Gregory Taylor

San Francisco resident Carl Stone has composed electro-acoustic and computer music exclusively since 1972. He has been commissioned to compose and perform his works in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America and the Near East. In this 1999 interview with Gregory Taylor, Stone talks about his methods for composing with new technologies and the artistic implications of sampling.

One of the things I think that's both somewhat invisible and still intriguing about your work is the technology that you use to make it. In part, that might be because the materials you use direct the listener's attention away from the "how" to the "what". I expect that you might be one of those people that either get all kinds of questions about gear or no questions at all. Which is it?

It depends where I am. I lectured at the Art Institute of Chicago and I didn't get one question about gear or software - the questions were all from an aesthetic point of view, which is great. When I'm in Japan I do get a lot of questions about gear. It's a legitimate question because it's not obvious, but I frankly appreciate this particular line of discussion we're having a little more - more on the aesthetic line of attack as opposed to which sampler I prefer.

Presumably your choice of tools had something to do with the kind of idiosyncratic ends you wanted, but I'm wondering about the way that things like hard disk recording changed the way you did your work in your early works.

Sure. Hard disk recording allowed me to do things that I aspired to. Years ago I was working with turntables and delay lines. Then, this Publison DM89 came along. It was my instrument of choice for a number of years. It was a high-end box designed for studios to use. It was very expensive at the time, too - and I had saved up for quite a long time to get one. It was only after it was stolen from me twice -

The same box. I had a studio in my house, and my house was burglarized. They cleaned me out, including this box - which was a five or six thousand dollar piece of gear. Of course, it was insured - so I had this check after break-in number two and I asked myself, "Should I get this box for the third time?" It's 1986, MIDI has arrived, the Macintosh is affordable, and sampling has come into the realm of the consumer. So, basically I thought to try something new. I saw it as a chance to do what I'd been hoping for a long time with my Poubeçon, which was to get some kind of programming ability and some kind of precise control over time - which I'd really never had. So the answer was obvious - it was time to try this.

What's the first recording that comes out, after you acquire this equipment?

It was a compilation on the Music & Arts label that had two of my pieces on it - Hop Ken and Wal Me Do. Those pieces reappear in different performances on the CD that I brought out myself in 1989 called Four Pieces.

Was the business of trying to use the different technology to reinvent yourself stressful?

No, I didn't feel stressed at all. I just cancelled all my appointments for half a year - my social life went completely to hell. I just worked more or less continuously for a long period of time 'cause I was really totally fascinated by the technology.

Well, I've been a Max user since the product first became commercially available around '91 or '92. But before that, I was interested in the use of computer programs for algorithmic composition, one of which - M - David Zicarelli had had a hand in. M was certainly an important program for me because of its interactivity; it was a kind of performance tool and a performance instrument that allowed a certain amount of controlled randomization that you couldn't get with straight sequencing tools. Sequencers for me are not really appropriate for live performance - I'm not just interested in the straight playback of MIDI material - so M was really a wonderful thing.

And then Max extended the ideas of M, and gave you really a full palette - a complete toolkit for building your own MIDI processors to do whatever you wanted. Because my approach to making music is pretty much outside the mainstream, I couldn't really be satisfied with most of the tools that were in the commercial marketplace for software at that time. From '92 to '96 I was using the standard setup - using a computer with a program like Max to control MIDI sampling instruments.

But when Max/MSP came along, it became obvious that this was the key to the future. These new fast G3 computers eat MIDI for breakfast; you can do everything you had previously done with MIDI and external boxes before internally with a single machine now. From just a convenience standpoint, I'm very grateful not to have to be hauling around lots of racks and pounds of equipment when I perform and tour. From just a convenience standpoint, MSP is a wonderful thing. But the other thing is that MSP allows you to build and customize your own tools to do exactly what you want, or even things that you might not know that you want. The commercial devices, which are created for a mass market and for the generalized tastes of the mass market cannot do that.

To be fair, you can perhaps tinker within limits....

They're optimized for a general purpose, which is driven by market factors - that's just the reality. But MSP is different - it's more flexibility-driven than market-driven. It's just great for composers like me - we can build and customize the things we use for ourselves. If other people are interested in them, that's just great. But the tool itself is so non-specific - it doesn't have a lot of specifics built into it in the way that a sequencer does. There are a lot of things you can do to defeat the assumptions of a sequencer, but you have to consciously do it - with MSP you start with a blank slate always and build out from there. Really the thing that drives it is not the marketing imperatives of a software tool, but rather your own instincts and imaginations - and that's what's really great.

So before the arrival of MSP, you were running Max and triggering a rack of samplers and effects processors?

That's right. My system at that time was pretty stripped down - I was kind of proud of the fact that I was doing everything that I was doing with just a very simple sampler, a Powerbook, an Alesis Quadraverb and a mixer, all being controlled by Max using MIDI. Now I've basically thrown out the sampler and the mixer and it's just done all with a fast computer and MSP.

So it's all laptop. That's gotta make touring a lot easier - you just go and plug it in...

I've always admired a trumpet player, the guy who gets the call at five o'clock and hears he's got this gig, and is heading out to the airport at 5:05 with his instrument. I've always wanted to do that and now it's a reality because all I really need to take is my Powerbook and a change of underwear.

So now that you're an MSP guy, I'm curious about your current situation. How do changing technologies alter what you do? I would be inclined to think not a lot except for the efficiency of working without all those encumbrances....

You're right, it hasn't made any fundamental changes. My approach is still the same after all these years in the most general way. The tools are different and the efficiency is increased, you're right. When I first got MSP, my first tasks were to kind of sit down and figure out a way to model and emulate what I was doing with sampling - external devices and MIDI - how to do that just with a Powerbook. But then it didn't take much time to realize that, and then I was left everything else that's possible, which is not necessarily about imitating or modeling preexisting devices, but taking new approaches that were available to me for the first time....

Let me see if I'm getting this right - you learned MSP by taking what you already understood how to do and then doing it using MSP?

Well, yeah. After being in this field for all these years, you develop habits and approaches which are basically the way you think or conceptualize a compositional problem. So, rather than completely rewriting the book, the first thing you do is figure out how can you can do what you know, and do it better. Then - because you don't want to be doing the whole thing for the rest of your life - at least I don't - it leads to something else, something really new.

