1. Sounding the trumpets

Late in the course of the siege at Waco Texas, I was to discover a little commented upon fact: the agencies involved in the crisis with the Branch Davidians had made use of recorded sound as a physical and psychological weapon. During the long nights of seemingly featureless and uneventful waiting that were to characterise the siege until its final days, the FBI launched an arsenal of amplified sounds – in what they called a ‘sonic assault’Footnote 3 – at the Davidians’ compound. Combined with the use of harsh lights, in what could also be termed son et lumière, the FBI attempted to drive the inhabitants of the besieged community out into the open.Footnote 4

Some time soon after these events, I decided to write an audio performance piece based on what I had seen (and only partly heard) on television. I became fascinated by the use of this sonic assault (a theatrical and indeed musicalised event) and by the fact that very little reportage had mentioned its use at the time – or for that matter has commented upon it in any depth since the tragedy. As a context for the work that resulted from my increasing interest in this event, I was commissioned as a composer and writer for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s national audio arts radio programme, The Listening Room (1988–2003). I was also teaching new approaches to sound performance at the University of Technology in Sydney, such that during the course of my research for the ABC I decided to experiment with this ‘media event’, using it as the basis for an extended sound performance workshop at the university. Here my class was asked to participate in exploring new ways to approach such highly visible, although in this case less obviously audible, media events – and from a musical, dramatic, sound arts and forensic perspective. The audio arts radiophonic ‘forensic theatre’ of Gregory Whitehead was an influence for this kind of work, as was Steve Reich’s experiments since the 1960s with ‘found sound’, including his use of documentary sound and voice in a variety of musical and music theatre works for stage, video and gallery. It was at this early stage too that I imagined the emerging piece as a series of movements, with the narrative ‘progressing’ through the use of sampled voices and performers recorded in the studio to be arranged in cantata form.

In my workshops, I asked students to play with key textual fragments I’d collected from a variety of media sources and to transform these into narrativised scored ‘parts’. The class was then divided into three types of ‘voice’: representing the authorities (FBI, military, and so on), the media (journalists and commentators) and a collective voice from ‘the inside’ (the women and men inside the Branch Davidian compound). At this stage I had not yet envisaged how I might employ the sounds of sonic assault; I had not yet established how these might form their own dark sound play in the shadow of media, or create a ‘signature tune’ for this ill-fated bunch of outcasts. As the siege intensified, I contacted ABC representatives in Washington requesting more information, but only after conducting my workshops and hearing the great potential in this event as a tragic play of voices complete with something akin to a Greek chorus, did I finally write the ‘score’, aurally imagining Cantata of Fire. Footnote 5

This story seemed a particularly compelling one to be told with the radio. In many respects, the Waco ‘narrative’ unfolded as a series of uniquely audio events, even if the title also alerts us to the visual spectacle of fire and media which was all that remained to see in the end. First and foremost Cantata of Fire was a listening (turned towards composition). In this listening, sound dominates, drawing us into the interior of events in the hope of some epiphany. No camera image taken ‘from the outside’ could take us to this place ‘inside’ the event, behind the walls, or allow us to hear, as those from the inside might have experienced it, the determining signature tune as played out before the Branch Davidians.

During the initial writing stage I also became convinced that this largely ‘overlooked’ and muted son et lumière (with all its apocalyptic overtones) had been highly invasive, but in ways that were not so obvious to the casual TV viewer. Invoking the ancient power of sound as a weapon, this sonic assault appeared to carry with it still living resonances from the history of war, and other more submerged and distant echoes from the biblical Jericho:

Somewhere on the border between documentary and fiction, theatre and musique concrète, my compositional practice produced a ‘post-mortem’ play, itself a product of the performance process: a kind of critical auscultation or forensic reading of the waves still emanating from the site. In turn, Cantata of Fire becomes, here, a launching pad for this much later reflection on what might be heard as a perverse ‘art of sound’ employed as part of a theatre of war.

