Cluster Pluck: Whole Head Spring Finch

THF Drenching, Whole Head Spring Finch CD
(Council of Drent, CoD001, March 2011)
An appreciation by Michael Tencer

Whole Head Spring Finch is an album of tape-manipulations from musical marxist-dictophonist THF Drenching, composed of sampled electronics, voices, instruments & birdsong. Its use of birdsong is distinctly unlike the twee Sound of Music backgrounds we're used to from movies & tv & Tranquility Series samplers. It is a far bleaker, subversive use of source material, the aural equivalent of a détourned peace dove billboard shitting out a bomb. Its mix, heard as spatially frantic inner motion on headphones or as flattened tho threatening-to-break-thru-the-screen animation on a stereo, evokes a weird apocalyptic landscape of whirs, screams & wet chirps, calling to mind the deranged despot G.W. Bush's malapropism, "where wings take dream". As in Captain Beefheart's 'Orange Claw Hammer', birds are the basis in song for the Pleasure Principle to overcome the Death Instinct.

As musique concrète & not audio documentary, it almost goes without saying that Whole Head Spring Finch frequently refuses anatomisation. It becomes impossible to distinguish, given the digital & analog manipulations of the composer, the sources of the sounds; occasionally we feel we are among midnite mounds of kitchen appliances in revolt, only to have the sounds sped up or slowed down to reveal human breath, children's squeals or birdsong. Or vice versa, we hear burps & slurps as intimate as digestion, only to have their sources revealed as electronic or instrumental.

As Esemplasticists we firmly side with Hermann Samuel Reimarus against René Descartes, acknowledging the intelligence & instincts of animals; we know that we are animals as well, no more & no less. Yet as Freudians, we continue to dream of a world for which humanity is the natural measure, the better to serve the pleasures of the ego. There thus remains value in La Mettrie's Sadean (or Jarryan) hyperextension, when he praises Descartes for having been "the first to demonstrate that animals are pure machines", only to continue the analogy to human beings – including theologians – saying that "however great their desire to work their way up they remain fundamentally perpendicularly rampant animals and machines".¹ An erotic vision which finds no distinction between the organism & the automaton informs many of the masterpieces of the twentieth century, from Duchamp's Chocolate Grinder & Bride Stripped Bare, thru Bellmer's dolls & Zappa's Sy Borg, Artificial Rhonda & Ms Pinky. As André Breton reminded his readers in 1965, "Freud had no hesitation in considering all the manufactured objects which surround us to be sexual symbols and in separating them, as such, into masculine and feminine categories".² Musique concrète extends this Freudian vision to such a point as to make even that separation impossible, & as listeners we live directly in a world emanating indistinguishably from animal & machine alike. Much like Norman O Brown, Drenching's music poots forth "the grand union and communion of opposites, the overcoming of all division between male and female, self and outside world, thine and mine, body and spirit", & in doing so "has carried the burden of radical thought to the farthest point: the point where sanity must appear as madness, where concepts must turn into fantasies, and the truth must become ridiculous".³

This is not mere metaphor or prestidigitation, but a logical result of technological modernity. Consider the moot platitude perennially posed by defenders of the second amendment in the U.S.: "Guns don't kill people; people kill people". Is there really any difference whether or not the machine has agency if its use kills us anyway? Years of 'smart bomb' manufacturing & pilot-less aircraft have indeed given the lie to that old distinction; yet it goes without saying, as we hear the gradually lowered whining tones of what may be bombs on their way to their final destination, that the distinction has always been a false one from the standpoint of nature, that to animals like the birds of the final track 'Labial Doily' there is no difference between the human universe, its machines & the animal kingdom. There is only this life & the revolutionary drive to avoid annihilation.

The title Whole Head Spring Finch, as well as the title of the longest track, '6 Giant Fat Balls (Oleaginous Balls)' – illustrated by an actual product of this name in the liner notes – suggests the consumption of bodies, & many of the gurgles & wet grunts bear out this concept. Such 'songs for supper' are of course a common theme in music: 'Alouette', the late-1800s French Canadian children's song, addressed directly to the bird-victim, details how the singer will pluck the lark's head, beak, wings, etc., prior to eating it. On the eating of a whole head, one may recall the French delicacy made of the ortolan bunting, whose tortures prior to consumption include having its eyes poked out, followed by confinement in a small cage & a force-feeding of oats, millet & figs until it has swollen to four times its normal size; whereupon it is drowned in brandy, roasted whole – & then consumed with a cloth napkin over the head of the consumer, "to hide your cruelty from the sight of God".⁴ Indeed, François Mitterrand illicitly took it as his last supper.