Once you're done with the implementation, you have a system that runs on your Powerbook that does what you did the last time you did something. When you think about moving past that, is the next step altered by your encounter with the technology?

It surely is. And it has to do with my fundamental approach to composing, which is that I very rarely start out with a fixed idea that I wish to realize, but rather the act of composing for me involves a considerable amount of simple play by using materials and processes which I construct myself. The process of play reveals something about sound and material and the sources that I'm using which, in turn, then, realizes something about form and content and so on. Eventually, this becomes a piece of music. And because MSP suddenly expanded the whole range of processes enormously, you have a whole new sonic world available to you once you break out of the old way of thinking and start a kind of new extended way of thinking.

So, what you're doing before you create the thing that will become the piece is a kind of interactive listening.

Yeah, that's exactly what it is - interactive listening which is predicated on some kind of harebrained idea about what might work and what might be interesting, constructed usually from some very simple process which could be used to generate an entire piece or to generate one line in a piece, or one section in a piece, or some subset of an entire piece.

I guess a lot of the other people I've been talking to have been talking about perfecting process, rather than creating a process and then kind of listening to the way it interacts with things that you bring to it. So I'm curious about your post-MSP work - I'm curious about where you've gone since that happened.

The first big piece I did using MSP was about an hour's worth of music that I created during a one month period when I was composer-in-residence at the Djerassi artist in residence program. Djerassi is a beautiful compound in the hills in the south of San Francisco, down the Peninsula on the way to Woodside, Silicon Valley-area. It's a ranch owned by Carl Djerassi, and about twelve artists go there to live in an isolated natural setting, just themselves and a small staff - to really be away from the distractions of everyday life to - in my case - compose. I had a project at hand, a collaboration with a choreographer and dancer from Japan by the name of Akira Kasai. The performance coming up a month after my residency would be over so I just sat about with my copy of MSP, my manual, and a form scheme for a 90 minute dance piece-about an hour of music - and began to jam. The hardest part was pre-selecting the materials that I would bring with me to use as fodder for my sampling, so I just brought an enormous amount of stuff and selected from that. Along the way, I just constantly tried out different techniques based on my imagination. Some of them worked, some of them didn't. You know, you work really hard for a month and the fax machine is off, and the phone is off and you don't have email - you get a lot done.

Coming out of that month, what do you wish you knew about MSP before you started?

Hmm... I have no real complaint about that, because I really started from zero.

There are people who encounter the learning curve of a technology and come out the other side and say, "I really wish I'd had a sense of this," or "I'm accustomed to working in a situation where the languages I work with for programming are hierarchical, and I find Max and MSP complicated to work with because I expect hierarchy and I don't find it."

In my case, it's neither because I don't crave hierarchy. I like the kind of non-hierarchical blank slate approach that Max and MSP give you. Because I'd been a Max user for a number of years before adopting MSP, I was very comfortable with the interface and the programming style and approach that Max embodies as it's further implemented in MSP, so I felt reasonably comfortable. There are some obscurities in MSP and - this is not a knock on MSP - I'm not personally very well grounded in math or acoustics, or digital-audio theory. When you start to work with the objects that are really deep like buffer~ and fft~ and ifft~, you do kind of need that stuff. At that point, I had very little grounding in that and there wasn't really time to go deep in that period because I had to produce a whole hour of music in a month. So, I kind of put those on the shelves and out of reach for that period. I guess I wish I had known more about those things at that time, but it worked out okay.

I think that one of the really helpful things about trying to learn digital signal processing is that you can sit down and fire MSP up and really start screwing around with an audio stream or the contents of a buffer - tweaking it and discovering that what comes out the other end sounds kind of like reverb, or a swarm of bees. While some people are happy with the math or bithead parts of it, I never had the hang of it until I saw what it could do. I came out of the other end of it thinking, "That's why I need it. Crap ! If I knew this, it would be a lot quicker." But there's a lot of wonderful damage to be done to stuff in the process of learning.

Of course, even if you don't know that, you can still spend a lifetime doing everything else. Last April I was in Italy for a month in a thing that was like Djerassi, that was sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation - I was at another artists' retreat called Bellagio, but the difference for me was that I didn't have a project at hand or have anything I needed to do, I just used it for research and going deeper inside some of these objects like buffer~ and so on, and that was very useful.

So what kind of Max and MSP work are you doing now?

More and more towards these kinds of things that I'm talking about where you get in at the bit and byte level and start peeking and poking around buffers and fooling around that way. I'm interested in resynthesis, and doing more with that - that's what preoccupies me at the moment.

You said that one of the things you're working on now is installation work. That's quite a change in direction, isn't it?

Sure. Almost all my work has been for performance or working with other media - time-based work that starts, proceeds, and then ends. I was very happy to have had the invitation to participate in a project in Japan where a number of composers were asked to create pieces for a kind of a sculptural instrument called Incubator - 50 iMac computers in a network. The instigator for Incubator was Mr Masayuki Akamatsu, who also made one of the pieces for it. This opportunity got me thinking about networking ideas and using Max and MSP to realize that. It was completely the appropriate tool.

My piece for Incubator was one of the richer ones compared to the other composers in terms of the materials. It used a lot of sound files graphics, Quick Time, dynamic texts...

There were 50 screens to watch at the same time?

Yes, 50 screens - although there was a certain amount of visual repetition throughout the 50. Sonically, you can make a joyful noise - a lot of racket with 50 iMacs. They were set up in a kind of a grid pattern, and people could wander around in between them and observe what's going on the screens and listen to the sounds. The sounds tended to mass in the room, but if you got in close to any computer you could hear what was going on with that particular one. There were actually six, at any time, six different programs running at the maximum.

They were networked together and some composers actually passed data in between. One composer had an interesting idea where they used the internal mike and internal speakers of the computers plus objects that could sense the absence or presence of sound so that machines would actually listen to each other and have conversations based on what they heard. In my case, the network was very rudimentary and simple. The programs were designed and installed on the machines. All the programs looked at a master synchronization clock, which was supplied by the network. Depending on the time of the hour, they would react in certain ways.

