Milne © 2008 / 1

Accidental Effects of Sky: Douglas Henderson’s Music from Empty Holes and Other
Works

by Louise S. Milne

[This] phenomenon [is] what the painters call accidental Effects of Sky – because they always attract particularly...
John Constable, Letter to J. Fisher, 23rd October, 1821

L’idée de l’espace comme une convention picturale, du temps idéographique, s’infiltre dans la science de l’art. Mais le
problème du temps et de l’espace comme formes du langage poétique est encore étrange à la science.1
Roman Jakobson (1973)2

About twenty or thirty people make their way to a All of this is steeped in deep
intoxication, restoring the very
warehouse space in Brooklyn. Inside, folding chairs are elements of rapture and in this
arranged in concentric circles, pointing out. People are rapture we rediscover the dry
seated. Banks of instrument panels and speakers seething and minimal friction of
plants, remains and ruined trees
surround the island of chairs; tiny winking lights produce frontally illuminated.
the impression of a space-ship or submarine. The first Antonin Artaud, On the Balinese
quiet sounds appear, hanging in the air, very far away; Theatre (1938)3
the room becomes vast, then open to the horizon. In the
clatter of rain from an imaginary sky, an imaginary earth
Ecoute bien pourtant. Non pas / mes
materialises – a shed, a roof, a hilltop... By the end of paroles, mais le tumulte qui / s’élève
Douglas Henderson’s Music from Empty Holes, the en ton corps lorsque tu t’écoutes.
audience has travelled through time and space on a wave René Daumal, before 19444
of hallucinatory noise, moved expertly across a spectrum
of scale and effects from tiny mechanical squeaks to
sublime Wagnerian orchestration.
I want to focus here on how meaning is constructed in this The poet has brought us to an
extreme situation beyond which we
piece, and in other works by Henderson, all of which are afraid to venture, a situation that
involve sound in one way or another. The impact stems lies between mental disorder and
first from their unusual psychological basis. The audience reason... The slightest sound prepares
a catastrophe, while mad winds
cannot perceive this art from a set distance, as in the case prepare general chaos. Murmur and
of film or painting. Instead, effects of distancing occur clangor go hand in hand... In this
directly in the auditor’s mind and body. The work tense state of fore-hearing, we are
asked to become aware of the
confronts the audience with the question: am I observing slightest indications... in this cosmos
an external event, or perceiving an internal one? The of extremes, things are indications
answer, of course, is both. The real subject of this art is before they are phenomena; the
weaker the indication, the greater the
“the subject” – i.e. that knot of culture and biology, the significance, since it indicates an
human subject. This is the arena within which origin...
Henderson’s spatialised soundscapes invoke their Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of
Space (1958)5
hallucinations, and the goal the realignment of the
subject is the goal to which these hallucinations are
directed.