For a more political elaboration of head-consumption, one might conceive of intellectual labour in terms of Marx's description of abstract human labour transformed under capitalism into Gallerte – literally, Jello.⁵ Mental work under capitalism is artificially valued & devalued, turned into so much stuff equivalent to just so much in wages (or, in the case of articles like this, afforded no monetary value at all). We may likewise read the head-consumption from the perspective of the commodity: the consumer product as the real live subject of capitalism, with alienated workers subjugated into its objects. The head is consumed by the reality overload, as Annie Le Brun describes the ubiquitous mediation of contemporary society. Or finally, we may read this head, & body, consumption as the basis of civilisation itself – as with Norman O Brown, "[t]o perceive in all human culture the hidden reality of the human body. This is to discover as Freud did, the Holy Communion as the basis of community; the Eucharist; the cannibalism, the hidden eating; one of the forms of which is war".⁶

But for now, let's imagine we the listeners are not the bird in question, drawn inside the liner notes attempting to emerge from the cash register & its arbitrary fixed price. Let's consider the bird as a bird, & listen to its song.

The European Goldfinch, one of the birds 'rhythmically sampled' on the concluding track, 'Labial Doily', is commonly kept & bred in captivity because of its beautiful song. "The call is a melodic tickeLIT, and the song is a pleasant tinkling medley of trills and twitters, but always including the trisyllabic call phrase teLLIT-teLLIT-teLLIT."⁷ Thus as prisoner, its song for English listeners evokes a command to eroticism, laughter & dishevelment, & an insistent urging to testify to one's experience. The Chaffinch, another performer on the album, was the subject of a famous study by ornithologist William Thorpe which found that castration eliminated song, while injections of testosterone caused the bird to sing straight thru its normally silent months.⁸ The linnet, on remarkably dictaphone-like chirps, is becoming an endangered species due to the use of herbicides poisoning its feed; while the American Goldfinch population, by contrast, has increased following industrial clearing of woodlands, the destruction creating the open area environments it prefers & driving down the number of neotropical migrant species.

It is impossible to imagine that the effect of humans has not indelibly marked the birds' songs. The lyrebird, perhaps the greatest songsmith in the art of mimesis, normally steals from other birds their calls, fashioning a vast sequence of borrowings to impress potential mates, occasionally attracting as well the species it imitates. Since the advent of humans encroaching upon the lyrebirds' habitat, many lyrebirds have added to their repertoire the sounds of human technology: thus camera clicks, engine turns & even chainsaws destroying the very forests they inhabit.⁹ Is this not the same contingent improvised blues displayed by the European Goldfinch in captivity? Is the castrated Chaffinch not a postmodern – & thus silent – poète maudit, sculpted in man's own image?

There is something singularly appropriate about musique concrète in presenting such songs of destruction. Magnetic tape sound recording, the technological innovation which made musique concrète possible, was developed during World War II for the purposes of standardised broadcasting as well as for espionage. (Tho for that matter, the Internet, which makes reading this article possible, was kickstarted by the Pentagon). The history of modern technology is the history of warfare – down to the plastic of the CD itself, cast from oil paid for in corpses of foreign war. All art after Auschwitz, sez Adorno, is rubbish; & indeed, as capitalism continues with the wholesale destruction of the planet, all culture really is built from the advances afforded by the byproducts of cast-off carnage. Whole Head Spring Finch, in making this overt, is actually a much different composition than the ones I suspect inspired it, Olivier Messiaen's Catalogue d'oiseaux, Réveil des oiseaux, La fauvette des jardins & Messiaen’s other bird-derived melodic materials. This is because we – the composer & the birds & the listeners – exist fifty years later, with that much more pollution & deforestation & scientific mutilation in btwn.

