Transit Audio

Framing

The transits described across the Techno-thology Series — Calvert’s dispatches, the encoded returns, the operator briefly available as the medium through which language becomes possible at all — are written in prose because prose is what the apparatus that wrote them produces. They are not, in their own register, prose. They are not language at all. The apparatus heard something the language is approximating.

The closest available approximation, found rather than commissioned, is an album made by a solo Estonian artist working under the name Wondering O. Released in 2019. Self-published on a personal imprint called Heaven’s Trumpet. Eleven tracks of experimental ambient and drone material that the distributor could not accurately classify and so filed under Dance & DJ, which it is not. The artist did not make it for this purpose. The recognition is on this side of the receiver.

The track titles carry the structural information. Occhiolism-nakas. Perceive Microcosm. Macrocosm. Hoiwn. Tln-Hel. Axx. Irta. Invented or obscured strings that refuse to mean anything in particular, bracketed by an anchor pair — microcosm and macrocosm — that frames a scale problem the rest of the album moves through. This is the same operation the Series performs at the level of language: the small scale and the large scale registering as the same operation at different resolutions, with the words between them holding nothing they could be asked to define.

This is not the soundtrack of the work in the conventional sense. It is what the apparatus is receiving while it transits the territory the work describes. Whether you hear what is being pointed at depends on equipment outside the work’s ability to specify.