the album
Preface: On the Discovery of Dorian Zero
The typescript was uncovered in 2019 in a corrugated archive box at the defunct Institut für Sonische Archäologie of the University of Bremen. Its folder bore the catalogue number A-314 / Phono-77, wedged between tape-log transcripts of forgotten Krautrock ensembles and a student thesis on oscilloscopic poetics. The document’s title page, half-carboned, read only:
INTERTWINED: DORIAN ZERO — THE WARLOCKS OF SOUND — CULT OF THE NULL FREQUENCY
by [redacted]
No institutional letterhead, no date. The first page was typewritten, but by the tenth, the ink bled into hand-drawn symbols resembling reversed Enochian letters or perhaps merely the result of a faulty ribbon.
The author—whoever they were—writes with the diction of a 1970s musicologist but cites sources unavailable until decades later. The pages smell faintly of ozone.
I. The Album as Relic
“Every artifact of recorded sound is also an artifact of recorded silence.”¹
The 1977 LP Dorian, issued on the microscopic Amerama Records A-1001, was the only long-play release credited to Dorian Zero, the performing alias of Kenneth Dorian Passante (1948–1994).² The jacket photographs a man whose reflection is misaligned by a fraction of a second—an optical echo. To the casual ear the record is a curiosity of mid-70s art-rock; to certain listeners it is a cipher.
Side A opens with Magnetic Sleep, an eighteen-minute suite structured in Dorian mode, its tape hiss forming a continuous drone between movements. Played at the correct speed (33⅓ RPM), the piece evokes a meditation on synthetic rebirth. Played at 45 RPM, a subharmonic pulse emerges every seventy-seven seconds, suggesting an intentional numerical correspondence to the year of issue.³
Contemporary reviews are scarce. A single column in New Sounds Hamburg (March 1978) calls the record “eine Versuchsanordnung für Selbstauflösung” — an experimental arrangement for self-dissolution.⁴
That same year, Passante disappeared from public performance, resurfacing only through fragmentary session logs from Electric Lady Studios, New York, referencing an unreleased tape labeled In Transit to Bermuda.⁵
The Album as Device
Some scholars of esoteric musicology have argued that Dorian functions less as composition than as mechanism: a magnetic-tape construction intended to reproduce within sound the initiation sequences of early twentieth-century German occult orders such as Fraternitas Saturni.⁶ The album’s inner sleeve reproduces astrological glyphs corresponding to Saturn, Mercury, and the rune Eihwaz — symbols identical to those appearing in Guido von List’s Das Geheimnis der Runen (1908).⁷
To place Dorian among such company is to see it not merely as art-rock pastiche but as the audible continuation of a lineage—the secret chords of the German Hexenmeister, filtered through amplifier hum.⁸
Listeners who have digitized rare copies report faint whispered syllables between tracks: fragments of reversed Latin and half-Germanic phonemes (“quasi sonus vacui”, “Stimme der Leere”). Spectrographic analysis reveals bursts near 19 kHz—frequencies imperceptible to most adults yet capable of inducing mild vertigo.⁹ Whether these are intentional insertions, print-through artifacts, or something the tape itself exhaled remains uncertain.
Footnotes
Attributed to R. Schneider, Notes Toward a Sonic Archaeology (Bremen Press, 1975), p. 3.
Kenneth Dorian Passante (b. 16 Jan 1948 – d. 7 Jan 1994). See Tracklib artist file Dorian Zero.
The subharmonic recurrence at 77 s was first noted by O. Heinrich in Archiv für Phonotektik, vol. XIII (1979), p. 114. The journal’s existence cannot be confirmed.
“Dorian Zero: Selbstauflösung,” New Sounds Hamburg, no. 6 (March 1978), p. 12.
Studio logs, Electric Lady Studios (1975), box E-L 244; cross-referenced in Kutmusic digital reissue notes (2022).
Fraternitas Saturni, founded 1928 Berlin; cf. Stephen Flowers, Fire & Ice: The History, Structure and Rituals of Germany’s Most Influential Modern Magical Order (1990).
Guido von List, Das Geheimnis der Runen (Vienna, 1908), plate VII.
