Joseph Nechvatal, editor
THE OBSCURITY OF MINÓY
Joseph Nechvatal
Is it so a noise to be is it a least remain to rest, is it a so old say to be, is it a leading are been. Is it so, is it so, is it so, is it so is it so is it so.
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
Solitude, that dread goddess and mater saeva cupidinum, encircles and besets him, ever more threatening, more violent, more heartbreaking—but who today knows what solitude is?
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human:
A Book for Free Spirits
But he still did not know who he was . . .
Michael Knerr, The Sex Life of the Gods
He was feeling his way through obscurities.
Aldous Huxley, Mortal Coils
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The initiative behind this book and CD has been developed as a project to rescue Minóy from obscurity. Therefore, in the shadow of eldritch Priest’s essay “Obscurity and the Poetics of Non/Sense,”1 I would like to explain a bit of how the Minóy project emerged out of obscurity, while simultaneously promoting the aesthetics of obscurity.
In large measure, we owe a debt of gratitude to my coproducer, Phillip B. Klingler (PBK), for its existence. Phillip had known Minóy since 1987, when Minóy was at the peak of his audio creativity. Phillip had been reading reviews of his music in the cassette underground press, notably pieces in Option and Sound Choice, where critics were calling Minóy a master of sound collage and a must-hear maximalist. Phillip sent Minóy a letter and ordered some tapes from him, but nothing quite prepared him for the unique world of Minóy’s music. In private correspondence, Phillip explained to me what Minóy’s dense musical abstractions meant to him, and how he perceived them. He described Minóy’s noise music in obscure terms, which is appropriate, as the origin of any sound in a Minóy track is most often indiscernible, thus creating an otherworldly abstract experience. Phillip found the work “dream-like, nightmare-like, but also sometimes spiritual,” and Minóy’s sound affected him deeply. Phillip (a painter at the time) sent Minóy his first sound experiments—and they were met with positive, validating comments from Minóy. Consequently, they started talking on the phone frequently. They had both been involved in the mail art scene, so were already on common collaborative sharing ground. In the mid 1980s, Phillip had been exhibiting his paintings around the L.A. area, obsessed with moving deeper into abstraction. When he heard Minóy’s music, he knew that the abstract possibilities with sound expression were nearly limitless—and Minóy provided an artistic model for him. Through their developing relationship (he collabo rated live with Minóy in Torrance, California and worked very closely with him throughout 1987 into 1988, making something like ten albums together under different names), he discovered that Minóy would stay up for days and nights on end without sleep, very excitedly, and compulsively, creating artworks and music. After that, Minóy would spend days in bed, depressed and non-communicative.
1 eldritch Priest, “Obscurity and the Poetics of Non/Sense in the Writings of Raymond Roussel and Fernando Pessoa,” Mosaic 45.2 (June 2012): 1–17.
Through this creative process, Phillip discovered that as dense as Minóy’s music could often be, it was created with rather limited instrumentation: electric guitar, synthesizer, shortwave radio, and a Sony Pro Walkman. The only effects unit he used was a beloved Radio Shack spring reverb. Minóy didn’t use the common four-track recorder to overdub his sounds, and instead he dubbed back and forth between several Boom Boxes and cassette recorders that he would place in different proximities around his room. Minóy would do this over and over until he had achieved the spatial audio effects he desired.
As Phillip recounted to me, 1986 was the first year Minóy obsessively documented his sound works. The results were 33 full-length albums created in a twelve-month period. This manic, compulsive need to create more and more art—where ideas flow into work after work—would typify Minóy’s working method. During a fevered six-year period (between 1986 and 1992) Minóy created hundreds of cassette albums. Minóy defined the concept of mail collaboration, which suited his personality and his phobias well. (As I previously mentioned, he was an agoraphobic, didn’t like to travel and could not drive a car.) Minóy was addicted to his mailbox and would receive huge stacks of mail. He even adopted the name No Mail On Sundays for his collaborative project with Damian Bisciglia, a reference to their mutual postal addiction. Phillip (PBK) performed live with Minóy at the University of California, San Bernardino, in 1988—a show that became scandalous. Minóy had a colorful cloth that he had draped over his head and shoulders, his nails were painted black, and one could not see his face at all. He was doing a sort of Butoh-inspired strange, slow dance, while howling some anguished mashup of Somewhere Over The Rainbow and, ironically, I Get By (With A Little Help From My Friends). Campus crusaders shut the concert down, turning the sound system off after only fifteen minutes onstage, but the noise music continued for an hour, played through their own amps. This has been documented with a tape called Devil Music: Minóy Live (cassette released on the Nihilistic Recordings label in Holland).2 The press clearly loved the scandal (no surprise there), but events like this made Minóy acutely aware of how unacceptable and misunderstood his creative works were by society at large—how obscure he really was. This concert led to a dissipation of PBK’s and Minóy’s creative energies in collaboration, and they never worked together again. Phillip didn’t correspond with Minóy after that, but he was aware of Minóy’s activities in the noise underground. Their solo works appeared together on many tape compilations from that time.
