The challenge for progressive jug bands during the Cold War was one of the sheer size of the processing equipment required to create works that transcended the Clyfford Still barrier. Most state-level acts, such as The Tel Aviv Jug Stompers and Peta-Jug Institut Francaise (PJUF), would house their mainframes in temperature-controlled sub-basement facilities, while Warsaw Pact aligned nations often constructed purpose-built silos for theirs outside major cities where the bands could concentrate on hand-weaving software in assembly code.
After a well-documented accident in which a UK regional jug band’s drigible caught fire due to an overheated memory unit, it was largely taken as best practice that studios as mobile facilities were not practical, and indeed the expansion of global telephony had allowed acts to set up remote time-sharing terminals at concert venues along their touring itinerary. And so it was perhaps unusual that Entropy Circus had chosen to install their IBM System/360 inside a roaming submersible.
“It seemed like a no-brainer to us,” Solomon Kirchner recalled, “the on-board reactor could provide all of the energy requirements of the processor, and in the rare cases where we couldn’t maintain the equipment ourselves, it was a simple matter of locating an IBM frigate and connecting control cables between the two vessels.”
The submariners of the EC/360 set up tours at coastal festivals worldwide without the vagaries of time-lag associated with pre-ARPANET gigging. “We used the trade routes of the old Hanseatic League for much of our northern European touring,” Kirchner explained, “and we intended to take the boat up the Danube to landlocked Mitteleuropa in 1972, but ridiculous concerns about radioactive leakage were boosted in the press by James Last to maintain his monopoly and keep us off his turf.” Oilrigs and drilling platforms, which had previously been the preserve of folk acts, were key elements of their tour schedule, “and of course,” noted Kirchner, “operating mostly in international waters, we avoided income tax for pretty much the entire period.”
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https://archive.org/details/EC360