RTRU* *Raudive Technoculture Research Unit at Kaje Brooklyn
Installation view, RTRU, Kaje, 2026
Installation view, RTRU, Kaje, 2026
RTRU* *Raudive Technoculture Research Unit
Ka Baird
Scott Benzel
Valdis Celms
Cal Fish
Jason Isolini
Voldemārs Matvejs
Karlīna Mežecka
Adriana Ramić
Konstantīns Raudive
Ieva Rubeze
“Mammu, nāc ātrāk.”
(“Mother, come quickly.”)
RTRU presents RTRU* (*Raudive Technoculture Research Unit), a group exhibition at KAJE that gathers around the figure of Konstantin Raudive (1909–1974), a Latvian writer, translator, philosopher, and parapsychological researcher known for his investigations into Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP), the capture of disembodied voices onto magnetic tape. The exhibition title extends the name of the curatorial collective itself—RTRU (Riga Technoculture Research Unit), originally referencing the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) and the Baltic’s oldest technical university, Riga Technical University (RTU, est. 1862)—by substituting “Riga” with “Raudive,” aligning the exhibition’s subject with the collective’s own research framework.
In the psychic aftermath of postwar Europe, Raudive—formerly a student of Carl Jung—pioneered experimental recording techniques to collect what he believed were messages from the dead. Using radio static, blank tape, and improvised recording configurations, he claimed to document thousands of brief, compressed utterances: voices that appeared multilingual, fragmented, and resistant to stable interpretation. These recordings were assembled in his book Breakthrough (1971), where he catalogued and analyzed them through a method combining empirical observation with metaphysical conviction.
A polyglot, Raudive recorded voices compressed or hybridized across Latvian, German, Spanish, English, Italian, Swedish, Russian, and French, producing a fractured auditory field in which sounds hover between noise and recognition. He reported that many voices seemed to belong to those closest to him—most often his mother, who affectionately called him “Kostja”—yet the archive also features unsettling echoes of Churchill, Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini, bringing intimate recollection into proximity with figures from twentieth-century history.
He proposed that the ability to discern voices in tape hiss was unevenly distributed, appearing predominantly among physicians, priests, military personnel, and teachers, framing listening itself as a trained and culturally conditioned practice. Statements—ranging from the mundane (“Heat the bathroom. Company is coming” / Bad heizen… Besuch kommt) to the obscure (“You belong probably to the cucumbers” / Du gehörst wahrscheinlich zu den Gurken)—and the first phrase Raudive believed he could clearly decipher—“that is right,” transcribed “pa-reizi-tā-būs”—were later said to have been present on earlier recordings all along, hinting at an archive whose meanings emerge retroactively through repeated listening, complicating the distinction between external transmission and internal perception.
The reception of Raudive’s work varies across cultural contexts. In Latvia, his legacy unfolds in two registers: an extensive literary catalogue of essays and translations, and the memory of a serious—if eccentric—intellectual whose investigations resonate with broader philosophical and spiritual traditions, a stance he occasionally framed through the concept of gara aristokrāts, the “aristocrat of spirit.” In the United States, Raudive’s recordings circulate primarily within paranormal subcultures—ghost hunters, speculative researchers, and late-night radio audiences.
Beyond these niches, the tapes circulate across cultural registers: hiss and buried voices appear in Christian metal as alleged satanic residues; The Smiths sample their spectral atmospherics; David Lynch explores related fascinations with disembodied transmission; William S. Burroughs’ tape cut-ups fragment and recombine recordings to reveal latent meaning; Mike Kelley adapts E.V.P. to his audio practice, valuing its blend of sonic effects, myth-making, interpretation, and spiritualist history and dubbing Raudive the “New King of Pop”. Labels such as Sub Rosa frame Raudive within experimental, industrial, and archival sound culture, where tape operates simultaneously as evidence, artifact, and aesthetic object moving between occult inquiry, avant-garde practice, and contemporary music.
RTRU* engages with both Raudive and his material to be re-examined rather than resolved. Egg-carton acoustic structures shape the exhibition’s architecture, recalling improvised recording studios. Within this environment, the project leaves open whether Raudive should be understood as the inventor of a new perceptual apparatus or as a subject overtaken by auditory hallucination. If trauma marks a rupture in symbolic continuity, the recording apparatus appears as a prosthetic attempt to capture and stabilize what returns in distorted form. The exhibition therefore unfolds less as a linear narrative than as an exploded diagram in which voices, devices, testimonies, artworks, and documents are set into relation without being fully resolved. In this context, Raudive’s tape recorder operates both as instrument and reference point, producing fragments of speech whose speakers remain uncertain.