Let us start with the question of surrealism. The twin
axes of the surrealist image are scale and hybridity,
corresponding roughly to displacement and condensation
in Freud’s theory of dream-imagery.6 Changes of scale are
central to the architecture of Henderson’s work; in Empty
Holes, the “same” noises may be “scaled” up and down
(displaced) and layered together (condensed). Due to this
dimensional manipulation, the subject experiences in
rapid succession the sensations of being near, far; in the
presence of the huge, the tiny etc. This produces a
dreamlike effect: the ego is seamlessly “cut” from one
“scene” or “viewpoint” to another, from panorama to close-
up, as in the compressed fictive time of a film.
In contrast to the moving image (with the notable
exception of Stan Brackage), Henderson’s work can make
panorama and close-up co-exist in the same moment of
apprehension; close-up may be scaled up (or “hybridised”)
into panorama, and vice versa. At the same time, recorded
sound lends itself to tonal ambiguation. Part or all of the
original referents can be rendered unrecognisable. This
happens in Empty Holes, whose third movement is based
not on rain but on recordings of a wood-stove. The roar
and crackle of burning wood, the squeaking of the iron
door produce high-pitched piccolos and super-fast
glissandos, matching the “snare-beat” percussives of
falling water earlier in the piece. Fire and water are
condensed and displaced together, revealed as aspects of
the “same” thing.
Now this is different from anything available to visual
surrealism, where a drawing may be viewed as a rabbit or
a duck but never both simultaneously.8 It is closer to the
moment of overlap in an anamorphic painting when the
head/skull is viewed straight on and is therefore
recognisable as neither; the parole (statement) of this
moment is “white noise” within the terms of its langue
(code). But in sound, weirdly, there is another langue to
fall back on, for orchestrated noise – noise with rhythm –
returns to the condition of music. This brings to mind
Deleuze and Guatari’s meditation on the refrain (=
ritournelle), as fundamentally an organisation of terrain,
generating around itself a sense of territory.
Milne © 2008 / 2
Everything moves, everything runs,
everything turns swiftly. The figure
in front of us...ceaselessly appears
and disappears... objects in motion
are multiplied and distorted,
following one another like waves
through space... a galloping horse has
not four legs: it has twenty, and their
movements are triangular...
Umberto Boccioni (1910)7
April 22 1663, Leeches in Vinegar.
Bluish Mold on Leather; April 29th. A
Mine of Diamonds in Flint. Spider
with Six Eyes; May 6th, Female and
Male Gnats; May 20th, Head of Ant.
Fly like a Gnat. Point of a Needle;
May 27th, Pores in petrified wood.
Male Gnat; June 10th, Sage Leaves
appearing not to have cavities; July
8th, Edge of a Razor. Five Taffeta
Ribbons. Millepede; July 16th, Fine
Lawn. Gilt edge of Venice Paper;
August 5th, Honeycomb Sea-weed.
Teeth of a Snail. Plant Growing on
Rose-Leaves.
Robert Hooke, Micrographia; or, Some
Physiological Descriptions of Minute
Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses,
with Observations and Inquiries
There Upon (1665)
In a general sense, we call a refrain in
any aggregate of matters of
expression that draws a territory and
develops into territorial motifs and
landscapes (there are optical,
gestural, motor, etc., refrains). In the
narrow sense, we speak of a refrain
when an assemblage is sonorous or
“dominated” by sound – but why do
we assign this apparent privilege to
sound?
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus 9

