What do Brian Eno’s 2003 album January 07003 and Neal Stephenson‘s new novel, Anathem, have in common? They’re both inspired by the Clock of the Long Now. The device, which is billed as “the world’s slowest computer,” was initially envisioned by Danny Hillis as the Millennium Clock, a device that takes us out of the instant and into the depths of time. For perspective, it is a clock that ticks once a year, and whose cuckoo, as Hillis put it, comes out once every 1,000 (more info at longnow.org/projects/clock). The album by Eno, who gave the clock its name and who is on the board of its foundation, was composed of bell tones synthesized from the device. In Anathem, Stephenson imagines a world vaguely like ours, but one in which the mythic clock, and others like it, have provided a sense of scientific-ecclesiastic routine amid the chaos of many millennia. The book is narrated by a young servant of the clock, named Erasmas, who early in the story (on page 22 of the hardcover edition) recounts part of the process of maintaining one of these massive yet prickly clock devices:
Our combined strength could not overcome the static friction of all the bearings and gears between us and the sprocket hundreds of feet above from which the chain and weigh depended. Once it became unstuck we would be strong enough to keep it going, but getting it unstuck required a mighty thrust (supposing we wanted to use brute force) or, if we chose to be clever, a tiny shake: a subtle vibration. Different praxics might solve this problem in different wqays. At Saunt Edhar, we did it with our voices.
Note the emphasis on voices. Like Eno, Stephenson hears music in the Clock of the Long Now, which is why the very title of the book turns out to be a song itself, one of “mourning and farewell,” as Stephenson puts it a little later in the novel (one page 100). An album of music inspired by the mathematic systems of Anathem, titled, Iolet: Music from the World of Anathem, is due for release by David Stutz (more info at Stutz’s website, synthesist.net). “Iolet” is appaently the word for music in Stephenson’s world.
The Noisejihad netlabel is back in action, returning with uncharacteristic quietude. Its most recent release, a beautiful trio of live performances by soundscape guitarist Aidan Baker, is arguably the label’s most peaceful offering yet. Noisejihad’s stock in trade has long been, true to its name, destructive recordings along the lines of a sonic equivalent of Sherman’s March — pure scorched audio. Recorded on April 24 of this year, this live Baker concert, quite the contrary, ekes out a splendid haze, from slow-build dawn-break stateliness (
The image to the left plays with perception of scale. That circular saw diving headlong into the white dome is not, in fact, a saw at all, but a tiny exposed contact microphone whose sharp metallic edge has cleanly sliced through a halved eggshell. What that mic, along with others like it, located in such brittle environs is exposed in four MP3s posted in a LiveJournal entry by Steve Burnett (aka Subscape Annex, at