Now is not a time in which a jazz genius like Eric Dolphy famously studies the patterns of bird melodies, or naturalists like W.H. Hudson, John Muir, Alfred Russel Wallace, Louis Agassiz & John James Audubon write long poetic ornithological essays to a wide popular readership; an album like Evan Parker with Birds today sounds ludicrously sentimental in all the wrong ways, like a warbly Al Jolson belting out 'Mammy', or white Hollywood extras with Native American attire grunting behind one actual survivor. Who could be so unconscious today as to steal the sounds of dying breeds for the reflective consolation of middle class hipsters? Whole Head Spring Finch is in such a different world – this world, in fact, grassroots, with all the broken glass & traffic you can play with down on Lapwing Lane – that after listening to this album, all sentimental fake-believe 'communication' btwn a saxophone & a nature clip really sounds like the glorified hold music it is.

For that matter, the world itself begins to sound like this album: tiny taps & clicks everywhere, scrapes & spelunks, a series of articulate molecular movements to which we mechanically ascribe no meaning at all. If this world were animated like a Jan Svankmajer short, if it were liberated from the cage we live with constantly round our heads, what is it this world is saying? Is it like that Harlan Ellison shocker, 'I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream'? It seems to me that this album suggests a somewhat different image: a wordless understanding of unimaginable horrors, conceived of with a certain necessary gallows humour, or umour, as Jacques Vaché called it during the Great War, which allows for critical creativity at the very mouth of death & tooth decay. The ornithological image it calls to my cinematic mind is the owl: the one who watches the monster's first murders in Bride of Frankenstein, the one who observes the scientist's destructive experiments in rocketry in Borowczyk & Chris Marker's Les Astronautes, the one who sees the suffering of the children separated at the conclusion of Jeux Interdits. There is something uniquely subversive about this owl image, deeply unsentimental & yet knowingly unmoved in the face of death, like Buster Keaton stonefacing his way thru a purgatory of mishaps. Drenching never breaks the character of the music, never says "drumming on broken glass is funny", or "listening to electronic wails & cartoon voices is funny", or "digestion sounds funny"; nor does he place his art on a pedestal outside the realm of politics, in the untouchable sanctity of comfortable aesthetic contemplation (cf. Zorn post-birdcalls); & thus the neglected materials are able to speak, & we can laugh at ourselves for neglecting to hear them in the first place. It is horrific & disgusting & beautiful & funny, like that other masterpiece of musique concrète, Konrad Boehmer's 'Apocalipsis cum figuris'.

& perhaps it too has a touch of the apocalypse about it, but it is no more a holdover of an earlier Messianic Christianity than the Messianic Marxism of Norman O Brown.¹⁰ Because it is transformative, eliminating the distinctions between man & machine & animal, it is a certain kind of utopian dreaming, albeit dreamt right in the midst of our present-day wasteland.

& then, when we least expect it, we hear the mechanical sound of the CD player ceasing to spin its plastic rattle.

Michael Tencer, 2011-x-19


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1. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, L'Homme Machine (1748), p. 194.


2. André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, tr. Simon Watson Taylor (1972/2002, with extra articles, including the one I'm quoting from on Konrad Klapheck), p. 411.


3. Herbert Marcuse, 'Love Mystified: A Critique of Norman O Brown', [on Love's Body] Commentary, Feb. 1967, pp. 71-5.


4. See: The Urban Hunt: A Summer Spent Killing—and Eating—Seattle's Small Game.

5. cf. Keston Sutherland, 'Marx in Jargon' World Picture Journal Vol 1 No 1, pp. 6-11 .

6. Norman O Brown, 'A Reply to Herbert Marcuse', Commentary, March 1967, pp. 83-4.

7. European Goldfinch @ Wikipedia.

8. William Thorpe, 'The learning of song patterns by birds, with special reference to the song of the Chaffinch, "Fringilla coelebs"', Ibis (International Journal of Avian Science) 100 (1958), pp. 535-70.

9. Not featured on Whole Head Spring Finch – tho see the classic recording on Folkways, The Lyrebird: A Documentary Study of Its Song Recorded in Australia by K.C. Halafoff (Folkways FX 6116 (1966)), as well as this clip from a David Attenborough doco.

10. Tho, for a sense of where Drenching actually surpasses Brown's mysticism, viewing the utopian '"way out" [as] a political task' rather than purely symbolic or individualist, see Herbert Marcuse's 'Love Mystified: A Critique of Norman O Brown' [on Love's Body] in Commentary, Feb. 1967, pp. 71-5. While you're at it, see also Marcuse's statements regarding revolutionary art in his 'Letters to Chicago Surrealists', Arsenal 4, pp. 39-47.