I've never heard of you doing anything like that before. What did you think about it?

It was my first time working with a network like that so I learned a lot along the way. I learned what worked, what didn't work, what could've been better. 50 machines - it's kind of an orchestra. I think that if I examined the piece that I did for Incubator, it could've been more dynamic - I should've gone the whole range from one to two to ten to 50, but things tended to be either on or off, very soft or very loud. In fact, I'm doing an upcoming piece in Mexico City that's a piece for 20 computers. This time, I'll really play with the dynamics so that each computer is its own voice and you have the full range.

Your using the word orchestra interests me. My first thought was that what you're describing didn't seem very much like the way we think of an orchestra as kind of timbral engine. Maybe after the 19th century we don't do that anymore....

One tendency in my work is the interest in compounded masses of sound through a technique of layering. I've done that with my old taped pieces and then through the digital cloning of materials, up to 16,000 layers of the same sound, and when you've got 50 computers in the same room, it kind of cries out for that kind of layering.

And you can spatialize is as well. Nice inexpensive spatialization - all you need is 50 computers.

Since you brought up the notion that layering has been a longtime compositional interest of yours, I guess this is a good place to ask about how you started working like this. How'd it happen?

I was interested in and passionate about music since early age, and studied classical piano when I was very young, but never really took it all that far. I wasn't disciplined enough to really practice, and I had no aspiration to be a pianist. But I continued with my keyboard skills, working in high school bands. I played both bands and keyboard in some groups that included some people you might know, even - like the percussionist Z'ev - who at that time was a Valley boy like myself by the of name Stephan Weiser. We had a blues band for a while, and also more of a western improvisational ensemble called The Sonic Arts Group. The Hogfat Blues Band featured a female vocalist named Wendy Steiner who later became the Nashville songwriter Wendy Waldman. My influences at that time were Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa and The Soft Machine - I really liked what Michael Ratledge was doing with his keyboard work, doing a lot of modification of his sound. It was what got me interested in electronics, and that led to an interest in synthesizers. The early 70s were when that was all coming to the fore - the Moog and the Buchla synthesizers were becoming viable instruments. Cal Arts started in 1970, and I began working as a student there as an electronic music composition major. I was equally divided between working with electronic sounds from the Buchla synthesizer as well as working with microphone-collected sounds and using the tape studios at, at Cal Arts. I parlayed that into a job as a music person - I worked for radio for a number of years as music director at KPFK, the Pacifica Station in Los Angeles. That continued, with me working as a composer in parallel to that, till I left the station staff in 1981.

How did you start working with appropriated and found material? What was the genesis of your interest in appropriation?

There were a couple of things. At Cal Arts, I had a work study job in the music library. My job was to tape all of the records in the music library onto cassette. They did this as a kind of archival project because they figured that the records would wear out and, and I guess they figured cassettes would last forever [laughs]. They set me up in this tiny room with four turntables and four tape recorders and a patch panel. Basically, my job was to just run dubs constantly - I would set up four in a row and play them all together. At first, the challenge was deciding which one I wanted to monitor - I could listen to Machaut or electronic music, or I could listen to some Pygmy music, and so on. Basically, it was up to me. Then I started getting into listening to combinations of them and doing kind of collage and mixing. Maybe that was the genesis of it all, although I wasn't thinking as a composer - I was thinking as a guy who was working in the music library, but it definitely had some aesthetic impact.

After I finished Cal Arts, I worked in a radio station, where my resources were completely different. At Cal Arts, I had access to what was then a fifty thousand dollar electronic music synthesizer and a lot of tape recorders and mixers and stuff like that. After I left Cal Arts, I had nothing except what the radio station had - which was a couple of turntables, a couple of tape recorders and a big classical music library. So I asked myself - how can I make my piece? What can I do?

And I had what you could politely call an inspiration - you could also call it sort of a stupid idea. I recorded the sound of Igor Kipnis playing Henry Purcell's Rondo from Adbelazar - the same theme that Benjamin Britten used for his Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra - onto the left channel of a tape recorder. Then, I went back and I recorded it on the right channel - the same tape, but displaced a little bit in time. So you had this kind of small delay effect that created a kind of a rhythm. I mixed those two channels, recorded them onto the left channel of my second tape recorder, and then went back and recorded again those two tracks onto the right channel of the second tape recorder - again, displaced in time, but by a different amount from what I had done before. So you had two delays happening, four tracks of material, and a little more complicated rhythm was starting to happen. I rewound all the, both tape recorders, went back to the beginning and then mixed the four tracks that I had now onto one in the mono, and then recorded those four tracks on the left channel of my first tape recorder, and went back and recorded on the right channel of the first tape recorder.

You can see what I had going here -my one had become two had become four had become eight....I just kept it going through 16, 32, 64, all the way up to 1,024 tracks of the same material. And what I noticed first of all was that the character of the sound changed completely. The harpsichord - which in the beginning had this kind of plinky thing happening - became more of a kind of a shimmering effect as I added the layers, but still with a feeling of rhythm, however complicated. As I got up into the higher levels of layers - 256, 512, 1024 - all of the feeling of rhythm basically fell out. All the smaller time details of the sound dropped away completely and you were left with the broader harmonic contour of the piece - the harpsichord sound had evolved into something completely out of this world, both denotatively and figuratively. It was interesting to me that this had happened - in large part because of where the sound had started out in the beginning. So I thought, well, the audience would find this interesting too. Why not just present the work in series where the form and the content and the process are all merged into one thing? Kind of pedantic, when you think about it in retrospect. But it was very much in keeping with the kind of minimalist movement of the time and the work of people like Alvin Lucier was doing in pieces like I am Sitting in a Room. I was very influenced by that when I was a student and so I basically applied that as a kind of formal device.

There are composers who find it difficult to understand the idea of appropriation in anything other than specifically ideological terms. Your story seems to be more about a compositional technique that you happened on serendipitously. Do you find that some of your audience expects you to account for a set of attitudes about appropriation that you may not have, or are there attitudes that you developed about the notion of appropriation and ownership in the process of working?