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When Phillip came online around 2000, it was basically known amongst mutual friends that Minóy had dropped out and was not making music any more, and he had also completely stopped corresponding with his music friends. It has now become known that it was in 1992 that Minóy wrote to a close collaborator, Zan Hoffman, informing him that Minóy Cassette works (his DIY label) was over, writing (as Amber Sabri shares in her memoir in this volume),
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 non-functioning people alone in the void of the 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.
After 1992, nothing else was heard of (or from) Minóy.
In 2012, Phillip started doing some intense internet research and came upon a posting that Minóy’s partner, Stuart Haas, had made on an obscure mail-art site. It said Minóy had died in 2010. With Minóy’s old house address, Phillip was able to get the phone number and he called it. Stuart picked up and they talked as easily as if twenty years had not passed. Stuart told him about the sudden illness that had taken Minóy’s life.
Having learned all of this within a few hours, Phillip became very concerned about the master tapes: did Stuart still have the tapes? Stuart said, “no, we threw all those out.” Phillip hung up, with only Stuart’s email address in hand, but following up by email proved more encouraging as Stuart later recanted, stating that he had kept any tapes that Minóy had written master on. Phillip was elated and wanted to help. He suggested helping digitize and archive the Minóy tape collection, yet didn’t hear back from Stuart on this for quite some time. Eventually, Minóy and Stuart’s good friend, Amber Sabri, stepped in to help. Amazingly, she had the complete collection of tapes Stuart had saved. In June 2013, Phillip received three large boxes via UPS. Opening those boxes, for Phillip, was like finding the Holy Grail. In the boxes were all (or all of what was left) of Minóy’s master tapes: his life in music, his legacy, everything that the man obsessed over and the things that made him famous in the 1980s cassette network. The first thing Phillip did was physically count and document every tape in those boxes. There were at least twenty five lost works: just the jewel-case/insert with titles and credits, but no tape inside. There were a number of cassettes with no written documentation on them at all. Some masters were missing completely, as there are tapes listed on the Discogs website3 that were not found in the archive. Using all that information, Phillip was able to compile the definitive Minóy discography—and it totals 208 releases. Because of all the mystery behind Minóy’s self-imposed exile, the boxes settled a lot of questions about Minóy’s creative output, especially the late period works. Still prolific in 1991, he completed almost fifty full-length albums. In 1992 there were a little over twenty, six in 1993, and in 1994 only one was found. It was the late period works that were most interesting to us for this project, as the fact that anything after 1992 even exists was extremely fascinating. Amber Sabri related to Phillip how Minóy’s parents had moved into his house (actually into the large three-car garage) and had brought all their worldly belongings with them, so now with his parents there, plus Stuart, it might have been very difficult for him to feel comfortable creating his music, even as his parents enjoyed and admired his art and music. Amber describes it as a “happy and functioning situation for all four of them. Stuart worked full-time as an aerospace engineer and the parents took over the household chores.” But for whatever reason, Minóy’s eerie vocalizations disappear in these last recordings. But why did he stop all together in 1994? It may have been in part the changing technology—away from cassette to digital formats (like the CD)—that was furiously happening at that time. But Amber tells me that she believes Minóy at this moment was disenchanted with making music altogether, that he felt betrayed by certain noise musicians, and that he really meant it when he said he was finished with the world as a musician. As his illnesses worsened (exacerbated by thirty years of medication treating his pain, panic, mania and paranoia, plus his morbid obesity), the creation of sound art consumed too much of his energy. He became physically less able to create anything in any form that required physical movement. As Amber recalls, Minóy’s father died in early 1991 and his mother’s paranoid schizophrenia became impossible to handle at home so they moved her into an assisted living facility. Minóy steadily became more and more ill and Stuart became more and more overwhelmed with working full-time, caring for him full-time, and trying to maintain all the duties of a household. It was at this point that Minóy—now calling himself Haint—turned to making digital art from within his bed. As Phillip expressed to me, Minóy’s late works seem very stern, with an angry edge to them, “ponderous structures, with sounds buzzing around, moving in little ways within a confined space, they are claustrophobic”—and that makes sense, given his situation. For this project (this volume you now hold in your hands, or are reading on-screen, plus the cassette and CD released from punctum records titled, simply, Minóy), Phillip combed through the archive in search of shorter compositions that would represent the oeuvre. This was a challenge, as the vast majority of Minóy’s compositions are of running time between thirty to forty-five minutes in length. As Phillip articulated to me:
Listening to Minóy’s music is sort of like watching a movie: it takes you on a journey, the twists and turns can’t be anticipated because nothing repeats, the structure is always in flux until it ends. The sounds aren’t literal. They’re metaphoric only in the most abstract way. These long, elaborate pieces were essential to Minóy’s aesthetic of a cinema of the ear, allowing him to explore outside of time restrictions that would apply to avant-garde sound artists working in the shorter LP format.
Yet Phillip and I were not interested in editing longer compositions down to excerpts for this project. We were more interested in compiling a collection of his shorter works from different time-frames in his career, thus allowing a listener to come away with a greater sense of Minóy’s achievements, and thus also the bigger picture of what Phillip calls his “musical genius.”
taken from:
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