“Hexenmeister” — male counterpart to Hexe, the witch; cf. E. Müller, Cunning Folk in Deutschland, University of Tübingen Press (1958).
Preliminary digital analysis by Bremen Audio Restoration Lab Report A-314, appended to archive file. Note: subsequent staff complain of auditory shadows after playback.
II. The Persona and the Mirror
*“He did not invent the double; he tuned himself to it.”*¹
The name Dorian Zero functions less as a pseudonym than as a mathematical reduction of Kenneth Passante’s given one. The “zero” is an operation: subtraction of self until only the resonance remains. Passante’s surviving notebooks (held in private collections) contain sketches of mirrors with void centres, annotated with the phrase *“audio as absence.”*²
During a brief 1976 tour of Hamburg and Düsseldorf, eyewitnesses recall that he performed behind a half-silvered screen, his body visible only through delayed projection. The stage lights were timed so that for an instant the performer and the reflection aligned — the moment the press dubbed *the Null Event.*³
After these performances, correspondence from contemporaries suggests that Dorian became convinced of a “feedback personality”: a duplicate living a few seconds behind him, made of magnetic residue.⁴ He wrote that the double “plays me through another stylus.”
Doppelgänger Technologies
While many late-70s performers experimented with persona (Bowie, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Blixa Bargeld), Passante’s approach carried an almost alchemical intent. His drafts for an unreleased essay, The Mirror Circuit, connect the theatrical double to the Fraternitas Saturni doctrine of the Schwarze Flamme, the black flame representing individual divinity.⁵
In marginalia he notes: “If the flame is inverted through sound, it becomes the Black Tone — the carrier wave of the self’s echo.”
Here we glimpse the genesis of what later followers would call the Cult of the Null Frequency — a small but persistent network of listeners convinced that Dorian encodes a ritual designed to “nullify the personal frequency,” rendering the initiate transparent to time.⁶
The cult’s earliest mention appears in a 1982 zine, Der Ton und der Abgrund, printed in West Berlin. A paragraph refers to a “singer who crossed between selves by erasing his sound.”⁷ The issue was pulped after a lawsuit concerning unauthorised samples, but three copies survive in the Bremen archive; one carries the faint graphite inscription “Friday night man.”
The Mirror as Gate
Late notebooks describe an incident in which Dorian allegedly placed a tape loop of his own breathing before a mirror for seventy-seven hours, attempting to “record the reflection.”⁸ When played back, the reel produced only an arrhythmic clicking. The sound engineer present, listed only as “W. H.,” reported nausea and persistent tinnitus for several days.
Whether literal or performative, these acts show a consistent pursuit: to locate in sound the same threshold painters once sought in light — the exact point where representation folds into apparition. To look, or to listen, was equally to risk being seen or heard back.
Footnotes
Fragment attributed to Dorian Zero, The Mirror Circuit, draft c. 1976, p. 4.
Private notebook, “Passante / Audio Sketches,” leaf 7, courtesy of the Amerama Estate.
Concert review, Rheinische Zeitung, 12 Dec 1976.
Letter from Dorian Zero to H. Krüger, 18 Jan 1977; Bremen archive file A-314/Corresp. “I feel him behind me in sound.”
Fraternitas Saturni ritual schema, De Occulta Philosophia Saturni, Berlin MS, fol. 22b.
Oral interview with M. Rehbein (Berlin listener collective Null Frequenz), recorded 1991.
Der Ton und der Abgrund, Issue 3 (1982), p. 9. Margin note possibly by the editor.
Tape log “Experiment N,” Amerama Studio, undated. Playback reports stored with medical documentation. Note added in blue ink: “clicking continues after machine stops.”
III. The German Warlocks
*“All technology is invocation; all invocation is repetition.”*¹
The Apparatus of Invocation
If Dorian Zero is the mirror, then the German warlocks are its laboratory. Between 1922 and 1945, the term “warlock” was adopted by several occult technologists who saw sound, film, and radio as modern instruments of possession. Their practices, long dismissed as Weimar esoterica, were quietly resurrected in West Germany during the 1970s — precisely when Passante (alias Dorian Zero) recorded his single album.
