Part 1
Joseph Nechvatal, editor
TABLE OF CONTENTS
// 1
Mongram The Saturated Superimposed Agency of Minóy Joseph Nechvatal
// 19
Mémoire Whatever Happened to the Man Named Minóy? Amber Sabri
Portfolio
Minóy as Haint as King Lear Maya Eidolon
// 63
After Words The Obscurity of Minóy Joseph Nechvatal
// 71
After After Words The Aesthetics of an Obscure Monster Sacré Joseph Nechvatal
// 85
After After After Words Hyper Noise Aesthetics Joseph Nechvatal
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MonogramTHE SATURATED SUPERIMPOSED AGENCY OF MINÓY
Joseph Nechvatal
What chaos and rhythm have in common is the in-between—between two milieus, rhythm-chaos or the chaosmos: Between night and day, between that which is constructed and that which grows naturally, between mutations from the inorganic to the organic, from plant to animal, from animal to human-kind, yet without this series constituting a progression. In this in between, chaos becomes rhythm, not inexorably, but it has a chance to. Chaos is not the opposite of rhythm, but the milieu of all milieus.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
AN INTRODUCTION
Minóy was the pseudonym of the electronic art musician and sound artist Stanley Keith Bowsza (October 30, 1951-March 19, 2010). Until now, it was thought that he stopped recording in 1992.
Minóy created some of the most remarkably engrossing,beautiful and imaginative art music albums released on cassette in the 1980s, often with handmade covers mailed out from his home in Torrance, California. Though perhaps understandably unknown to you, the reader (he was celebrated only once, in 1991, when his image appeared on the cover of the July 1991 issue of Electronic Cottage mag-azine), Minóy was a major figure in the DIY-controlled noise music and homemade independent cassette culture scene of the 1980s. It is significant that Bowsza chose his pseudonym Minóy based upon how someone he met mispronounced the name of one of his favorite artists, the deceased Catalan Surrealist Joan Miró. One can detect with this choice early on his em-brace of psychic chance operations coupled to the phantas-magorical; a method-theme that is profoundly explored during his creative career. Minóy was agoraphobic, but a prolific sound artist in-tensely active in the music underground between the years1986 and 1992. During that period he created many mes-merizing audio agglomerations in collaboration with othersound artists and mail artists. To be sure, Minóy was an avidmail collaborator, working with noted experimental Ameri-can composers such as PBK (Phillip B. Klingler) (as Minóyand PBK but also as Disco Splendor), If, Bwana (as Bwan-noy), Agog (as No Mail On Sundays), Zan Hoffman (asMinóy/Zannóy), Dave Prescott (as PM), Not 1/2 (as El Angel Exterminador), and many others. But he is best known for his thick palimpsest-like multi-tracked soundscape solo compositions: productions that fol-low the incorporation of multilayered electric sound into music compositional practice similar, at times, to the mas-terful musique concrète of the Groupe de Recherches Musi-cales. In general, his noise music is a form of labyrinthian droning superimposed collage electronics that produced an immersive otherworldly effect. It is a form of highly tex-tured, manipulated, and layered sound and noise that often creates a sonic painting-like effect with a spatial feel. Fre-quently, non-periodic tone clusters sweep across the treblerange, moving the contours of the sound, like shifting waves of shimmering colors that glide in an ocean of found sound.Many of his tape releases had only one or two compositions on them, thus allowing him the time to develop a drone theme and hypnotically immerse the listener in what were vastly complex works of art. His challenging, irritating at times, roaring-ambient recordings were often created by delay echoing and multi-tracking sounds (like field recordings and short wave transmissions), forming these sounds into deep and blurry ambiguous compositions full of feeling. Sometimes he used a constant murmuring voice along with found sounds or static or shrieks or staccato guitar bursts or the twitter of a toy mouth organ. His commanding but graceful compositions were more often than not delicate yet powerfully embellished soundscapes of great artistic sophistication. The work’s trans-formative affect is typically achieved through an effective cumulative buildup of tense, almost nervous, sounds that cycle through the realm of overload, an overload that compresses and mutates the original sound sources and transforms them into an expanding and indeterminate sonic field. It is a technique of creative destruction highly suggestive of forms of social resistance applicable to global techno-culture, as it suggests an ultimate triumph of individual originality over national-corporate hegemony. A GHOSTLY REFLECTION
Minóy’s lingering sonic material is a project of personal transformation (for him and us) that also covers much of the sonorous scope of the second half of the 20th Century, expanding the boundaries of the musical exploration of complex overtone structures. Minóy was (and is still) a precise example of expansive post-John Cagian abstract soundmusic let loose upon the expanding electronic environment in which we now abide. Of course, Minóy’s sample-based sound-music is noise music, indeed. It’s often a bit antagonistic, irritating and sometimes unpleasant, but it’s also exceedingly considered and put together beautifully with the utmost proficiency and comprehension. Yet a listener must fabricate a complicated forensic fairy-tale out of its counter-mannerist mélange as it keeps slipping in and out of idiosyncratic narration.
