the occulture

In December 1995, I found an unsigned note tacked to the student board in the music building of McGill University in Montreal. The note was most probably destroyed in a 2005 house fire. It stated (in broken English), that shortly after I had participated in a series of neurological tests around the ability of perfect pitch, a conversation had been overheard which suggested there was more to the experiment than met the ear. The note alleged that a neural program, or algorithm could be implanted in subjects with substantial memorization capacities, who are also good hummers, though the modalities of this implantation remain utterly mysterious. A stimulus of some kind was to trigger an internal generation of melodies, which would then get stuck until externalized by humming, enabling them to virally circulate. Though supposedly the experimenters were unsure as to the effectiveness of this implantation, the intention was that these generations would circulate as anticipations of corporately-valenced melodies- to-come.

This presentation follows from an attempt, admittedly provisional, to digest the implications of this still- cryptic message, using the time-honoured tradition of chronoportation to identify specific historical tropes and feed them forward into the world of sonic contingencies they have helped bring about. It trans-verses several iterations of attempts to process, through various creative frameworks, some of the still-murky domains adumbrated by the haunting frequency of this aberrant missive, concretized by subsequent research into corporate technologies of viral sonic infestation avant-l’internet. I adopt this method in order to situate this 1995 event as a lynchpin in the elaboration of a network of inhuman, sonically abductive modalities instantiated by neuromarketing imperatives. To dismiss this note as the practical joke of a conspiratorial crank would occult the opportunities it affords to induce effective revalencings of psychosonic capture operations into forces accelerated towards a future beyond capitalist instrumentalization….

– Couroux (@xenopraxis)