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The Sound of One Hair Falling
Compiled by David Lytle

WARNING: OFFICIAL FBI DOCUMENT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO AUTHORIZED LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIALS. NOT FOR PUBLIC RELEASE.

CONTENTS: TRANSCRIPT OF WEBCAST INTECEPTED ON 10/22/02 BROADCAST SOURCE: SLACKER MUSIC NETWORK, USING ILLEGALLY OBTAINED INTERNET ADDRESS

(NOTE: initial portion of Webcast is unintelligible. Transcript begins approximately 2:23 seconds from start of program)

SPEAKER ONE/MODERATOR (IDENTITY UNKNOWN): ... it all began when the hair fell into the tape machine, is that right?

SPEAKER TWO (IDENTITY UNKOWN): Not a tape machine, an analog phase-loop echo flanger, a real 70s leftover. You copy some audio to the magnetic tape and then it loops the tape around and around with a trippy out-of-phase synchronization. It's pretty simple, really, the two tape heads are offset just slightly, which causes an audio parallax.

SPEAKER THREE (IDENTITY UNKOWN): You can call it the tape machine, it's okay. I like it because it's got a grainy, goosey feel -- know what I'm saying? It's way better than what comes out of the digital synth.

MODERATOR: How did the hair get into the machine?

ZACH: I was adjusting my Black Diamond headlamp that I wear when I'm working on the equipment. It gives off an almost monochromatic beam of light that ... (unintelligible).

SPEAKER TWO: It's like this, Zach here was messing with this geeky headlamp thing he wears and one of the straps snapped a hair off his head and the hair must have fallen right into the machine. The next thing we hear is this wailing sound like we never heard before. The tape is still moving, playing this three-second long Miles Davis horn riff we sampled from Bitches Brew. But the hair got caught between the tape head and the tape, and the riff all the sudden has this cat-wail groove tunneling through it like you would not believe.

MODERATOR: So that's how big hair music started -- the biggest sensation since hip hop started with an accident? I guess it ended with one also, right?

SPEAKER TWO: No, man, slow down. It was a cool sound but you couldn't dance to it. You'd go crazy if you listened to it for more than a minute or two. I tried.

ZACH: The incident with the tape flanger was the starting point for a lot of iterations with the hair, trying to find the correct size, diameter, texture -- all these factors -- that would work best. We knew we had something, but it was strictly pre-release.

SPEAKER TWO: That's when we started the quest. We had to find the right hair. The hair with the perfect sound. We got samples from everybody we knew, collected them from hair salons, from wig shops, everywhere. We went through a lot of sounds. There was hair hop at first, then we got two machines going at the same time and that made a drum-like sound -- that was the bristle bop period -- then there was follicle rock, techno frizz, also sorts of shit.

ZACH: Wig shops, that was a major mistake. We found that the longer the hair had been removed from the human body, the worse it sounded. It lost the elasticity and structural flexibility need to generate the warmer, organic tones with multiple harmonics.

MODERATOR: I see we have a message for Zach from the online chat room that's running simultaneously with this Webcast. The caller wants to know if certain hair colors worked better than others.

ZACH: Yes, some colors were tonally advantaged. Blonde hair in particular gave us a good sound without much of the minor-key distortion that we found, say, in most hair from red heads.

SPEAKER TWO: But getting the right kind of blonde was a bitch. You know how much peroxide is out there? And nobody will tell you if their hair color is natural or not. We feed it through the tape machine and it might sound okay, but then we go back to the same woman the next week to try again and the hair sounds different.

ZACH: It was the decay rates in the coloring polymers that led to inconsistent sounds, and frankly, to a certain brittleness in the phase changes. It wasn't working.

MODERATOR: We've got another person who wants to know about differences between hair from men and women and if you can recommend a good criminal lawyer, given your recent encounters with the law.

SPEAKER TWO: Female hair had the best groove, no question. It would wiggle back and forth when it was caught in the tape head, where men's hair just lay their flat, making a gritty, dry sound. I can't comment on that lawyer stuff, don't even want to go there.

ZACH: After our first record on the head hop label went platinum, we knew we needed a steady supply of fresh, natural blonde hair.

SPEAKER TWO: That's when we started getting into the big hair period, when I'd take ten, fifteen of these machines to a club and run them all night with the house DJ. That sound just eradicated everybody.

MODERATOR: But I understand you had some problems with obtaining the hair you needed. Is that what led to the arrest warrants -- can you talk about that?

ZACH: That's when we decided to go on the Iceland tour. Iceland has the world's most homogeneous population. Practically everyone can trace their genetic history to when the Viking explorers settled there more than 1,100 years ago.

SPEAKER TWO: Everybody's white skinned, blue eyed, blonde haired. No bleach. Kind of scary, but they treated us okay. Grooved on the music, too -- it was a big underground scene in Reykjavik. And plenty of women to get hair from. Good blonde hair that squealed so nice when you ran it through the machine. Until Zach here got freaky on me.

ZACH: It wasn't anything intentional. I was using a new laser-based hair scissors I invented. A simple diode-pumped fiber laser with a curvilinear beam dump for a safety shield. Just insert the hair and hit the switch and you'd get a perfect cut. I had checked out Iceland's radiological health codes and they were pretty lax when it came to using lasers, so I knew I was okay there, although the certification standards for hair stylists were really high and that kind of had me worried. But we were just taking samples in the clubs, everybody volunteering their hair for the next song, so I didn't worry too much about the authorities hassling us. But I'm rambling.

SPEAKER TWO: Damn straight he's rambling. If it wasn't for me we'd be in some Icelandic penitentiary right now

ZACH: As I said, it wasn't my fault. The group that played the night before had rigged the club's master panel to get more electricity for their amps and didn't set it back. I was supposed to get 220 volts but I was getting 440.

MODERATOR: So the laser was little stronger than you expected?

ZACH: More than a little. First hair sample I took, the beam fried the safety shield without me even knowing it. Then the second sample I took, well, that was the one that caused the trouble. It was a clean cut right above the woman's second vertebrae. I don't think she felt a thing -- the laser even cauterized the wound, so there was no bleeding at all, well, no more than a drop or two. Nobody in the club noticed a thing.

SPEAKER TWO: I noticed it! Hell, it's not often you see a head full of blonde hair rolling along the floor without a body attached to it! I tried to get the head under the stage where nobody would see it, but the rest of the body -- the part without the head on it -- was too big to hide. Then people started to see what was going on and it was panic time, everybody screaming, shouting, heading for the exits.

ZACH: At that point instinct took over. We grabbed what equipment we could carry and ran.

MODERATOR: You both are obviously not in Iceland anymore, although I'll abide by your request and not reveal the location of our Webcast studio. But there are reports you two were spotted performing in a New York club just last week.

SPEAKER TWO: We got off that island, yeah, but we can't say where we are. There are warrants out for our arrest, so we're kind of lying low, working on new stuff until things simmer down. The U.S. has an extradition treaty with Iceland, can you believe it?

ZACH: Something interesting did come out of the whole affair. I had a microphone rigged up to the laser scissors so I could sample the sound of the hair being cut, and when I listened to the last recording -- the one of the accident -- I found some seriously funky sounds. Right now I'm working on isolating the DNA of the blood sample that was left on the laser. I think with a little work. …

NOTE: WEBCAST WAS TERMINATED AT THIS POINT.

NO FURTHER INFORMATION IS AVAILABLE AT THIS TIME.