Minóy’s compositions are both harsh and contemplative. The contemplative register of his layered sound-music, achieved through superimposition as opposed to juxtaposition (for example in ‘Doctor In A Dark Room’), is noticeably different from other sample-based audio artists, such as the early sonic collage works of John Cage (‘Williams Mix,’ 1952, ‘Fontana Mix,’ 1958-59 and ‘Rozart Mix,’ 1965), James Tenney (‘Collage #1–Blue Suede,’ 1961), Steve Reich (‘Come Out,’ 1966), Terry Riley (‘You're No Good,’ 1967), Negativland, John Oswald (‘Plunderphonics’), or Christian Marclay. I find Minóy’s superimposed sound aesthetic closer to that of the audio décollage work of Wolf Vostell. Indeed, I feel that his droning fluttering work sounds closer to that of Vostell and to some early work of Pierre Schaeffer (‘Cinq Etudes De Bruits: Etude Violette,’ 1948), John Cage (‘Radio Music,’ 1956), Pierre Henry (‘Après La Mort 2: Mouvement En 6 Parties,’ 1967), and La Monte Young (‘Two Sounds,’ 1960, ‘Poem For Tables Chairs Etc., Parts 1 & 2,’ 1960, and ‘23 VIII 64 2:50:45 – 3:11 am, The Volga Delta From Studies In The Bowed Disc,’ 1969). Indeed, though exactly the opposite of La Monte in one way (Minóy’s released public output was prodigious—perhaps only surpassed by that of Merzbow— and La Monte’s is tiny), like La Monte, duration (time in terms of the distribution of flows) plays a large part in his compositions of assembly. And like La Monte, their lengthy layered complexity is a neurological stimulant for the imagination. The extended length allows deep subjective perceptions of the present moment to come to consciousness. As such, they offer a sonically ontological vision of the world as superimposition, one that shows us in place inside of a saturated world. Thus a mental picture in which both the human and the nonhuman are recognized as open-ended becoming: a mental place where we take on emergent forms in an intrinsically temporal play of agency. In that sense (for me), Minóy’s noise music can be heard as a superimposed block of philosophical propositions that immerse us into rather different conceptions of being in the world. Here we are expected to work devotedly to appreciate its absurd conundrums, and to supply mental transitions between the diverse assortments of irrational elements that supply the sound-music its hooks. As a matter of fact, Minóy conjures up a different ontological interplay of the human and the nonhuman, as his productions speak powerfully of a dense, embodied, material engagement with the world at large. The sound of Minóy has us listen to (and look for) pure visceral abandonment coupled with emergent aesthetic effects in the world (superimposed swirls and vortices of chance juxtapositions, for example), which allows us to be carried away to a place where we are at once both the psychic co-author and the detached explorer of his composition, both an active and passive player at work in constructing its connotation. This is one key point I really want to emphasize, how Minóy unarguably shows us how originality based in co-directional creativity can still genuinely emerge in our digital age of endlessly recycled culture by remaining in the thick of things. With Minóy we go to the superimpositional place of the intersection of the actual and the virtual, and the human and the nonhuman, in an open-ended, forward-looking, search process. Subsequently I would say, Minóy’s sonic material thematizes for us a thick ontology of layered becoming, as it entails an assembly between the human (us now) and the nonhuman (the work he left behind), as well as an intrinsically sequential and superimpositional becoming-at-large. The point to grasp is: to appreciate Minóy’s droning style of assembly depends on us living in the thick of things. And his labyrinthian electronic sounds thematizes that assembly for us. On the other hand, the haunting 2007-2009 portrait images from the ‘Minóy as Haint as King Lear’ series that photographer Maya Eidolon created before his death in collaboration with Minóy (then known as Haint) and Stuart Hass (Minóy’s partner)—included as an image portfolio in this volume—visually thematizes for us the eerie madness of resisting that ontological condition of existence. At this point, I have to say something about ‘Minóy as Haint as King Lear’ that has in one way or another helped me live in the presence of becoming. ‘Minóy as Haint as King Lear’ unites life and death visually in a counter-hegemonic formation full of self-conscious unifying practices. Thus Eidolon’s photographs point me in the direction of a natural ontological attitude, exposing dualist detachment from the world for what it is: just one tactic of being in the fluxing world that we have at our disposal, and that is always slipping away from us. It is salient that Bowsza took on a third pseudonym for this phantasmal project of self-invention: Haint (he dropped the name Minóy and stopped releasing recordings in 1992) as ‘haint’ is a deep-south American colloquialism for a ghost, apparition, or lost soul. A general point I want to make here about ‘Minóy as Haint as King Lear’ is that we should not be dazzled by the work’s phantasmagorical field. Instead of seeing this performance for the camera as a descent into the thick eerie nonhuman (or as a move, a tactic, a ploy, a play), we should perhaps see the performance as a very specific way of living mad in the intensified flow of superimposed becoming. After all, we can well imagine his rage against his approaching death here. We can almost hear in these images his Lear-like scream into an unbounded white noise. Thus for me, Bowsza in ‘Minóy as Haint as King Lear’ delivers an airy irrational punch of nonsensical negation to spectral life by tying together methods of insouciant informality with a visceral irony: at turns hip and flamboyant or abrasively outrageous. And, alas, that recitation keeps turning back into one about stinking death—that strange, incurable and deeply irrational affliction. So yes, ‘Minóy as Haint as King Lear’ is about self-transcendence by means of madness. Indeed I read it as a meditation on humiliating death in all its undifferentiated fabulousness, by which I mean its essentially nasty comedy. ‘Minóy as Haint as King Lear’ is then crazy counter-mannerist art about comical, difficult death. So my argument is that even if we live and die in the thick of virtual and actual de-centred processes of becoming human and nonhuman, this is normally veiled from us by a particular tactic of dualist detachment and Bowsza tears back that veil. To move in this direction with ‘Minóy as Haint as King Lear’ also immediately reminds us that in an ontology of becoming, art shades indirectly (and perhaps, also, unconsciously) into spirituality as immanent in nature, which itself is to be wondered at. Utter energy or vitalist matter: either way, with ‘Minóy as Haint as King Lear’ we are in an enormous artistic and spiritual field that immediately evokes the ontology of becoming of Gilles Deleuze. ‘Minóy as Haint as King Lear’ is self-consciously in the flow of becoming a phantasmal self-experiment, imaginatively exploring the open-ended spaces of the world’s possibility. So this is where I would look for inspiration to renew our ontological faculties to remake the phantom world again, materially as well as representationally.