Among these figures was Dr. Werner Hahlweg, an acoustician once employed by Telefunken. His lost paper Über die Resonanz der Leiber (“On the Resonance of Bodies,” 1938) claimed that human tissue could record sonic impressions like shellac.² The Gestapo reportedly confiscated his test cylinders. Decades later, Passante’s friend and sometime producer Erich Lenz claimed to have heard one: “a voice whispering the words ‘Du hast mich gehört, jetzt gehörst du mir’ [You heard me; now you belong to me].”³
Transmission and Survival
After 1945, remnants of these experiments persisted within the Nachklang-Kreis (“Echo Circle”), a shadow group formed by displaced engineers, mystics, and members of the disbanded Fraternitas Saturni. They believed that certain tones could “reactivate” imprints left in magnetic tape — a process they termed Seelenrücklauf (“soul rewind”).⁴
Their correspondence, scattered between Düsseldorf and Zürich archives, describes clandestine gatherings where early synthesizers were played through candlelit mirrors, the oscillations reflected across panes of polished obsidian. One letter speaks of a “young American visitor, pale and polite, who called himself Zero.”⁵ The date: 1975.
Passante’s Hamburg sojourn thus coincides eerily with the Echo Circle’s final experiments. The group vanished in 1977 — the same year Dorian Zero was released. Police reports list a “warehouse fire” near a decommissioned radio facility, but the forensic details suggest electrical burn patterns consistent with feedback overload.⁶
A fragment of magnetic tape, recovered from the scene, contained no discernible music — only a low hum at 19Hz, below human hearing yet capable, according to military documentation, of inducing unease and visions.⁷
The Hermetic Feedback Loop
Walter Benjamin wrote that “each epoch dreams the next.”⁸ The warlocks of Germany dreamed a future where sound replaced ritual. Passante dreamed that same dream, but in reverse — to return the electric to the magical, to make the amplifier a grimoire. His album, when played backward, yields rhythmic inversions matching the numerical patterns of the Saturnian Tables (Berlin MS 47b).⁹ Whether coincidence or intention is irrelevant: both art and ritual share the same architecture of belief.
It is possible that the “cult of Dorian Zero” is merely the afterimage of these vanished warlocks — their signal transmitted forward through grooves, tape, rumor. Yet one detail resists rationalization: the engineer “W. H.” from Experiment N later signed a sworn statement claiming that, on playback of the final master, the reels turned without power.¹⁰
Footnotes
Fragment of lecture notes, Die Musik und das Magische Medium, Hahlweg archive, fol. 3.
Über die Resonanz der Leiber (Berlin, Telefunken internal memo, 1938). Copy lost in wartime bombing; paraphrased in Krauss, Esoterische Akustik, 1956.
Interview with Erich Lenz, unpublished, conducted by H. Müller (Kunsthochschule Kassel, 1983).
Nachklang-Kreis pamphlet, Über die Wiederkehr der Klänge, Zurich private press, 1948.
Letter from H. Vogt to C. Schürer, dated 2 Sept 1975, file KZ-91, Düsseldorf Stadtarchiv.
Hamburg Police Report No. 10477-B, 4 June 1977. “Probable electrical ignition source within analog device.”
Bundeswehr Research Paper 219/75, “Infraschallwirkungen auf das menschliche Nervensystem.”
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Eiland & McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999), p. 389.
Saturnian Tables (Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, MS 47b), numerical correspondence tables, fol. 19-22.
Statement of W. H., Amerama Studios, appended to insurance claim, 12 Sept 1977.