You're correct. When I started on this path, I didn't really come to it from an ideological point of view and I had not developed a specific set of theories behind it. I was aware of movements in the art world that used appropriation - Warhol, Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg. I also knew of Duchamp, who had used found objects and appropriated work in their own. So I knew intuitively that what I was doing was consistent, and I did not have any doubt about the ethics of it. But in musical terms, I really hadn't thought or searched for any precedent and wasn't all that much aware of them - although if I'd thought about it I would have realized that in fact the precedents go lots farther back than our current century in music.

But it seems to me that when we think of quotation as a musical device - at least in those historical situations - we have this idea that when a "real" musician borrows something, there are these notions of compositional skill used in that borrowing and the formal devices used to do it. It seems to me as though they're presented as being somehow qualitatively different than skills that you're talking about - the skills to imagine the timbres which emerge from displacement, and so on. I'd think that there's some critical pushback there....

They may be different, but so what? They're still skills - they may be different, you can't deny that skills are involved. For me, one issue with sampling is that when you listen to a piece of music whose composers use appropriated musical material as a starting point comes down to a simple question: Does the musical interest of the final piece derive from the material that's sampled in the beginning or does it come from something that's done to it? If the answer is the former, I have my doubts about the work. But if it comes from the processing of the music somehow, then I have absolutely no problem with that.

It seems to me part of the question about the idea of working with appropriated material has to do with its visibility and transparency. I suspect that there are a lot of people in the universe who listen to your work the way I do, which is to occasionally play trainspotter - to try to recognize source material. Is the invisibility of source material important to you? Is there a certain sense where the invisibility of the source material is attached to more visibility for you as the composer? 

It really runs the gamut. A lot of times in the earlier works it's very exposed, and very often from the beginning. Early on, I had basically two techniques - I was kind of in a rut. A piece would either start out naked to the world and then would somehow develop into something completely new, or I'd begin with something completely foreign and unknowable which transformed itself into the familiar over the course of time. While both are fine, I like to take a little more complicated approach now where I think things are sometimes a bit more understandable and you can put your finger on them, or nearly so. In a piece like Nyala, the ambiguity is a little higher - if you listen, you hear Jimi Hendrix jamming together with Miles Davis, but you're never sure if those are really the samples that I'm using or if it's an illusion I've created. There's an element of alchemy now that I'm interested in, and I like that kind of ambiguity and uncertainty - that queasiness that you have when you're not exactly a hundred percent sure what's going on. But even to this - today in the music that I'm doing there are times when it still becomes patently apparent.

But it's also the question of where we stand with the law and how that's changed. In the beginning when I had no reasonable expectation that my work would be released commercially, I could go in and use Michael Jackson or use the Temptations, Four Tops, or those kinds of things. I have a piece called Shibucho that's all based on Motown. Since that work was never intended to see the light of day commercially, I could just let it all hang out. I guess I never thought about this consciously, but now that my work has found some release in the commercial marketplace, I guess that I am subconsciously putting things a little more under the skin, putting a veil of gauze over the sample - so that I won't be getting a letter from Island Records one of these days.

Do you see the business of live performance as being qualitatively different than the material you produce on compact disc because of the nature of the performance or because of the circumstances under which it's made? I don't want to belabor the technology issue, but in a sense different technological resources might be brought to bear on what you do.

It's a very legitimate question. Nyala could not be performed live. I've done concert performances of sections of it, but the piece in total could not be done live. It is therefore by definition a studio work. Other pieces that have found their way onto CD are documents of live performances that I do and other pieces are simply created in the studio. My first released recording which came out on LP, Woo Lae Oak, was a studio work done in a tape studio. It was commissioned for the purpose of radio broadcast. And along the way, it falls into a kind of a fifty-fifty differentiation. My bread and butter is performance now, and so works tend to be created with that in mind. So I'd say it's used more in the favor of pieces made for live performance, which then eventually I like to bring out on CD in hopes of meeting a larger audience.

One of the interesting things about Max and MSP for me is a kind of historical irony - that Max saw some of its beginnings in the bowels of an institution dedicated to High Modernism and a certain set of attitudes towards composition. By virtue of a number of hilarious historical incidents and accidents, it has now landed on the desktop of all kinds of people who have no particular investment in that cultural discourse and are busy building their own nonhegemonic memes, just whacking away with it.

I think the work that Miller Puckett did at IRCAM back in those days must've been considered somewhat heretical to a certain extent. But even to the extent that it wasn't I think that the trend toward the democratization and personalization of music was absolutely inevitable. It couldn't have been stopped by even the most powerful music Czar.

Most of the time I think of interesting cultural exchanges of music as things that make their way from the margins to the center. Max and MSP strike me as kind of peculiar because in a way they have gone in the opposite direction - from the corridors of cultural power to the clubs and art galleries of the world. In turn, there's this reflected wave thing that happens, too - the technologies have moved out to the edge, and the work that happens on the edge washes back to the center and renews and changes things. I just heard that this year's Ars Electronica prize didn't go to an academic composer, it went to Richard James (the Aphex Twin).

Yeah. Institutionally, they made a conscious effort to open up and proactively involve composers from outside of the academy. By getting submissions from outside for the Ars Electronica Digital Music awards and facing the whole breadth of musical material that they didn't have before, that's what they get.

Well, not commenting on the specific wisdom of who did or didn't get the prize, I think it's a very good thing, I think that prizes like that should really look at the whole breadth of musical activity for what they're worth. To say that it's only open to the academy is obviously very self-limiting and silly - I don't have a problem with that.

I'm curious about the way that you think about the kind of manipulations that you used to perform. There are any number of artists - DJ Shadow comes to mind here - whose recordings have a pretty bewildering mix of interleaved material from turntableland. The overall feel of that there's something immediate about it. It seems to me that your work comes from a more gestationary process. It's not precisely in the moment in that sense. You ever felt the urge to return to doing turntable work? Do you see the kind of assembly that you do as being a different kind of process?

