by Hieronymous Superfly

One dark midnight in early 2013, I took the controls of a midnight-4 a.m. Saturday morning radio show on KNON 89.3 FM in North Central Texas. My new show was called Mansion of Madness, named after Juan Lopez Moctezuma’s weird film of the same name. I inherited the time slot of Rocket Radio, a popular show hosted by Cyberina Flux, who spun dance/industrial/ electronica for 14 years. No bizarre villain of pulp’s Academy of Night ever took more delight than I did at being in utter control of 55,000 watts of community radio. “In 14 years, your voice and your mixes will leave our solar system. Vibrations that you broadcast will outlive you, which is encouraging. But ultimately they’ll get lost in noises from stars and planets, drowned in a cosmic soup, which isn’t. More than likely once the signal leaves Earth no one’s really listening,” I was told by Nick 4-D, co-host of Rocket Radio early one morning. I liked Nick. He was a skilled curator, fucking up the airwaves in innovative, funny ways.

Times were weird-wired. Community radio had suffered worst during President Bill Clinton’s infamous Telecommunications Act of 1996 that lifted the national cap on radio station ownership. This ushered in an era of tiresome, commercial, corporate radio that undermined and bought out local radio, silencing local voices and communities. Mega-corporations gobbled up most of the radio bandwidth. Their focus groups picked playlists. From those, songs that elicited strong reactions- good or bad- were eliminated. Artificial, lackluster medication-time radio was everywhere. Rock was dead, rose again, overdosed, died again, and might still jump out of the shadows. Club music became ubiquitous, aboveground and every DJ “just killed it.” Fascism was on the rise again. So were authoritarian populism, erosion of critical thinking, psychopathic politics, oligarchy, and intolerance. Community radio still survived in the shadows, cross-pollinating with supportive media, archives, and global reach via web.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, this is Orson Welles and the name of this show is Mansion of Madness. Last week, after my radio artistry spooked scores of fart-wits into believing Mars had launched an all-out attack on New Jersey, the suits made me apologize to listeners who panicked during my masterful adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, a classic that should be familiar to anyone over the age of 5. Tonight I’m here to retract that apology, bite the hand that feeds me, and spit poison in the eye of anyone idiotic enough to think that the beachhead of an interplanetary invasion would be Grovers’ Mill, New Jersey. I was going to treat listeners to my adaptation of Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden, which is a really nasty bit of work, but instead I’ve decided to wash an entire stuffed, roasted goose down with a bottle of single-malt Martian whiskey.

-Dr. Night-pig & the Time Toilet

I grew up on radio. KLIF and KFJZ doused me in rock & roll and threw a lit match in my face. In the 70s rock was on AM and many kids wore their radios as fashion accessories, Panasonic’s R-72 Toot-a-Loop snaked around wrists. Their Pan-a-Pet was a colored sphere with a speaker and wrist-strap. I lived in a wilderness on its way to suburban deforestation. We lived by a creek and my joy was to listen to CBS Radio Mystery Theater under the blazing stars and moonlight. I recorded my first song compilations and field recordings on portable cassette and soon on a weird 8-Track deck that could also record cassettes. It felt like magic when I called a local station and the DJ took my requests. Later in life, I took up culture jamming, crank calling Evangelist Bob Larson on behalf of the Hot Tub Mystery Religion, and ultimately debating him on stage at churches in Ft. Worth and Euless (home of the HTMR). My friends included the legendary prank caller Brother Russell who targeted evangelical radio shows as an elderly woman named Melba. My friend Ryan cut a diode on his scanner so we could record early cell phone calls. Later he went to work at Survival Research Laboratories in San Francisco and the tapes were played at performances. Our mutual friend, Greg Leyh, made the world’s largest Tesla Coil (at that time) for SRL. The last I heard, he was working on one that would be powered by 12 million volts, and shoot off 260 foot lightning bolts

SRL’s soundtracks for robotic mayhem whetted my appetite for Exotica & Bachelor Pad Jazz, and I soon found myself spinning it at Forbidden Books, the Dallas town hall for glorious freaks in the 90s. I played there for books, coffee, and muffins. I soon wrote and edited a couple of ‘zines, Macumba and The Eulessynian Hot Tub Mystery Religion. As a result, I met new friends and was soon immersed in the Dallas underground where I DJ’ed secret occult/ absurdist warehouse parties like the annual Halloween Disturbathon, which featured muddy splosh pits, pig head fountains, designated fornication spots, live goats, espresso stations, weird art, secret rooms, pranks, and wild performances. Meanwhile, Thom Metzger of the Moorish Orthodox Church ordered my second ‘zine, reprinted one of my articles in the Moorish Science Monitor. He wrote “get yourself a Fez and consider yourself Poobah of the Lone Star State…what you’re doing is Moorish Science.” So I did. This odd event directly led to my meeting my dear friend, Mustafa al-Laylah, who was interested in Moorish Orthodoxy, infusing magick, ritual, video collage, and subversive sounds into area raves via the Hazy Daze Collectif. Our meeting was catalytic and the first Moorish Orthodox Church lodge in Texas emerged and has thrived for more than two decades.