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A REMEMBRANCE (FROM AFAR)
As for most others, Minóy first came into my realm of awareness in the mail. I never met the man. Out of the blue I received in my Lower East Side mailbox a tape from him that I loved immediately: ‘In Search Of Tarkovsky.’ I quickly began trading Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine1 tapes with him for his work; my favorites being ‘Doctor In A Dark Room’ (1985), ‘Nightslaves’ (1986) and ‘Firebird’ (1987). These tapes resonated considerably with the overloaded nature of the palimpsest-like gray graphite drawings I was working on then (which were reflective of the time’s concerns around multiple forms of proliferation). But my reception of his music also had to do with my vague impressions of California. No, there was no sun in them, but I could vaguely detect the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, long LSD trips, morning bong hits, and lurking danger; something like listening to the Beach Boys’ ‘Pet Sounds’ while on bad acid. So I was deeply impressed by his talent on those tapes even without meeting him, and I was determined to publish something by him on Tellus as soon as I could.
His work reminded me of when I first saw the obscure No Wave performer Boris Policeband play his screechy sounds in 1978 at a concert to benefit Colab’s X Magazine. It was entrancing for me how Policeband appropriated police scanner radio transmissions, entwining them with his dissonant violin and hilarious voice. After Rhys Chatham, his brand of post-minimalism may have had the greatest influence on my striving for my own form of post-minimal chaos magic, an art of magical gazing. That year I had been reading Aleister Crowley’s book Magick in Theory and Practice. What I conjectured from Crowley while listening and watching Boris Policeband, was that a noisy aesthetic visualization process could be used to create feedback optic stimulus to the neocortex in a kind of cop-free project of foreseeing (an attempt to scan into an un-policed future), based roughly on the basis of magical gazing. That gazing idea led me to form Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine and hence become acquainted with the music of Minóy. Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine was created in 1983 by me, curator Claudia Gould, and Carol Parkinson, a composer and staff member of Harvestworks/Studio PASS. We met for drinks to discuss my idea of a magazine on cassette that would feature interesting and challenging sound works. With the advent of the Walkman and the Boom Box, we perceived a need for an alternative to over-determined radio programming and the commercially available recordings on the market at that time. We then began to collect, produce, document and define the art of audio by publishing works from local, national and international artists. Sometimes we worked with contributing editors, experts in their fields, who proposed themes and collected the best works from that genre. Unknown artists were teamed with well-known artists, historical works were juxtaposed with contemporary ones, and high art with popular art, all in an effort to enhance the crossover communication between the different mediums of art: visual, music, performance, and spoken word. I was very pleased to have published Minóy’s dark ambient composition ‘Tango’ in 1988 as the lead piece on Side B of Tellus #20, an issue that I curated, entitled ‘Media Myth.’ The premise behind ‘Media Myth’ arrived to me out of the compositional principles of my palimpsest graphite drawings (deeply layered and saturated with vague imagery) in contact with the shivering layered fuzz music of Minóy. I would often do my artwork with Minóy playing on the Walkman headset or blasting out from my black Boom Box. Slowly the goal of the ‘Media Myth’ issue became the exploration of the introspective world of the ear under the influence of the era’s high-frequency electronic environment —that is, electronic circulation. Since it was rather difficult making sense of the mid-1980s swirling media society, the general proposition behind Media Myth was to look for a paradoxical summation of this uncertainty by looking for artists who took advantage of the time’s superficial saturation—a saturation so dense that it failed to communicate anything particular at all upon which we could concur (except perhaps its overall incomprehensible sense of ripe delirium) as the Reaganomic reproduction system pulsed with higher and higher, and faster and faster, flows of senseless info-data to the point of ear hysteria. Perhaps the result of this ripe information abundance was that, the greater the amount of Reaganomic information that flowed, the greater the incredulity which it produced—at least, for thinking, questioning artists. So, the tremendous load of data produced and reproduced all around us then ultimately seemed to make less, not more, conventional sense. Indeed, this freeing feeling became the premise of the ‘Media Myth’ issue. This supposition, it now seems to me, played also into the history of abstract art which teaches us that art may refuse to recognize all thought as existing in the form of representation, and that by scanning the spread of representation, art may formulate a critique of the laws that provide representation with its organizational basis. As a result, in my view, it was electronic-based sound art’s onus to see what unconventional, paradoxical, summational sense (in terms of the subjective world of the imagination) art might make of the mid-1980s based on an appropriately decadent reading of the time’s paradoxically material-based (yet electronically activated) media environment. Such a basically abstract, artistic, paradoxical/summational fancy began with the presumption that an information-loaded nuclear weapon had already exploded, showering me with bits of radioactive-like informational sound bytes, thus drastically changing the way in which I perceived and acted, even in my subconscious dream world. Perhaps you can now see why Minóy’s ‘In Search Of Tarkovsky’ touched me so deeply, as Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (1979) is a reasonable zone of connection to these ideas and feelings, as seven years after the making of the film, the Chernobyl disaster occurred (on April 26, 1986) and that led to the depopulation of a surrounding area that was officially called the zone of alienation, rather like in the Stalker film. Minóy’s weirdly romantic sound, by virtue of its distinctive electronic constitution of fluidity, floated for me in an extensive stratosphere of circulation while also simultaneously being tied to the materiality of the physical ribbon in the cassette tape. Hence, the particular constitution of Minóy superimposing and overflowing compositions could best be seen, perhaps even more so today, as an osmotic membrane: a blotter of the instantaneous ubiquity/proliferation of the mid 1980s. Consequently, Minóy reflected (and worked with) the social power that was