are going to hear some samples of recordings belonging to group « A », experiment done on July 17, 1965. » The samples given here, which for some, we’ll provide a translation, are representative of the type of language captured by magnetic tapes.
Reference to Group « A » means that the voices are immediately audible and do not require any kind of special training to perceive them; in contrast to group « B » where they are faster or thinner, more difficult to identify; and finally, those of group « C », which according to Raudive, are very important pieces since they concern life after death, yet almost outside the limits of human perception.
Raudive also classifies these voices according to the manner in which they were captured: running magnetic tapes, without a microphone or a microphone capturing non-audible voices (they are only discovered upon reading the tape) – the so-called » microphon-stimme ». The errant voices captured by the telephone channel are the « telephon-stimme »; and finally, the « radio-stimme », captured between radio frequencies.
The characteristics of what is heard here is that the perceived phrases are, for the most part, a combination of different voices, at various speeds and, most importantly, the created sentences stem from different languages – namely German, Latvian, Baltic dialects, and Swedish, but you also hear English, Russian, Spanish and French. Consequently, we better comprehend the extreme twists that materialize in the grammatical structure.
In addition to the poetic and bizarre aspect of the phrases heard, we thought it interesting to hear the material itself, the voices, the crackling, the magnetic tape copied and replayed time and again by Raudive for the purpose of making us hear better.
Some excerpts from the first part (#1):
« I should be with you » (in Latvian) (1’00)
« 2 X 2 nothing » (Russian – Swedish – German) (2’00)
« here one lives » (2’40)
« good night » (French – German) (2’50)
Jundal can walk by himself – attach him to the bed (3’05)
Some excerpts from the second part (#2):
« let us sleep » (40′)
« yet at night, God’s air is free » (Lithuanian and Russian) (1’15)
« Good evening, I’d like to drink your wine with you » (in five languages) (1’15)
« these owners of these voices have their own vehicle » (6200)
« we have Sousabusi » (2’30)
a father calls to his dead son, a child’s voice responds in Latvian:
« papa, please call me » (3’00)
« hello, hello, we wish you a good night » (4’15)
« goes directly to Konstantin » (5’40)
« you have chocolate for the young girl you made climb the mountain » (6’00)
« I can speak » (6’55)
the experimenter says: “thank you »
a voice responds: « I am never going to see » (7’30)
« build – the authors announced: you will not die » (8’10)
« here disturbs Garcia Lorca » (9’07)
« the land of the soul » (10’50)
You beat/tape our realms
After having listened to the documents many times, a few things come to my mind.
One can appreciate something without having scientific authenticity or total conviction to back it up – so many efforts made and so much hope cannot go unconsidered.
This is a classic issue of perception – to see the familiar in the immaterial. Here is truly a question as old as time itself – the shape of clouds, prophecies, auspices – to be able to read entrails blood or the air for things to come.
Perceive in these voices, the voice of death itself – deaths, known or unknown, which hold an obscure message for us – emitted from the land of souls.
A distant memory – adolescents gathered in a kitchen, around an Ouija board. A glass turned upside down point to the letters; one takes note of each word. During one of those nocturnal sessions, a grammatically incorrect phrase appeared, «vous tapez nos Royaumes» (« you beat our Kingdoms »), this could have meant they are disrupted by “hitting”, by striking against a celestial or infernal partition. On second thought, since we were writing down all that occurred, it could just as easily have meant the same as the Anglo-Saxon verb “tape” – that which is recorded. I became aware of that later on – by then knowing the power of the collective unconscious among a group of 16-year old friends.
This adventure concludes so many years later, after many a coincidence and fortuitous meetings or premeditations. Meanwhile, we have had our share of deaths as well, but they have not spoken.
Guy Marc Hinant, March 2002 (for the first printing)
