Interview with Joe Banks
Original position in magazine: pages 15-17
Contents: Technical information, where do you study, spiritual dimension, length of recordings, Numbers stations, Antiphony remix, gallery installations, equipment list
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JB = Disinformation (Joe Banks)
EP = Ed Pinsent
EP There seems to be a deal of technical background information - be it military history or electrical phenomena - associated with your work. Is it necessary for the audience to know about it to understand or appreciate the work? For yourself, were you always interested in these things, or did the sound-events come first and intrigue you enough to want to study them in greater detail?
JB Hopefully Disinformation is direct enough for people to able to appreciate it without knowing any details beforehand. This is certainly the impression I get from playing live. Normally little flyers or explanatory pamphlets are available at each gig, but in some cases when no information has been provided [eg - Audiometria @ The 121 Anarchist Centre, National Grid @ The Museum of Installation] the response has still been very good.
I had no interest in radio science before this project - my enthusiasm developed as the possibilities of radio noise started to become clear. I instinctively regarded radio enthusiasts as boring trainspotters, and so still feel the sense of amazement first experienced when I realised what extraordinary phenomena they sometimes deal with. There are a bunch tweed-jacketed, cloth-capped, pipe-smoking ex-RAF electrical engineers, who worked in radar during the war, and have spent half a century or more quietly listening to what would once have been described, not without reason, as the voice of God - with, apparently, little or no concept of the cultural significance of what they have been doing.
Although the INSPIRE [NASA-funded] space physics organisation I joined used to ground-monitor the space-shuttle SEPAC experiment [Space Experiments with Particle Accelerators], these kind of particle accelerators [laser beams as virtual antennae] fired through the magnetosphere are quite unlike the famous ground-based accelerators at CERN [in Switzerland] or SLAC [in California]. They don’t produce measurable collisions or sub-atomic particles, so far as I know they don’t reveal, and I unfortunately don’t personally know, anything about quantum physics. The INSPIRE radio was used to record ‘Ghost Shells’ and ‘R&D Track 1′.
EP Where do you study for your research? Is your research planned and methodical or simply cumulative? Where is it leading?
JB I hoover up fragments of information wherever and whenever possible - but it has to be said that to some extent information finds me. For instance a few months ago I was racking my brains about how to find information about Dani Karavan - designer of the Monument to the Palmach Negev Brigades, the world’s greatest sound sculpture - I went for a walk into Mitcham and found a book with a photo of it in a skip. When I was looking for information about the ghost town at Imber in the Public Record Office, opening an index at random revealed a reference to Imber immediately. There are maybe 10,000 text references per index, 200 odd volumes of indexes, and maybe half a dozen references to Imber buried in among them.
There is a lot of research involved, it isn’t systematic, and I have no idea where it is leading. After nearly ten years of professional work my ‘career’ has done its utmost to leave me almost completely braindead. If it achieves nothing else Disinformation has provided me, by way of an antidote, with a self-education it is unlikely I could have achieved by other means.
EP Could there be a spiritual / metaphysical dimension to your work, or is it more materialist?
JB This is a very good question for the simple reason that I do not have a consistent answer. There is a great deal of anthropomorphic projection in people’s interpretation of radio noise. I have lost count of the times people have asked me if I’m interested in crop circles, aliens, using radio to pick up voices from the spirit world. ‘Experimentation’ - using the term loosely - into these kind of alleged phenomena has been an established feature of the New Age / Strange Phenomena scene for decades, often based on a fundamentally inaccurate sentimentalisation of the forces of nature. It is, almost without exception, total rubbish - and this can be easily and unambiguously demonstrated. Electrical engineering isn’t the kind of profession you’d think had a lunatic fringe, but it does. Titles like ‘Ghost Shells’, ‘Theophany’, and the ‘Angel’ artwork in Antiphony refer to these projections as cognitive phenomena rather than metaphysical realities, to undermine the influence of accumulated cultural precedent by reducing them to physical evidence of manifestly simple electrical processes. The term ‘antiphony’ itself is a deliberately misleading allusion to the language of religious music. Even lightning - which is one of my all time favourite experiences - is only awesome in ratio to human scale, at one level it is no more impressive than the spark you make flicking a light switch.
I am interested in these kind of projections - but as examples of comparative anthropology rather than an objective truths. By way of contrast, your readers might like to look at an article compiled for issue 3 of Immerse magazine called ‘Rattling Thunder’, which demonstrates the influence of similar processes in Arabic folklore.
Another practical example is to compare Disinformation’s ‘Theophany’ [’the voice of God’] with the composer John Tavener’s recording of the same name, which are two rival interpretations of the same theme (Disinformation published first). One manifests short-wave radio statics produced by the local recording of intense electrical storms - which is a completely inhuman sound, and a pretty good candidate for an ‘authentic’ voice of God. On the other God is represented by, surprise surprise, a very deep human voice - demonstrating the truism that man created God in his own image, and not vice-versa. However it is also true that with material like ‘Stargate’, the nature of this work - type 2 radio emissions from the sun, also known as the ’seashore effect’ - instinctively made me think about all my family who have died and the emotional opportunities that have been have missed. Whatever I think intellectually I am subject to the same emotional pressures as anyone else - and I approach these issues from the point of view of a participant rather than a cynical outsider. I played the two rival Theophanies on top of each other for Scanner at the ICA - John Tavener’s music being shattered and ripped open by these overpowering noise-peaks from lightning strikes, which, personally speaking, was quite a cathartic experience.
EP Given that records to you seem to be a method of ‘reportage’ of events that are happening more or less constantly - how do you plan the length of a recorded piece?
JB I don’t plan the length of recordings at all, but live performances and DJ sets are planned.