shaped by the de-centered electronic overload of the 1980s. This is its historical merit. So, the question for the ‘Media Myth’ issue of Tellus was: how could artists like Minóy and I symbolically turn these de-centered power codes into artistic abstractions of social merit? Perhaps it was possible because he knew, and demonstrated with ‘Tango,’ that these symbolic media codes, which after all, helter-skelter, make us up as representational characters, are positively phantasmagorical. This is, of course, even more true today. Based on the premises of his atypical ‘Tango,’ perhaps a socially relevant digitally-based creativity can still be found dancing in today’s electronic world. After all, electrons partake (and make up) the all-encompassing phantasmagorical/ technological sign-field within which we live and which defines us (at least in part). Conventional non-artistic representation is often thought constructed of rather solid, unyielding social signs. Fine art, like Minóy’s ‘Tango,’ typically is thought to be made up of dancing, anti-social, unconventional, irresponsible signs. For me, ‘Tango,’ though constructed from social signs (albeit abused), represented the fine art mode of weird dark realism that corresponds to the real arbitrary nature of all signs, subverting socially controlled systems of meaning. In Minóy’s electronic noise I heard the opportunity for the creation of applicable antisocial phantasmagorical signs. That and abstract ecstatic anti-signs, that continue to mentally move and multiply within. Such a Tango-based, fancied aesthetic non-knowledge is certainly the most erudite, the most aware, the most conscious area of our current identity, as it is also the phantasmal depths from which all digital representation emerges in its precarious, but glittering, existence. Indeed, it was this quivering phantasmal cohesion found in his un-danceable ‘Tango’ (and in his weirdly sublime/ perverse output in general) that maintained for me a way beyond reductive conceptual minimalism into an excessive post-conceptualism. ‘Tango’ is an early example of a postmedia art, which is in theory, opposed to the tabular mental space laid out by classical thought. It is an art where reproduction technologies blur into transformations continually laced with contradictory messages (and that necessarily counters the logic of crisp information), warped and rowdy shifts in scale that evokes the infinite, and unexpected woven interconnections between the micro and the macro. If the ultra-dissemination of the physiological signs in ‘Tango’ may create such phantasmagorical hyper-logics of use to the formation of art, his potential may prove useful in questioning received notions of representation when viewed against assumptions of utility versus pleasure. Indeed, perhaps his unconscious intention with ‘Tango’ was to achieve an ultimate phantasmal integration by dissolving audio form into its original electronic foundation of nerve energy. Such a dynamic sense of aesthetic electronica as nervous contemplative vision might suggest the continued potential of social re-configuration, as it subsumes our previous world of simulation/representation into a phantasmagorical nexus of overlapping, linked hybrid observations of the outer world with precise extractions of human mentality. Encounters, then, with his audio work, one may assume, might create an opportunity for symbolic societal transgression, and for a vertiginous ecstasy of thought. Surely such an electronica/phantasmal impetus as found in his artistic production can help release pent-up ecstatic energies today, in that the more overwhelming and restrictive the social mechanism becomes in our age of digital surveillance, the more noisy the counter-effects needed. Hence he pushes us to exceed the assumed determinism of the technological-based phenomenon inherent (supposedly) in our post-industrial information society. Therefore, his electronic music may serve as an ecstatic impulse/phenomena which proliferates in proportion to the technicization of society. As such, a nervous electronica-ecstasy may emerge as a result of our technological society’s obsession with the phantasmal character of digital speed and proliferation. Predictions for his legacy, then: as human psychic energies are stifled and/or bypassed by certain controlling aspects of mass digital data-mining, such nervously frenzied art like his will increasingly break out in forms of noisy resonances (and noisy visuals) that will promote an indispensable alienation from the socially constructed. His is a necessary outburst of nervy ecstatic art superimposed onto data-mined experience. Thus his type of noisy euphoric counterattack, such as in ‘Corridors’ (1985), provides phantasmal defiance through transport aimed against the controlling world’s scrutiny-destructiveness. Consequently, his aesthetic philosophy will provide a fundamental antithesis to the authoritarian, perfunctory, simulated rigidities of the controlling technical world. I would ultimately argue that the nervous phantasmal play found in his noisescapes has urgent political/social ramifications in our media saturated digital society today. His well-founded phantasmal model for an art of noise indicates the continued capacity for the electronic media’s worth, as it provides the explication and the means of the nervous phantasmal links that abet both communications and the superimposition of becoming onto being. Hence, his excessive audio abstractions, such as those found in his pieces ‘Mass’ or ‘Shame On Love’ (both 1986), or with Zan Hoffman as Minóy/Zannoy, ‘Why Jake Hobo Ate Whey’ (1987), can be seen and heard, in a sense, as the representation of all representation when we attempt to think through an artistic unlimited field of representation as non-utilitarian phantasmal ideology. This would be an attempt at scrutinizing representation in accordance with the sound’s phantasmal non-discursive process as noise music, such as in his ‘Distant Thoughts’ or ‘The Last Fortune Cookie’ (both 1986), where he has demonstrated for us art as an abstract ObjectOriented metaphysics—a nerve-based metaphysics where his phantasmal noises helps us step outside of ourselves and to posit ourselves outside of the mechanics of homogeneous dogmatisms. And so Minóy: the spectral audio project I have outlined for you based in part on your posthumous work ‘Pawbone Kisser Daylight Sins I’ (1993), will, I hope, contribute to the inventing of a new nervous noise art in which what matters is no longer sound identities, or logos, but rather dense, phantasmagorical forces developed on the basis of inclusion. A project where from now on things will be heard and seen only from the depths of this reverberating inclusive density (withdrawn into itself, perhaps, and adumbrated and darkened by its obscurity), but bound tightly together and inescapably grouped by the vigor that is hidden in a depth that is fermenting a phantasmagorical discourse that is both nervously capricious and, paradoxically, socially responsible.
