One night while hunting for interesting soundbites to use as samples in a DJ mix/sound collage, I chanced across a file named "Dec Rant" in a file-sharing network.

i wasn't listening too closely. At first it sounded to the casual listener like some kind of left-field stand up comic, ranting about an X-files type conspiracy. But it went on for too long to be any sort of comedy routine. Then I noticed the repetition of certian key words, over and over again: ganster-computer-god-frankenstein-controls-headphone radio-eyesight-television, like some kind of nightmare world where all you could hear were media soundbites on a cracked record.

I soon became hypnotised by it, until I noticed the psychotic ramblings also exposed hideous racism, directed against blacks and jews. It had to be satire on bigoted people,I hoped, but done in a very uncompromising artistic way. And then the sheer madness of the words erased the fear of malignant Nazism. Dec hated and feared everyone, including his own brother, and his madness was not shrouded in any sort of "philosophy".

A few searches on the internet revealed the Dec rant I had found, and four others available at http://www.ubu.com/sound/dec.html have a bizarre street authenticity. Their origin is a genuinely insane mind, not the artificial creation of the avant-garde, and not a media savvy serial killer or pop-loony like Charles manson.

Francis Dec, it appears, has been fighting an apparently hopeless battle against severe delusional paranoia, and has been firing off letters from his New York home, sometimes to seemingly randomly chosen recipients, warning of a vast conspiracy by an entity known as the computer god, to control humanity. The computer god, Dec believed, has deceived many people, perhaps all people in the world, by having high tech surgical implants put in them, the "earphone radio" and "eyesight television".

In 1986, an American DJ recorded some of Dec's ramblings, and that's what you hear. "Doc on the Roq" is the voice on the rants. His silken tonsils and very polished delivery contrast surreally with the uncontrolled stream of consciousness Mr Dec put into his original writings.

As I listned to Dec's rants over the next few days, I often found them hysterically funny. There was also tragedy there, and finally a sense of wonder at the odd poetry that emerged from the mind of this lunatic.

Francis Dec's fame is not exactly stellar. Anecdotal evidence suggests he was unaware of the kind of reception his letters and pamphlets received while he was writing them, and he continues to be so (assuming he is still alive). Thanks to the internet, we can all marvel at this cerebral disaster area which accidentally created a fascinating document of madness.

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