2. Son et lumière: going all the way to the abyss

Although I know of no detailed historical studies of this military usage and performance potential of sound, music and noise, sound as weapon has a long history: of engagement, and of performance. Warring armies and campaigns consistently and imaginatively have used to their advantage sounds and voices in their arsenals. We might think of all those drums and trumpets and bagpipes wafting over hill and mountain, fronting armies, heralding their own particular apocalypses. We might also recall the buzz bombs and aircraft designed by the Nazis and used during the course of the Second World War to inspire terror, amplifying an almost Godlike power that, in the form of a sonic assault, they too announced.Footnote 6 These sonic traces have not yet been erased from living memory, and their screaming could be interpreted as heralds of more terrifying forces to come. The screaming of all kinds of voices and machines should be heard perhaps as one movement in the continued amplification and echoing of a whole array of sounds we know from the historical record to have been orchestrated by this machine of war – with the Nazis launching one of the most extravagant and terrifying son et lumières the world has yet witnessed.Footnote 7 This son et lumière can still be recognised in the recorded iconography of Hitler’s voice, which resounds not only with his unmistakable fever-pitched delivery – as mediated and cultivated through loudspeaker and radio technology – but with the clamour of the crowd that invariably accompanied it, acting as its approving and ultimately destructive echo. According to Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Hitler’s voice was what she called the fascist ‘triumph of Echo’, ‘not the despairing Echo of Greek myth, the Echo condemned to repeat the sentence endings of the beloved Narcissus. This is a successful Echo, jubilant in sharing Narcissus’s voice, strong in following, in imagining itself repeated, rather than repeating.’ This is also the echo of the dictator, literally ‘the one who speaks’ (Kaplan Reference Kaplan1986: 8).

The writer Jacques Attali noted too that noise ‘in all cultures is associated with the idea of the weapon, blasphemy, plague’ (Attali Reference Attali1985: 27). Historically, sound functions as more than sign or metaphor here. As Deleuze and Guattari have suggested, sound organised and de-territorialised as ‘music (drums, trumpets) draws people and armies into a race that can go all the way to the abyss (much more so than banners and flags, which are paintings, means of classification and rallying)’ (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987: 302). The weapon of ‘sonic assault’ using all kinds of audio frequencies and pre-recorded sound effects was not new to this event either. Something similar had been deployed in various international crises: during the Vietnam War by American Forces; in 1980s Korea by student protestors; and against General Noriega during the 1989 Panama crisis, part of what the US called its ‘Just Cause’ Operation. A recent report of sound used as a weapon comes from Israel.Footnote 8

Thus long before the final pounding of tear gas that ultimately would precipitate the end for the Branch Davidians, an acoustic signature tune coming from a long history of sonic military theatre could be detected, announcing in no uncertain terms what was nigh. Not quite the aural equivalent of a mirage, the hallucinatory tones of pre-recorded bugle calls – traditionally a call to arms – could be heard to echo across that Texas plain and the increasingly confused divide between reality and its real-time electronic and virtual substitute.

After reading reports produced after the tragedy, too, one’s impression had been unmistakably of an invasion or war. This was regardless of comments from authorities attempting to divert media attention away from their more unconventional strategies.Footnote 10 Alan Stone, MD Professor of Psychiatry and Law, Harvard, in presenting his report (1993) to the US Justice and Treasury Department regarding the handling of the siege, described the sound/light assault as the ‘third phase of the standoff’. This saw the FBI engage (in his words) in a ‘more aggressive approach to negotiation’ (Stone Reference Stone1993: 7–13).Footnote 11 Contradicting FBI official language, this approach, he said, was ‘all-out psycho-physiological warfare intended to stress and intimidate the Branch Davidians’ inducing ‘mood disturbances, transient hallucinations and paranoid ideation’ in ‘predisposed individuals’ (Stone Reference Stone1993: 7–13).

