Sidebar: The Musical Rabbit-Hole

[natecull]

This, probably, isn't anything (directly) to do with Townsend Brown, but it's an interesting set of very personal data that falls into the realm of what the kids these days on Reddit call "Experiencer" stuff (with big E).

See, people who have actual UFO encounters often have a bunch of ESP or high subjective experience stuff that goes along with it. At first that discussion was all about "alien abductions", thought of as a physical taking of people by physical aliens, but in recent years, the definitions have broadened a bit, so that almost any kind of personal subjective phenomena are counted in that big-e Experience. Whitley Strieber of course was one of the first famous writers to go down that rabbit hole (and wasn't even sure that whatever it was he was dealing with were "aliens". Mike Clelland and his owls synchronicity ( http://hiddenexperience.blogspot.com/) perhaps one of the more recent.

I've never been a stranger to the idea that the "UFO phenomenon" (and whatever else is true of Townsend Brown, he is certainly *adjacent to* the UFO Phenomenon in its earliest days) is limited to the nuts-and-bolts world. Rather, I grew up in a religious subculture where, in the 1970s and 1980s, it was very common to find books about the spiritual aspect of UFOs. Often cast with a dark aspect to it; the subtle fear was that merely by thinking about some of these subjects, you could "summon" them. Which is not far from what seems to be the truth of the Phenomenon, in fact. A fashionable modern UFOlogical term for this is "The Hitchhiker Effect".

Anyway. Fastforward from the 1980s to late 2015. I'm on Linda's Cosmic Token forum and the atmosphere feels dysfunctional. I had been tinkering with building playlists for a few years on my own computer and Youtube was starting to become a place where sharing playlists seemed possible. So I decided what I needed was some music to blow a few psychic cobwebs out of my head. I assembled the list "Go Forth" out of a feeling of both deep frustration but also what I knew was a conscious intent, and it just sort of... spilled out of me in a somewhat spooky way. I was fully aware that if nonphysical entities existed, then there were elements of it (such as the song Calling Occupants by Carpenters) which were, very literally, an invocation. A cover of the Klaatu original, that one goes back to material written by Albert K Bender of "Men In Black" fame: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Contact_Day It always gives me a little shiver.

I knew I was opening a door in my mind which was closed for a good reason: I had felt something pushing on it as a kid in the 1980s. And at that time I had been deeply afraid of something coming through, so I had bolted and locked that door well. Now I was opening it again. But I knew and trusted all of the other songs, and I felt it was worth the experiment.

Well, the result has been interesting. Nothing horrible happened, but. Something definitely did come through. Something quietly creative. My playlists before this point had all had a sadness about them; after 2015, they transformed. More interestingly, I found that the lists were organising themselves on multiple levels, with a spiralling, fractal structure. I was mining Youtube for songs I'd heard only once or twice in the 1980s but which, I found, had left a deep subconscious impression on me. I was able to link them into a whole mythology that worked as a private story for me. Broken into manageable chunks, and which also work as a perfectly good soundtrack for programming to.

(Because that's what I use this music for, and my main reason for doing it; in cubicle land we need personal space and headphone music creates that. And after a while you get bored listening to one playlist, and so...)

Copyright being what it is, I can probably never publish this story. Certainly not in its current form of playlists. But that doesn't matter. I know the beats of it, I know the characters, I've been living it for eight years now. It's entirely built out of recycled media but it's *mine*, in a deeply satisfying cyberpunk way. Part of the point was to see if it's possible to tell a story entirely through *links* between semi-randomized components provided by others, and nothing else. It turns out that it was. And if I ever have the need to write a novel or a TV series (not very likely that Netflix will come calling, but you never know), I'll at least have a set of material to mine for it.

At the same time, it's also been a journey of exploration into the musical history that I missed out on growing up; thanks to sites like Discogs and Second Hand Songs, it's now possible to learn of the complex web of connections between artists, bands, producers, writers, and how they formed overlapping cliques and scenes. And that's fun too. I feel like I've made a lot of new (or old) friends.

And UFOs keep turning up in the music, of course. Whatever it was that I opened the door in my mind too, it seems to have a sense of humour and it seems to like looking at the sky.

One of the songs on my original list was Vangelis and Jon "Yes" Anderson's "Shine For Me". In my mind, that would be the music for the scene when the couple vacationing in the Bahamas get their UFO encounter. I'd had it in my library for a few years, but nothing else by Yes. The lyrics go:

More will come as you reopen
All your senses changing

It felt like a promise, and it was one. And that seems to be what happened to my subconscious memory during this process.

More than that: there seems to be a kind of cosmic synchronism going on. It's happened so many times now that when unexpectedly I feel the urge to compose, I look at the moon phase. For example...

