Annihilating the Past Read online

it made sense and of course I wanted to get deeper into it.

  Me

  That was when you started running experiments at parties?

  Trevor

  No, that was later. Dr. Allen wanted me to come out and help with his research. He thought we could amplify the effect if we worked together, so I cleared my schedule and flew my ass out to the west coast. I set up all my gear in a research laboratory. I’d be working on patterns and changing them on the fly while he was watching a wall of screens that had these computer models of actual brains. They were really beautiful, and I would tweak a sound and watch a screen full of brains erupt with pink and purple. Working that way we came up with our first algorithm. The first time we tried it on live people we increased the response to something like 62 percent.

  Me

  So these were real sorties at this point?

  Trevor

  Yes definitely. The very first ones. We kept refining it and got the response close to 80 percent before I left.

  Me

  What was the message of these first sorties?

  Trevor

  There weren’t any messages. Dr. Allen could see if the people had gone into the hypnotic state from his sensors. We’d just let it wear off.

  Me

  What was your role then? Couldn’t he have just applied the algorithm to random noises and gotten the same result?

  Trevor

  No, you need a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down. People who don’t respect the art form just think it’s a pattern of rhythms and repetitions that are introduced and interrupted in specific ways, but the brain has to be in a certain state initially. Listening to music can put it in that state. He tried to use our findings with visual patterns, but he found that the way the brain interprets visual stimulus is too literal. Music opens up an abstract kind of thinking that leaves a person open to hypnosis. The right kind of music opens up the mind in the right way, the music that the patterns are embedded in makes all the difference.

  Me

  So you came back to Baltimore with a bunch of annihilation sorties that didn’t have any message, they just put people in the initial state?

  Trevor

  Yeah, after that first trip I had three complete sorties and a few mini experimental ones.

  Me

  How long?

  Trevor

  The four mini ones were 8-30 minutes, but we figured out that the optimal length was 74 minutes.

  Me

  So did you play the sorties out right away when you came back?

  Trevor

  Pretty soon yeah. I talked to Dr. Allen about using the technology to influence behavior and emotions, and he told me where the message should go, so I modified one of the sorties and played it out right away. The results were pretty staggering.

  Me

  But the first annihilation sortie was played by Telephere.

  Trevor

  Right, but it was my sortie.

  Me

  Why didn’t you play it yourself?

  Trevor

  First of all ‘play’ is the wrong word. The sounds and patterns have to be too precise to actually play it live. A fraction of a microsecond timing change can ruin the effect, so it was all prerecorded. We didn’t want anyone to know that though, so we needed someone on stage. It was new, so we decided to put a new face up there, plus I wanted to be out on the floor to see how people reacted.

  I was getting a lot of help back then from our promoter, Jaime Mum, and she knew this kid Hector who had played some of our after-parties under the name Telephere. He wasn’t a very good DJ but he looked great, he was a sewerpunk with a kind of wild-hyena look, so we threw him up there and told him to hit buttons and turn knobs, but he wasn’t doing a thing.

  Me

  So he didn’t have any input into the content of the sortie?

  Trevor

  None. That’s not to take anything away from what he did later, after he left us. He actually turned out to be an amazing artist, and I have a lot of respect for him. Some of the stuff he put out on his own was really groundbreaking, but at the time we just threw him up there because he looked cool.

  Me

  He tells a different story in his film.

  Trevor

  I never saw it, but I promise you all the parties that he played with us, he was just faking it. I did all those sorties.

  Me

  Tell me about the first one, what was the message?

  Trevor

  We wanted to get people to dance. That was the message, it was simple. Get on the floor and dance sucka! (laughs) It worked, every single person at that party was dancing, not one person was hanging back.

  Me

  Was this one of the parties you recorded?

  Trevor

  No, the third party was the first time we set up spatial time scanners. We did that because the second time we played a sortie, things got a little out of hand and we got nervous. We were so happy with the dance sortie that we figured we’d push it a little further and bring people’s inhibitions down. We figured the enemy of dancing is self-consciousness, so we put this sort of ‘let yourself be free’ message in with the call to dance.

  People let themselves be a little freer than we thought they would. People were taking their clothes off and having all kinds of sex right on the dance floor, I mean we were shocked. We just wanted people to have a good time, not risk pregnancy or VD. If someone found out what we were doing we coulda got sued or thrown in jail maybe. I called Dr. Allen and told him what we’d done, and I convinced him to come out and lend his analytical mind to our efforts.

  Me

  You were scared of the power the sorties had over people?

  Trevor

  I was in awe. I saw the algorithm as the culmination of thousands of years of musical practice. It seemed to me to be the most important discovery since the harmonic scale. Music had always had a profound effect on people, but now we had the key to controlling its effect. You could make a person feel exactly how you wanted. People say that Dr. Allen and I invented annihilation sorties, but we didn’t, we discovered an algorithm that had been there all along.

  Me

  So Dr. Allen came to Baltimore to help you throw parties?

