GX Jupitter-Larsen 'Characterized'

Psychiatrist Ewen Cameron ended up being a compensatory and reputational nightmare for the Canadian government, after the behaviourally and psychologically devastating impact of his psychiatric experiments – in part delivered as contractor services to a subproject within the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program – were revealed in later decades (a fate not limited to Cameron, and not the only part of Cameron’s life or practice deserving of criticism). A feature of Cameron’s work was the use of repetitive spoken words, delivered in isolation and as part of an arsenal of techniques intended to psychologically deteriorate a patient – in the undelivered hope that a new construct could then be inserted.

Alvin Lucier’s seminal minimalist work ‘I Am Sitting In A Room’ also realises degradation through repetition, a piece of narration repeated through recording and tape playback, degradation, room atmospherics and frequency emphasis emerging from the process to realise something new from the repetitive process. It may be no coincidence that a classic image of Lucier in performance – used recently on the excellent ‘Illuminated By The Moon’ boxset – makes Lucier up to resemble an involuntary subject.

Both serve as experiential reference points for ‘Characterized’, a piece for radio authored by GX Jupitter-Larsen and which aired on Australia’s Radio National in May 2015 after an earlier airing in the United Kingdom. The piece subverts GX’s entropic intentions to bore away at psychiatric wholeness by the use of its own unstable repetitions of a few central spoken phrases, taken from Chelsea Manning’s testimony as part of the judicial process which led to her conviction and imprisonment for Espionage Act violations. Cameron’s work is part of the MK-ULTRA legacy which continues to inform interrogation ‘techniques’ carried out by America agencies.

After those initial few words provide the unstable point of our trepanered opening, silence, Manning’s text expands from a selection of opening single word repetition to short passages sampled from her testimony and underpinned by extended exhalations of hollow feedback, the content deformed by edited stutter and cacophonous layering, and with doubt clinging to the words as glitch and decomposition take root by operation of GX’s own clandestine techniques. Ultimately the words are unstoppable, their initial probing and hesitancy coaxed on by the smaller repetitions into greater segments, layers and disclosures, ‘Characterization’ ending with a denser selection and longer phrases than the small fragments which opened it.

While the promotional blurb says that ‘Characterization’ was created with the intention of capturing a dream state, its sound creation carries an abuse focused on isolation and degradation through repetition (Anthony Adeane’s book ‘Out Of Thin Air’ explores the intersection of dream states and interrogation techniques and is a fascinating bisection of crime confessions) which is initially more dismal than that description suggests – ultimately triumphed, however, by Manning’s testimony revealing itself in spite of the sonic attacks on her voice which reflect the social, judicial and political attacks on Manning’s name, character and conduct.

The skill of repetition is to locate purpose, something Lucier and Cameron share even if their worlds never collided. GX Jupitter-Larsen does so with ‘Characterization’, the work far more immersive than what its somewhat simple creation would ordinarily carry. My single point of concern is that some background knowledge/context is unfortunately important for appreciation – a listener coming in with no information may only hear repetition and glitch, without the techniques or content carrying the power that GX’s choice of character imbues in the piece. A power of radio is the excitement of discovering the unknown, turning the switch to hear something new and undeniable. While ‘Characterization’ sensibly disseminates by public media it also arguably suffers from that too, the potential impact of discovery lessened by what I consider to be the necessary immersion in the story which the piece portrays.

An archive of the Radio National broadcast of 'Characterized' is available here:
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/soundproof/characterized/6445292