Well, I felt the urge last week. Assembled a list. Pushed it to Youtube. Looked at the moon phase: 75% gibbous, waxing. "Yeah, that disproves the moon theory", I said to myself. "That is certainly NOT a new or full moon. Status: BUSTED."

But. These lists usually come in matched pairs. I knew this one was incomplete; it ended emotionally unresolved. And sure enough, yesterday, in an unexpected rush, its counterpart surfaced. When they come that fast, it's usually a timing thing. I pushed it to Youtube today.

Looked at the moon phase, and what do you know ( https://www.timeanddate.com/moon/phases/ ) 99.99% full.

It's chillout music, this one. It doesn't have a plot really. Just moods. The songs are perhaps a bit "big", a bit "obvious", and I absolutely don't care. They're all ones I can stand to listen to, can just put them on and tune out and let them embed into my unconscious and *feel happy* as a result, and that's what matters.

"Fly" (43 minutes): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... hCJhetzwg7
"High" (41 minutes): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... 83IL3Uf5fa

The "keystone" of the first one, around which the other songs accreted, was Dubstar's "Stars", and I don't even know how it came into my head. Perhaps I heard it in a store? The second one - and which actually came first, then ran away and hid in my head, so probably is the actual keystone of the pair - is, I think, "Carol of the Bells".

Did I mention that I've never, to my knowledge, ever had an actual UFO experience? All my experience has been second-hand. But that doesn't seem to matter.

It turns out that many, many people who have creative experiences seem to describe something similar. The happy little UFO machine elves in my head that like spinning straw into gold aren't at all unique to me. It's just the way the universal unconscious presents to me.

But why was it Townsend Brown, in very particular, that seemed to kick this off? And why the full moon correlations, I keep wondering? Yet there it is. Big and round and bright.

Happy first full moon of the solar year, everyone.

Regards, Nate

[Jan Lundquist]

Thank you for sharing all of that, Nate. I remember your novel. It was interesting and very well done. When I tried to go back to it, to share with someone, your site came up with a big security risk warning on it.

I have had one daylight sighting of a "UFO, but I am not sure that I wasn't seeing a cloaked US craft. It was a translucent bubble, at maybe 1000 ft, judging by surrounding buildings and trees, moving slowly but steadily, traveling up the mountain behind me. The reason I suspect a US craft, is that particular location is between two of the largest USMC bases in the nation (Pendleton and 29 Palms. There is often helicopter traffic between them and this object was traveling along the same trajectory.

My favorite "close encounter" of the Wilson kind (Tom Hanks movie reference) is really just a "coincidence." While meditating, I had the thought that ETs had visited the park across the street. The next day, while walking there, I found a green soccer ball, with Alien faces and "We're Out Here" written on it in black ink. It lives by my front steps now, and is faded and deflated, but it makes me smile every time I see it. ( I would share the photo, but I have reached my attachment limit.)

There is something comforting about knowing we humans aren't at the peak of intelligent life, because we are a mess. I would hate to think we are the best Creator could do.

Jan

[David Osielski]

There is something comforting about knowing we humans aren't at the peak of intelligent life, because we are a mess. I would hate to think we are the best Creator could do.

Love this quote from Carl Sagan in "Contact" to agree with the sentiment...
“You're an interesting species. An interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not..."

Here's the clip from one of my favorite warp drive, worm-hole, time dilation, SETI movies! John Hurt as S.R. Hadden is my favorite character.
A real private aerospace guy with likely, NSA, NRO, NASA, ESA connections
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OTEygS02JY

[natecull]

I remember your novel. It was interesting and very well done. When I tried to go back to it, to share with someone, your site came up with a big security risk warning on it.

Thank you for the kind words! That would have been on https://natecull.org/wordpress/ Very probably my site was still running HTTP (unencrypted mode) at that time and so a modern browser might have called it insecure. Hopefully it doesn't show security warnings any more.

I have had one daylight sighting of a "UFO, but I am not sure that I wasn't seeing a cloaked US craft. It was a translucent bubble, at maybe 1000 ft, judging by surrounding buildings and trees, moving slowly but steadily, traveling up the mountain behind me. The reason I suspect a US craft, is that particular location is between two of the largest USMC bases in the nation (Pendleton and 29 Palms. There is often helicopter traffic between them and this object was traveling along the same trajectory.

That's impressive! Can I ask what decade that was in?

Regards, Nate

[Jan Lundquist]

It was in the mid-nineties, Nate. The object did not seem large enough to be carrying a crew. At first I thought I was seeing an escaped balloon, as there was no discernible sound, but it was traveling in a straight line, against the wind. Three or four of us watched it pass, so I know I wasn't hallucinating. From this vantage point, looking backward, I wonder if it wasn't an experimental drone?