I was doing a turntable work back in the early eighties - pieces like Dong Il Jong and Shibucho. Frankly, I was completely unaware of any parallel movements which were happening at the same time in terms of hip-hop and the things that Grandmaster Flash was doing. I was in this fuzzy-headed classical new music world that just wasn't really paying attention to that. Eventually I found out that this was going on too, and I really liked it. But at that time, I'd pretty much left that world and started working with sampling, working from a computer or a keyboard-controlled point of view. And, of course, there's been so much innovation and there are so many great technicians out there now that it's kind of scary to think about delving into that.

Is there any kind of music happening out there on the margins that interests you personally?

I think most of the music that interests me is out on the margins at this point. I'm kind of a weird case because I'm not a big consumer of music; I don't listen to a lot because I tend to get more absorbed in making it than listening to it. I spent a lot of time in Japan and I'm pretty interested in some of the composers working there.

It seems to me that the material that you use is so carefully chosen that I assume that you must listen to stuff all the time.

You'd be surprised. Maybe because I don't listen all that much, things really come out and grab me when I do. There's also the idea of what I use as my musical material and sampling material. I never use electronic music for my sampling.

No technical reason, no. There are several reasons. First of all, electronic music is - almost by definition - already highly processed. Because what I'm interested in is using musical cognates for their significance, they have to be fairly concrete to begin with. Usually, I use things that are somewhat iconographic, classical music or pop music or something like that.

So the things you bring in bring their resonance with them....

They bring their resonance, plus it gives me room to change and the change has significance, and you can ascribe it to what I'm doing. If I were to start with something that was already abstracted, like the electronic music of Robert Normandeau, Michael Redolfi, Otomo Yoshihide, it would be meaningless because it's already once removed.

You've worked with Otomo Yoshihide before. Your collaboration with him was interesting because in some respects, it seemed to me that you met in the center - you were both very interested in this business of selectively mining this set of shared cultural objects, taking that material and doing something with it.

That's right. But what we did was the opposite of what I told you - we did what I don't normally do, which is to use each other's developed materials in furtherance of this kind of sampling project. But the only reason we did it - and the only reason it worked in my mind - is that if you went back to stage one, you would hear the original materials at the beginning.

Are you doing any collaborative work now? I suppose that using MSP now means that you can prototype instruments quickly. That's bound to make collaboration a little easier....

Yeah, you can prototype instruments quickly and you have these terrific adc~ and dac~ input/output things that you can do, passing material, data, audio data and other kinds of data back and forth between computers. I haven't done a lot of work with that yet, but it would be interesting to have two composers playing together where they're networked, they're actually passing not only audio data in and out, but other kinds of data through some kind of networking scheme. I'd be interested in trying that.

It would be interesting to see if there's a way to do that that didn't mystify the process of passing materials back and forth.

Yeah, hopefully it would not become totally oblique.

It seems to me that good process work is a little like the classical music of India, where the performance of a given raag contains the information you need to navigate through the listening experience - from the statement of the raag, to the entrance of a pulse and rhythmic structures, to its virtuousic elaboration. At the end, you're in a position as a listener to appreciate what you've actually heard, because you've been led along the way.

an-interview-with-carl-stone

An Interview With Carl Stone

jhno, a.k.a. John Eichenseer, is the culprit responsible for many of the plug-ins in the Pluggo collection. A musician and programmer living in San Francisco since 1994, jhno can be found DJing chill rooms in the bay area as well as experimenting with live collaborations in the diverse local scene. In this 1999 conversation with Gregory Taylor, jhno talks about his history, the minimalist musical tradition, and some of his favorite non-musical stimulus.

I started playing piano when I was four-years-old, lessons... my parents basically compelled all of my siblings and myself as well to take piano lessons, and it has stuck with me longer than any of them, I guess. I ended up playing piano all the way until high school where I started studying jazz with the local band director who was a jazz pianist. At that time I still really couldn't play, I had no conception of improvisation or jazz harmony, and it wasn't until I went to college at the University of Texas at Austin that I really started to understand jazz and be able to play it with any degree of authenticity or authority.

So, at the same time I took an early interest in electronics and computers - probably found it in my father's vocation as an electrical engineer - and started working with electronics when I was a junior in high school. The first computer I programmed was a patch-bay Heathkit boolean logic sort of educational computer where you'd connect and-gates and or-gates with little cords that were each carrying five volts, wire them to switches and lamps, and watch your little logic operations play out. Then, my dad built a Heathkit 8080, and I programmed that in octal machine code until finally, when we got the big 64k board, we could load Basic from a cassette - and I just moved on from there. By the time I was in high school, trying to think of what I wanted to do in college, it was pretty clear that the two threads of interest were computers, on the one hand, and music, on the other.

So I elected to go to a school to study computers and started doing that at UT Austin, but by the time that I completed about three semesters I realized that if you stuck with a degree program long enough to actually graduate, you come out the other end really thinking like a computer scientist. The course work involved in as rigorous a discipline as that really changes the way that your mind works and it has a huge effect on the way you spend your time, and I realized, fortunately a little early on, that that wasn't exactly who I wanted to become and that wasn't how I wanted to spend my time. I decided to switch my major to music instead. I took a degree in music, a very general degree that let me study jazz and classical music theory and composition, and especially ethno-musicology and electronic music as well. The main reason I chose UT Austin is because I knew they had some electronic studios and I wanted the opportunity to use some equipment, because I never had much. I had been scurrying around with a couple keyboards and tape decks, just whatever I could get my hands on, but there was precious little access to equipment throughout high school and junior high. Eventually I was able to work in the studios at UT Austin and kind of cut my engineering teeth there, learning about mixing and recording.

There are people who claim that the kind of formalisms you have to do to make music and the formalisms necessary to handle a degree of abstraction that certain kinds of computer science require are similar - so we get the old saw that musicians make good engineers. I hear you suggesting that they might be at war with one another.