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ADDENDUM: CRITICAL DESCRIPTION & RECEPTION OF VARIOUS RELEASES
‘White With a Crust Of Chill’
Thick layers of sounds added together make a detailed and overwhelming mix. Most of the tapes from Minóy have a distinct sound, sort of like high-pitched machine noises with bits of different musics wafting in and out of focus. Excellent, Must hear. (Robin James, Sound Choice #5, 1986) ‘Obscure Medicines’ Have you ever screwed up something so bad or got caught doing something so embarrassing that the memory of it, even years later, is physically painful? Well, Minóy has just composed a sound collage for you if you have. The opening track, ‘Naked Came The Memory,’ begins with mechanical chattering, industrial pounding, a stringed instrument suffering rape and torture, and a haunting drone that sounds like a far off air raid siren stuck on a middle tone. All this builds up, ebbs away and then comes back full in your face like the naked truths we must face from time to time. On the title track it sounds like every stringed instrument in Torrance, California tuning up in Minóy’s living room until the sounds swirl and rotate about each other like some discordant tornado. Five more equally disturbing or masochistically pleasing tunes follow, perfect background music when your Uncle Bob overstays his welcome, drinks the last shot of Old Thompson and still won’t go home. (Mick Mather, Sound Choice #9, 1987) ‘Plain Wrap Purgatory’ An acknowledged master of sound collage offers two sidelong pieces, the title cut and ‘Flying Overhead.’ For the uninitiated, this is the guy who lives under your bed and creates soundtracks for your worst nightmares. Purgatory greets the listener with disembodied voices, moans, groans, demonic howling, clanging, industrial drones, and a stringed instrument tinkling like windchimes from hell, er, purgatory. These sounds are layered, bent, treated and kicked in and out of the mix, a Minóy trademark. On side two it appears our sins have been purged. We’re treated to an airy, uplifting blend of sound, giving the impression that you might be flying and making that last connection out of purgatory. Then, en route to some higher place the tone begins to turn brooding and ominous once more, like ice forming on the wings . . . Mary, Mother of GOD, full of grace . . . . (Mick Mather, Sound Choice #9, 1987) ‘Pretty Young Negro Man’ More kooky, psychotic, and truly hellish sounds from this prolific sound composer. Followed immediately by loud, high-pitched machine interruptions. Groans, drones and warps loop in and out of sequence. Found sounds from many sources are woven into the irregular rhythm of the piece. A severely distorted string instrument is being beaten to death and gives out horrific, inhuman cries. There's also some of the strangest vocal manipulations I've ever heard. On side two Minóy plays with the radio dial, turning it slowly to catch extended bits of random speech and Mexican music, and turning it quickly to get clicks and honks. It’s as if several radios are shot through a tremendous p.a. system. A peaceful, yet oddly disturbing synth is laid on top. The overall mood is alarming, playful and determined. (Christopher Carstens, Sound Choice #9, 1987) ‘Firebird’ & ‘The Flavor Of Acid On Ice’ Minóy is one of the stalwart figures of the cassette network. At last count there were 63 tapes available and an untold number of collaborations and compilation appearances. These are two relatively recent releases. On both Minóy builds surging/droning looping icicle shaped sound pictures out of minimal electronics. I prefer the earlier Firebird for it's more varied moods. Morning is especially evocative. That's when I enjoy his music the most, in the morning, as sun cuts in low across the room. Sound mingles with dust particles floating in a beam. ‘The Flavor Of Acid On Ice’ gets a bit more violent in its imagery. Both are capable of producing these visual pictures through sound. (Glen Thrasher, Lowlife 13, 1988) ‘Doctor In A Dark Room’ & ‘Babel Two 30-minute pieces of unique textural richness, borrowing something from industrial, Ligeti, Xenakis, and Tangerine Dream. ‘Doctor In A Dark Room’ creates a mesmerizing effect by constantly hovering between tone and noise, disembodied orchestras and choirs singing multitimbral drones, crashing waves of sound . . . best at high volume, but not late at night. ‘Babel’ is multi-tracked radios (FM, AM, Shortwave, CB, etc.), voices wreaking havoc with meaning and intelligibility in a dense riot of glossolalia. I’d call Minóy a maximalist as he is unafraid of thick and heavy textures which could run the risk of collapsing upon themselves. (Tom Furgas, Option Magazine, Jan/Feb 1985) ‘Future Perfect’ This consistently engaging tape plays tricks on your perceptions by displaying large sheets of texture that overlap one another so that it becomes impossible to discern whether they are organic or synthetic. Under this he further confounds us with barely perceptible voices that haunt from afar. Filled with a strange beauty, it evokes images of imaginary landscapes. (Kim Cascone, Option Magazine, Jan/ Feb 1985) ‘Landscape With Serpent’ More great sonic mayhem from the master of the musically macabre. On side A, ‘Stalker’ is that presence following you down that ciurcuitous tunnel to hell. Programmatic isn’t a dirty word, but for the most part, this surpasses that and is just plain eerie. The title side evokes visions of a primordial wasteland with a menagerie of strange, lumbering life-forms cavorting way off in the (safe) distance. In the closing section, the serpent's lonely wails penetrate the heavy mist and fog. (Jack Jordan, Option Magazine, Sept/Oct 1987) WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE MAN NAMED MINÓY?
