Noise Without Borders Volume 3

https://noisewithoutborders.bandcamp.com/track/99-sensory-complex-james-heighway-slowly-drowning

Release On Demand (ROD) Program

I’ve recorded a few albums over the years, but haven’t often put them out on CD or tape. And I can’t really see the sense in having boxes full of them.

Sooooo…. what if someone wants to help me out and buy one? To that end I now offer a “Release on Demand” service. Kind of like print on demand.

It’s like this:

1. Go to the Microwave Eyes Bandcamp page. Or just click on one of the album covers above because each one is a link to its respective album.

2. Listen to some stuff.

3. Find something for which you’d like a CD or cassette.

4. Purchase a digital download. Digital albums are usually $7, but you can pay more if you want. Pay me $14 instead of 7, and I’ll make you a CD. Make sure to send me a note to let me know you want one!

Next Month's Album: Teenage Hells

November’s album will be Teenage Hells, a “solo” album. That means it will be under my own name rather than a band name or an alter-ego/alias.

There are 17 original tracks, plus a bonus cover song on here. Most of them were recorded in my high school years (1991-1995) on either a boombox or home stereo system, upgraded to 4-track cassette sometime in ‘94 or ‘95. A few tracks are newer ones, sneakily added to the compilation when they don’t belong there. I’ll leave it up to listeners to decide which ones are which.

Teenage Hells is intended to become a series, much like Phantom Limbs. If you don’t know about Phantom Limbs, it’s an ongoing series of recordings with songs recorded immediately after they are written, in the most bare-bones, lo-fi format, usually just an acoustic guitar and voice on a cassette. I’ve got tons and tons of cassettes that I am going through, a painful process. If I find anything else good (a subjective term, for these recordings and compositions hardly meet any accepted criteria for musical “goodness”) then there might be a Teenage Hells Vol 2 as well.

A post about how I'm doing

People always ask you how you’re doing. I always lie and say something positive.

I’m alright/Doing well/Fine, thanks/etc. Isn’t this what everyone does? I mean, who’s fine, ever?

If I were to answer truthfully, I'd probably say something like “disordered,” or “dysregulated,” or “unsupported,” or a combination of those things, because that’s how I actually feel. Every day.

Now, there are days when I do feel “fine” or “well” or whatever. Sometimes that feeling will stretch to a week. Sometimes two weeks. But it takes a tremendous effort of nervous system regulation, a monk-like level of self-control via diet, exercise, rest, meditation, therapy, scheduling and routines, and much more (without the aid or accountability of a monastery, other monks, or even reliable, present friends) to achieve that, and it inevitably crashes down like a house of cards, leaving me a mess for extended periods of time: weeks, months. But nobody ever sees it because the people in my life other than my immediate family only see me maybe once a season, if that, and when we do see each other, well I grew up by learning how to mask my thoughts, feelings, desires, mannerisms, facial expressions, etc. with some degree of effectiveness. And if we see each other that seldom, are we really even “in each other’s lives?”

Yes, I’ve been diagnosed and the verdict is that I have a pretty disordered mind. That means they told me I have four disorders: Autism, ADHD, SAD, and Adjustment Disorder with Anxiety. I had to look that one up, and I have to say that it’s a relief to receive diagnoses as it gives me a more clear path on how to heal and hopefully get better somehow.

So I’ve been in therapy. It’s helped me a lot already. Unfortunately though I’ve come to self-diagnose with yet another thing: Complex PTSD. I think some people think of this as “childhood PTSD,” and it has to do with having an “injured nervous system from coming out of a rough family.” Anyway, I’m pretty sure CPTSD well-describes a lot of my feelings and behavioral patterns, so I’m adding it to the list. Isolation, feelings of being utterly alone, even feelings of not being human, are regular states of mind for me and feature into the criteria for CPTSD.

When I was a kid, my parents would fight. And by fight I mean they would have screaming matches and things often got broken and there were multiple threats of divorce. Once when they were having one of these fights I got in the bathtub to feel safe and stop shaking. The hot water and the bubbles were soothing. But when the dust settled, they barged in on me and asked me which parent I would rather go with if they divorced. I’ll never forget it. I was eight years old.

Me in 1985 as an alter boy at St. Mary’s in Greenville, SC. I was in third grade there.

