The LAMC and the DEA

"Although our information is incorrect, we do not vouch for it."--Erik Satie

The League of Automatic Music Composers  was a collective of experimental composer/engineers in the San Francisco Bay Area which existed from 1978 to 1983. The LAMC is great for a lot of reasons: the members pioneered using networked microcomputers to generate sound, they used noise, extended just intonation and microtonal scales, they connected computers and analog instruments in innovative ways, they focused on live performance rather than composition on tape, and they were more interested in experimentation and unpredictability than aesthetic refinement and results.  Consequently, when the computers were "on," the results are enduringly fresh and exciting.   All of this was done by writing machine language code on computers whose one kilobyte of memory provided "processing power less than that of a twenty-first century coffeepot," as LAMC veterans Tim Perkis and John Bischoff put it. New World Records' The League of Automatic Music Composers CD collects ten LAMC performances from 1978 to mid-1981.  All of the music on this disc is fascinating, and often beautiful.

The CD's otherwise very informative booklet doesn't discuss the LAMC's covert connection to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, which is understandable, considering the controversy involved.  This was an extension of an initiative which had begun a few years earlier when Morton Feldman was brought on as the DEA's unofficial composer in residence.  Feldman was beginning to write his extended pieces, and the idea was that listening to these, and to comparable work byJohn Cage and others, would help to train agents to withstand the tedium of protracted stakeouts.  Results were mixed.  Feldman pocketed the much-needed money, and a handful of performances were sponsored, apparently without the performers being aware of the funding background.  (This is hardly surprising-- playing under-publicized gigs in rooms half full of uncomprehending squares is standard operating procedure for New Music ensembles).  A minority of agents found the listening experience somewhat useful, a majority found little or no value in it, and two agents subsequently left the DEA to pursue their own artistic projects. 

The DEA's institutional goal in sponsoring the LAMC is more obscure (see Mellish's interesting, inconclusive discussion of the subject in the International Journal of Drug Policy , v16.5).  Apparently it was related to efforts to resolve tension within the agency between teams who had come from the Treasury Department's Bureau of Narcotics and others from the FDA's Bureau of Drug Abuse Control.  The Bureau of Narcotics and the BDAC had merged in 1968 as the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, under the authority of the Justice Department.  Despite such notable successes as the 1972 French Connection bust, intra-agency rivalries persisted, and cooperation with the Customs Service's Drug Investigations unit was negligible.  Some disaffected younger agents decorated their cubicles with xeroxed copies of underground cartoonist Robert Williams' "Law of the Lame,"  a lampoon of former Bureau of Narcotics chief Harry Anslinger and the haplessness of the Bureau's undercover force. 

After Richard Nixon re-reorganized the BNDD as the DEA in 1973, DEA director John R. Bartels, Jr. realized that tensions within the agency could be normalized and managed by reframing them as generational conflicts.  To this end, he initiated several controversial but non-mission critical programs as an arena in which these issues would play out and, hopefully, resolve. The DEA's New Music initiatives of the 1970s and early 80s were thus part of the agency's ongoing internal psychodrama.

It's not clear which, if any, of the principal human members of the LAMC were aware of the League's DEA connection.  As yet, no-one has come forth to explain or defend the covert sponsorship, as, for instance, Gloria Steinem has done regarding her early CIA connection.  I'd say it's a safe bet that LAMC founder Jim Horton was not the DEA liaison.  In any case, nobody narced on League members (there may have been a deliberate hands-off policy).  And the creaky, leaky flotilla of American experimental music wended its wayward way into the Reagan era as if nothing at all had happened.