The Hum

 

Round about this time, Jaz Coleman ran away to Iceland, didn't he? Got up to all sorts of necromantic malarkey. When Killing Joke went on Top of the Pops to do "Empire Song", they had to have a stand-in, wearing a deep sea diving suit. 

From nearby Greenland, the story of a mysterious seismic hum that lasted 9 days. 

"Seismologists picked up a deep hum oscillating at 10.88 millihertz.... By the time the hum decayed, after nine strange days, a variety of experts, including tsunami researchers and deep-Earth geoscientists, had gathered into an expansive chat group on an open-source platform called Mattermost. They debated all sorts of possible explanations, from the routine to the avant-garde.

"The seismic signals didn’t match the signature of an earthquake. Perhaps an ice sheet, disturbed by the rockfall, was ringing like a bell. Maybe the landslide had forced a chunk of ice to melt, and that water slipped through a natural piping system in a glacier, turning it into an instrument and creating the geological equivalent of music. Or could the Greenlandic hum be the work of some incognito volcanism?

"No evidence to support any of these ideas was forthcoming. People started jokingly wondering if it was aliens, or maybe dragons, having a rave or a tantrum." 

"The geological equivalent of music" !

Worth reading the Atlantic piece for the solution to the mystery.

Reminded me of this quote: 

“The violence that Killing Joke is about is not violence on the immediate level but the mass violence, the violence bubbling underneath your feet, the violence of nature throwing up. And we become that violence” - jollyman Jaz, speaking to NME, early '80s 

Ooh, another Joke-ish bit further down the Atlantic piece: 

"The difference with the Greenlandic pandemonium is that, luckily, it caused minimal damage and zero casualties. Instead, Earth presented scientists with a riddle—and they went all in to solve it, simply to satiate their curiosity."

I assume that's what Jaz & Co mean by "pandys" anyway. 

One of my favorite bands, the only group of that era I saw twice, but somehow the idea has got out there that Killing Joke are undervalued and sidelined in Rip It Up.  "They should have a whole chapter!". Only PiL get a chapter to themselves, and PiL are PiL. Everybody else has to share. 

Bathetic side note: one of my Mum's favorite sayings is the somewhat quaint use of "hum" to mean "strong odor". Of an unventilated bedroom, one might say "oooh, it dunnarf hum in there". Of a ripely authentic French cheese brought back from a daytrip to Boulogne, that then stank out the train compartment on the journey back, "it really did hum".  Upon taking off one's shoes after a hot summer day's trudging around London.... you get the idea. 

I like this expression for its synesthetic drift, the cross-contamination of sense boundaries. It makes me picture those stink-lines that cartoonists would draw in the Beano or the Dandy. Stench so potent, so thick, it becomes vibrational - but also something you can almost see. 

Ah, I see I have distorted this is in memory - it's not a deep sea diver's outfit (I always do picture something out of a Tintin story) but something somewhere between an astronaut's suit, a biological warfare scientist's protective gear, and a beekeeper's helmet.