My older brother would beat the shit out of me every time I was alone with him, humiliate me in front of his friends, call me a “faggot” and otherwise degrade me, ever since I could remember. By the time I turned 13, in July of 1990, he’d cut all that shit out—he had been a wild teenager, even getting into fist-fights with our Dad—loud crashes as they wrestled each other against walls and into furniture—Mom and Dad and Danny all screaming at each other, cussing—chaos, entropy—I remember one incident where the big mirror that hung on the wall in the living room fell and broke—I would hide under my bed, shaking like a leaf, not out of fear for myself but fear for them, that they would be seriously hurt or even killed—I imagined I could just jump out a window and run away and that’s how I made myself believe I wasn’t scared for my own physical safety—I guess he had matured a little after having been kicked out and having to get a job and an apartment and all that. That summer he’d returned from working in Tennessee and started taking me out in his old Corvair convertible and getting me burgers and fries and milkshakes and talking to me like an actual human being, as opposed to a piece of shit that he wanted to scrape off his shoe. It finally started to feel like I had a real brother, not just some kid who was six years older and hated me. But then he got in a car wreck that same month that left him in a 5-month coma and permanently and totally disabled.

There’s a lot more than that, and I could go on and on about all these things, but those two patterns of abuse—let’s just call it what it is—are enough to fuck a little kid up pretty good for life.

I’ve never wanted to talk about all this shit for a lot of reasons, but mostly I feel ashamed of all of this, even though not a single thing they did to me was my fault. I don’t know why I’m even writing this now, except that the shit I went through in my volatile home life as a small child has led me to the state of extreme isolation in which I now live.

There are (thankfully) at least a few people to talk to on the phone about some things, but I don’t have a real social support network or a real circle of friends, i.e. people I can rely on to be present for me physically (as in in the same place at the same time) or offer me affection, people I can see more than once or twice a year. I can’t even get anyone to come over for a fucking cookout. It’s not their fault. It’s no one’s fault really, except maybe my family, who raised me this way.

Anyway, I’m fine! How are you?

MI PRIMERA PALABRA

Let me just say that I believe no words are bad in themselves. They’re just things, objects. They can be used for good or for ill. But the word itself is just a tool of expression. Sure it can be used as a weapon, but that’s not what it was made for.

When I was growing up my parents and my brother and I would go to Texas every summer and sometimes over Christmas. In later years, after Danny’s accident, we started flying rather than driving there. We would gather at an aunt and uncle’s house somewhere in the Houston sprawl or we would camp out at Grandma and Grandpa Martinez’ house in Corpus Christi. Things were very different there than they were back in South Carolina. The food was great and so was the music and the weather and some of the architecture but I think what made the deepest impression on me was probably the language.

Mom and her brother and sisters and Grandma and Grandpa would all carry on endlessly in Spanglish, seamlessly moving back and forth between Spanish and English midsentence. There were a lot of colorful expressions used. The one I remember most clearly and affectionately is “chingado.”

Coming soon to a theatre near you! Off-off-off-off Broadway.

It’s a very Mexican thing to say, from the verb “chingar,” which means “to fuck.” Like its English equivalent, “chingar” is one of the most flexible of utterances, being readily adaptable to any and all parts of speech. I learned how to say “chingado” if I accidentally broke one of my toys or stubbed my toe, “chingalo, pendejo” to asshole kids on the playground—they didn’t know what it meant and couldn’t remember it well enough to repeat to report me to the authorities—“¿qué chingados?” when confused. La Chingada is also a town in Veracruz, the Mexican state where my Grandma Martinez was born.

Of course I couldn’t say any of that shit around the adults. But all of my cousins and I cussed as much as we wanted when the grownups weren’t around, which was probably twice as much as they did. That includes my white cousins back in SC, but we just cussed in English.

The word “chingado,” in spite of and because of its vulgarity, is a source of great pride for me and many others. It’s a part of my essence that runs through my veins and can never be taken away from me. Octavio Paz wrote about the word in El Laberinto de la Soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude) and my interpretation of it is that Mexico is a bastardized nation. The biggest ethnic group there is Mestizo, a mix of the indigenous people and the Spanish invaders. During the Conquest, Cortés relied on an interpreter to communicate with the Mexica and other native leaders, a woman called Marina or Malintzin, often referred to as “La Malinche,” and sometimes derisively as “La Chingada.”