A Mémoire of My Dearest Friend, Stanley Keith Bowsza, the Man Who Was Minóy
Amber Sabri
BEYOND LOVE STORIES
Love is a Madman working his wild schemes, tearing off his clothes, drinking poison, and now quietly choosing annihilation. A tiny spider tries to wrap an enormous wasp. Think of the spiderweb woven across the cave. There are love stories and there is obliteration into love. Love flows down. The ground submits to the sky and suffers what comes. Open completely. Let your spirit ear listen to the green dome’s passionate murmur. Let the cords of your robe be untied. Shiver in this new love beyond all above and below.
The sun rises but which way does the night go? I have no more words. Let the soul speak with the silent articulation of a face. Locked out of life, waiting, weeping.
Coleman Barks, A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings
The man who was the noiseMusic and cassette artist named Minóy disappeared completely from public view in 1992. In this memoir I would like to acquaint you, dear reader, with a brief history of the man who was Minóy so that perhaps the mystery of his sudden exodus can be understood.
I first virtually met Stanley Keith Bowsza through Flickr, the well-known image sharing website. I joined the site in January of 2005 and began uploading my photos and artwork under the name of Maya Eidolon. About a month later, someone named “My Life as A Haint” effusively complimented my digital art. When I looked at his Flickr site of artwork, I was in absolute awe. Our friendship grew from this moment. We began to comment on each other’s work, share ideas and communicate through private Flickr mail. We were both eccentric and we were similar in so many ways. Haint made light photoPaintings, and this grabbed me as the first photos I had made as a teenager were black and white light paintings of moving traffic at night. We both loved motion and blur and the night. Haint called us the Neon Night Twins. Through the summer and early fall of 2005, we communicated intensely via Flickr mail. We trusted each other and he needed someone to talk to, someone to confide in. He was entertaining and funny and a wonderful storyteller.
We shared a certain approach to our creative work. Keith Bowsza, both as Minóy the musician and as Haint the artist, worked intuitively with a minimum of pre-planning. The work evolved and was refined over time. It is my belief that what defines an artist is the richness and unique formation of the artist’s intuition (a ‘sixth’ sense), an amalgam of conscious, unconscious and subconscious thoughts and feelings and bits and snippets of sound and image. The ongoing jumble Memory of one’s life is the well from where intuition and creative endeavor flow.
To me, that intuition can best be visualized as a cosmos, a structure so large that one can not see its outside edges because the moment one begins to try to conceive of the enormity of it, the moment one tries to imagine what it might look like if it were possible to be outside it at a huge distance, one becomes engulfed within and swept along the glistening arrays of molecular structures, ever-shifting with light and color illuminating the impenetrable surrounding darkness. Keith sought to channel his intuition and be carried along by his creation whilst he created it. That process provided gratification for him and he wanted his audience to share the delicious and profound phantasmagoric depth of feeling and emotion he experienced as he created the work. The power of Keith’s creative output came from his prodigious resources. He was often manic: he barely slept and he spent most of his functional waking hours either producing art or absorbing art, music, or film. He had a phenomenal memory for sound and imagery, and when he created sound he approached it like he approached everything else, intuitively with gargantuan passion and leviathan intensity. The sounds he wanted to produce were the sound Noise music of his inner experience, not to be gently orchestrated but screaming to be let out: colossal sweeps of multilayered feeling and turbulent emotions. He created what he was feeling and the core of what he was feeling was mammoth psychic and physical pain. Being the terrific showman that he was, he knew how to maximize the effects and with his flare for drama, he played it to the hilt. We were mutually simpatico from the moment we met and I was instantly smitten with this marvelous man and his work. He was brilliant and had a vast Brobdingnagian knowledge of art as well as music, film and theater. He was a sensitive and beautiful soul: intense and passionate. We became the dearest of friends. He delighted in being my entertainment director, sending me music and recommending films. Keith shared with me that he was an invalid confined to a wheelchair with little respite from his decades long struggles with neuropathic pain, frequent episodes of intractable panic, and the mania and paranoia that had permeated his daily life. Always a large man, he had become morbidly obese. By this time in his life he was rarely able to muster the stamina to leave the house. He lived on his bed, surrounded by CDs, DVDs and art books. His computer was his link to the outside world. I believe that it was a catastrophic event early in his life that greatly influenced Keith’s personality and outlook towards the world. In his late teenage years, Keith told his parents he was gay. They responded with what was an alltoo-common reaction in those days: they thought he needed to be “cured.” In a horrifyingly misguided attempt to “fix” his homosexuality, they subjected him to sessions of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). He complied willingly at first, but after he accidentally died and had to be resuscitated on the ECT table during one of these electroshock procedures, he refused to continue. This dreadful episode clearly had profound effects on his mind and body. All of his life he had terrifying nightmares, reliving an out-of-body experience of death, and seeing the “white light.” Although he told me that he had forgiven his parents