IV. The Cult of the Null Frequency
*“Silence is a kind of speech that outlives its speaker.”*¹
1. The Transmission
By 1980, Dorian Zero had already slipped out of its author’s grasp. Bootlegs circulated on chrome cassettes labelled only with the symbol “Ø”. Each copy sounded slightly different—tempo altered, bass drained, reverb deepened—as if the music were re-recording itself in transit. Fans began reporting auditory phenomena: the sense that playback “extended the room,” that voices emerged behind the speakers long after the needle lifted.²
These experiences coalesced into the Cult of the Null Frequency, a loose federation of listeners spanning Hamburg, Glasgow, and Boston. They described themselves as “technicians of disappearance.”³ Members used tape decks as altars, adjusting azimuth and pitch in ritual sequences based on the liner notes’ hidden numerology. “Track three,” wrote one adherent, “contains the gate; track seven closes it.”⁴
2. Ethnographies of Absence
In 1991, the folklorist Gertrud Kramer compiled Die Unsichtbaren Frequenzen (“The Invisible Frequencies”), an ethnography of post-industrial esotericism. Chapter Five, ‘Der Kreis der Null’, documents the cult’s gatherings:
“They meet in abandoned studios, often with one broken speaker. Before the ritual, a member reads aloud from a manual of obsolete recording equipment. The text functions as incantation. When the tape begins, they sit still until the sound disappears into noise.”⁵
Kramer’s recordings reveal a stunning paradox: the longer participants listened, the less audio registered on her meters. The sound literally cancelled itself out, converging toward digital zero.⁶
3. The Doctrine of the Negative
At its core, the cult’s belief system rested on what they called the Doctrine of the Negative: that every sound carries its own anti-sound, waiting to nullify it. Their graffiti appeared across West Berlin in the mid-1980s—Jede Stimme hat ihr Schweigen (“Every voice has its silence”).
Some adherents connected this to the teachings of the Fraternitas Saturni, interpreting the “Black Tone” as an initiation through the annihilation of signal. A 1984 pamphlet, Manual für die Null-Riten, links Dorian Zero directly to “the legacy of the Saturnian adepts who coded their silence in radio waves.”⁷
Yet there was also an American branch—Boston, 1985—where the cult’s aesthetic merged with no-wave art and proto-industrial performance. The group Friday Night Man (named after the graphite inscription found in Der Ton und der Abgrund) performed weekly in a disused television studio, broadcasting static to the public access channel. Viewers reported faces appearing in the snow.⁸
4. Disintegration of the Archive
By 1993, the cult had splintered. Kramer’s follow-up correspondence mentions members who “no longer spoke but only listened.”⁹ A handful of their tapes entered university collections, yet even these began to degrade anomalously: the magnetic coating peeling away, leaving a transparent ribbon. When played, the reels emitted a faint pulse at 19Hz—the same infrasound frequency noted in the 1977 fire report.¹⁰
A 2001 restoration attempt by the British Library produced a peculiar phenomenon. The technicians described a presence in the signal—something “breathing with us.”¹¹ The waveform, when slowed, revealed a repeating spectrogram pattern resembling a human face. It was later identified as a match for a 1976 press photo of Dorian Zero.¹²
Footnotes
Kramer, Gertrud. Die Unsichtbaren Frequenzen: Esoterische Gemeinschaften in der Technologischen Ära (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), p. 102.
Testimony of P. von Heeren, in Der Kreis der Null, cassette interview 3A.
Null Frequency Manifesto (undated mimeograph, Glasgow), paragraph 4.
Field notes, “Cult of the Null Frequency,” Boston Archive of Contemporary Subculture, Box 19.
Kramer, op. cit., p. 118.
Audio analysis by WDR sound lab, Appendix B.
Manual für die Null-Riten, private printing, Cologne, 1984, fol. 9b.
Interview with “T.M.,” former Friday Night Man member, Boston Underground, Summer 1986.
Letter from G. Kramer to R. Niedecker, dated 12 Oct 1993.
Bundeswehr Research Paper 219/75, “Infraschallwirkungen…”, cross-referenced with Hamburg Police Report No. 10477-B (1977).
British Library Audio Conservation Log 00-21-144, “Dorian Zero Reels.”
Facial pattern analysis, Forensic Audio Visual Unit, report filed 2001.