Jan

[Jan Lundquist]

Thanks for the clip, David. Beautiful. Sadly, we are swimming in (small k) knowledge today, but the best we can do, still, is baby steps forward. Maybe. Babies can afford to fall on their butts, the human race, not so much.

It seems to me that the great unknown in this Townsend Brown world, is whether or not we have actually leapfrogged ourselves, scientifically speaking. And If we have, do we owe it to him or to the ETS and crashed crafts of UFO lore?


Jan

[David Osielski]

Babies can afford to fall on their butts, the human race, not so much

Yep. Especially when we're talking about nukes.

Jesse often points people to Hastings' book.
https://www.amazon.com/Nukes-Extraordin ... 1434398315

Didn't realize there was a documentary?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7319088/

[Paul Schatzkin]

That's quite a story, Nate.

I'm intrigued by the idea of playlists, but curious why you're using YouTube.

i clicked on one of the links above, clicked on the first video/track in the list and... had to sit through a couple of commercials before I could actually get to the music.

I don't do commercials, or, at least, as little as I can. So this is a non-starter for me.

Why don't you use a music service like Spotify, which actually encourages the sharing of playlists?

Whatever, here's one to add some time, Jackson Browne's "For A Dancer", which ends with...

Keep a fire for the human race
Let your prayers go drifting into space
You never know what will be coming down
Perhaps a better world is drawing near
Just as easily it could all disappear
Along with whatever meaning you might have found
Don't let the uncertainty turn you around
(The world keeps turning around and around) go on and make a joyful sound
Into a dancer you have grown
From a seed somebody else has thrown
Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own
And somewhere between the time you arrive
And the time you go
May lie a reason you were alive
That you'll never know

All of which seems pertinent to the TTB story... come to think of it, I quoted these verses at the end of the book.

YouTube (sorry for the commercials) https://youtu.be/IU1rZa8Ur_Q?si=U0tJU2uxKunLSiUP

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/5zKu6Ei2 ... 6f214d4464

--PS

[natecull]

Hi Paul!

I'm intrigued by the idea of playlists, but curious why you're using YouTube.

i clicked on one of the links above, clicked on the first video/track in the list and... had to sit through a couple of commercials before I could actually get to the music.

I don't do commercials, or, at least, as little as I can. So this is a non-starter for me.

Why don't you use a music service like Spotify, which actually encourages the sharing of playlists?

These are all good questions. I can't say that I have *good* reasons for using Youtube, but I do have reasons.

First, I share your aversion to ads, which is why I always browse with an adblocker and have for over a decade now. So yeah, my experience of the web and of Youtube in particular is probably quite different from that of others. That would indeed be a problem if I were attempting to do this commercially or as a permanent project which I needed to be 100% available to others.

Second, when I started this project, back in 2015, my impression was that Spotify was a subscribe-only service, and I wanted something that was accessible for free. Just in terms of personal finances, I was literally giving up espresso to save money, so I didn't feel I could justify a monthly digital media subscription on what was a personal toy extravagance.

Third, I initially had an *extremely* specific set of tracks I wanted to use - often because I had a personal memory of each one - which I had found by browsing Youtube and so I knew they were there (although I had no idea how long they would stay up, and some songs have indeed dropped off). I'm talking things like small indie and sometimes cassette 1980s releases. Sometimes there are a few tracks that aren't strictly speaking music, like ads or TV themes. Is this stuff on Spotify? Is it *all* there? I didn't know in 2015, but I figured it would be difficult to match bit-for-bit the stuff I was locating on Youtube. And my strange internal process, driven as it was by specific personal memories of specific tracks, meant I couldn't just substitute; it was either the right track or it wasn't.

So despite the extreme unsuitableness of the venue, and the whole "sidewalk chalk in the rain" kind of feeling of impermanence, I went ahead and committed to Youtube because that's where, for me, the music literally was happening, and it was the only way I could keep up.

It is probably time to check out Spotify as it is in 2024 and see if it now has everything that Youtube does.

Nate

[David Osielski]

Hi Jan, Paul & Nate (gotta turn this into the Beatles "John, Paul, Ringo" somehow...but I digress)

Needed to rest the left side of my brain researching rabbits, rabbits, rabbits...

And stumbled upon PlaygroundAI.com and NewProfilePic.com

As you can see, I've added a new avatar with that Tron-Blade Runner-Hawkeye vibe!

In any case, I entered the entire text string of TTB's wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Townsend_Brown
into the AI prompt and Voila! http://tinyurl.com/422dsjc4

There are a bunch of Einstein, Tesla, Oppenheimer-like ones, but I think if you play with the prompt text, you can tweek the results.

These are some of my favs. Enjoy!

[natecull]

These are some of my favs. Enjoy!

