The morning of that day was like any other...but it was going to be a special day for me.

After one and a half years of work on my first solo industrial noise music recording under the name Choronzon - an underground cassette entitled Zero Divided By Infinity - I was finally going to be laying the final track on it.

I knew that this was to be the day of completion.

Since at this time I had been in a topsy-turvy kind of relationship with a guy who had a fetish for the occult, it was rather common practice for me to enact elabourate rituals at various times to mark the happening of events of import. Now was such a time.

I gathered together my supplies to finish the tape there in the back bedroom of the apartment on Stevenson Street, in a building which stood almost directly underneath the big stretch of double-deck freeway which used to feed the traffic into the City around Duboce...where there should be a 13th Street, but isn't - rather like the missing floor of an elevator.

The view of that freeway from my kitchen window there was to become one which sent chills through me. It was finally bulldozed away in 2003...at least in part due to this being a feeling common to many in this area.

I had obtained the most important item - a four-track tape recorder - from a mutual friend of my boyfriend at the time: a sage blonde woman with big hornrimmed glasses who played violin and studied the Enochian Angelic Language. When she talked, you'd always hear things like "watchtowers" and "opening the gates" and "aethyrs".

She knew what I was going to do with it, and seemed a bit leery. She took this sort of thing very seriously; for me, it was mostly show business...though there was underneath all that a thread of true experience, I generally kept that hidden.

This particular ritual was, in effect if not intent, a sort of symbolized revenge against our mutual aquaintance, my boyfriend at the time, who claimed to be a "white" magician, who'd have no truck with evil things like "chaos demons"...and, as such, would take various occult steps to protect himself from my influence.

He had a good reason to -- because at that time, I was well-nigh fed up with his behaviour. At the time he was seeing another girl, a 17-year-old girl named Landra who was deeply into astrology and tarot and the like, to the point of consulting voluminous books and charts to see if it was an auspicious time to go out to the corner store and pick up groceries.

She was a bit intimidated by me, which I thought was just fine. The whole issue with this girl was pissing me off; it just went on and on without any sign of ever ending.

He should have just broken up with me, but he refused to do that, which might have had something to do with my own dimwitted clinging to him, despite the fact that he steadfastly continued to sleep with both of us on alternating days for more than a year. The one time I came close to finding alternative male companionship of my own, he exploded into a storm of failure-to-process. I remember him seeing a gift that this boy had given me--a pendant with two serpents forming a double Ouroborus, swallowing each others' tails--and yanking it off my neck, then pitching it over a fence and onto the roof of a nearby deserted warehouse.

I was so mad at him for this, and he was so recalcitrant afterwards that he climbed up there to find the damned thing and return it to me. When he found it, he saw that the act of tearing it from me had broken the head off one of the snakes. It was ruined. The following day brought with it the discovery that the guy who gave it to me was stricken with starry-eyed love. But not for me: for this girl named Leanne who was fantastic and he'd just met her and every fourth word was Leanne and after 10 minutes of that I hung up the phone and that was the end of that.For Godssake, even the girl's names were so similar: Landra, Leanne. I went into a state of utter angst after this point.

The resultant bad vibes accruing from this idiotic nonsense had, just a few months earlier, gotten me thrown out of the warehouse where we all lived...which was probably a good thing for everyone concerned, as I do believe having to hear John and Landra experiencing harmonic convergence upstairs in his room would have probably driven me postal had it continued any longer than it had. After moving out, the owner of the studio and bandmate in IAO CORE felt a bit bad about throwing me out, and made it up to me by allowing me to use the studio two or three times a week.  This I did without fail for the entire spring and summer of 1989, and it continued through the autumn until at last, in late October, I was ready to mix in that last layer of sound and mix it to four-track.

Around noon, I had all the other things I needed at the ready: various noisemaking devices, secondary tape players to feed into the four-track, a microphone, my lyric sheets, the obligatory candles of yellow and black (these colours have to me always been associated with Choronzon) and some incense that smelled for all the world like a cross between burning ozone and the singed ends of soldered wiring. I was set.

From noon until around 3:30 pm I laboured over the remaining work to tie up production of the tape. I knew exactly how I wanted it to sound, and in many places, it was doing just as I desired. I thought to myself: Chaos would not let it be any other way, for I was its ally, its lover...I was part of the thing.

After all the months of beating on sheet metal and messing around with MIDI, I found I was experiencing an incredible rush as I finished the tape.

I had come about as close to summoning Choronzon, the demon of the Abyss, as anyone could...and at least partially this happened because I had treated the whole thing as nothing more than an amusing joke.

When I finished the tape and had my little mental orgasm over it, it was 4:30pm. Time to go to my stupid job.  Mundanity, humanity and its inanity - it was still paying for the things I needed to make Choronzon happen. 