3. Signal to noise

The replay of specific sounds and musics could perform in this situation then ‘strategically’ and ‘logistically’ according to the type, intensity, duration and semiotic deployment of the sounds in the resonant field opened up by the principal and competing narratives: here between the authorities in charge of operations, the media’s own storytelling, and sect members and their leader David Koresh’s collective interpretation of ‘the signs’. (You will hear in Sound example 5 from Cantata of Fire how these sounds can also be heard to become fused and confused. Listen to the dentist drills, distinguished most clearly in the early parts of the sound play, which, by its close, recall air raid sirens and also screams. Hear how the sound of the phone off the hook, through high volume and extreme distortion, becomes an alarm. Likewise, babies crying become a whole sea of infants in distress, their collective voices merging with the sound of the dentists’ drills into one extended nightmarish wail of high-pitched terror.)

Even as this bizarre array of sounds (and voices) became players in the unfolding drama being witnessed at Waco – and we will deal specifically with these soon – we should not assume their roles can be clearly defined. Although we might predict certain outcomes, phenomenologically and semiotically speaking, these sound effects and voice positions remain unstable in their meanings. They slide between signal and noise. In part they do this because sounds – separated from a visible source, and released into the charged air, which could be said to surround Waco at this time – perform (in Pierre Schaeffer’s terms) as acousmatic events. By acousmatic, Schaeffer meant those ‘sounds one hears without seeing their originating cause’.Footnote 12

In his book on film sound, French sound designer and writer Michel Chion discussed the use of the acousmatic as a ‘dramatic technique in itself’ (Chion Reference Chion1994: 72). Sounds, which no longer can be sourced in a corresponding visible event – like the ones heard to penetrate the walls of the Davidians’ compound – become overtly dramatic: lacking in clarity through disconnection from their source, they are more open to the power of suggestion. Their reception and interpretation moreover will be directly connected to the state of the system into which they were (here, pathologically) inserted. To some extent they are also liberated from the more bounded meanings imposed on them by the visible presence of a source. Just as with the little, mostly unidentifiable, sounds we hear so acutely in suspense-film (and horror) genres leading us into danger, these sounds of assault likewise could be positioned in such a way as to unsettle their intended audience. They are vectorised – to use one of cultural critic Paul Virilio’s preferred terms – leading their audiences astray into a dark unknown, off-screen and beyond the limits defined by the frame. These noisy ghostly emissions deployed at Waco by government forces could function then as ‘voices’ – voices able to attach themselves parasitically to other bodies and organs, summoning, possessing, calling out through the voice of another. In terms of the narrative terrain I am mapping at Waco, these vectorised voices appear to have been highly audible to those already pre-disposed to hearing their messages.

4. Listening To The Prophets Of Baal

According to a variety of reliable sources, including eyewitness accounts, the FBI employed a curious selection of sounds and music at either high volume or repetitively over long periods – whilst also blasting the inhabitants of Mt Carmel with light, or alternately switching off their electricity so that the sounds might be received in darkness. While this happened, ‘negotiations’ through loud hailers added to the barrage.

We should not underestimate the physical and psychological effects of the material qualities of the sounds used here. This is crucial to any overall understanding of effect. A high-pitched (high-frequency) sound, for example, played over long duration repeatedly and at high volume – in this obvious context of stress – is likely to contribute to the force of its impact and extended effects upon the hearer. Of significance here is the opinion that many of the sounds used were reportedly in the high-frequency range, and these sounds have the ability to cut to the heart through the denser overall sonic atmosphere. ‘The screaming sounds of rabbits being slaughtered’ is but one example. Not surprisingly I was unable to find this sound listed in any of the standard effects compilation CDs routinely used by film-makers, and TV and radio producers. This type of sound effect – if indeed it was a ‘faithful’ rendition of an actual audio event – was most plausibly recorded for its associational impacts rather than as the ‘real thing’. It performs no doubt as yet another player in the trompe l’oreille Footnote 13 affected by high-fidelity audio, merely invoking the sound of rabbits being slaughtered, as one might aurally imagine them. Needless to say, a sound like this, part of an arsenal, would also rely on its vectorial (and this is also a tending to the virtual) powers for impact. In other words, associations related to this effect in its particular milieu might become increasingly significant as they extended into and over time – distress linked to the high-pitched whining whistling sound, similarities between these sounds and a baby’s cry or even any helpless creature’s squeals of pain. (There were many families inside the compound for whom these sounds would be most affective). Listen now to Sound example 2, ‘A Sign from God’.