In 1995, I directed my first warehouse party, Blisskrieg with my Disturbathon friends, including future robotics pioneer, David Hanson, who created a 5,000 gallon reservoir accessed via a slide. Ex-Yippie/ FBI fink George DeMerle created a 15 foot long dayglo Yoni that was suspended from the ceiling. I worked with a friend on a Tree of Life sculpture garden. He had access to concrete garden statuary that we painted and placed. With an hour to spare, we were desperately scrambling for something to represent the Cabbalistic Sephora for Hod (science), then watched as someone we didn’t know wheeled a cart with a projector into that spot, unfurled a screen, and started projecting Air Force flight training films. Future Mutant Sounds blogger Matt Castile DJed one room, I took another. There was live percussion followed experimental sounds. Then a loud pop sounded. The reservoir broke and flooded the warehouse. Oddly, the firemen and a couple of cops who had been observing our efforts for months broke out squeegees, evacuated the warehouse, and had the party up and running again in 90 minutes. Before the party, I had fallen off a ladder and broken the radial head of my elbow. After the party, David stepped in the wrong puddle and was electrified, a white arc shooting out of his elbow, nearly ending him. From those incidents we walked away with matching elbow scars.

By 2013, my head was filled with wild ideas, pranks, incipient radio plays, mad science psychobabble, and lots of music. I just needed a medium.

This is Hatey Puddin’ Bloop-Bop of the Tarnation Militia, and what you’re listening to is our new radio show, God Damn You All to Hell, coming at you like a beef-slap on KNON 89.3 FM. If you ain’t tuned in before, you must be some sort of blockhead, but I ain’t gonna hold it against you ‘cause that describes about most folks these days: corn-monkeys teachin’ their toddlers to shoot assault rifles, that dentist who snorted meth and paid to wrestle the last red gorilla, somethin’ he done in the nude! Don’t tell me he didn’t deserve to be torn apart like a CPS rag-doll. What a world.

-My Dinner with Dr. Night-Pig

For seven years, I have meddled with the airwaves and every aspect of my show are under my discretion or whim. I have done my best to break boundaries and to innovate. Being a fan of Orson Welles’ 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast, I used it for a springboard into writing and directing my own satiric radio plays while fomenting bizarre agit-prop. It turned out that I had more than a dozen friends who were top notch performers, enough to found The Mercury-in-Retrograde Theater of the Air and broadcast a series of live radio plays featuring the horrid Dr. Night-pig. Early on, I ran into a bit trouble with my station and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for sounding a recording of the Emergency Broadcast System during our second Martian Invasion. Other than that, I have yet to find the limit. Together with guests, I regularly read aloud from anarchist texts, occult theories of radio, words from visionaries, mad science rhetoric, and my weekly opening rant inspired by the late Peter Ivers, erstwhile host of New Wave Theatre. Guests have included Tom Riccio, director of the immersive Dead White Zombies theater company; Mack White, underground comic creator of Villa of the Mysteries and Texas scholar; Dr. David Hanson, who created the Philip K. Dick android and invited me to write dialogue for it concerning Dick’s mystical experiences with the Vast Active Living Intelligence System; Musical Prodigy Aaron Gonzalez, who treated listeners to an esoteric and hair-raising vocal ritual; and Bucks Burnett, who premiered a recording of Tiny Tim reading an absurdist book, The Boxler Letters. Additionally, a fake singles show with fucked up testimonials was featured regularly.

Greetings mere humans. This is Tanzuki the KNON Love Goat. Why stick your Buzz Aldren through a hole in the fence when you can meet a methed-up lot lizard with a heart of gold and soft gums, without the awful splinters or risk of necrotic venereal zombosis- what the Millennials are calling Deep Purple Persuasion or Icky-Ficky-Dropsy. KNON’s Dark Meet has all of the hook-ups and none of the hang ups. In the Goddamn Age of Aquarius, now that we have harmony and understanding, even you can meet hot monsters! KNON’s Dark Meet is the best way to get Johnson and Snazzle together, if that’s how you roll. We don’t judge. My thing is shaved midgets in little monkey suits who like to grind the organ. The word love gets bandied about a lot in these post-apocalyptic days. But take it from a real Love-Goat, me, the sound of love is better than its smell. Now stop worrying about the government and listen to some music before I fetch my gun, which I purchased with ease even though I’m utterly insane. May Baphomet bless these United States and our new Martian President Ultimo X. I’m going to trek down to Antarctica to wait out Helter Skelter, suckers.

During one show, as part of a radio play, a Mystery Ritual was employed to open the first occult lodge on the airwaves, to the best of my knowledge.

Unbuckle your forebrain, that I might tease the goddamn light out of your Darkness. For I am the Feast Queen of Shellies, and Thou art Ploppins McGurdy! I open the gates of Heaven so you can resume your soul. Tonight you shall know your secret name and come out of your goaty old death cave, Loyal Goats. But first you will suss the electromagnetic current of my Radio Mystery Hole, KNON 89.3 FM.

I’d urge anyone with interest in community radio to get involved with your local station. Volunteer at events and get to know the station personnel. Help with pledge drives. Get to know the DJs and apprentice with them. Appreciate the variety of cultures and musical styles your area offers. If you’re a disc jockey, this is the best way to get a show. Beyond the airwaves, a good community radio station is a bastion of something that has largely been lost: “the voice of the people.” As the media sphere explodes, one can hope that an electromagnetic Renaissance will blossom in defiance of corporate mediocrity and domination. Until that happens, I will settle for agitating against our present new Dark Age with tactics of carnival and Saturnalian inversion.

“Carnival is a pageant without footlights and without a division into performers and spectators. In carnival everyone is an active participant, everyone communes in the carnival act…The laws, prohibitions, and restrictions that determine the structure and order of ordinary, that is non-carnival, life are suspended during carnival: what is suspended first is hierarchical structure and all the forms of terror, reverence, piety, and etiquette connected with it… or any other form of inequality among people.”

-Mikhail Bakhtin

Hieronymous Superfly can be heard weekly, Friday night starting at midnight-4 a.m. at KNON.org or 89.3 FM in North Texas