I think that they're different worlds. There are a lot of computer or math people that are interested in playing music, and vice versa. But I would say that, generally speaking, in my experience in both of those worlds, the really brilliant computer scientists - or scientists of any sort - and the really brilliant musicians are generally mutually exclusive sets. I have found that the musicians that I have a great degree of fondness for tend not to be very computer literate, and the people that I know that are really good at computers, if I listen to their music, a lot of times it sounds like the kind of music that I would expect a computer scientist to make. That's not always the case, there are exceptions. I think maybe now, in this modern age, those exceptions are starting to become more common. The problem is really, I don't think it's an inherent exclusivity of these realms or them being at war with each other, it's just that in the human life span, and with the human size brain, there's only so much time in the day, and only so much you can do with your life. Music is an extremely demanding discipline and it takes your entire life to get anywhere musically, and to develop yourself as a musician. With computers it is kind of the same way, to get into it very deeply takes a lot of time, and so it's been rare that people have been able to do both in the past. I think it's becoming more common that people can bring them together now simply because computers are accessible enough, and perhaps even music education, well... I guess music has always been accessible. I think that basically, people are able to spend more time focusing on developing both of those aspects within themselves and actually produce a satisfying synthesis between them. Maybe that's a reflection of the state of technology - maybe that computers are becoming more accessible.

I suppose that every musician is a kind of transitional figure in that respect - probably every period of musical practice finds you suspended between one thing and another. You sort of set off navigating by dead reckoning toward a goal, and the winds of history or circumstance come up and blow you off course, and the sort of zigzag you make as you try to tack [to] the place you want to go... it just happens that now it's technology. For not being an engineer, you're fairly familiar with both the use of technology and tools and the interplay between the tools that you use in the works that you do.

Right, well I've made my living as a computer programmer ever since I went off to college, working my way through school as a systems administrator. When I got out of college I didn't start being a musician, I started working for a software start-up doing things that had nothing to do with music, and then on the side I was playing in jazz bands and writing music for modern dance. So those things were very separate and that's why I came here to the Bay Area to try and integrate them, which, as it happens, worked out better than I could have ever foreseen.

What you're saying, music and technology have always had a very intimate relationship... certainly currently the focus is on computers as a very pure and advanced instantiation of technology, of technology as a force in human history. I think you can trace relationships between music and technology throughout the course of history.

Sure. It seems to me that the difference there is that to the extent that any musical instrument is the result of an on-going community argument about how to convert some kind of force to make some kind of sound, there's a real sense in which the argument that circles around, say, a piano is more clearly articulated, and more general than we find in terms of current technology. You could, in fact, build your own piano, if you wanted to. You could build a piano with nothing but single course of strings, you could change the material. Most people don't and probably the reason they don't is because we have a pretty good idea about what we expect a piano to do. Technological instruments have either not been around long enough, or the circumstances of their generation has not been such that those agreements have been easily made, to the extent that there are any agreements… the agreements about the instruments in that rack were made by the people that designed and marketed by them, not by you. You clearly made choices over one set of things in that rack over another, but it's kind of not exactly like a piano in that sense, so the relationship is both more tenuous, it seems to me, in that lack of agreement gives you more space to work in that you may not have in quite the same way that you have with other instruments, or historically may not have occurred in the same ways.

Right. I think that what has happened that you're getting at here, is that information technology has created a sort of quantum leap in technology which has facilitated the development of instruments much more rapidly. What I'm really trying to say is difficult to express: I think that if you look at technology as a phenomenon in human history, one of the recurring themes and perhaps the primary theme of technology is the quantifying of an otherwise continuous realm - it has to do with measurement - and basically the process of the mind making distinctions between one thing and another, and putting them into categories. If you look at other technological innovations, this is what they are doing, in different ways. For example, the written language took the continuous spectrum of human vocal communication and basically categorized it into a finite set of fixed symbols and phonemes, or letters or an alphabet that could be recombined to represent really not everything that was said between people but a subset of that. When you do that, the continuous realm of expression is mapped onto a new discrete symbolic representation of the whole, and suddenly you are able to do things that you couldn't do otherwise. The symbolic representation facilitates activity in that realm in terms of communication: you can write things down, you can remember it, you communicate across great distances with more reliability.

You have ways to say what could be said, you don't have words for everything, but you have a structure that either lets you do it, or you have a situation where you can mix phonemic symbols with sort of meta-symbols that describe other relationships. The reason that Egyptian hieroglyphics were really difficult to figure out was because that no one really figured out exactly what the schema of representation were until they had the Rosetta Stone." The reason that Egyptian hieroglyphics were really difficult to figure out was because that no one really figured out exactly what the balance of... until they had the Rosetta Stone, they had this idea that you'd count the number of phonemes and you look at the number of characters that it's translated into and you realize that some of those symbols must not be functioning as phonetic units, they have to do something else, so the question is what did they do and it was very difficult to figure out. But the idea is that the meta symbol allows you to make, to sort of make different distinctions that are not merely phonemic.

Well, language is probably one of the most complex examples of this kind of technology. There are other technological innovations that I can think of...

A real simple one is making a tape. The transfer of something from the continuous domain of a bunch of guys sitting in a room, to a resulting piece of tape which is a physical, discrete object, which maps some of what happens in the room onto the tape, then you have the physical thing that you can then alter, scramble, and manipulate. That's a very simple simple version of it, but you get the idea.

Right. I hadn't thought of that particular case. What I thought of was the case of digital audio, in which case the technological innovation is more clear, I think, because you're taking the continuous wave format of pressure that is traveling through and quantifying it into discrete steps or samples that can be stored and manipulated in a computer.

Do you think that that insight depends upon the sort of mechanical transcription of the world in physical form first? Things like hygrometers, the technology of the 18th century that takes muscular movement and transduces it to recordings on tape. If you look at the French cardiologists of the 19th century - Etienne-Jules Marey comes to mind, there's this thing in him about what we do when we do... that is, we take things in the world that happen too quickly or slowly for us to see, or too gradually for us to see, or at too small an increment for us to see, and we have a way of amplifying it so that we can investigate them. Now, he's not actually using those records to manipulate the heart, but he can see something to it that he didn't when he started.

Well, that's a good example. And I think that historically all of those developments must have contributed to what we can currently do with audio, with computers. But they're not at an abstract level, I think that digital representations of sound are not...

Is that abstract level something you find more... It seems somewhat at odds with your description about what interests you about people's ability to do music without a lot of technical background. It sounds like the delightful part of what you're describing requires...