David Koresh played a role here too, sending out messages on the winds and wires and via radio to anyone who might tune in to his ‘show’. A murmur of cosmic proportions, in actuality and in effect, enveloped the site of Waco, and this murmur pitched noise against appearance, chaos against order, with all tribes proclaiming to speak in the name of God and with the tongues of prophecy. As a prophetic weapon, sound could be employed in this ‘theatre’ of operations as much more than a representation. Able to penetrate and vibrate walls, it remoulds and destroys them in extreme circumstances.Footnote 14 Sounds, in the form of music or sound effects, are also endowed with complex meanings, functioning as signs. Penetration operates at both levels: at the level of sign and as a material force that literally touches or sets in motion. This penetration occurs directly on the physical plane that includes the neurological, but it also operates from within the perspective of the psychological. It is in this latter context that the penetration of the sonic begins also to operate within the frame or narrative space of the diegetic – that is, with reference to the ‘reality’ fabricated by one’s placement in partiular narrative worlds. From a physical and psychological ‘point of listening’, therefore, the many unorthodox sound recordings used against the Branch Davidians could reveal a highly affective power, with the potential to induce disintegration or dangerous ‘sympathetic vibration’. The double-edged motif of sympathetic yet destructive vibration also moved to the centre of the sound performance Cantata of Fire as we hear voices imitating and echoing one another, becoming fused and confused in the mix between reality and fiction. Listen to Sound example 1, where we hear Mina Kanaridis singing the recurring lament for King David, and hear what becomes a refrain: ‘There are things igniting even as we speak’.

On the symbolic level, and in order to assess the possible impact of specific sounds used in the FBI’s arsenal, this confrontation must be considered within a framework of the construction of a particular narrative world and in terms of competing God-like voices performing on both sides of the divide. Koresh, self-appointed leader and prophet of the group, spoke ‘for’ the others and to those not yet within his power, routinely delivering sermons in house and on the radio. His was a personal yet electronically distributed voice contained within, and yet emanating from, the walls of his church sited at ‘Mount Carmel’. Through TV and radio, Koresh’s words circulated widely as they burned brightly for that short time in which the media chose to fan them. And even as this church was built upon a flat prairie – a misnomer for those beyond its influence – for the Davidians this ‘mountain’ could come to exist powerfully on the symbolic plane, with all its particular psycho-religious overtones. This place, this scene, recalled battles fought by the prophet Elijah against ‘the prophets of Baal’ described in the Old Testament. From the camera’s and outsiders’ perspective, Mt Carmel would always be nothing more than flat earth, a buckle at most to distinguish it, a small shadow cast across an otherwise featureless landscape. For the Davidians, however, not only was this place their holy mountain, a refuge from the forces of evil turning America (they believed) back into a profane wilderness, it could also become the future scene of a re-enactment – the spiritual plane brought to earth, a new prophet once more before an old enemy, the forces of Mammon or Baal.Footnote 15 Here we might understand a version of spirit speaking through Koresh, who prophesied apocalyptic endings as written in the Bible. In Koresh’s voice (in the live radio reports as the FBI bullets rip through his stomach, for example), we hear him crying out in pain, a sympathetic echo perhaps of the sacrificial and suffering Christ as he endured the assaults of the Roman guard on Calvary. Listen to Sound example 4 (‘Possessed’), where we hear the mediatised voice of Koresh.