  Trevor

  (laughs) No, he came to help turn the parties into controlled experiments. I think he’d been secretly longing to take this stuff out of the lab and see how it worked in a more dynamic environment. He brought a couple of research assistants with him, one of whom was Emma Silverstein, who became my collaborator on a lot of the post-crash sorties. We set up spatial time scanners and chemical screeners, so we could determine what drugs people were on, and then we threw those five parties that became so famous. Or infamous…

  Me

  These were with Telephere on stage?

  Trevor

  Yeah, and he was blowing up, people were mobbing him when he came offstage. I have to say, he handled the situation really well. He wanted to get involved in the creative side of things and I think I was pretty dismissive, so it wasn’t a huge surprise later, when he struck out on his own. Anyway, with each of those parties our skills got refined. I found that I could create incredibly subtle and emotionally resonant responses along with whatever the main message of the sortie was. I felt like the palette I was working with was the range of human feelings, and that sound was just the brush. Those were really heady times.

  Me

  Were you releasing the sorties on your label?

  Trevor

  Not then because if we did someone would figure out what was going on. We were paranoid (inaudible) … with good reason.

  Me

  How did the truth of what you were doing finally come out?

  Trevor

  The parties were attracting a lot of attention. The authorities, we later learned, thought we were drugging people somehow. They thought we’d come up with a way to aerosolize ecstasy. (laughs) When they executed their search warrant they got
all of Dr. Allen’s research and they seized all the STS recordings, and of course they saw everything in the most negative possible light. They arrested us for possession of child-pornography based on the STS data from the parties. We had images of some crazy shit going down on the dance floor, and not all of the participants were over eighteen. But at the same time they put out a press release saying we were trying to brainwash the youth, so it was pretty obvious what their real beef was about.

  Me

  How long were you in jail?

  Trevor

  One night! The label hired some good lawyers and we all got bonded. It was the beginning of ten years of legal hassles though, and we were thoroughly demonized in the media.

  Me

  Was that the end of the parties for a while?

  Trevor

  Oh no, Dr. Allen was spooked and ran back to California, but I had three new sorties in the can so I decided to capitalize on all the publicity. The news outlets described what we were doing as drugging people with sound. The criticism that actually kind of stung was when they said it was immoral to do this to people without their knowledge or consent. It made me think maybe we’d gone about it the wrong way, so we threw a party and said ‘come and be drugged with sound.’ Apparently that idea appealed to a lot of people so we had to book a huge venue. We were charging a fortune and selling out immediately. Once word got out, our parties started making millions of dollars, pre-crash dollars, and the more the cops and politicians tried to demonize us, the more popular we got.

  Me

  Was this when you started broadcasting them?

  Trevor

  Yeah, I think so. I had a sortie I thought was really important, a goodwill message, and I wanted as many people as possible to hear it, so I struck up a deal with a radio broadcaster.

  Me

  Old fashioned terrestrial radio?

  Trevor

  Yeah, the pick system was new, so we thought it was best to do it that way. We’d put out a bunch of CDs and cassettes of the sorties, but we found it was diminishing their popularity because if a person listens to the same sortie over and over the effect diminishes every time. We had a bunch of people saying the sorties weren’t as strong as they used to be, or that mass-duplication dampened their power which was all bullshit. At the time there were only ten or eleven sorties in existence, and we weren’t producing any new ones, so it was just that people had heard them before and they weren’t nearly as powerful the second time.

  Me

  So you needed to make some more.

  Trevor

  Right, but Dr. Allen was freaked out. Eventually I lured him back to Baltimore with the promise of riches.

  Me

  Were you calling them annihilation sorties back then? Where did the name come from?

  Trevor

  It came from a particularly rabid news article someone wrote about our parties. The guy described what we were doing as launching sorties of sound designed to annihilate all independent thought. The first CD we released was called ‘Annihilating Sorties of Sound.’ The music on that first CD was credited to Telephere, and I know he tells a different story about how he came up with the name, but it just isn’t true. In any case it isn’t worth fighting over, I think it’s a terrible name. If he wants the credit let him have it. By the time I realized that’s what everyone was calling them it was too late to change it.

  Me

  At what point did you start helping other artists make sorties?

  Trevor

  Around then. See Hector, Telephere, had hooked up with a Swedish mathematician who had backwards engineered our algorithm based on recordings and broadcasts and stuff. I didn’t have him under contract or anything so the first I heard of it was an ad for a new Telephere annihilation sortie. I was angry at first, but eventually I figured there was no way I could contain a musical development that profound, and I figured I should ease back my control of it. I was feeling burned out at that point anyway, and I thought I was repeating myself, so I went looking for people with something to say. I signed philosophers, rappers, singers, and poets. They all saw the sorties as a way to positively impact people’s lives.

  Me

  That’s when you met Tiny?

  Trevor

  Yeah, she was this really inspirational poet, and she wanted to use the sorties to empower women. Of course men responded just as well to her stuff as women did, which bothered her at first. (inaudible) … she did empowerment and self-respect sorties that were really popular and freaked out the powers that be. It gave them a hint of how effective the sorties could be as a political tool.

  Me

  Were they still trying to throw you in jail?