Well, I'm only describing what we were talking about with this relationship between technology and music. To kind of finish my line of thought there, the point I was making is that I think that there is this recurring theme in technology, that these innovations occur where a continuous strata is measured or quantified. We talked about the example of language - I think that money is another good example as the technological quantification of human relationships, and I think film is an example of quantifying the continuous spectrum of light into either grains on a film or, eventually, pixels on a computer screen. More relevant to the current topic is the last one I mentioned which is digital audio, where you measure a sound pressure wave in terms of discrete steps that can be sorted into a computer and manipulated, and once you can do that the range of possibilities for manipulating, changing, analyzing, and synthesizing sound opens up exponentially. Developments in the process of working with sound have... their pace has similarly increased exponentially, and I think if you look at other technological developments, the other area that I mentioned where you're measuring with language or money, you also see a similar exponential increase in activity and development that can occur once this technological step has taken place where you can now work on this representation of this system, instead of the system itself.

When you work on the representation of the system, what sort of history do you bring forward with you when you do that? What you're describing sounds kind of like operating on the representation allows you to conceive of what you do as a sort of research project, you have a different kind of material to work on now, what happens if I do this...

I think it defines another dimension of reality in which can take place phenomena with as much subtlety and aesthetic beauty as any. For example, language may be an imperfect expression of meaning, and of interpersonal communication, but language itself, the medium of language has given rise to the phenomena of poetry and literature, much of which is completely reliant on the strata in which it's conceived. The same with music. I think that if a technological innovation takes place... another good example is the development of equal tempered tuning systems that took the place of previously continuous and pure system of just intonation. Once you create a new system that contains a simpler representation than that which you were describing, then a whole new set of operations and abilities is presented to you. In the case of equal temperment, that technological innovation gave rise to music that could've never existed without it... for example, romantic music, impressionists, Ravel all the way up through jazz. The music of Bill Evans and John Coltrane could never have occurred without the innovation of equal temperment. The music that has happened since that innovation has been married inextricably to the equal temperment system in which it's conceived. I think also that if you look at the development of music, the technological innovation of equal temperment - while it left behind much of the subtlety and purity of just intonation - caused a certain quickening of novelty and a far more creative development to occur faster than before, simply because you now had a sort of simplified system that was a representation that was kind of distilled from the pure strata that it described, and then with that, because of the way that the human mind works, with this simplified symbolic system you're able to more quickly work with it, and so developments occurred more rapidly. And that's what's happening now with technology and with digital technology in particular, is that there's a similar quickening of genuinely innovative development in terms of types of music and the kind of processing and synthesis that you can do in the realm of sound.

So how does technology enter your life?  How does it change what you do or how you think about what you do?

I think that's the thing that people would be well-served to remember: that these symbolic systems that we use - whether it's equal temperment or notation, language, digital audio - they're all describing something that is much more real and much more subtle, and I think that people who work with technology and music can sometimes get a little bit lost in the aspects of working with the technological tools. In my opinion, in my own experience, music is a realm that precedes the symbolic systems that we work with: it is a more fundamental and significant reality. In other words, when I'm working with music I try to be guided by music and not by technology. You asked if they were forces at war with one another, and I think that they are, in a sense, forces that are different from each other and relating. I wouldn't say they're at war, in particular, but they are kind of different worlds, they are different aspects of human development, in a way they're sort of different spiritual domains. I prefer for my focus to remain on music - for that to be my guiding light, if you will. I'm trying to bring technology into the service of music, for the sake of music and the betterment of music and not the other way around, I'm not trying to bring music into technology to further technology. I prefer to do things for the sake of music and if I am working with technology, be it at my own studio, trying to develop my facility with technological instruments, or whether I'm programming software to make tools that I can use or that other people can use, it's all to work with music. I try to be guided not by what is interesting in terms of the technology, but really by its utility for music and its implications for music.

So a reasonable, if somewhat waggish question is, given your background in this sort of wonderful, rich electronic tradition and the tools that technology affords you, your interests in serving music as music and finding yourself in the stream of sort of improvised musical behavior, why are you doing all this godless, soulless techno-crap?

Yeah, I would've been rather surprised, I think, even three or four years ago to hear then the music I listen to now. If I would've heard it then, I would not have heard it as music, I would not have understood, it would not have moved me, my ears have rather opened up to aspects of electronic music that previously seemed to me perhaps soulless.

Can you recover what those were?  What do you think would not have been worthy of your attention?  It didn't swing?

What's most often obvious, and most often criticized about a lot of modern electronic music, especially derived from dance culture, is its repetitive nature. This is a criticism that was leveled at minimalism as it emerged from the more so-called legit music circles, work from Steve Reich and Philip Glass and Terry Reilly. Some people, when they hear that kind of music, and myself too... it requires a different kind of listening that I think, to a certain extent, has to be learned, or it requires a frame of mind, a certain sensitivity to phenomena that are taking place in the music that are different than the kind of phenomena that happen in other kinds of music, like western classical music or pop music, on which most of us have been weaned.

Do you mean in terms of time scale or attention span or rate of change?

I think those are things that people identify as empirical elements of the music that differentiate one kind from another. But, they're all hinting at some aspects of music that are more fundamental. Those parameters are important, I think, for example just time-scale has a lot to do with it. In a minimal piece, if there's a passage that's repeating indefinitely, subtle development of sound could be happening not in the notes themselves, but in the timbre of the notes, or the relative timing or pitch or volume relationships among those notes. So, somehow as a listener you have to make this leap of not just listening to the notes themselves, but listening to these other levels of activity that are occurring in the music, and I think that that's something that takes a certain amount of sophistication to be aware of. But I don't think that it takes an awareness of those things in order to be moved as a listener - I think that you can hear very repetitive minimalist music and be moved by it without having the intellectual persective to be able to describe all of these aspects that we're talking about. There's a certain sense in which those pieces, like all of music, are trying to relate emotional realities, or trying to describe relationships that exist in the world, and they're doing it in a certain way, and I think that listeners of any kind can, by hearing this music, achieve an artistic appreciation of what it's trying to express, whether or not they can analyze it and discuss all of the details of how it's implemented.