I’ve lived in South Carolina pretty much my whole life. But Texas and Mexico go with me everywhere I go because I carry them around inside of me. ¡Ay la chingada do I love being alive!

Los Angeles
April 28, 2023

Notes from the underworld

Sooooo you may know that I’m working on getting some shows again. Part of that is searching the internet for bands I played with before and venues and such, and I’ve come across some amusing tidbits.

For instance, this cover of my song “Bad Luck” by Greenville punk band Scuds, from their 2016 release Bombs Away:

What is a Mixed Means artist?

It’s not exactly mixed media, but it’s kind of like that. I first came across the term in a book called The Theatre of Mixed Means: An introduction to happenings, kinetic environments, and other mixed-means performances by Richard Kostelanetz. It was a seminal work in my development, featuring interviews with La Monte Young, John Cage, Ann Halprin, and others concerning work that blended techniques and ideas from various artforms, dissolving many boundaries between them in the process. Robert Rauschenberg’s theatre pieces I found particularly amusing.

In my work, all of that adds up to a cosmically-scaled fiction project that uses prose and verse writing, songs, photography and video, graphic design, zines, comics, and any means or materials I have at my disposal to tell the complete story. “Mixed Means” is the essential composite form of the Wolf Note Collective and all its many stories and songs and images and films.

I don’t like the sound of the phrase cosmically-scaled. That sounds too hippy or too bloated or both.

It may be both or neither of those things. I don’t really care either way. I follow my muse, not critics. That’s why I don’t read many music or film reviews, I have never used Twitter, and I don’t subscribe to periodicals that feature this type of writing. It’s not that I never read them, but I wait until after I’ve had time to think about the work I’ve just read or seen or heard and form my own view on it. When I do read them, I often disagree. Usually with old, classic work I don’t find the consensus to be far off the mark, but with newer things I don’t find much value in critical readings because too often they either spoon-feed the reader some key concepts they want them to understand or they misinterpret things, or they use a political checklist to assess a work’s worthiness or unworthiness.

I call my work cosmically-scaled because primarily it’s fiction, specifically fantasy fiction, like The Lord of the Rings or Dune—I group Dune and LOTR in the same category, excuse me, due mainly to the world-building elements—with an infrastructure of an invented world, complete with its own history and prehistory, economy, geology, political and authority structures, physics and astronomy, mythologies, competing religions, and so on. That might not be apparent in a story where the groop almost burn down the house they’re living in thanks to an ice-skating mishap, but it’s there, most obviously in stories with ancient or medieval or far-future settings or stories with magic and monsters.

It seems to me you’re dealing with themes of—

Let me stop you right there. I am happy to talk about how I do the work, processes, and so on but don’t ask me about the themes. Let’s just say that the result and the process are the same thing, and what it boils down to is a type of unification. That’s all you need to know about the themes. If you like the work and you want to spend some time thinking about it, then think about it. But don’t look to me to validate or denounce your theories.

Do you have a speaking position?

In my view, sex, sexuality, gender, and identity are all fluid things, within certain physical limits. For instance, I can’t change the fact that I’m a white latino. Mom’s side of the family was from Mexico and Dad’s was from the isles, I think Ireland and Scotland. I can ignore the history and culture of one or both of those but it won’t change my genetic makeup. But to answer your question I am an Autistic single father with ADHD and anxiety, White/Hispanic (or Latino, or Latinx, if you prefer, doesn’t bother me either way), gender fluid or gender non-conforming or just plain non-binary (he/him/they/them, both “masculine” and “feminine” attributes which are expressed in cyclical alteration or overlapping, but I typically mask as a simple male most of the time,) and omnisexual, that is, attracted to all genders to varying degrees. I could go deeper on all this stuff but I don’t know you that well and it’s personal.

The 1960s seem to have a particular resonance with you. And the ‘90s.

