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Music

Getting Wavy with Sean Michaels and the Theremin

The Montreal native who wrote a book about the world's most interesting instrument talks about the transition from reviewing music to writing fiction about it.

Despite The Beach Boys’s best efforts, the theremin still connotes creepy Hollywood sci-fi instead of the avant-garde of pop music. The instrument’s sound is wavering, unnatural, and somehow unresolved. It was perfect for tense thrill-rides like The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Lost Weekend, but the novelty by now has bled into camp and kitsch.

You can get a sense of the original, magical potential of Leon Theremin’s 1918 construction, though, when you actually watch someone play it. Take the late virtuoso, Clara Rockmore. Her hands wave near two bare antennas as she wrings sound out of the air. Music meets the machine. The human body moves with the invisible magnetic fields of progress.

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Dr. Theremin, his famous device, and his best pupil/great unrequited love, Clara Rockmore, are the materials out of which Sean Michaels has fashioned his sparkling debut novel, Us Conductors. Michaels takes us from revolutionary Russia to the Roaring Twenties in the United States, back to the Soviet Union at the height of Stalin’s reign of terror, throughout conducting the inventor’s journey as a story, at bottom, of lost love. Theremin’s memory of Clara is a wound he carries to the Gulag, but she both haunts him and keeps him going.

It’s gorgeous. And the prose sings and jumps, too, following our hero’s narrative like an elegant oscilloscope. I couldn’t help but be reminded while I read that this is not just some dusty academic but an inventive music writer (Michaels is the founder of the mp3 blog Said the Gramophone). One of his trademarks has been the blending of short fiction with music; instead of cutting to the chase, he’s sometimes taken the longer way, lapping up the total effect of a recording, circling around it to catch all the good. At Said the Gramophone Michaels has built songs on top of songs, in a way, and his first novel is a great big one.

Us Conductors is out now in Canada and published by Random House, and will be published in the United States (with Tin House Books) on June 10. Its author has been touring like a musician himself, giving live readings, but Noisey had the opportunity recently to ask Sean Michaels about writing, music, and the theremin.

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Noisey: Said the Gramophone was one of the first mp3 blogs, and yet it remains in a league of its own in terms of genre and approach. Could you talk about when and why writing fiction appeared to you as a possible way of doing music criticism?
Sean Michaels: The real truth is that I’m not very good at music criticism and I stumbled into doing it. Said the Gramophone started, more or less, as a variation on Fluxblog’s model: posting an mp3, writing about it. Because the song is right there in front of you, with a giant PLAY button, you don’t need to spend so much time describing the sonic specifics of the sound. Any listener will hear the “jangly guitars,” the “Dylan-esque vocals.” This freed me up to act on my weird instincts: describing music in an abstract way, using the convoluted fictions and metaphors that cloud my dumb head.

It turns out everyone’s head tells these kinds of stories, and it can be interesting to read them.

And now your first novel takes a musical instrument as its subject and central image. What first drew you to the theremin and its inventor?
I admired the way the theremin is secretly beautiful—a crazy sci-fi noise machine that needs a virtuoso to make it sing. And I was drawn to Lev Termen’s magical life: so extraordinary it couldn’t possibly be true. But it’s true.

Us Conductors begins with the note “THIS BOOK IS MOSTLY INVENTIONS.” So Theremin’s story is extraordinary, but you’ve also done a lot of imagining, obviously. How did you decide when and where to invent and when and where to “document”? I guess there are no rules when you’re making a novel?
I guess I was guided by intent. I wasn’t setting out to tell Termen’s true story; rather, Termen’s story inspired the novel I gradually imagined. I think it’s fairest to think of Us Conductors as a dream of Lev and Clara: I binged on history books then fell asleep.

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I love the way you chose to inscribe the sound of the thing: “DZEEEEOOOoo.” Are you a fan of the sound of the theremin? Have you ever tried playing it?
I am! I’ve got a couple of the things—my dad built me one, Moog send me an etherwave. Although I can’t play it much better than your average warm-blooded, electrical-current-conducting human, I marvel at players like Clara Rockmore and Peter Pringle.

You’ve been doing a lot of readings lately. Do you like performing? Are you touring with a theremin?
It can be really nice to share the bits of the text I’ve written. But I’m still figuring out who I am, up there. I don’t want to over-explain what I’ve written. I’ve been bringing a theremin with me, sometimes, but I’ve also found an alternative to my incompetent electric yowling: for most of my upcoming U.S. readings, I’ve found local thereminists to come in and show how it’s really done.

Some inventions catch on; others go unused and die. Why do you think the theremin wasn’t a huge success?
It was the victim of some straightforward catastrophes: patent disputes and the Great Depression. It was too tricky, too complex, too Russian. And I think it was also, in a way, too occult to really take off—this machine that summons voices from the air.

You riff on the physics of communication technology throughout Us Conductors, likening love to the sending of signals (which might not reach their destination). Is this beautiful but tragic idea of connection something that is obsolete for us, do you think? Theremin’s love for Clara seems very analog, if that makes sense.
That’s an interesting thought. It makes me think about the whole thing of email “read receipts”—the little pings that tell the sender if their email has been read. Some people love read receipts. Some people hate them. I think I hate them. Not just because I want to callously ignore correspondence: receipt-less writing seems truer to real life, somehow. Interacting with other people, we don’t know if our meaning is understood. We flash our clumsy semaphore and hope these messages get through.

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Writing about music, at least writing short reviews, requires you to focus on the record, but here you’re not just imaginatively writing about a record or a sound but about a whole historical period.

You’ve done lots of different kinds of writing, for newspapers and websites and magazines, and now a novel. What’s your favourite kind of work?
I feel fully myself when I’m writing fiction; the other things are like trying and trying and trying to fly a kite.

His time in New York City is exciting for Dr. Theremin—he interacts with lots of great artists and people. What’s it like being an artist in Montreal?
Montreal’s the best. I’m not just inspired by all the great art around me but by the way it gets made: people persisting and persisting, with money or without, not for success as much as for the doing. It’s a community of friends but also a kind of union: solidarity, co-conspirators, all these fellow travellers.

What are you inventing now?
Maybe I’ll write a book about gambling.

Henry Adam Svec is a writer and amateur thermin player who is on Twitter.

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