In the late 80s, after I left school, when I worked at Franklins supermarket and redid my HSC at a TAFE college, I started a new label in my collection of radio recording tapes, called "Difficult Music". Named after a line from Laurie Andersons' Home Of the Brave album, it was where I put the unclassifiable weirdness which often came under the umbrella category "experimental", and was broadcast in short-lived or marginalised late night shows on JJJ like The Worx and Shipbuilding For Pleasure.

I hate the term "experimental" myself, because it cheapens and degrades the intentions of the musicians; it implies that it's something less than music, as an experimental car or plane is something less than the finished product, because all the faults haven't been discovered yet. It implies that this music is full of faults, and when the faults have been eliminated the music can enter the mainstream, a duck turning into a swan. No! To me this was Difficult Music, but only because it didn't flow or have a regular beat. I didn't find it the least bit difficult to listen too, but I gravitated towards it like an immigrant in a foreign country, tuning into an ethnic broadcast in his own language. As I tuned around the dial and hunted for more, I discovered that 2MBS, the "fine music station", was a rich source, with several shows playing between 12PM and 1AM.

At this time I owned an old reel-to-reel tape recorder, which captured better sound than cassette, and boxes of tapes found at the street markets. With a long tape, on slow speed, it was possible to record 3 hours per side, so I wouldn't have to turn the tape over. The first such tape I made contained firstly Bend Sinister, an industrial music show 1 hour long, followed by Stalking the Nightmare.

Never before had I heard such a sustained, rich, perfectly orchestrated stream of subconsciousness poem rendered into noise. The truth was revealed, the faltering, halting, precious stance of those other shows I had been listening to was blasted away. Listening to STN was like observing through a microscope as neurons in a human brain grow dendrites out into the surrounding mass of brain tissue and establish links with them. It was like making a cross section through the communal mind of the human race and seeing what we were really dreaming about. It was like being a scientist who discovers an entirely unsuspected parallel to the electromagnetic spectrum and, upon building a radio which tunes this new form of radiation, picks up secret broadcasts from the aliens amongst us as they attempt to decipher the mess which is human culture. The juxtapositions, between mass murder and children's storybook records, between euro spy jazz and 80s robot cartoons, between prank calls and gut-wrenching industrial screeches, between formal dada musique concrete experiments and banal daytime TV ads, between beatnik exploitation records and wildlife documentaries, revealed unknown vistas of insight and beauty. The DJ mixed and selected like a man with X-ray vision he can't switch off, who could see through the surfaces to the structure beneath, who understood everything in terms of it's true nature.

Who was behind this show? Pretty soon I caught the DJ mentioning his shop, the Land Beyond Beyond, a comic store in the middle of Sydney. The next day I went to visit him and find out what sort of person played these sounds. There I found Terry Brown, a quiet, unassuming man, dressed entirely in black, with a sharp nose and bald head of a young leprechaun, standing behind the counter of a dark comic shop down a long corridor from George Street. He played beatnik jazz in the store, and had an excellent selection of rare books and underground comics, as well as masses of the regular super-hero stuff for collectors. I became a regular customer.

And, at the risk of attributing too much influence to the show, I believe I would never have ended up in the Cyberspace warehouse if I had never heard it. Before Stalking the Nightmare, I was struggling through the 5th semester of a Diploma of Teaching course at university. Nothing then horrified me more than the idea of graduating and being doomed to a life of teaching brats in schools staffed by hordes of the dour young Christian women I met at college, but I could not imagine any reasonable alternative to this fate. After STN, I quit, and started experimenting with making quilt covers out of second hand neckties and selling them at street markets. Then I saw the ad in the Drum Media for a warehouse art studio, and when I went to investigate and discovered that there were people living in the building, it seemed obvious to join them.

It's funny, the number of different formats I've recorded the show in. At first I used reels of tape running at 3 3/4 inches per second on a regular old reel-to-reel tape recorder. Mostly for the aesthetics, as I mentioned. Later, when I realised that the sound was barely better than a cassette, I used cassettes for a time. Then I went back to large format tape reels when I acquired some, and a big recorder to use them on. That gave much better sound, with the tape moving faster over the head. Just now I realised that young people with no experience with analog recording might not even understand why that was important. I've already met kids who didn't know there were different rotation speeds for playing those flat black disks, or the reason why. Kids, it's like this: faster speed of in analog formats is like higher bitrate in MP3 or other digital format. At any rate, most days in my studio you would find the reels turning, which was a nice thing to see.

A couple of years ago Michelle and I drove out to Jugiong, in the mid west of the state, to visit Terry at his current abode. He gave up the comic shop years ago for isolation and contemplation in the peaceful countryside. He still catches the coach to Sydney once a fortnight, I believe, to broadcast his show, although it’s been years since I tuned in.