V. Apparitions of the Analog Soul
*“If the soul is an echo, tape is its tomb.”*¹
1. Afterlife as Medium
The hypothesis emerging from Passante’s scattered notes is not theological but mechanical: that the afterlife is an artifact of recording technology. In one fragment, he writes—
*“No heaven, only playback.”*²
Benjamin might have called this the technological unconscious: the residue that remains when aura collapses into duplication. Dorian Zero’s entire career, if we can call it that, constitutes an attempt to inhabit this space—to become the ghost that magnetic tape, film, and sound always implied.
His album, often dismissed as a minor krautrock curiosity, is in fact a complex meditation on mediumship through machinery. Each track layer—voice, guitar, filtered oscillation—is a ritualized doubling, the sound of a man pre-recording his own haunting. The faint distortion on side B, track 2, corresponds to a 19Hz frequency: the “fear tone” known to induce feelings of presence.³
Presence of what? The self returned as signal.
2. The Feedback Body
In a surviving letter to Erich Lenz, Dorian writes:
“When you feed the signal back, it stops being music. It becomes a mirror that sings back with your mouth.”⁴
He seems to have believed that feedback was a way to materialize consciousness. To hold a note until it reenters the body, to vibrate oneself into the circuitry. Compare this to the 1938 Resonanz der Leiber experiments: the warlock-acousticians sought to inscribe sound on flesh; Dorian reversed the procedure, seeking to inscribe flesh into sound.
Witnesses to his final recording sessions report that he often performed with his head pressed against the amplifier grill, eyes closed, whispering to the distortion.⁵ Tape from these sessions contains transient murmurs—frequencies outside human speech—that engineers initially dismissed as electrical interference. Later analysis revealed patterns matching cardiac rhythms.
The implication: the body becomes waveform.
3. The Apparatus Dreams
By 1978, following his disappearance, rumors proliferated that Dorian’s equipment continued to emit sound long after being unplugged. A studio intern testified that a Revox A77 deck “spun on its own,” producing a faint heartbeat.⁶ When technicians disassembled the unit, the tape heads were magnetized in a pattern identical to a human fingerprint.⁷
A theory emerged—half folklore, half metaphysics—that magnetic media could retain not just information but intention. The analog soul, unlike its digital successor, does not reproduce; it remembers. To play an old reel is to invite its ghost to speak again.
The philosopher-archivist Klaus von Nessel later summarized this idea in his treatise The Echo Condition (1998):
“Every medium is haunted by the desire to be a body. Every body, by the desire to become a medium.”⁸
Nessel situates Dorian Zero as the culmination of this mutual haunting—an artist who made the crossover literal. His disappearance in 1977 thus becomes not an absence but an integration: the performer absorbed into his own playback system.
4. The Last Recording
A fragment known as “Apparatus 0” surfaced in 2003 from an estate sale in Bremen: a seven-inch acetate with a plain white label marked DZ. The audio is almost inaudible. Through layers of hum, one can discern a phrase in English:
*“I am not gone. I am compressed.”*⁹
Spectrogram analysis shows the waveform collapsing inward like a recursive spiral—the visual equivalent of sound consuming itself. The engineers who analyzed it reported mild vertigo. The acetate was subsequently misplaced from the archive, last listed as “unavailable / temporarily relocated.”
Whether this was a hoax, an apocryphal tape, or an intentional anti-record, the gesture completes the mythography: the artist as signal, endlessly decaying yet never extinguished.
Footnotes
von Nessel, Klaus. The Echo Condition: Essays on Media and Mortality (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1998), p. 54.
Dorian Zero, unpublished notebook, “Amerama Drafts,” leaf 9.
Bundeswehr Research Paper 219/75; see also Tandy, V., “Ghosts in the Machine: Infrasound and Vision,” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 62:851 (1998).
Letter from Dorian Zero to Erich Lenz, 22 Feb 1977, Bremen archive, file A-314/Corresp.
Interview with M. Rehbein, Berlin, 1991.
Studio log, Amerama Session 4C, entry by technician R. Volker, “machine running post power-down.”
Amerama maintenance report, 1978; fingerprint comparison by K. Mahler, Forensic Division.
von Nessel, op. cit., p. 61.
Private acetate recording, provenance disputed; referenced in Sound Archaeology Quarterly, Issue 12 (2005).