for this abysmal act of parental treachery masked as compassion and love, issues of fear and betrayal plagued him throughout his life. He remained keenly sensitive to betrayal, real and/or imagined. Pain, panic, paranoia, bipolar mania, schizophrenia . . . he lived it all. Massive amounts of medications had been prescribed for him for more than forty years in an effort to mitigate his neuropathic pain and psychic suffering, beginning with antidepressives in his adolescence, and he had to cope with side effects as well. As 2005 progressed, my friendship with Keith deepened profoundly. We spoke every day. Sometime in early October I awoke and went to my computer eager to view my usual morning treat of looking at the new images Haint had uploaded. To my great horror, his whole account was gone. My heart sank and I started to panic. My visceral gut reaction was fear that I had lost touch with this incredible man. I lived in San Francisco and he lived in Los Angeles. All of our communication had been via Flickr and now I had no way to reach him. I was bereft. My heart was broken. Much to my relief, after a few hours Keith phoned me and assured me he didn’t want to lose touch either. That morning when I discovered Keith had deleted his entire art and photo website on Flickr, I thought perhaps he had done so in a fit of despairing rage and desolate fury, but I was wrong. He told me he had been contemplating it for several weeks, resisting the urge. His feeling was that if he performed this act of self-assassination it would in some way free him . . . and yes, he was right . . . it seemed to work for him. He felt better.
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During the next few years Haint’s ritual of self-annihilation was to be repeated several more times, echoing his disappearance of Minóy in 1992. Months would go by and he would build up his Flickr site with art and photography, and then suddenly the site would disappear from public view. Stuart (his partner) and I would beg him not to destroy it and all the wonderful comments from his admirers, but he insisted that he felt he “had to do it”—that this sacrificial act would somehow free and protect him.
He did not destroy the art itself. He knew how good it was and called it the best work he had ever done. He preserved it carefully on external computer drives, but withdrew it from public view, perhaps irrationally fearing that even though he, the man, was well protected beyond the physical reach of any viewer, the risk of letting people see his work left him too vulnerable. Simultaneously, a large part of his personality wanted very much to be seen, to be adored, to be congratulated. What a paradoxical dilemma. Keith told me that he had always had been extremely shy. His coping strategy was to imagine himself an actor playing the role of himself. He was quite amused with this idea. It exhilarated him to take time to “prepare” à la Method and as part of his costume he would also use makeup on his face before going out on those rare occasions when he left the house. Playing a role seemed to allow him to center himself. However, as his illness progressively left him more and more exhausted, he became less and less able to manage the tremendous swings of his internal weather. His inner resources crumbled and with that, his seclusion became his safety. By the end of that first year, I was spending hours talking with him on Skype and gradually I began to know more of him and his life partner, Stuart Hass. It was during these long Skype sessions that he told me he had been known as Minóy, the cassetteNoise musician. He told me the story of the ‘Devil Music’ Concert at Cal State Northridge. He and Phillip B. Klinger (also known as PBK) had performed a live concert at the university. They were shocked when the startling and completely unexpected response of the audience was hostility and abject fear. He had never felt so vulnerable at a performance, so hated by a crowd. Later on, in those all-too-often periods when he sank into days of despair and depression, he would relive this terrifying incident, perhaps convincing himself that his retreat into seclusion and isolation was the safest and most rational path to follow. It was difficult for Keith to accept any kind of negative response or criticism without overreacting. He was quick to respond deeply to any slight, real or imagined, and it was almost impossible for him to brush off these feelings. They fed his paranoia and panic, and when he felt threatened and vulnerable, he retreated deeper into isolation. Keith as Minóy disappeared completely in 1992, retreating into a hermetic-like existence with his mother and Stuart. His mother’s increasingly severe mental illness added to the conjoined household burden of emotional dysfunction. He contacted no one, did not return any correspondence, and no one knew why. Keith sent me a link to show me the last public communication of Minóy written on the outside of a package that he had sent to the musician, Zan Hofman, with whom he had been collaborating. Keith told me he’d killed off the persona of Minóy. He felt deeply betrayed and furiously angry and wanted nothing more to do with the outside world. Here is what he wrote:
Minóy cassette works has been permanently terminated. My soul has dried up and blown away. I can no longer feel joy but only constant mental and physical (psychosomatic, so it seems) pain. We are three nonfunctional people alone in the void of Minóy house, sanctuary become prison. See and hear us go bump in the night in the day in the night in the day. It’s all the same. No exit. Now we scream help.
As we now know, Keith continued to make his innovative cassette noiseMusic for a couple of years after he killed off Minóy. After Keith’s death, Stuart and I felt it was important to try to preserve his work. We sent the master cassettes to Phillip B. Klinger who has digitized them for posterity. This book, as well as the accompanying cassette and CD, have been published to share some of these works with the world and to preserve the legacy of The Man Who Was Minóy.