EP Do you know anything about the so-called ‘Numbers Stations’ on the short wave supposedly used by military intelligence?
JB According to Akin from Irdial Records the last track on Disinformation’s R&D is a numbers station broadcast, although I wasn’t aware of this when it was recorded. Irdial are the experts in this department, but even then, in the 72 pages of the booklet published with their (4xCD!) numbers stations release I couldn’t find any evidence substantiating the alleged connection between numbers stations and military intelligence. My favourite use of Numbers Stations is in [the film] Orpheus by Jean Cocteau.
EP For Antiphony, were the remixers given any instructions, advice, suggestions? How is it possible to remix a Disinformation piece? Do you have any comments to make on the results?
JB The sound side of Antiphony was mostly organised by Mike Harding - he didn’t issue any instructions that I’m aware of, so the remixers had a free hand to let their imaginations roam. I chose the title, designed the graphics and packaging and invited Evan Parker, Chris and Cosey, and People Like Us to remix Stargate. Evan Parker was very keen to participate. His superb record Monoceros refers to a constellation close to Orion and Canis Major, and Stargate was performed by our own Sun. However the plan entailed the record company providing some money for studio time and this seems to have been spent on recording Evan’s Solar Wind CD instead. It’s very hard to know what to say about Antiphony, some people love it, other people hate it, and I’m hardly best placed to comment objectively.
EP Let’s hear some more about your gallery installations. How many have there been? Also live performances - can you say a bit about the Disobey event.
JB National Grid at Disobey was fantastic, but very, very stressful. The venue was absolutely packed, with queues going out into the street. Obviously only a handful of punters were there specifically to see me, but nonetheless I was being paid and had a responsibility to perform. I was standing there with a dodgy old radio and no confidence that this ridiculous idea was really going to work. Of course I left the antenna at home, so we had to improvise - Mick from Disobey skinned a guitar lead for me with his teeth! The principle is that the radio set-up allows me to pick up the sine-wave of AC electricity and then tune it just like a musical instrument - using an upper and lower side-band filter designed for interpreting morse-code transmissions. It went absolutely perfectly - from excruciating highs to real heart-stopping infrasonic noise crashes. I was microtuning interference patterns of 2, 1, maybe even 0.5Hz with ease, and controlling the radio by waving my hands around in the electrical field or walloping it.
The strangest side-effect of that episode was that afterwards Disobey / Blast First / Paul Smith approached me as intermediary to brokering a collaboration with the KLF - Paul is now their business manager. They were very interested in Ghost Shells, and particularly National Grid and Paul told me they’d actually gone out and bought an electricity pylon! I was told they wanted to employ me, the architect Charles Jencks, and Stuart Home to help realise what has since evolved into their millennium pyramid scheme. You have to remember this lot spent £40,000 taking the piss out of Rachael Whiteread, and also threw about the same amount in cash onto a fucking bonfire! Naturally I was prepared to suspend judgement on the suspicion that they’ve sunk into being a bunch of criminally ostentatious egomaniacal cocaine-addled tossers, in the hope that they might be prepared to invest some serious money in my ideas. They weren’t. He offered me £1000 plus expenses to, as I saw it, replenish their exhausted ideas. I argued that they already owed me far more than that for nicking my ideas about sound weapons, and if he didn’t substantially improve the offer I wasn’t interested. Falling out with Paul was definitely a bad move - he seemed to be pretty much the only person in the mainstream media with the foresight to take projects like Disinformation seriously - but I don’t think I had any choice in the circumstances.
At the Museum of Installation the main area of the gallery was virtually empty, I set up the National Grid apparatus in the basement, tapped the ambient electric field for powerline noise and fed the signal to two sub-bass speakers with integral low-pass filters [B&W BS6 Active Subwoofers]. The sound was like an extremely low musical note with a distinct 2Hz interference pattern - low enough not to interfere substantially with normal conversation, but intense enough to make two whole floors of the building shake. Afterwards the curator gave me a couple of kilos of broken masonry, bearing the words ‘danger electricity’, which he reckons was dislodged by the vibration and fell off the front of the building. Other sound works by Bruce Gilbert, Javier Marchan, and Dave Clegg were either intermittent and / or sufficiently high-pitched that no frequency-masking occurred. The Museum of Installation show was artistically 100% successful and very enjoyable indeed.
EP What kind of equipment do you have?
JB I use:
- The Interactive NASA Space Physics Ionosphere Radio Experiments’ RS4 Natural Radio Receiver - which picks up electric-field Very Low Frequency radio. It isn’t very easy to use (in the countryside, at night, in winter), it’s very badly constructed (by me), and now broken (also by me).
- A Low Frequency Engineering L500 magnetic-field VLF receiver with loop antenna, is very small, robust, and much easier to use than the RS4.
- A Datong VLF converter.
- A Phillips DCC recorder, the poor-man’s DAT machine, which can be easily converted by anyone to work as an ionospheric / space physics radio.
- A 12-year old Tascam 4 track, which I use as a mixer for DJ sets, with sliders as crusty as the undercarriage of a chocolate hob-nob.
- Mike Harding’s 1970 Lafayette short-wave radio, complete with electric shocks.
- Various conventional radios, contemporary and antique - which I either owned anyway, nicked off skips, or in one case actually paid for - a lovely Cossor All Wave Superhet I got for £30 in a local junk shop.
- A Cossor CSP1250 Ionospheric Simulator, so far unused. This is a digital sampler and multi-effects unit for training military radio operators to interpret distorted communications traffic. It’s listed in Jane’s Defence Electronics and I’d guess it originally cost around £10,000 - Barry Nichols bought it at a car boot sale in Northampton for £3.50.
- I did have a scanner but I sold it when I was unemployed.