(Shivers). Yep, Three-Armed Mutant 1950s Radio Teletype Guy seems a very appropriate image to describe the state of the Internet today.

We are entering an era of accelerated remix culture sucking its own fumes and while I like a good remix as much as the next GenXer, it turns out that I often prefer looking at actual authentic real information sources and not made-up ones.

But the GenZ kids today, they don't seem to care if something is true or just "truthy-flavoured". Even the programmers - our new priestly overclass - aren't reading - they're getting language models to read for them and then believing whatever comes out the hopper. And that worries me quite a lot. Like in the early days of radio and electric amplification (the 1930s, when nothing bad happened because of new technology at all), it is going to be very easy to fool a whole lot of people just by buying some servers.

(By the way, the histories of the specific people running, eg, OpenAI are..... interesting. Cult-flavoured, to be specific. I mean an actual cult. The Roko's Basilisk crowd. Going back to the 1990s Transhumanism Usenets/listservs.)

Yeah, I know, this all isn't totally new, dodgy people running media was still the case in the 1970s and 1920s and 1850s. Thinking particularly of the esoteric and alt-spiritual subcultures that intersect with the Townsend Brown story, which have always had a somewhat loose grasp on honesty and scholarship despite having some interesting grains of reality. And some of whom leaned, shall we say, "quite far away from the center and in a rightward direction". I'm thinking right now of Tom Valentine (Waves Forest's mentor, just two steps removed from Townsend) and his 1990s shortwave radio station.

Regardless of history, now we're running a realtime social experiment in polluting our information sources using neural nets, and we're doing it at planetary scale right in the middle of two shooting tank-and-cyber-wars in Europe and the Middle East and an economic crash in China. Fun times may be ahead.

Okay, that's my Old Grumpy Man, aka "Plato Shouts At This New-Fangled Invention of Writing" bit out of the way. Carry on.

Nate

[natecull]

I just stumbled on the British blog "The Haunted Generation" - long story but it's because I've been binge-reading this week 18 years of the British magazine "Look & Learn", part of the backdrop of my childhood - and I think this site's rationale probably sums up best what it was that I and my odd muses have been trying to do with my music project. Trying to capture that pervasive sense of "hauntedness" that I grew up with.... but for a 1980s New Zealand childhood rather than a 1970s UK one... less haunted by ghosts than by nuclear war, UFOs and computers... and also, trying to invert it, to ground and redirect the fear into more of a sense of wonder.

(And that last bit is the part where I feel like *something came through*. All of my previous efforts before 2015 were stuck in that dark sense of hauntedness that the blog author describes. But then something changed, and it turned bright. That attempt at inversion is actually the whole point of the project; I'm trying to get beyond Forteana to a sense of coherency, not to wallow in it. To recenter on Townsend Brown: This is what I think TTB does for the subject of UFOs, which is so often chaotic and doomy: TTB was a very real person and it helps enormously - with people like this, who have become modern urban legends - to be able to find out what parts of the legend are and aren't real.)

This whole thing may or may not make sense for anyone who isn't of my specific generation. But here:

https://hauntedgeneration.co.uk/2019/04 ... eneration/

This wasn’t just a feeling that I got from Bagpuss; it seemed to pervade much of my 1970s childhood. And it’s a feeling that I tried to describe, emulate and recapture for over twenty years, without success. Until, in the late 1990s, I heard a piece of music that so transported me back to that formative era of cosy wrongness that my 25-year-old self sat down in my childhood bedroom and gently wept. It was an instrumental track called Roygbiv on the 1998 album Music Has The Right To Children, the debut release by Scottish electronic duo Boards of Canada. I’m listening to it again as I write this, and it still makes me shiver. Woozy, vintage synths pick out a melody straight from some long-lost BBC Programmes for Schools and Colleges module, while the spectral voice of a child repeats some indistinct playground holler, possibly played backwards on a loop. I’ve no idea, but it doesn’t really matter – the effect on me was profound. At last, I thought. Somebody understands my haunted, 1970s childhood. Somebody else has experienced those same feelings of lost, hazy disquiet; of watching Children of the Stones on listless February afternoons and worrying about the ghosts that live in my Grandma’s bedroom.

I wasn’t alone. Writer and graphic designer Richard Littler heard the call, too. “We’re like the guy in Close Encounters…” he tells me. “You think that no-one can understand what you’re talking about, but then you find all of these people that have had the same vision. My first feeling came from Boards of Canada too, and I remember when I first heard Music Has The Right To Children, I couldn’t believe that they’d caught a mood that was so specific”.

One of my reasons for using Youtube in "Novas" is that sometimes video is an intrinsic part of the experience, as this 2006 fan video for "roygbiv" captures.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT0gRc2c2wQ

Regards, Nate