I had been working as a telephone surveyor, over at a market research firm in North Beach. They paid me $5.50 an hour to sit there and call random strangers on the phone, and see if I could keep them on the line more than five minutes or so answering these truly intriguing questions about things like which brands of microwave beef stew they liked best. I was really glad that I only had to do this for four hours a day.

I threw on my boring normality-zone clothing, and scuttled off for work, hoping that I didn't smell too much like Choronzonic incense for the people in that closed-off basement boiler-room to cope with.

While on the way to work, I kept noticing the drug-like high I was having. I'd actually finished that tape;  the power of completion thrumming in my body and my mind flying higher than the stars no one can see.

At five o'clock PM, on the afternoon of 17 October 1989, I walked into the building where I worked.

That date should be quite familiar to long-time San Francisco residents.

For me, starting work at five in the afternoon, it was to be a rather short work day.  Four minutes, to be exact.

I remember hearing about it from the woman that I'd had hanging on the other end of the phone - who was from somewhere down around San Jose, where it had started to happen a few seconds before it began to happen where I was.

"I can't talk right now, I ah--um..." A stretch of silence. "I think we're having...think there's an earthquake. My God, we're having an earthqua--"

I heard her say that, in the middle of my rattled-off schpiel, and then, right as she said "earthquake", the ground beneath me began to not merely shake, but heave up and down and side to side, simultaneously.

"Uh, it's happening now, here, too--" and then the "stop, drop and roll" instinct - which one gleans by default when having lived in California for one's whole life, which at that time was 24 years - kicked in without my even thinking about it.

The receiver just dropped from my hand as I whacked the wheeled office chair from behind my ass and dived beneath the desk, hands laced behind my neck.

( No one else in the boiler-room did it, which suggested to me none of them were native Californians. They even looked at me queerly, like they were thinking "What the hell are you doing under that desk! We're having a fucking earthquake!" ...while my thoughts were "What the hell are you doing NOT under your desks? We're having a fucking earthquake!"

Fortunately for them, we had a stable ceiling in the building, and the place was located near the stabler ground of the area around Telegraph and Russian Hills.

To this day, I wonder if that woman in San Jose whom I'd dialled up to query her about her taste in nuke-ready canned beef ever has one of those conversations where someone asks "What were you doing when the big Loma Prieta quake happened?" and she answers with a story about getting called by one of those market researcher annoyances who, before she could even get past the first question in her survey schpiel, seemed to have received the earthquake by telephone.

The quake seemed to go on forever and ever.

I'd remembered thinking it was a pretty strong jolt: no piddly temblor this, but had no idea what I'd see outside when we were summarily dismissed from work that day...being, as it was, obvious that no work was going to get done with the power out, and everyone scared shitless, both here and in our target calling areas.

I could see it was more than a mere minor quake we were dealing with when I started heading down through the financial district into the Soma, towards the warehouse and studio at 10th Street, it being closer to me than my apartment, and I knew they had batteries and radios, whereas I did not.

I walked out into a San Francisco caught in the grip of chaos. The suits were streaming out of the skyscrapers on Market Street in disorderly up-and-down rows, like ants after their anthill's been stepped on. I could hear some of them yakking into their cellphones (which, in 1989, only the terminally upwardly-mobile had, and these were those bulky unwieldy things) and listening to the portable radios they'd brought with them to work. 

Not usual practice for yuppies: they had brought them to work that day intending to use them to listen to the "Bay Bridge World Series" after work--which I had (correctly) assumed had been aborted by the seismic event.

Someone was doing a Chicken Little, squawking into his cellphone about the Bay Bridge caving in.


I started to become a little bit afraid of having a piece of the City fall on top of my skull and split it open like a great big melon, so I started calmly but steadily moving very fast to get away from Powell Street and the surrounding zone - the area where all the big glassy office buildings are. Everywhere I could see pieces of things all over the ground. I looked behind me, and saw a huge plume of smoke rising slowly into the air in the direction of the Marina.

It suddenly occured to me that my magickal boyfriend with his Crowleyite friends were going to find all of this rather interesting.

He knew about the rites I'd been performing, and had often heard me working on the songs, when we had lived together in the warehouse studio the prior year.

And one of the "songs" (if one could call them that) which I'd been finishing that day was called Convection is Exitless (Mother Nature's Fault), referring to the shaking, cracking instability of the very ground of the Earth, which paganistic types often use as a point for their focus. For "grounding".

If one were to be VERY, very disposed to the less-than-completely sane sorts of synchronicity interpretation, holding with beliefs consonant with the more intense varieties of metamystical hoodoo-goo-goo, one might get the idea that my ritual invoked this earthquake.

I don't know.  All I do know are that stranger things have happened since then that lean me to wondering a bit...

At any rate: after a few days' adventure in the post-quake blackout I returned the four-track to the woman I had borrowed it from--thankfully it had not been damaged.

She took it from me gingerly. Maybe it's just me but I think she might not have wanted me to get too close to her.

Zero Divided By Infinity was unfortunately, as far as noise-cassette culture releases go, essentially stillborn.

