Theme: "Yellow Mercury 4," off Empathy Moves the Water by the Crooked Jades

(And we're back. I had to take a break from writing the newsletter to finish some projects. I'm delighted to resume, with a slightly different format for season two. Thanks for reading so far, as ever.

This newsletter started as a research notebook for a couple of books, which are both out this summer. Communication, co-authored with Mercedes Bunz and Paula Bialski, includes the story of Charles Cros's Martian mirror (told here) and Hans Freudenthal's language for extraterrestrial dialogue, which began as a draft for this newsletter. Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Technologists, and Utopians Who Created Cryptocurrency includes many parts that began as letters to you, from Bolshevik cryonics to probability and the Howland Will fortune. I couldn't be happier about either of the books, or about starting work on something new and telling more stories here.

If you're in the Bay Area, I'll be talking about Digital Cash at City Lights on June 4th, and we're holding a book launch at the Internet Archive on June 25th. I'd love to see you there.)

tune a brook by moving the stones in it

Fluxus (previously) was perhaps the most ephemeral, portable, and resourceful art movement, ready to be packed in a suitcase or mailed with a single stamp, making do with whatever could be found where its practitioners turned up: used clothes, community center pianos, junk-shop discards. The heart of Fluxus practice was the score, brief instructions for a piece to be performed. Most scores created by Fluxus artists could be written on an index card, and most of them demanded interpretation and adaptation. Many of them were musical in one way or another:

Bengt af Klintberg, "Calls, Canto 4" (Dec. 1965): "A party of about 100 persons walk out into a forest at sunrise, climb up to the treetops and call and sing a hello-chorus."

Mieko Shiomi, "Wind Music No.2" (1966): "Several performers operate fans toward suspended musical instruments such as bell, gongs, gourds, etc., making them swing and sound."

George Brecht, "Drip Music" (1959): "For single or multiple performance. A source of dripping water and an empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls into the vessel."

That last one was part of a series by George Brecht that fascinated the then art school student Brian Eno: "a big box of cards of all different sizes and shapes," he recalled, "and each of the cards had instructions for the piece." Eno was also interested in John Cage's chance-driven musical instructions (rolling dice, casting the I Ching, drawing from a deck of stories), and the work of Cornelius Cardew, a composer who prior to his third act as a Maoist folksinger explored the possibilities of what a prose score could be. His masterpiece The Great Learning is built on instructions like "Sing any note you can hear" (as Eno summarized it; here's Paragraph 7) which, in execution, means a crowd of strangers, without formal training, will move from discordance to converge on a set of lush, blurry harmonies around the resonant frequency of the room in which they sing.

(John Cage was also part of the revival of the work of Erik Satie, whose sheet music for his piano compositions has performance directions like these:

"Like a nightingale with a toothache"

"On yellowed velvet"

"Laugh without anyone knowing"

"Totally forgetting about the present")

Cardew's endlessly complex Treatise is 193 pages of beautiful graphic scores that look like geometric and optical diagrams, maps of rivers, process flowcharts and architectural renderings: a shockingly beautiful document, with no explanation as to how it should be interpreted, leaving it up to each performer to find their way through. He was a cofounder of the Scratch Orchestra, an ensemble that experimented with scores that included scribbles, designs for bell-ringing machines, and brief prose instructions:

"Chimes in an airstream"

"A great noise a very expensive noise"

"Tune a brook by moving the stones in it"

The painter Peter Schmidt had completed a series of 64 drawings based on the hexagrams of the I Ching when he and Brian Eno became friends. Both Schmidt and Eno had independently been working on sets of instructions, demanding interpretation, chosen by chance between drawing a Fluxus card and casting the I Ching which could break creative deadlocks in their respective studios. Trying to figure out how the instruction applied was part of seeing your stalemate differently, a way of cutting across your situation: a "worthwhile dilemma," as they put it, or an "oblique strategy." (Schmidt's first strategy read: "Was it really a mistake?" Eno's first was: "Honor thy error as a hidden intention.")

The deck of Oblique Strategies the friends created for themselves was written by hand on bamboo cards with instructions, puzzles, questions, dilemmas, and opportunities to rethink more abstract but still an echo of the score, the first step toward the open space of a new song or story:

"Go slowly all the way round the outside"

"Is there something missing?"

"Cascades"

"Fill every beat with something"

"Do we need holes?"

"Emphasize differences"

"Are there sections? Consider transitions"

"Go outside. Shut the door"

"Remember those quiet evenings"

(You draw a card instructing you to add a new card to the deck: what would it be?)