This is the nth in the MOO-COW Gamma series of Various Idiocy, Routinely Released by the Sly Beast of YOU, Fpfflfolqixzde R Necko. In this edition, we were lucky enough to track down Screaming Squid Stephenson and Graham Wallpaper Tao-Jones for an interview. This MOO-Cow Gamma is dedicated to the sections of that interview dealing with World Hack '94.

Part Only:

Floyd Gecko: I guess before we start talking about WH94, you should explain for our readers what World Hack is all about.

Screaming Squid Stephenson: Well, uh, it's basically an art project that the Netweb puts together every year. On July 23rd, a whole shitload of loosely affiliated pirate radio stations, experimental artists, political activists, and, uh, people like that... They get together and do a 23 hour hack. People in the listening audience send stuff in over phone lines or radio or whatever, and we share it around the world by shortwave, or by micropower rebroadcasting. It all ends up as a big confused mess most of the time. There's about 200 micropower stations participating, mostly in the States and Europe, but there's some on every continent. Uh, except Antarctica, although in '92 some guy from the French Antarctic team sent a little speech by shortwave.

FG: So how did you two get involved with World Hack '94?

SSS: I'd been doing the Hack for a few years: I have a micropower radio station in Salt Lake City. I'd been involved since, oh, about 1986.

Graham Wallpaper Tao-Jones: I met L... uh - Squid - through Dawn Coyote, who's another member of Mahlo, which is an experimental noise project I founded in 1979. Squid turned me onto World Hack by playing me some of the old recordings from the past few years. It fit in with the ideas I'd been thinking about, to do with self- containing open-ended art, or some shit like that. No, uh. You know, like how music is part of the environment we live in, and the environment is what music's about. I'm the media-sampling sound- collage guy in Mahlo: the multi-layer format appealed to me. One thing I particularly liked was this one segment from the '92 hack where live footage from a pirate DJ getting arrested in Atlanta got mixed into the mess in realtime. He was wired for sound at first, then some friends came to his hearing with mics, and samples from his arraignment for illegal broadcasting got recycled through the whole rest of the day. THAT's the kind of self-reference that I think is really cool.

FG: So you're into media-sampling. Can you just sum up the rest of what goes into Mahlo for us?

GWT: Hmm. Dawn is interested in computer generated patterns of sound: fractal music and some kind of cellular automata based on Feigenbaum numbers, and like that. Dan's mostly interested in making and playing bizarre instruments: electrical, acoustic, kitchen appliances, and stuff. He has a whole attic full of weird shit he's put together. And then there's K. She's interested in animal and plant music. You know, wolves, whalesong, birdsong, and stuff taken from electrographs of ferns. Typically about half the sound on our recordings are fragments recorded by me, K, and Dan, worked into a background by Dawn, and the rest is improv.

FG: So how did the two of you work together in World Hack '94?

SSS: Well, uh, Graham introduced me to the rest of Mahlo. Him and Dawn were the most interested in the Hack, but the others thought it was a neat project. Graham's good at picking out samples and noticing ironic ways to put them together. I let him use my studio pretty much by himself. I generally stick to talking, so I just sat with a mike off in the corner to talk, and handled the low- level technical shit. Graham did all the recording, looping, dubs, and such. Dawn wrote a couple of programs that were designed to switch inputs together based on previous patterns, and also to make her own weird techno music stuff to send to other nodes. She did a lot of the engineering that let us start using the internet for the Netweb in '94. The other two mostly provided raw material.

GWT: Yeah. Though Dan put together a neat setup in Squid's bathroom that used her building's plumbing to create bizarre acoustics and running-water effects, and we fed a lot of K's whalesong through it to distort it. We got a couple of calls from other people in the building, but I think most of them thought it was the water heater. [laughs]

FG: Okay. So we've got some background. Now what was the special thing about World Hack '94?

SSS: Well, I guess the main thing is that we'd decyphered the cheese ball by that point. Or rather, someone else had, and we had the data. So the important thing was that Dawn's electronic music was almost entirely based on the field equations for the U.S.'s flying disc antigravity device. The relationships between pitch, beat, volume, phase distortion, and all that stuff were precisely isomorphic with the agrav field equations. And while we were broadcasting it, sending it over the phones, or the net, or whatever, I did a little monologue explaining about the cheese ball, and about what happened to it, and how to decypher the music to figure out how to build your own disc... Uh.

GWT: Yeah. Well...

SSS: Uh...