I don’t really know why that is. With the ‘60s I mean. With the ‘90s its obvious and I don’t try to resist it or make too much of it but that’s when I was an impressionable teenager. I don’t adhere to that attitude that the music of my formative years was the best but it imprinted on me in ways that are predictable and perhaps inescapable. But I can remember certain times when cultural artifacts from the ‘60s jumped out at me. As a preteen I liked war movies, in particular Vietnam war movies. It was the first time I started to really notice songs. British Invasion, Motown. Later on, in history classes, the idea that it was a particularly tumultuous time period struck home with me. As I entered college and began to learn a little political science and more history and start to develop an anti-capitalist stance, the social upheaval of the era resonated, as a belief was seeded in my late teens or early twenties that things were just as bad now as they were then, but maybe we were just less organized. There was just as much shittiness in the capitalist system to resist, if not more, than in the 1960s. The Mixed Means book, now that came out in ‘68 and the interviews were with artists who were well known in that decade.

It’s not so much a self-consciously retro thing. I don’t often consciously imitate the tropes of that era or any other, and I don’t subscribe to the internet culture which venerates some particular past time or place to the point of having ‘60s or ‘90s mood-boards and band t-shirts and the right shoes or hairstyle for the time or any of that, and I definitely don’t feel like I should have been born in some other decade, like some of those tie-dye wearers that I got stoned with as a college student. It’s more that from my point of view the parallels in Timespace are obvious. We live in at a point of vast social upheaval in some ways similar to past times. I grew up paying attention to that stuff and I draw on it continually, but use it unconsciously.

In particular?

Specifically I paid attention to in my formative years what I considered to be fringe guitar bands that incorporated extended techniques and dissonance and the generation of Downtown music that preceded that, guitarists like Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca, and before them, La Monte Young, and before that any eastern music I could find, especially anything that utilized drones. I believe that a performer and the song itself, even in an entirely conventional setting, they have these hypnotic qualities, and these qualities may be exploited to harmonize a room or whatever performance space. The original gang of CBGB bands but especially Blondie. Madonna, Andy Warhol’s Factory as depicted in Factory Made, Gillian McCane and Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me, Paul Jordan Smith, the unholy trinity of Reed/Pop/Bowie, a psychedelic complex of cannabis, LSD, Hesse, Castaneda, Luis Buñuel’s films, Breton’s manifesto, all the early 20th century art movement manifestos for that matter. Burroughs, Borges, The Kids in the Hall, Syd Barrett, Andy Kaufman, Cindy Sherman… I can’t pull them all together off the top of my head but I was exposed to their works at times when my mind was particularly opened, and they made lasting impressions on me and, at least from my point of view, the lines from their work to mine are pretty straight.

You seem reclusive by nature. But not shy. What is the connection between these aspects of your personality and your status as an unknown underground artist?

It’s a causal relationship. I am shy. But I mask to a high degree in order to socialize. It is an enormously draining use of neuronal configuration. I have a string of disastrous interpersonal anecdotes and ruined relationships that might have been avoided or at least blunted had I been diagnosed with Autism earlier. But the cookie didn’t crumble that way.

The other variable in this equation is desire. In my view, desire is the fundamental element in all life, the spark that animates everything. My desires, my fantasies about “the art life” have everything to do with the work itself and very little to do with the publicization of it, or seeking interviews or gallery representation or any of the professional moves that would help me gain the resources to fulfill the vision. It’s a real stumbling block. Add that to a pretty deep anti-capitalist, anti-commercial stance and voila. I’d like to overcome this, at least a little, because if I could get some attention and some cash flow I could possibly do more elaborate, higher quality work and develop an audience with which to communicate via the work. I just never feel like I have an adequate skill set or even the motivation most of the time to get my work “out there.”

What is the Wolf Note Collective’s elevator pitch?

What? I don’t understand the question.

If you were to summarize the Wolf Note Collective so that someone unfamiliar with this work could understand it, how would you do that?

“The Wolf Note Collective was a failed parallel-universe multimedia franchise, a long-running, unsuccessful collaborative effort between a loose-knit group of losers in Texas and South Carolina who all pretty much hated each other and then died together in a warehouse fire.”

I believe I read that already, here on your website. Or maybe it was on your Bandcamp.

So?

Well, I was hoping you’d give us something fresh.

Oh Jesus you asked me for a short description and seeing as I’ve already got one I used that. This isn’t even a real interview.