Like a naturalist, Henderson collects sounds in the field.
His finished work deconstructs these raw materials,
producing two effects which are really one, like the two
sides of a Möbius Strip. On the observational (or
objective) level, he manipulates his “found sounds” to
expose their latent nature and narratives; revealing them,
in fact, as not raw at all, since they speak of the interface
between culture and biology, and all recording is an
abstraction of some kind. On the subjective level, this
deconstruction achieves a psychoanalytic effect.
It is important to Henderson that the effect of his sound-
sculptures should be “experiential and natural, not alien.”
There is a strong element of realism in this art: the sort of
measuring and re-matching of existing representations
against contemporary experience which has been the
hallmark of novel observation since the Renaissance.
Tickertape is a sardonic commentary on high finance,
whose machinations are, on the one hand, secret and
abstract, on the other, all too visible and material on a
gigantic scale. Hidden among the choreographed noises of
financial machines is a version of the communist anthem
(“sung” very slowly by tonal changes in the samples), and
Henderson’s own voice, reading an exposé of the shady
land-dealer for whose offices the piece was made. Here, an
aspect of collective cultural memory provides both subject
matter and style – complete with inbuilt torques of
resistance, repression and conflict.
This refrain is indeed a territory, a universe of wailing
and struggle inside the chinese box of the modern office.
It is as if we are listening to the unhappy collective
unconscious (or conscience) of the marketeers, whose
robot-surrogates now communicate more than the minds
of their users intended to reveal.
In A dream like she loves you, old-fashioned mail-boxes,
each mouth blocked by an old boot, uncannily mutter the
text of an inarticulate teenage love-letter. This theme of
the unconscious leaking into materiality is given elegant,
pared-down shape in the astonishing Untitled, where
wholly inaudible pulses of sound are transmutated into
wholly material patterns on the surface of water, held in a
series of bright turquoise bowls. The water magically
springs into shapes as the frequencies change, and the
viewer stands rapt, in the presence of occult forces. The
uncanny confrontation with Otherness in the scrying
bowls of Untitled returns us to the hallucinatory qualities
of spatialised sound, and the more general question of
how Henderson’s art “restages” the human subject’s
experience of itself in the world.
Milne © 2008 / 3
Take a garden seen through a
window... focusing on the garden... we
do not see the window but look clear
through it... But we can also
deliberately detain [our attention] at
the window. We then lose sight of the
garden; [which appears as] a confused
mass of color pasted to the pane...
[but both] the windowpane and the
transparency [constitute] the work of
art...
José Ortega y Gasset (1956)10
That the idea of simultanism is
essentially naturalistic is obvious;
that the polyphony of interwoven
sounds and meanings has a decided
effect upon our senses is
unquestionable; [that] we can get at
the spirit of things through this
system is demonstrable.11
Marius de Zayas, 1915
Together with pure sonorities and
optical constructions, [the pun]
produces nooks and crannies, bubbles,
cracks, stains, and washes on the
conventional plain surface of the
linguistic canvas... The good pun is
not merely the dead trace, or pale
shadow, of thought, but the living,
self-moving motion of thought; it is
language speaking by itself, singing
new meanings....
David Michael Levin, 197712
The stait of man dois change and vary
/ Now sound, now seik, now blith, now
sary / Now dansand mery, now like to
dee / Timor mortis conturbat me13
William Dunbar, Lament for the
Makaris, late 15C
Dream man said he will do dreams.
He has a box and a clock. He has a /
clock to wind when it is Wednesday...
/ Can you hide, I think so. Can you
think, I think so. In a box to hide. /
Can you do a box like you can a
dream if somebody who loves you does
/ not love you. / You can do a dream
like she loves you....
Russell Edson, Dream Man, 196914
 Milne © 2008 / 4

The sound-sculptures of 10,000 Things describe shapes The rule when using bait is either a
whole lot or very, very little. A dead
and their natures. Each can be considered as a kind of steer or horse, for instance, makes a
psychic trap. As Gell argued, a trap condenses two wonderful bait for coyotes. However,
behavioural models: it is an artefact which incarnates the ten handfuls of grouse feathers will
just make them suspicious. It’s best,
desires both of its creator and of its victim. In this sense, in my opinion, to have the critter
an art-work resembles a trap: it embodies a scenario, [a] either search around for the bait or
dramatic nexus wherein two protagonists [the artist, the lose all fear because the bait is so
overwhelming.
viewer] are aligned in time and space and bound Ragner Benson, Ragnar’s Ten Best
together.15 The intention of the artist captures the Traps (1985)16
attention of the ego.
In The 103rd Thing, a breaking wine-glass is “put together ...in mid-earth there came emerging /
Flotillas, willed and wanted, bearing
again.” Each tiny piece of glass dust gives off a bell-like in them... / Things made by mid-
tone as it falls; amplified and choreographed so that the terrestrial, mid-human / Makers
microscopic and the human-scale sounds exist in the same without knowing, or intending, uses
Wallace Stevens, A Completely New
impossible plane of reference. The oneiric effects of Set of Objects (1946)
rapidly shifting and “condensed” distances are even more
trap-like in The 105th Thing, whose main shape is a rotor, The whole hissed as it swung through
constructed from the sounds of a subway car rounding the the air... I counted the rushing
vibrations of the steel... there rushed
corner of Alexanderplatz. Here virtual propellers whiz to my mind a half-formed thought of
closer and closer, ending with “hair-flicking” elongated joy...I forced myself to ponder upon
blades of sound, as if caught in a sonic equivalent of The the sound of the crescent...
Edgar Allan Poe, The Pit and the
Pit and the Pendulum. Pendulum (1843)

