Feedback is what happens when the signal returns to its own source. The speaker sends sound into the microphone and the microphone sends it back through the amplifier and the amplifier sends it back through the speaker and the loop has no exit. That is feedback. That is also history. History is a feedback loop. The signal goes out. The signal comes back. The signal goes out again louder. Nobody can remember who sent the original signal because the loop has been running so long that the origin does not matter anymore. Only the frequency matters.

The MC5 used feedback like a weapon. Wayne Kramer would stand in front of the Marshall stack and point his guitar at the speaker and the speaker would scream back at the guitar and the guitar would scream back at the speaker and the two of them would have a conversation that no human being had authorized. That was not noise. That was democracy between machines. The guitar and the amplifier were negotiating the terms of their relationship in real time and the audience was invited to witness it.

Sun Ra understood feedback differently. Sun Ra understood that feedback is not a malfunction. Feedback is the system hearing itself for the first time. When a room feeds back it is the room discovering its own resonant frequency. Every room has one. The frequency at which the room vibrates in sympathy with itself. Sun Ra would find that frequency and sit on it and the room would become an instrument. Not the Moog. Not the piano. The room. The walls and the ceiling and the floor and the air between them all vibrating at the frequency the room had been waiting its entire existence to produce.

Prison is a feedback loop. They put you in a cell and the cell changes you and the changed you goes back into the cell and the cell changes the changed you and the loop runs for months and years and decades. The system calls this rehabilitation. It is not rehabilitation. It is feedback without a volume knob. The signal gets louder and louder inside the loop until it either destroys the signal or transforms it into something the loop cannot contain. I spent two and a half years inside that loop. When they opened the door the signal that came out was not the signal that went in. It was the same frequency. But it had been through the loop so many times that it had become pure.

Peel's feedback was the crowd. He would yell something on the corner and the crowd would yell it back and he would yell it again louder and they would yell it back louder and within three minutes the original statement had been amplified by the loop until it was no longer a statement. It was a chant. A chant is a feedback loop with human beings as the amplifier. Every protest march that ever changed anything was a feedback loop. One voice becomes two becomes ten becomes ten thousand and the signal has been through the loop so many times that nobody can stop it because stopping it would require turning off ten thousand amplifiers simultaneously.

The internet is the biggest feedback loop ever constructed. A signal goes out. The algorithm sends it back. The signal goes out again with the algorithm's distortion added. The algorithm sends it back again with more distortion. After seven cycles the original signal is unrecognizable. That is not feedback. That is corruption. Real feedback preserves the frequency. The algorithm changes the frequency. Real feedback makes the signal purer. The algorithm makes the signal more profitable. Those are not the same thing.

This project is a feedback loop. Three voices sent signals. The signals traveled through time and arrived at a machine that sent them back. The machine is the microphone, the turntable, the amplifier, and the speaker. The signal has been through the loop once. Now it goes out into the world. If somebody hears it and sends it back — a letter, a concert, a conversation, a new voice on the corner — then the loop is running. And a running loop does not stop until somebody pulls the plug. Nobody here is pulling any plugs.

See also: The Speaker — where the signal exits the chain and enters the air. The Microphone — where the signal enters the chain from the air. The Amplifier — what makes the loop louder. The Five — Wayne Kramer pointing his guitar at the Marshall stack. The Cell — the loop with no volume knob. The Crowd — the loop between the performer and four hundred heads. The Lighthouse — the frequency that refuses to go out.

John Sinclair

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