I do not remember what we made it of; there was some kind of cylinder
which we covered with a thin coating of candle-wax to the best of our ability.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Primal Sound

How many sounds and infinite histories does a phonograph contain? What contours of experience make themselves heard and felt upon the nimble flesh of a waxen cylinder? Which acts of inscription steal noise from the body so as to render voice and corporeality, sound and script, indistinguishable? Can the phonograph picture the world in figures not only audible, but also material and aesthetic? The answers to such inquiries are at once historically specific—rooted in a history of recorded sound at the turn of the twentieth century, a mechanically mediated world of sensibility and psychology—and deeply poetic, at home in varied guises across time, media and genre. The phonographic moment resounded with the echo of a paradigm. A new era in the phantasmagoria of perception was christened, wherein, as Theodor Adorno claimed in 1934, the “history of ideas” [Geistegeschichte] ceded to the overwhelming sonority of a “cultural spirit” [Geist] contained in things that trapped sound. The phonograph was therefore the cite of a dialectical struggle between history and poetics, spirit and technology.

Such lofty concepts as sound and voice, self and subject, desire and embodiment seemed to lose their specificity in the intermedial possibility of this new technology (and indeed that of its inheritor, the gramophone). If this frenzied skein of resonance is to be deciphered, it is only in the form of lyrical bursts or extended aphorisms, scenes from a history and prehistory of the phonograph that serve to address, and indeed complicate, such questions.  In lieu of augmenting the historical record, the voice—as theoretical object and prerogative of the present author—dissolves into the stories themselves as a string of spirit [Geist] in the labyrinth of sound. The stories set forth herein set philosophers and poets in not-so-silent dialogue: Rilke, Lacan, and Freud; a poetess-psychoanalyst and a beloved boy from the ruins of antiquity; a few others of the edge. Wax and flesh, wings and images become an inscriptive matrix for the transcription of sound. In this space of slippage between the apparatus and all kinds of non-human substances, organic, inorganic and mythic in origin, arises an audible unconscious of wax.   

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