Amazing experiments in electronic communication with the dead
The best way to embark on this Substack journey, I figure, is with a little disambiguation—what the hell is that newsletter title all about, anyway?
I've always had a soft spot for spooky picture books of the Mysteries of the Unexplained variety. Poltergeist photos. Kirlian photography. Russian telekinetics hovering a ball. Ectoplasm jetting from this or that orifice. Not that any of these phenomena feature heavily (if at all) in my stories. It's the aesthetic. I love the ambiguity. One half of me is a raging sceptic: the other just wants to believe, wants magic to be real. And those books are like a doorway to an impossible world, made real because (in the era predating deepfake technology) photographed.
I remember vividly my ecstasies, on first searching through the library at university, to find a comprehensive (albeit small) section dedicated to parapsychology. I was studying film up on a little (now almost certainly doomed) arts campus on a hill in Sheffield, England, and the library was a slice of slightly odorous heaven, filled with walls of VHS tapes and poky side rooms full of books I could never have imagined—portals to a thousand-and-one future obsessions.
The first book I took home was Breakthrough by Konstantin Raudive (with a subtitle I have shamelessly appropriated for this post and newsletter). A gorgeous black-and-silver covered hardback, dense with his experiments in recording EVP, or electronic voice phenomena. Raudive and his experimenters would leave reel-to-reel tape decks running in empty rooms and play back the recordings at volumes high enough to hear detail in the static. (A nod to which you can see in the opening shots of M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense.) Raudive claimed to find hours and hours of voices, conversations in different languages, people speaking over one another, chattering, gossiping, complaining, conversing as though very much alive. Only—not. Because no one was there. Breakthrough is full of these voices, transcribed, and it was these, more than the experiments themselves, which had such a profound effect on me. Here they were: the voices of the dead.
At the time, I was just coming out of a years-long obsession with William Burroughs, and there was something in the cadence of the voices, the odd syntax, the surreal or nonsensical content that echoed the Burroughs–Gysin cut-up style, simultaneously activating my scepticism and my utter conviction. There was no either/or duality. It was both either and or in joyous tension, both this and that, both true and not true. The book was a hoax in the very same world as living ghosts nattered and gabbed in the silence all about me.
And it's that space, that liminal point of perfect ambiguity where the supernatural resides, that continues to excite and inspire me as a writer and as a reader. The name of my website and of this newsletter is therefore a nod to that aesthetic of ambiguity, a world firmly grounded in the real that nonetheless hints at the impossible.
If you, too, dig on that ambiguous vibe, stick around. There's more where that came from.
Till then...
J.