Look, I’m trying to help you here. I don’t have to be here at all. I can tell my editor not to run this interview.

Sizzlin synapses—who gives a shit? Nobody reads your rag anyway. Let’s just get back to some real questions before I call this off.

Fine. That sounds good, actually. How would you characterize the intersectionality of your work, specifically the way your personal character is reflected in the stories, songs, and visual presentation?

I said I don’t talk about the themes.

You seem very angry. Like you’re easily triggered.

Fuck this we’re done. And fuck you too. Goodbye.

What draws you to hoaxes?

Finally.

Finally what.

Finally a question.

Wow. Flattering.

Hey I can’t help it if you’re sensitive.

Do you treat everyone this way?

Probably. God I hope not, which reminds me, this has gone too far and I must apologize. I went on the offensive and for that I’m sorry. But you know that aggression masks insecurity. I expose myself by going on the attack. But maybe recognizing fundamental insecurities can help me to overcome them. If I even overcome one of them, like this one, the tendency retaliate in a nasty way when I wrongly perceive a slight, well that’ll be an improvement. It is a social block.

It still doesn’t excuse how you talked to me.

I’m sorry. I will try not to let it happen again and treat you with kindness free of judgement. I’m sorry I judged you.

We’ll give it some time. If you show me you can be good, we may see ourselves talking again sometime in the future.

To your question, hoaxes. How much time do you have?

End

THE FREE TRAVELERS (zine)

The Free Travelers is a 36 page, 1/2 letter sized black and white zine with a color cover now available from Mink’a Press. Filled with photographs, speculation, gossip, and biographical information about the principle members of the WNC, this “encyclopedia of the Wolf Note Collective” is limited to 100 copies, printed (using mixam.com) on 80lb satin finish paper with a 100lb satin color cover.

The zine is shipping now, so head over to our shop and get your copy.

it’s him! on microwave eyes cassette

STUDIO STUPIDO

There’s always lots of stuff going on around here. For instance, over the holiday I totally rearranged a few rooms so I’d have a better studio setup. The living room became a music room, which is still a living room, technically, because in my view living involves standing up and playing the guitar and making songs and recordings and practicing instruments and doing art pieces, NOT sitting on my ass and watching TV. One and Zero.

Amidst all that chaos, real work continues unabated. Here’s a little rundown of stuff I’ve got going on, continuing from the last time I did a post like this:

• painting a guitar Aztec Gold—I’m really into gilding things atm, so it’s of a piece with everything else. The guitar is going to need some electronics work, which I’ll get to when I’ve acquired the necessary tools and supplies.

• painting gold circles inside of squares on wood or plywood in several sizes

• still going through my archives of CDRs and cassettes (hundreds of hours of home-recorded music) and notebooks (songs, song fragments, lyrics, album plans, cartoons, drawings, etc)

• the big one is that my cassettes came in for my upcoming release of It’s Him! by Dim Jim. I’ll have these for sale at my next show (January 29, Inchoate Art Gallery, Greenville, SC) and will do a post and social media stuff about it within the next 5-7 days.

• Still jamming guitar and switching out my switches, auralizing and visualizing the upcoming show.

It's Him! Cassette release

It will be the first cassette release I’ve done in quite some time. I believe there may be some copies of some old stuff still floatin around out there but don’t look for it. You won’t find it and it isn’t any good anyway.

I’m doing a hundred copies of this set. I guess this makes Microwave Eyes into something of a real label now. Except there isn’t likely to be a release from someone else in the near future unless I stumble into some extra cash, like I did just recently, enabling the production of these cassettes several months earlier than I had anticipated. Everyone’s gotta get lucky every once in a while so I’m not complainin. It’s going to be a nice pretty pink cassette tape with all the lettering imprinted right on the plastic. None of those paper labels for Dim Jim. He’d be proud if he could see how this is going to turn out.

Also there will be download cards included, in case anybody still uses those. If not it still will make a nifty souvenir.

Studio Update: Merchandising

It’s mostly CD packages, collages, booklets/zines, and other paper stuff. The new thing is collecting broken shit and other junk and assembling things out of it. For instance, I’ve got two smashed up guitars, a roll of wire screen, some old metal coat hangers, and other such sundries.