Voices became weapons in more ways than one in this play between light and dark, on and off screen, obscurity and high definition. A voice representing the State could be discerned, sounding out above and beyond the other noises. This was a voice sure of its moral superiority and embodied in its agents. Here was a voice given to conjuring and commanding, speaking in recognisable refrains: ‘If you can’t see; walk towards the loudspeaker. Follow the voice.’Footnote 16 This collective, yet also singular, voice carried on the winds and wires over loudspeaker, monitor and telephone, could hail from the wilderness or promised land depending upon your perspective. And in the unfolding narrative at Waco, it hardly requires a major leap of the imagination to hypothesise that for the Branch Davidians these same surrounding and threatening government forces might be discerned as ‘forces of evil’. Reports indicate Koresh described government agents at the time as ‘the Assyrians’ (Smolowe Reference Smolowe1993: 29). Within such a narrative foundation – a context conditioned by a skewed and isolated Biblical interpretation, which included Koresh’s reported ‘pathology’ manifest as a ‘control mania’Footnote 17 – it is entirely plausible that the FBI be cast as foot-soldiers to a corrupt and heretic government. To this legend and casting of performers, another voice could be heard to speak over and between these voices, another God-like actor who can always be called upon to play mediator or Devil’s advocate. This voice, becoming legion (and enacting its own son et lumière), reverberated with the words so often re-cited by media in their coverage of this tragedy and as repeated in Sound example 4 of Cantata of Fire: ‘We did not introduce fire into this compound. We did not introduce fire.’Footnote 18

But how could forensically oriented performance techniques, using sounds as concrete ‘sound objects’, assist us to hear this story ‘from the inside’, to effect a hermeneutic reading from auscultation? What might we hear in the dangerous sympathetic vibrations building in the play between opposing forces, and between voices pitched against one another at Waco?

5. Psycho-acoustic refrains and the release of demons

Much of the text created for Cantata of Fire derived from media accounts – on TV, radio and print, incorporating words from survivors, journalists and the FBI. From these I extracted and played with fragments of ever-reiterative media speech. Fragments of radio news also operated as ‘found sounds’ becoming, through repetition, almost concrete sound objects. The sounds of the FBI’s sonic assault, as I aurally re-imagined and re-performed them – presented in ‘loops’, changing in duration, frequency, and intensity and quality of sound over the course of the piece – were designed to work on the listener in a number of ways. At the same time as functioning musically, psycho-acoustically, semiotically and concretely, they served to build dramatic and narrative sequences. Through a process of repetition, principally using the figure of the tape loop (a digitalised sample was used in my case), I attempted to listen more intensively to the sounds (or phrases) that I had chosen to represent the FBI’s sonic assault. Trying to understand through mind and body how hugely amplified walls of sound such as dentist drills, babies wailing, a telephone off the hook or ringing into this long day’s journey into night might have actually been received from the inside, I drew on Pierre Schaeffer’s notion of écoute réduite (literally a ‘reduced listening’).

As Schaeffer discovered, when a sound is played and listened to repeatedly, its particular qualities and formal properties may be revealed in something like an objective sense. From a phenomenological perspective, the sound becomes an object when more intensely perceived in this way. Through repetition and the severing of the sound phrase from its contextual continuum, a reduction in the field of perception is effected. According to Schaeffer, the listener becomes more intensely aware of the objective qualities of the sound; apprehends the sound event in its concrete, now almost architectonic form.Footnote 19 These found-sound objects, when repeatedly performed and organised into musical phrases or refrains (for Schaeffer this work was also in a sense constructive) could reveal through the very process of repetition their other only half-submerged siren-like voices. Sonic feedback and decay were important in this rendering, too, as they are properties of the electronic repetition process. I recalled Steve Reich’s early minimalist tape phase pieces. Experiments in Its Gonna Rain and Come Out (Reich Reference Reich1987) encouraged me to play with the repeated sound fragment – revealing a machinic ability to release other only barely submerged voices.Footnote 20 Yet, unlike Reich’s unpredictable – and as he has said ‘mysterious’ – music-sound experiments (cited in Nyman Reference Nyman1999), I was working directly and consciously with narrative material and an outcome that was already known. Listen here to Sound example 3 (‘The Prophecy’), which opens Cantata of Fire. This is the first time in the piece where we hear the samples of the sonic assault effects, and as they might have been selected by the FBI. At this point they are plainly presented, almost ‘raw’, without the added accidentals that come with repeated listening. In their unadulterated form, they may remind us of a prior ‘innocent’ or uncorrupted state before their more intense deployment. This is perhaps the last time we hear them as mere sound effects.