In both pieces, the observing ego is effectively “split;” In the same way as our dreams react
on us and reality reacts on our
constantly re-locating itself on the moving playing-field of dreams, so we believe ourselves able
the soundscape, and also released from solipsistic limits. to associate mental pictures with
This “shattering” of the ego produces exhilaration, fear dreams, effective in so far as they are
projected with the required violence.
and joy; at the same time, the “I” finds itself in the And the audience will believe in the
company of projected occult presences: the implied illusion.. on condition they really take
agencies originating the sounds, and a palpable invisible it for a dream, nor for a servile
imitation of reality. It must release
maker, originating the scenario. the magic freedom of daydreams, only
recognisable when imprinted with
TheThings – like Empty Holes, like Tickertape – generate terror and cruelty.
Antonin Artaud, Theatre and Cruelty
sets of interlocking, overlapping psychic domains. (1938)17
“Captured” sound involves an eerie disembodiment for the
viewer/listener, faced with a dense world of perception
whose concrete referents are at once hyper-realistically
materialised and surreally withheld. Shifting,
simultaneous “viewpoints” encourage a dream-like,
transcendent multiplication of the ego, experienced as the
hallucinatory sense of being in several places at once.
Once this magic has been worked, the final experiential
level is triggered: the parts of the self are re-aligned in
time and space, at the hands of a master-trapper, whose
accidental effects of sky attract us so particularly.

1. The idea of space as a pictorial convention, of ideographic time, has made its way into the study of art. But the
problem of time and space as forms of poetic language is still foreign to science (my trans).
2. Questions de poétique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973), 28
3. In Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, trans. V. Corti (London: Calder & Boyers Ltd, 1970), 48.
4. Yet listen well. Not to my words / but to the tumult that rages in / your body when you listen to yourself. René
Daumal (1908-44), Poésie noire, poésie blanche (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 42.
5. The Poetics of Space, trans. M. Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 175-6.
6. Louise Milne, Carnivals and Dreams: Pieter Bruegel and the History of the Imagination (London: Mutus Liber
Press, 2007), Intro & Ch 1; On the Side of the Angels, in J. Lingwood, ed., Susan Hiller: Recall, Selected Works 1969-
 Milne © 2008 / 5

2004 (Gateshead: Baltic; Kunsthalle, Basel, 2004-5)

7. Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting, in R. Goldwater, ed., Artists on Art (NY: Kegan Paul, 1947), 435-6.
8. For the duck-rabbit as an issue in perception, E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (NY: Pantheon, 1961), Intro.
9. A Thousand Plateaus:Capitalism & Schizophrenia (1980), trans. B. Massumi (Minneapolis: Continuum, 2004),323.
10. The Dehumanization of Art and Other Writings on Art and Culture, trans. W. A. Trask (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1956), 10.
11. Unsigned note in the first issue of 291 (1915); in Willard Bohn, Apollinaire and the International Avant-garde
(Albany: SUNY Press, c1997), 51.
12. “The Novelhood of the Novel: The Limits of Representation and the Modernist Discovery of Presence,” Chicago
Review 28.4 (1977), 99.
13. The state of man does change and vary / Now sound, now sick, now blithe, now sorry / Now dancing merrily, now
like(ly) to die / The fear of death disturbs me (my trans). NB: Makar (= maker) means poet.
14. From What a man can see (1969); reprinted in The Tunnel: Selected Poems, (Oberlin: Oberlin College Press,
1994), 55.
15. Alfred Gell, ‘Vogel’s Net’, in his The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams, ed. E. Hirsch (London: Athlone
Press, 1999), 201.
16. Ragnar’s Ten Best Traps And a Few Others That Are Damn Good, Too, (Boulder: Paladin Press, 1985), 11.
17. In Artaud, op. cit., 65.