For Keith and Stuart, the rest of the 1990s was progressively more and more arduous and frustrating. Keith had turned his creative energies to making digital art and he renamed himself “My Life as a Haint,” then “Haint.” In southern United States English vernacular, a haint is a ghost, an apparition, a lost soul. Years of doctors and medication had not cured him nor had it slowed the relentless progress towards the inevitable. He knew he would never regain the health he had lost and he was consumed with grief and anger. So often we see brilliantly creative people plagued with mental afflictions, illnesses I have come to believe have their origins in overly intense and innate sensitivities to the vicissitudes of life. The delicate neurochemistry of the brain and body goes awry and can slide into self-propagating, neverending cascades of reaction and tortuous re-reaction twisting and turning to try to maintain stasis—to reach a mental and physical status quo. As we reach our later years of life on this earth there is a tendency to gravitate downward as our resources for existence dwindle. Keith and Stuart were fated to experience this dwindle way too early in their lives. In the 1990s they were only in their early 40s, but the world was beginning to collapse in on them with a vengeance, drastically closing them in, isolating them. As the years went by, Keith’s fears caused them to become entirely cloistered: no family, no friends, no casual relationships with their neighbors. As he became more and more incapacitated by his physical and mental afflictions, Stuart was swept along with him into their conjoined isolation. They were cocooned in a house filled to the brim with the prodigious agglomeration of their lives, yet all of this cushioning barely mitigated Keith’s profound and all consuming terror. Small events can become magnified in such an isolationist environment. Reality becomes warped. There was The Incident of the Wall. After a minor earthquake, a small section of a five foot cement block wall bordering one side of the house property was knocked partially askew. Keith’s response was way out of proportion. He catastrophized this relatively minor event and agonized over The Wall for months. Even after it was repaired he relived it as if it had been a major disaster in his life. Was it that his web of safety, his protective shell against the world, had been breached? I think so. ON THE IMAGE SERIES: MINÓY AS HAINT AS KING LEAR
I first visited Keith and Stuart early in 2006 and would visit them a couple of times a year over the next few years. Each time, Keith was able to muster the will and energy to get out of the house in his wheelchair and the three of us went to museums and drove joyously around Los Angeles shooting continuous exposures of light paintings. Those outings were precious to Keith as they were the only times he got out of his room. He delighted in these occasions even as the herculean effort he had to exert to cope with pain took a lot out of him. We also had several indoor shoots where we took thousands of the portraits of each other, some of which can be seen on my Flickr website. 1
As a gift to him, to try to cheer him up, I put together an image Montage piece called “King Lear” from some of these photo sessions (http://vimeo.com/2258762). I also made “Infinity Arcade” with the intent to show his digital art work to prospective galleries (http://vimeo.com/1947808). He was drawn to the idea of publicizing his work in the art world, but would invariably change his mind and withdraw from the idea, saying no, he was too sick. It is from the “King Lear” series that Joseph Nechvatal has chosen the image portfolio for this book. By the time I met Keith and Stuart in 2005 and began to interact in their lives, their world was collapsing. Keith’s mental and physical issues were ever-worsening and Stuart was breaking down. He was worn out, never getting enough sleep, sinking more deeply into the mire of his own lifelong depression, becoming more frazzled. In retrospect, we see that Stuart’s incipient early dementia had already begun the insidious destruction of his brilliant mind. There were times when Stuart would call me to help Keith calm down. I could hear Keith in full panic state, screaming and sobbing, raging, raving, ranting on and on. It would take hours for him to calm himself down. Keith in the throes of a panic attack was a formidable and disturbing thing to hear. It was scary as hell. He did his best to deal with his daemons and had amazing powers of recuperation, but his exacerbating illnesses were increasingly impacting his mind and body and it became harder and harder to define what was Keith and what was illness. The last dreadful half year before Keith died was filled with emergency visits from the fire department to help him get up from the floor where he had fallen and several hospitalizations. By this time all he could do was listen to music. I was able to speak a few words with him on the day he died. Stuart was with him, holding him in his arms. I knew Keith Stanley Bowsza for the last five years of his life and I knew him as the digital artist, photographer and videographer who named himself ‘My Life as A Haint.’ His spirit is one of my guardian angels, and I imagine him looking down from the cosmos, ecstatic that people will be able to enjoy his work via these publications.
The day he died
Keith said to me, “I love you, sweetie. Stay in the light.”
In Commemoration to you, my dearest Haint.
My darling Keith,
your corporeal body passed into this Earth too soon, cheating you out of years of life. If only there had been a magic potion to cure you of your afflictions, if only fate had given a full lifetime to enjoy, if only . . . For over half your life you struggled with brain Tangled cascades of maniacal neuron Screams that rarely left you in peace. Your death was a death that brought relief. Tragic and sorrowful though it was, it was the only solution to ease your suffering, the ultimate best solution in a situation where there are no good solutions. Musings of my neon Heart . . . where it all comes from . . . the heart and the mind the soul the art the music the passion the love. The world around us will forever be demented . . . the flesh next to mine . . . the air downtown . . . perverted strangers . . . the blinded white House . . . . . . the world at large enthralled with violence pushing and steaming and bursting to get it on get it going and roll on and rollover and crush her human children into despair. The light keeps us going . . . looking for the light . . . looking for sugar . . . looking for relief . . . looking for safety . . . looking for love. Have no fear . . . but know when to duck . . . when to step aside . . . when to let darkness pass because it is blinded by hate and it doesn’t even know you but it hates your guts and if you try to reason with it or snare it or snag it or engage it in any possible way it will kill you in the end . . . eat you alive . . . so let it go . . . stay in the light. Stay in the light, my darling Keith, bask in the light . . . let it caress you from the darkness seize it from the darkness . . . pull it towards you and don’t let go. You are safe.
taken from:
to be continued...
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