The works assembled in RTRU* span existing contemporary artworks, repurposed archival inserts, non-art objects, and new audio-tinted commissions by a cross-generational constellation of artists, living and deceased. Signals arrive fragmented, meanings remain provisional, and listening emerges as a deliberate and speculative labor rather than passive reception. Within such a field, messages rarely stay where they began: voices drift, contexts fracture, and what once circulated as metaphysical evidence reappears, without ceremony, inside the formal registers of sound art, archival playback, or even dance music. The persistent question is whether any residue of the original charge survives such migrations, or whether meaning, like tape hiss, simply conforms to the systems that reproduce it.
This question finds its echo in the inscription on Raudive’s own tombstone: “Nāves nav, ir tikai pārtapšana.” (“There is no death, only transformation.”). If that is the case, Raudive’s archive suggests a simple operational principle: signals do not disappear; they merely change formats. The question then becomes what continues to speak once the channel has been switched.
Outer Gateways (2026) by Scott Benzel is a 2-channel sound work unfolding as a continuous 1:50:00 loop, weaving together archival recordings, experimental music, EVP phenomena, and esoteric sonic artifacts into a liminal auditory environment. Drawing on sources that span early spirit communication experiments to late 20th-century electronic composition, the piece constructs a threshold space where signal and noise, presence and absence, and human and non-human voices blur.
Structured in three movements, Logaeth, Vrihl, and Daäth, the composition layers fragments from artists such as Eliane Radigue, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and György Ligeti alongside recordings attributed to Konstantīns Raudive and materials from Okkulte Stimmen Mediale Musik and The Conet Project. These elements are interwoven with contemporary sound works and field recordings, producing a dense sonic topology shaped by interference, resonance, and transmission.
The work’s title evokes both metaphysical portals and technological thresholds, positioning listening as an act of tuning into unstable frequencies—between worlds, histories, and states of perception.
Outer Gateways
I. Logaeth
ELpH – Zwölf
Eliane Radigue – Kyema
Konstantīns Raudive – from Radio Stimme Microphone Stimme
Okkulte Stimmen Mediale Musik – (Recordings of Unseen Intelligences 1905–2007)1520–13 Trance-Reden und “Direkte Stimme”(Trance Speech and “Direct Voice”)
ELpH – Philm 1 vox, Philm
Okkulte Stimmen Mediale Musik – Rita Goold as “Russell”Recorded in Leicester, England, 18 November 1983
The Body – Coils of Kaa
Okkulte Stimmen Mediale Musik – Jack Sutton Contacts Dead Airmen
Konstantīns Raudive – from Breakthrough 7”
Ian Wellman – Mercury Vapor Lights
Bernard Parmegiani – Riposte
Okkulte Stimmen Mediale Musik – The Enfield Poltergeist (Voices from Possessed Children)
Desmond Leslie – Saturn-Chronos, The Death of Satan
The Conet Project – Gong StationChimes, Drone B, Odd Clacking
Okkulte Stimmen Mediale Musik – Einspielung Nummer 29 Recorded by Friedrich JürgensonParanormale Stimme durchs Telefon: “Du Verbrecherin gehörst verscharrt!” Recorded in Germany, 1999
The Gateway Project – 4Hz Theta Waves, Adeki
The Conet Project – Magnetic Fields, Deep Nuclear
Ian Wellman – 5G Antenna
Fletina – Network of Pipes
White Sun – Gong for Wealth
Lawrence Pike – Orpheus in the Underworld
David Tudor, Gordon Mumma – Rainforest 1
II. Vrihl
Field Recording, Bees
Karlheinz Stockhausen, Interstellar
Desmond Leslie, Esoteric Tone Poem, Flies
Lee Reynaldo, DJ Spooky, Lee’s Raudive Mix
Eleh, Death is Eternal Bliss
Barbara Mcbeath, Brendan Cook, MITD EVPs
Gyorgi Ligeti, Lux Aeterna
Wilburn Burchette, Psychic Meditation Music
Arsène Souffriau, Bubbles
Walter Wegmüller, from Tarot Raudive diodes
Okkulte Stimmung Mediale Musik, Theodor Spoerri, Ekstatisch Pathetische Kunstsprache Bei Chronischem Paranoid, Rhythmisch Gegliedert, Mit Strophisch Geordneten, Vokalreichen Lautkombinationen: Ecstatically Emotive Emotive Artificial Language In A Chronic Paranoid
Alessandro Cortini, Paragioia Oscilloscope drawing of Raymond Roussel’s Cosmic Star Spirits of LaGrange whisper EVPs
Konstantīns Raudive, from Radio Stimme Microphone Stimme Raudive diodes (clicking, distortion)
III. Daäth
The Gateway Tapes, from Wave 3, side 1
Raymond Cass, Uppsala Sun Countess
Leif Elggren, Somnambulism ABBA Soaking in His Presence Vol 9
SCSM whisper EVPs