GWT: Okay, this is one point we disagree on. I'm willing to believe that those equations are someone's theoretical work on antigravity. Even that the theory might be right. But I don't buy that the U.S. government has these things. If it were actually theirs, and it's as top secret as it's supposed to be, we'd be dead by now. Plenty of people have turned up from, you know, suicide by shotgun blast to the back of the head while investigating these things. But so far this cheese thing has gone totally un-covered- up.

SSS: While I say that they don't dare draw attention to this case, since they're relying on the sheer stupidity of the cheese ball to keep people from taking it seriously.

GWT: Yeah, well, anyway. There's no doubt it's something.

SSS: Yes. Anyway, the point is that while Dawn's musical version of the equations were being broadcast around the world, we'd keep getting these calls, or fragments of calls that filtered to us from, say, Austria, or New Zealand, about people flipping out and having visions, or being visited by the dead, or discovering nine- legged cockroaches dancing the Marimba on their windowsills, while listening to the music. There were also some death-threats, none of which were followed up later on, against whoever was releasing this top-secret information over the air. Graham sampled them mixed in other stuff, and turned them into an Abbott-and-Costello "Who's On First" routine. You know: "Who's sending the agrav plans?", "Exactly", "Exactly what?", "Who's sending what, exactly?", "Yes", "Yes what, exactly?", "I SAID, Who's killing what?", "No, what's killing who, and exactly's sending the agrav plans to when", "When?", "Tomorrow", "Exactly who's going to die tomorrow?", "Exactly.". That kind of shit.

GWT: Actually, it was exactly sending the plans to who, while when was doing WHAT to WHOM for HOW MUCH MONEY?

SSS: Yeah. And then the death threats got offended, and asked him if he thought he was being funny, and he said "Well, I'm laughing" and sent out a whole bunch of burbly whalesong with some "Hail Satan" chanting, and they seemed to get embarrassed or something, because they went away.

GWT: The power structure works by intimidation. I've dealt with the Men in Black before: you just have to allow yourself to be posessed by the Trickster God archetype, and they can't hurt you. They're the Black Iron Prison in miniature: they only exist as long as they can keep you convinced they do, and they have power over you. The MIBs are just receptacles for paranoid vibes. And it was actually "Ia Ia Cthulhu, we invoke thee Asmodeus, we implore thee Cheez Whiz". It's the studio version of the Turkey Curse. The whalesong was digitally modified using word-usage frequencies in the Gnostic Gospels of Thomas the Twin.

FG: So you banished the Men In Black? Or their telephonic forms, anyway.

SSS: Yeah. Which is what was significant about that Hack. We not only released a whole load of information that provoked them, but we got clean away with it. See, those callers were manifestations on a technological plane - which is just as distinct from the so- called REAL world as the astral plane, and just as close - of the Guardians of the Threshold. And what we discovered was that the Guardians, and other creatures of the Abyss, are less powerful than the tiny, loose-coupled world-mind we create in a World Hack. So they aren't that far beyond humanity after all. Which suggests that whatever secrets they're REALLY trying to keep, we're likely to discover them independently within a hundred years or so.

FG: Graham?

GWT: I tend to regard it as a cool phenomenon to sample. I'm planning on using extracts from World Hack '94 in the upcoming Mahlo album. It'll have the complete agrav-plan (or whatever) music peice Dawn made, along with the burbled whalesong, and I've been thinking about using some signal processing shit to turn all the samples of death threats from human voices into running water without making the words incomprehensible. I think that'd be cool.

FG: So are you two going to do any further projects?

GWT: Well, I wasn't able to help Squid with her bit in the Hack in '95, because of some crazy lawsuit shit, but we're planning on getting back together in '96.

SSS: I've been giving Mahlo some airplay on my show, and I've been talking to Dawn about having them do some live concerts on my station. But actually I've been getting more into religion lately, and a little less into music.

FG: Oh? What sort of religion?

[Here ends the segment of the interview devoted to World Hack '94: Screaming Squid Stephenson's religious monologues can be heard on her syndicated talk show on several micropower radio stations.]

Comment by Floyd Gecko:
This interview is significant, because it reveals the first known evidence that the Men in Black can be banished. They appear to be manifestations of Greyface: Chaos Majik and Discordian Majik have been highly successful since this discovery in preventing them from suppressing information from Beyond the Gateless Gate of Iok Satot. So keep the lasagna flying, and help us learn more about what REALLY lurks in the shadows of Area K-23. Inhail Eris!