It was fated to leave my life for twelve years, after which it returned to me, and to the World At Large, thanks to the Internet.

In the fall of 1990 I was travelling by Greyhound bus to San Francisco from Sacramento after my first two months of detoxification following my Summer 1990 opiate (mis)adventures. When I arrived in San Fran, I was hoisting my belongings onto my shoulder and exiting the Greyhound bus, and since I was alone and had numerous bags and boxes, I had to make two trips between bus and station to get them all.

Upon returning to my seat in the bus to grab my box of tapes I discovered that it had been stolen while I'd been hauling out my first load of stuff. I looked everywhere for it and made inquiries of at least a dozen employees at the bus station.  When it sank in that all my music was gone forever I sank against the wall of the building and cried.

It was an experience of such utter chagrin that it led me straight back into heroin, less than 24 hours after arriving in the City and losing my tapes. While the loss of my 84 or so industrial music albums, lovingly indexed in original cases, was a horrid enough thing on its own, the true despair came from the fact that my master tapes for Zero Divided By Infinity were also in that box. Undoubtedly the whole lot ended up sold at some used tape outlet and since the masters were only labelled with a null symbol on one side and a lemniscate (the sideways-figure-eight sign of infinity) on the other, they were probably recorded over by someone, somewhere.

I had made nine copies of Zero Divided by Infinity before losing it. I'd put six of them up for consignment sale at the now-defunct Auricular Records that once was the coolest record shoppe anywhere, located in the lower Haight/Fillmore area. I'd given one to John of IAO Core, one to dAS of Big City Orchestra, and one to Jan O. Sanguine of Katharsis, all three of whom were contributors to it, each on different tracks.

John lost his.  I sadly lost track of Jan, while in the process of losing track of myself in the two years to follow, and she pretty much disappeared from the noise scene; I hope she's still alive, as the net has turned up no mention of her regarding her doings in any time past 1989. I couldn't find dAS anywhere (if I had looked a little harder I would have, and also would have discovered he still had his copy intact.)

One of those six consigned copies was bought by a fellow named Simon, once a resident of San Francisco, who's now living in Philadelphia. He came across this page in 2002, when it was located at my other website, Involution, and remembered having bought the cassette.

He sent me an email.

To hear that he wanted to send me my missing tape was the sort of news that makes one nearly fell off one's chair. I think I really DID fall off my chair.

Soon I received a package in the mail.  There it was, just as I remember packaging it, even the inserts were intact. I set about to digitising them and since I didn't know a damn thing about what I was doing the results were hideous. (I do plan to re-do the mp3-isation of them, now that I know a bit more about this, but it will have to wait until after July, my self-imposed deadline for finishing Choronzon's current manifestation.)

Simon visited me on a vacation to San Fran and it was very nice to meet him and his companion. He wanted to make sure the tape got returned to him, which I couldn't help but be touched by. People like this give me hope for the (trans)human race!

ZDBI was probably the only album which ever rocked San Francisco even though only six copies of it were ever made. Or so one might just say. In any case, it has now been digitized and can be downloaded via the links above. (I do not have "streaming audio" set up - best to just download them completely before playing them.)

These files represent very much a "learning work" in industrial noise creation. It is the product of a year and a half spent learning about sound, and the equipment used for its production and recording.

Industrial noise has come quite some distance since 1989 and has branched into forms with the natural habitat of nightclubs. This is not "club industrial" - you won't hear the likes of Front 242 or VNV Nation here - although I am quite fond of both, Zero Divided By Infinity takes more of its influence from Throbbing Gristle and Katharsis than any of that. (In fact, Jan O. Sanguine of Katharsis plays on one of the pieces, "Who's In Control".)

I cannot thank Simon enough for returning what Chaos took from me...what Chaos takes, Chaos will so often return - in the good ways as well as the bad.

THE THUMBNAILS to the left are links to the xeroxed matter that made up the tape packaging. Clicking them will open new windows. Some of the graphics have been "digitally remastered" so as to be readable.

They look very amateurish and DIY, much as the sound files to the left suffer from the fact that it was the first experience I ever had whatsoever making any kind of sound-art, a combination of quality issues related to digitalisation of a dupe cassette. The imperfection is thusly continually noticeable.

I still love them, anyway.

As I love all births of this sort: Choronzon is an art-child, the progeny of the mind and spirit...borne to child-free men and women, such as myself those who live lives devoted to, and spent in, the realms unmundane: labour for months on end, followed by expulsion.

Now this child is an adolescent, and like all adolescents, filled with energy, rebellion, change...rage...sexuality, and the urge to love.

The rage flows out against the minions of order and overcontrol. Who and what will it make love to, or with? Definitely with its creator: I have experienced this before and after the protracted rites of creation.

Perhaps it could be you, though, as well. You, who are reading these words right now. You will know it, if it happens. That is all I need say.

- dmt