  Trevor

  They would’ve if they could’ve, but this was before the CNP. Charging me with child-porn was brilliant because every news report that mentioned me called me ‘accused child-pornographer Trevor Brushton.’ Even after the state knew they were going to lose the case, they prolonged it just so they could keep calling me that. Then it was tax evasion, then I had to testify before congress when they were talking about restricting or banning annihilation sorties.

  Me

  (laughing) How can they ban a pattern of sounds?

  Trevor

  I don’t know but they banned a plant for seventy years, so I wouldn’t put it past ’em. I just went and was completely truthful about everything. I told them how I thought it was the culmination of all music and one of the congressmen asked me why I didn’t release the algorithm for anyone to use then, and that question kind of stuck in my head. I kinda thought maybe he was right.

  Me

  But you did release it.

  Trevor

  Yeah, after year zero. The CNP was putting out militaristic and control sorties, so I figured the worst thing that could’ve happened was already happening, and it would be better if everyone had access to it. I didn’t want anyone using the methods I’d developed for war or hate, but I couldn’t stop it. Releasing the algorithm would at least blunt the effect a bit.

  Me

  Let’s talk about the end of the world and what has happened since then in the states. You took an early stand against the party?

  Trevor

  I’d say they took an early stand against me. (laughs) When people couldn’t buy tickets to the parties, or buy records anymore we had to fold up the label. I just couldn’t keep paying the staff with no money coming in. I still wanted to continue making sorties though, and I started working with Emma Silverstein who had some innovative ideas. I was paying her out-of-pocket.

  Me

  Where was Dr. Allen at that time?

  Trevor

  He was financially destitute so he wound up taking a job at the University of Arizona. I was lucky because I always wanted tangible investments, like property and metals, so I wound up okay. I owned this property and had a place in Brazil, along with the Baltimore compound.

  Me

  Did you see it coming?

  Trevor

  No, of course not. The overseas places were really just in case the government tried to seize my assets, I wanted to have some holdings that they couldn’t touch.

  Me

  After the crash, you were still putting out sorties on the radio, why did you do that? There was no financial benefit.

  Trevor

  I did it to help people, to give them hope. The message of most of those post-crash sorties was ‘we can overcome this adversity.’ I felt like doing those sorties was a moral obligation.

  Me

  There’s a general belief that you were working with the CNP back then, and that they paid you to help manipulate and control the population.

  Trevor

  That’s bullshit, I would love to see one shred of evidence that supports that claim.

  Me

  People were rising up, and you made sorties about not succumbing to mob mentality.

  Trevor

  Right, which is exactly what the CNP represented to m
e, a mob mentality. You say people were rising up, and maybe that’s what it looked like from Canada, but at ground level? It looked like a bunch of terrified, starving people, trampling each other to death. I wanted everyone to cool out and come together to do something positive.

  Me

  There are people who think that you and Dr. Allen were working on a black-op the whole time, and that annihilation sorties are a tool of control.

  Trevor

  They can be used that way -just look at the CNP sorties. Having the recipe fall into the hands of the fascists was always my biggest fear from the beginning, but come on, it was inevitable. Ultimately there was nothing I could do to prevent it, so I open-sourced it and even published a step-by-step guide on how to make them. If I was working with the CNP why am I living in Mexico? Why do I live behind an electric fence?

  Me

  You’re saying you’re a target?

  Trevor

  Look at the documents Pacifica liberated in the purge. I’m on the list of people the party deemed enemies of the future. Read the list, out of a hundred and twelve people only four are known to still be alive.

  Me

  Most people assumed that Pacifica faked those documents.

  Trevor

  I think they’re real.

  Me

  There are other questions about your history that are unpleasant to bring up. You’re often described as a violent, unstable person. For example you were in a car wreck and a young girl was killed. The other person in the car said you crashed on purpose to prove a point.

  Trevor

  That was one of the saddest events of my life, I think about it every day. I died in that crash too.

  Me

  What do you mean?

  Trevor

  Death and life are binary, so in any life-and-death situation multiple worlds are created. The many-worlds hypothesis has been proven.

  Me

  But you’re here, she’s not.

  Trevor

  From my perspective, yes. You can’t observe yourself dead, so from your own perspective you always live through such an event.

  Me

  Did you crash on purpose?

  Trevor

  Does a human being have free will?

  Me

  Yes.

  Trevor

  Then I guess I did. Next question.

  Me

  What about some of the artists you worked with at your label who say they were taken advantage of financially?

  Trevor

  Like who?

  Me

  Telephere for one, and a bunch of others have said that you bought the rights to their entire back-catalogues after the crash. A lot of them have said they were desperate, and they sold their work to you for much less than it was worth.

  Trevor

  That’s bullshit, any artist who feels that way can contact me and I’ll gladly give them back the rights to their music. I was just trying to help those people out. I was trying to put money in their pockets, and as for Hector, we paid him for the use of his name and image, that’s all. Considering the amount of work he did on those sorties, which was zero, he should be happy he gets any piece of it at all.

  Me

  Why did you stop making sorties?

  Trevor

  Who says I stopped?

  Me

  You stopped