ABSTRACT
An early version of the text reproduced below was first given as a mixed-media presentation at an interdisciplinary conference on "Noise" held at the University of California, Santa Barbara in June 2002. The conference brought together a group of musicians, composers, visual artists, ethnomusiciologists and film, TV and media scholars drawn from a range of institutions sited in the States and abroad. Prophecy is a two-faced, fork-tongued speech that snakes its way in time back along the rippling of its own encircling syntax. Prophecy is speech that spells itself upon the open ear of an acoustically dyslexic and self-centering world: a world that always strains to hear and through that very effort is rendered deaf to what it's being told. Both vernacular modernism and high modernism are placed in the mid-50s simultaneously outside the mainstream and beyond the pale.