There is perhaps also something of William Burroughs’ conception of the parasitic ‘viral’ voice in the authorities’ recordings and verbal hailings via loudspeaker and telephone. I certainly reference this in my usage of the word ‘possessed’. For Burroughs a concrete ‘demon word’ – literally and materially proliferating, invading and controlling bodies of all kinds via media – could constitute a very direct, although concealed, form of warfare.Footnote 21 In his oral story-telling, Burroughs spoke of such sonic weaponry, imagining a new weapon of ‘sympathetic vibration’ in The Job – which ‘magnified sound frequencies’ to shift ‘the battlefield to the internal arena of the body itself’ (Lydenberg Reference Lydenberg1992: 416, 417).Footnote 22

Is it possible that something like Burroughs’ viral demon-like voices and parasitic words were in operation in this sonic assault? Although we may not have been dealing with weapons inspired by paranoid cut-up artists, traces of a perverse sonic inscription are to be detected here and resounded in the system that appeared to mask them. By way of an explanation, Tibetan monks recorded in rounds of prayer were played repeatedly at the Davidians during the siege. A Washington Post staff writer was quoted in the Tibetan Network News:

While the sounds of some effects – babies crying, rabbits dying – appear to have an obvious material and psychological profile, the effect and use of these other sounds in the FBI’s repertoire appeared to be more enigmatic. What can we make of the apparently wholesome American pop group of the 1970s, The Carpenters, who also were on the FBI’s ‘playlist’? Fronted by what many will remember as the angelic voice of Karen Carpenter, the group was innocuous enough and still heard with regularity on golden hits radio formats and shopping-mall PA systems.

What might these choices signify? Knowing the narrative terrain in which the Waco drama found itself, a more hermeneutic reading might be productive. Calling my attention as if from afar, Karen Carpenter’s characteristic angelic tones spoke to me as a symbol of purity and innocence. One might well imagine the FBI offering Karen Carpenter’s voice as gift, as invitation to leave the darkness and come to the light. Follow this voice, they might have summoned; if you don’t trust us, put your faith in her… But her voice – a highly controlled, almost cool voice – might just as well have functioned as something other, something darker. For those inside their bunker, the Devil himself might be expected to speak in such seductively simple and dissembling tones.

Roland Barthes has suggested that there is a direct relationship between a voice and a body – specifically, the grain of the voice and the weight of the body that is its resonator. Taking into account the fact that it was no longer any secret at the time that Karen Carpenter had effectively starved herself to death (she suffered from anorexia), what repressed noise might have been heard here in this redeployment of a voice revealing (through its ‘grain’)Footnote 23 a body already on the way to disappearance? Could the marks of death found in the punctum Footnote 24 of Barthes’ photographs also be discovered here – in this voice with wings, as light as air, of Karen Carpenter?