One of the projects I’ve got going on is a crystal radio with my kids. It’s almost finished—I think the only thing we need is a ground wire. It’s been fun—a chance to practice my shitty carpentry skills.

What I'm Workin On

I’m always workin on about a million different projects all at once. Not literally all at once—I’ve got a bunch of plates spinnin at the same time is what I mean. That way I don’t get bored or burned out on one. I’ll work on something til I get tired of it, then meditate and reset. Clear my mind. Task switching is an obstacle. But more on that later. Maybe.

Once I get near the finish line I get a fever to get there and stay focused on that once thing until it’s done.

Here’s a sample of some things:

• An album by Sol y Sol called Shadow People, with plenty of synths, guitar skronk, and vocal harmonies, probably about 1/2 done

• A photo and video series starring Bramble Childress (owing to the fact I left this mustache on my face and I hate to waste natural resources), one music video shot so far

• Several zines, all writing, artwork, and design complete, but only one printed so far:

  • A2, a chapbook with lyrical photographs and poems to accompany them

  • Harmony for Guitarists, a music theory on chord construction for the musical illiterates among us

  • The Free Travelers, an encyclopedia of the Wolf Note Collective, printed and ready to invade your bookshelf

  • La Espada no. 400, a big 1/2 tabloid size affair with fiction, fictional interviews, a comic, manifestos, and more

• The Anywhere People, a novel set in Locustville, featurin all the colorful characters that populate that nasty little town, includin the infamous WNC (25,827 words so far, aimin for probably 80k)

• The Nagual Gem (working title), another novel, this one a straight adventure with swords and sorcery, aliens, monsters, zombies, Timespace travel and more, made up of four standalone sections in varying forms that add up to one giant epic spannin about 15 billion years, (47,042 words so far, probably aimin for 100k)

  • The Birth of Desire, an epic poem, a weird cosmogony and cosmology written in blank verse, shootin for about 3000 lines, 300 of which are written, but probably 2/3 of the whole thing has been plotted out

  • The Pale Things, a 17,000 word zombie sword and sandals novella - complete already

  • The Tragedy of Prince Emrys, an Elizabethan style tragedy set in a fantasy Welsh kingdom, shootin for probably 1800 lines

  • Charlie and Lala (working title), a novel unto itself, tellin the psychedelic adventures of Charlie Gil and Ofelia Hass

• A cassette release of Dim Jim’s album It’s Him! I’ll play shows (and hopefully sell some of the zines I got printed and some of these old t-shirts I got lyin around) to raise the cash

• Teenage Hells, old 4 track cassette recordings from way back in the day. I’m going through all my old cassettes and trying to find anything worth listenin to. I’ll remix my earliest album “efforts” and make compilations of whatever’s left that doesn’t make me puke.

• Visual stuff: practicin and learnin how to paint and draw and occasionally makin collages.

“Grandpa Martinez,” 2022, acrylic on wood

• Plus: The Sixth Sun, a new full length (48 minute) audio/video album by Sensory Complex, featuring eight improvisational looping guitar instrumentals, all complete and waitin for the opportune moment to unleash it upon the world (or local noise scene, whichever comes first), possibly as another cassette release, assuming I can beg, borrow or steal enough cash to repro the sucker.

When or if any of this shit ever gets finished is anyone’s guess. But I keep workin on it just the same, every spare minute, and keep on keepin on as long as I can. Now leave me a comment down there so I know you seen this!

The Return of the Wolf Note Blog

I don’t think it’s in the cards for me to return to that. But since I have a website, and it has this blog built in, I might as well get some use out of the thing. I’ll use it along with social media and physical media (flyers, stickers, etc) to announce shows and to promote new works. And if I can’t behave myself, may occasionally (very occasionally) vivify these virtual vistas by venting a bit of verdant, viscid, verbiage.

The idea is to go out and perform and share my work out in the world however I can and go see other people’s shows and support them the best I can, and use online stuff (blog, YouTube, Bandcamp, etc) to promote that, and vice versa. Nothing fancy or unusual. Normal things.

I would be very appreciative of your comments or suggestions, here or on my Instagram or Facebook or YouTube channel, when stuff appears in one of these places. Your feedback helps me grow and improve, and hopefully deliver on whatever promise is inherent in the work.

Thank you!

James