Ephphatha! An Improvised Performance on Emily Francisco’s Trans-Harmonium

Dad talked about the clutch of his 2003 Toyota Matrix as though it were the Christ-wafer spinning itself to death somewhere deep inside the car’s crust. Everywhere, cars die on little stone shores of road. You see them sometimes. The driver’s gone. And you wonder where they went. They’re getting gas, or getting help, or they just walked off into the brush beside the road, a place that looks like the absolute end of the world. And you’re sure this is the only desert left, the only lifeless place, or what Marc Augé calls a “non-place”: “two complementary but completely distinct realities: spaces formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure), and the relations that individuals have with these spaces,” an anonymized transient space that “cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity” (76, 78). The non-place is unnatural nature, an exit ramp to the end of the world. In the hilly, upper-middle class non-place of Roswell, GA, where people wash their cars for fun, we couldn’t get our car past twenty miles-per-hour, and long drives up short hills meant lots of time for radio. My dad and I were experts in conservative talk radio. Michael Savage and Michael Medved were trusted voices, but Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck provided occasional low-brow romps. I believed that if the world were ending, I’d hear it first from Michael Savage. Yes, maybe our car was dying because we never washed it. A car wash is the only Baptism anybody gets in a non-place.

In Aramaic, “Ephphatha” means “be opened.” Jesus utters the word to a deaf man in the gospel of Mark. Ephphatha’s blown out and distorted radios open the listener’s senses to radio’s harsh simultaneities—its discorrelated overlapping dialogues/musics during its last, desperate gasp for air, at the end of its world. Ephphatha is one last rapture before heaven shuts its doors and leaves us in this non-place, before Dad’s car breaks down one last time. On talk radio, the “good news” of the gospel sounds like its own bad luck. The worship of Jesus sounds like pity, as though the modern American evangelical knows better than Jesus did. They wouldn’t have gotten caught like he did. They would have been less trusting of the Pharisees, a little less naïve, and a little more realistic. Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, but what he really wanted was to lease an Audi. And when the Audi died, he’d simply leave it on the side of the road and walk further into the non-place of modern life. It is from this peculiar substitution of Christ’s so-called victory over sin with pity that evangelicals construct their unique eschatology as a desire to speed the world into the end of the world, into the non-place at the end of history: the only fitting revenge for their savior’s weakness, his murderer’s cunning. On conservative talk radio, the gospel starts to sound like bad news so that the only possible affirmation, the only some-place is a non-place, is the end of the world: a rapture delivering souls from the non-place of the dead-living to the some-place of the living-dead. In Ephphatha!,Red Hot Chili Peppers float up to heaven hand-in-hand with charismatic pastors asking for seed money to plant a church in the non-place, in the Hell they take the world to be. 

Recorded in The Media Archaeology Lab at The University of Colorado Boulder on Emily Francisco’s Trans-harmonium, “a deconstructed antique piano re-wired to play a collection of radios,” or, perhaps more precisely, bedside digital alarm clocks, Ephphatha! is a study of the radio’s harmonies and counterpoints in its gasping twilight years. Emily Francisco, an artist and academic working with “cheap consumer technologies [and] discarded obsolete devices,” designed the trans-harmonium, so that each key triggers a different alarm clock, thus creating a way to view radio as not only a way to make recorded music accessible, but also as a musical instrument itself. Despite the undoubtedly harsh sonic quality of the instrument, there is undoubtedly a kind of musicality to playing the trans-harmonium. As I played the trans-harmonium, I listened for natural breaks in musical and grammatical phrasing to change the station. In so doing, I enjambed bible verses with commercial breaks. I played chords so that each component of the chord told the truth about another component. I grouped Christmas songs—I recorded the piece in the middle of December—with commercial breaks, electoral politics with bad pop music, and religious threats; I recorded the piece around midnight so that only the most extreme voices were left talking—with sudden harsh noise.

Ephphatha is a palimpsest. The piece ensures that the listener is always listening through noise to access the song or conversation beneath it. Or, conversely—and possibly more interestingly—the listener may find themselves listening through the song to hear the noise it’s made of. To retrain the piece’s improvisational quality, to retain many of these ugly palimpsests, I edited as little as possible, compressing the audio only slightly to protect listeners from sudden and extreme changes in volume that might be harmful. This insistence on retaining the fidelity of an improvised performance meant keeping the moments of dead air where a key on the trans-harmonium might be broken, and you can hear me searching for a working key and a new voice. Dominic Pettman, in Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics, writes that “the challenge” of writing and indeed listening to a piece like Ephphatha! “is to truly listen to something as it is disappearing . . . becoming an object of loss” (50). Ephphatha!, in retaining its mistakes and awkward silences, loses as it listens, disappears as it accumulates. Moreover, because of the piece’s palimpsestic nature, the transcript for this piece had to represent the same polyvocality by transcribing the discorrelated voices, conversations, and commercials in one column, and brief descriptions of the sounds beneath, above, and around them in another. I also elected to transcribe the spoken text of the piece as a long poem to call greater attention to the piece’s tonal breaks and shifts: a kind of “Waste Land” if Eliot lived in a post-Rush Limbaugh waste land.

Ephphatha! draws from and builds upon several sonic projects. Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf (2002), which approximates the experience of flipping through radio stations on a long car ride, is one such project. Yet, Songs for the Deaf displays a hierarchy of listening. It merely uses the radio merely as a rhetorical frame to provide context for the songs. Ephphatha!, however, displays no such hierarchy. It uses a song or a conversation as the occasion for flipping through radio stations, for turning away and moving on, as much as it uses its extended noise collages to tune up the radio for more fire-and-brimstone sermonizing. Likewise, Glenn Gould, one of radio’s greatest discontents, who famously smuggled his voice into his rendition of Bach’s Goldberg Variations (1956) as though the voice were contraband, producing new ways of hearing and embodying musical counterpoint and collapsing listening hierarchies, provided another touchstone (Alexander 82). There is also historical precedent for a harsh instrument like the trans-harmonium. Jonathan Sterne describes a “Cat Piano” that Athanasius Kircher built in 1650. The device would stab cats, each chosen for their unique tonal range, in the tail, producing a shriek. Sterne writes that “the cat piano showed there is no such thing as cat music, only human music made through tormented feline cries” (68). Ephphatha! is a kind of cat piano: “only human music made through tormented” alarm clocks. While the tortured alarm clocks may not produce the same retrospective concern as one should have for Kircher’s cats, there is nevertheless something exceptionally pitiable about these alarm clocks, which once decorated many a bed-side table, and now, broken and half broken, slouch into the trash bin of history. Yet, the same cannot be said of the content of right-wing talk radio itself. The non-place of the right-wing underground has, in its zombie afterlife, simply moved increasingly to weird internet fora and social media. Now it’s underneath every tweet, diffused endlessly across the internet, where it, escaping its radio-cage, is limitless. Now, there is no place but a non-place, only one giant exit ramp at the end of the world.