Perhaps the FBI’s usage was accidental – and this audio-graph emerging out of the FBI’s own obscuring camera could claim to be an innocent, albeit misguided, usage. But what can innocence mean here – in this specific narrative context, in the cultural and listening context of this time and place in America? In the ‘promised land’ or the ‘land of broken dreams’, this voice – at once so fragile and yet so highly polished – might have had the power to cut through the walls of darkness and, depending on which side of the wall you stood on, be received as an embodiment of safe passage (a guardian angel) or the perverse and monstrous messenger who well reveals America’s hollowed-out voice as it is perceived to be ‘possessed’ by demons. ‘Isn’t belonging to this voice of no one, the same as being possessed’, the female chorus cries out in my sound-play (Sound example 4; ‘Possessed’), ‘like the prophets and saints always were?’ In this context of tumult, Carpenter’s voice might well be heard as a ‘pre-echo’ of disappearance: her disembodied heraldic message an invitation to shipwreck. The Carpenters at Mount Carmel inserted into the son et lumière during those long nights of parasitic and dissembling sound-play might have been misinterpreted in the dark spaces of aural hallucination (from the inside), and with some degree of perversity. Emerging then from this Pandora’s box, Karen Carpenter’s voice now resonates with a bitter bathos, her angelic tones taken as subterfuge falling from grace in the visible darkness.

6. Sympathetic resonances: sounding the Jericho Effect

In my response to this now symbolically marked terrain, figured and eventually torn apart by the effects of sympathetic resonance, the FBI’s more exotic offerings – the monks, for example – could penetrate those inside as heretical voices, the sacred chanting one more indicator of the presence of dissembling demons who advocate with forked tongues. For those keeping another flame burning for their God behind the walls of their sanctum sanctorum, these holy rounds might have provided more proof of America’s ‘possession’.Footnote 26 We might imagine hearing in them a kind of bass or foundation track into which the other more profane voices were inserted. But none of these sounds played out in a theatre of war operates in isolation, as we have seen, or on only one plane.Footnote 27 So it is possible to imagine the repressed noise in Karen Carpenter’s apparent purity of voice intermixing and sympathetically vibrating (to ill effect) with these other apparently extra-diegetic offerings from the FBI. In his Sympathetic Vibrations: Effecting sound histories, Tony MacGregor discusses the story of Joshua and his crowd bringing down the walls of Jericho with trumpets and shouts. He imagines the walls of Jericho to be undone by equally sympathetic vibrations:

While invoking the Biblical story of Jericho, this cantata of voices ‘released’ through intensive audition or auscultation aimed to also explore the essentially interpenetrating zone between the interior and the exterior brought into inflammatory contact through a kind of friction or ‘energetics of information’.Footnote 28 Sound and light – two interconnected but, in this mise-en-scène, incompatible speeds – were able to operate on the fault lines between what we might refer to as the realms of media-induced virtuality and an actuality turned on its head. In this scenario, my score suggests that the friction produced by these two affective forces coming into contact was able to spark off a chain of events that at first glance appeared to have been the fault of no one. Waco 1993 might usefully be understood as an instance of Paul Virilio’s energetics of information. This is the energy carried and released in the speed of light transmission of images and sounds with potentially catastrophic effects. Following Virilio’s argument, these events can be understood to have been ignited by (and made a logical consequence of) the media and FBI’s real-time fusion and confusion of matter and energy, reality and fiction. In many respects, this play was called up from that other obscured side of the media’s apparent illumination. It marked the site of an intensive listening, aiming to take heed not only of a repressed soundtrack, but sound as it now interacts with the realm of the visible – and as it is ‘muted’ or even ‘blocked’ by the media’s own obscuring camera. Perhaps more importantly, we are dealing not only with the dominance of the visual via electronic vectors – which appear to offer us a transparent passage to the real through continuous ‘high resolution’ – but with the realm of desire made visible, indeed palpable. I will try to explain.

7. Image block: ‘a public opinion-generated effort’Footnote 29

Virilio suggests that the sphere of the virtual is increasingly impinging on the sphere of the actual. In the age of electronic media vision, virtual and real no longer stand in opposition to one another, rather they exist in a new relation.Footnote 30 Virilio argues we are increasingly being governed by a ‘paradoxical logic’ that ‘emerges when the real-time image dominates the thing represented, real-time subsequently prevailing over real space, virtuality dominating actuality and turning the very concept of reality on its head’ (Virilio Reference Virilio1994: 63). The virtual (from the Latin virtus, indicating potential) now tends, in Virilio’s terminology, towards the actual. The realm of the virtual thus can have actual effects, with the potential to alter the state of play in the real world.