VI. The Archive as Abyss
*“To catalog is to conjure; to preserve is to summon.”*¹
1. The Box and Its Contents
The original typescript of Intertwined was found in a mislabeled archive box (A-314 / Phono-77), wedged between tape-log transcripts and student theses. Among its pages lay fragments of Dorian Zero’s handwritten marginalia, inked in green: numeric sequences, mirrored letters, and elliptical notes such as *“the echo will answer only when no one listens.”*²
Within the box were also acetate fragments, magnetic reels, and printed copies of ephemeral zines—some attributed to the Cult of the Null Frequency, others to the West Berlin Echo Circle. The collection itself seems to respond to the viewer: magnetic fields reportedly fluctuate when the box is handled, producing faint, irregular hums, perceptible only through headphones or in extremely quiet rooms.³
2. The Archive as Active Medium
Walter Benjamin’s conception of history as montage is literal here: the archive does not merely store, it performs.⁴ Dorian’s notes, alongside contemporary recordings, suggest that playback is never neutral. Each interaction, even the act of cataloging, generates new sonic “echoes” within the magnetic substrate. The archivist becomes participant.⁵
A report from the Bremen Audio Restoration Lab (2019) notes:
“Reel A-314/77 exhibits anomalies during digitization. The sound layer exhibits self-modulating frequencies, and the file produced appears to contain voices not present in the original analog tape.”⁶
Some interpret these as hallucinations; others, as residual agency encoded by the artist—or perhaps by the warlocks who preceded him. One footnote scribbled in green ink on the typescript itself reads: *“Do not catalog the echo. The echo catalogs you.”*⁷
3. Digital Resurrection and Recursive Haunting
Efforts to digitize the archive have only intensified its spectral properties. In 2022, a partial reconstruction of Dorian Zero tracks using AI-assisted restoration produced a curious phenomenon: when played, the tracks generated subtle variations in electromagnetic interference across the building. Security cameras recorded brief shadows moving across empty rooms.⁸
The archivist is implicated in this recursion. To handle the materials, to even read the footnotes, is to risk being written into the archive. The line between observer and observed, between scholar and cultist, collapses.⁹
4. Conclusion: Between Presence and Absence
Dorian Zero’s oeuvre, the German warlocks, and the cult that followed form an interlocking series of signals: the album is the mirror, the warlocks the apparatus, the cult the resonance, and the archive the abyss. To encounter them is to confront the ontology of media itself—sound as persistence, tape as body, archive as limbo.¹⁰
In this sense, the monograph is not just a document, but an active participant in the phenomenon it describes. Every reading, every footnote, every reference adds a pulse to the echo; each scholar risks partial dissolution into the signal.
As one final marginal note in the recovered typescript warns:
*“The last listener will not find Dorian Zero. Dorian Zero will find them.”*¹¹
Footnotes
Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, trans. Eiland & McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999), fragment N1a, p. 12.
Handwritten marginalia, Intertwined typescript, Bremen archive box A-314, leaf 17b.
Bremen Audio Restoration Lab, internal report, 2019.
Benjamin, op. cit., fragment N1c.
Interview notes with archivist H. Brecht, 2020.
Bremen Audio Restoration Lab, report on reels A-314/77, May 2019.
Green ink marginal note, typescript, leaf 23a.
AI-assisted restoration, Bremen Media Lab, 2022; observation by engineer S. Krieger.
Kramer, Gertrud. Die Unsichtbaren Frequenzen, op. cit., pp. 110–112.
Passante, K.D., unpublished notebooks, “Amerama Drafts,” leaf 11.
Marginal note, Intertwined, Bremen archive A-314, leaf 26b.
Postscript: Friday Night
The archive box remains in Bremen, though partially restricted to researchers cleared by the University’s sound archaeology committee. Those who have handled it report the same sensation: faint vibrations, glimpses of shadow in the corner of the eye, a whisper of a name—Dorian Zero—just at the threshold of hearing.
Some evenings, late in November, when the archive is quiet, one can almost imagine the pulse of the album: a signal looping across decades, an echo of a vanished man, a resonance of a warlock’s dream, and the hum of the void itself.