Virilio names this new milieu the dromosphere. This is the sphere of speed in which a new kind of theatre of operations insinuates itself upon and begins to inhabit the real. This sphere is characterised not so much by high-speed vehicular movement – planes, trains and automobiles – but by the real-time instant speed of dispatch and delivery of images and sounds. Now transmitted at the speed of light via satellite and other digital technologies, sounds and images can substitute themselves for reality. As Virilio has suggested, we have become engaged in ‘[a] war of images and sounds rather than objects and things’ (Virilio Reference Virilio1994: 70).

But how does this substitution impact upon us? With the development of technologies that enable real-time transmission and reception of sound and images, there is no longer any delay between dispatch and delivery, the ‘son-image’ (sound-image) performs as if it were the actual event, in a certain sense (through its speed) grafting itself onto perceivable reality. Pressing up against history – and in effect, piercing the real with its gaze – those on the receiving end of the ‘transmission’ (the audience) are able to contribute a powerful and statistically devastating voice to the outcome of such events, rendered ‘tele-sized’ (as Virilio would have it) and happening in real time. How should we measure, then, this potent off-screen voice? In sub-sonic vibrations? Or could we imagine a kind of pre-echo feedback rather than any direct sound? Although hidden from view, this ‘voice’ is of a crowd-in-absentia,Footnote 31 and its parasitic murmurings ‘broken down into millions of small rooms’ (writes author Don De Lillo in Begley and Lillo Reference Begley and Lillo1993), appeared to my thinking as deeply enmeshed in the apocalyptic outcome as the other player/voices ‘performing’ at Waco. Using Virilio’s critique of real-time media energetics this crowd’s voice could come to contribute its force inadvertedly to what was already an incendiary mix. Jack Zimmerman, a lawyer representing two Branch Davidian survivors concurs with this fusion/confusion trope for me when he described Waco as ‘a public opinion-generated effort’.Footnote 32

8. One more return of the loop

Listen now to the final movement (Sound example 5: ‘The Mystery’), which brings us full circle, returning us to the opening prophecy. Note how the singer in the finale no longer sings the sephardic lament; rather, words and phrases from the sound play are sung in fragments, although with the same melody as before. The ‘image’ I wished for here was one where the words without narrative are all that remain; their story is now exhausted, and they rise like ashes swirling, eddying in updrafts of wind, the last remnants of a mystery that implicated all players. For fifty-one days the eyes of millions of spectators were upon Waco. This was a site subject to negative development before the media’s ‘absent’ eye. For fifty-one days, the international news media waited. For the TV cameras – hungry for lights, action, exposure – there was little to develop, little to be seen on the outside except the boarded-up white building on a treeless Texas plain. Images appeared to be over-exposed – saturated with light and with the desire for spectacle (the light of continuous live coverage). This desire implicated the audience as player, not simply as passive spectator. Exposure could lead to overexposure. Images, sounds and stories could repeat themselves, creating feedback loops, and dangerous sympathetic vibrations. As the days dragged on, tensions built, not only were the officers growing weary, so too were audiences and media. In their paranoia, the Branch Davidians were not to know how time could catch up with them – that ‘the End’, their Apocalypse, could come at such speed, and so soon. They had dug in for the long duration, as if duration still counted.

In this obscuring camera, we as audiences saw only more light and more fire, a fascinating spectacle in which the abject reflection of ourselves in the ashes was all that remained. This was an old shadow play of fallen angels and mistaken messengers. This was ‘closed circuit television’ excised of its multitude of (unheeded) vibrations. Here a theatre of phantom voices, concealing a war fought with images and sounds, was taken to its logical conclusion.