What kinds of recordings or performances sort of helped you change the way that you hear?

That's hard to say. If I try and look back on how I came to listening to either repetitive electronic music, minimalist electronic music or minimalist classical music for that matter... I mean, when I first heard minimalist composers in the world of new music, I had the same reaction - I just didn't get it, I couldn't hear what was happening, I wasn't having a musical experience, I was just bored. And there is a lot of music that still has that effect on me, but if I look at how I came to appreciate that genre of music, and how I came to recognize the examples in it that I considered to be truly great, I think, on the one hand it was just hearing pieces that did resonate with me and that had meaning for me, which is still kind of a small subset of minimalist music. A lot of it just won't work for me, it's kind of a rare piece that will.

How about the decision to actually start making it? Did you want a way to come to terms with how you thought it worked, or was that something that you discovered by virtue of the technology, the tools you were using at the time, or... ?

Well, it's interesting because you're asking me this question having heard the records I've put out already, which I don't consider to owe very much at all to a minimalist tradition, and in fact if you place them next to the other examples of electronic music which most people would place in the same category, I think in my music there's more activity and variety than most, just because I have a background in jazz and in classical music and in other kinds of music where... I like to hear a lot of things going on, I like to hear complexity. The funny part is that in about the last year I've been moving steadily toward things that are much more minimal, it's just that you haven't heard any of them yet. So you're asking about something that is a very real part of my current musical development, even though most people haven't heard it.

I guess what I was thinking about, though, is the notion of locating yourself within the genre... well, let's put it in this way: whatever your intentions, someone someplace drew some conclusion about the territory in which you work, that may not have been your intent, but it was the case, and my guess is that most people who know your name immediately would say "Oh, he does X"... we have a category of work. How did you decide to pitch your tent in that clearing?

I did not and I think that I never will because I can't, and I've tried before, but it's just not in me. What I mean is that I have been sufficiently influenced by music that I've heard, to make me want to make music that is in the same category... that is, if I listen to jazz, I'll hear great music, and that makes me want to create jazz music, it makes me want to play the piano, it makes me want to write jazz pieces... and when I hear techno music that I like, it makes me want to write a techno piece... that music is similarly affecting and I love it, but whenever I've tried to do that, it has never worked. If I sit down and try and constrain myself to write a piece that's using the elements of a real jazz piece or a real techno piece the way that they're traditionally done, the way that their genres have been traditionally defined, I can't compose in that way. I have never been a very good at constraining my creative parameters to a given genre. What I have been able to do is integrate all of those things as influences, and create music that is heavily influenced by specific genres and that owes a lot of debt to them for techniques and ideas and sounds that I'm using.

But I think, at least for myself, when I look at the music that I've made, none of it fits into these genres very well. Even the jazz pieces that I've written on the piano, it just seems to me that the harmony that I'm using... I don't really consider myself a jazz pianist, even though I've written a lot of songs, and I play out, it just doesn't seem that that's my identity, because I don't think that what I've done fits very easily into that genre, from my point of view. Obviously other listeners, and the music industry in particular, has to pile things into those genres for marketing reasons or just for people to have an understanding of what you're doing and be made aware of it. Many creative artists reflect this sentiment, that their music transcends genres or cannot really be categorized, but some artists play well within the boundaries of a specific genre. Some people play traditional jazz - that is what they're doing and they're very clear about it. People that make house music are intentionally making house music pieces. If you are trying to put out a new 12-inch in a particular style, then you stay well within the established boundaries of what happens in that genre of music. If you step too far out of line, people that are really deeply into that culture will not hear it, it might sound interesting for some reason, but it won't fit into that class of music. People have a lot of expectations, especially when it comes to dance music and its culture.

Well, I'm speaking from dialogues that I've had with people listening to music and my music and talking about what those differences are. I've made things that have integrated elements of techno or drum and bass, because I've heard that music, and some of it has really turned my crank and opened my ears to new things. So, I'll make a piece that has elements of those types of music in it and say, play it for a friend of mine - I'm thinking in particular of a DJ friend of mine, Lukas Girling in the U.K., who I worked with - and he would say that when you're making music in one of these dance genres, the music that happens... basically, new and innovative music takes small incremental steps from what is already established. If you're making a drum and bass track that is part of a particular branch of culture that's listening to that kind of music, there's only so much you can do in a single track that's going to differentiate it from the rest, it's like the track has to have all these familiar elements and then just a few things can deviate slightly...

...and it's almost like an expression of a regimented class system where people's roles in society fixed and rigid. I guess my approach is a little bit more based in the spirit of jazz, and a spirit of free-thinking and directionless innovation where I am just making pieces that sound good to me and I don't really care if they fit into a certain category or not, I just use whatever elements appeal to me. When I'm making a piece I really have the feeling that the piece itself is some sort of platonic form that already exists, that I'm trying to uncover. The worst thing I can do is try to impose restrictions of a given genre onto it... I think it's an unfortunate, almost morally corrupt thing to make something smaller and more restricted than its fully manifested self, so I think that I'm always trying to hear the piece for what it is, and let it go in whatever direction it wants, not constrained by any guidelines of style or convention.

It seems like there is a situation in which a custom is accultured, in having these kinds of modes of production, consumption and listening, and that the kind of listening you do as you move is different than the kind that you do when you sit down. So, ideally what you do meets both criteria if it's done well?

I guess. I'm not even a dancer myself to tell you the truth. I dance sometimes, but pretty rarely - so I don't feel like I have as much of an understanding of movement, of dance as some of the people that are more inside this culture and making dance music. I don't think I really make dance music, although I've seen people dance to my music - everything from people on a dance floor, to music of mine that's been used by modern dancers for formal choreography. And so obviously it can work, but that's not what I'm doing when I'm making music, I'm not thinking about the movement of a body. I guess I have a sense of rhythm enough now that I can hear the way that things swing, and I think I've become a lot more sensitive over the years to subtleties of rhythm and of things being in time or feeling good in time, and that's grown, but it's not really through moving my body. When I think about rhythm, I think more about the pacing of my mind, and the way that my thoughts occur. I listen to the internal sounds and communications happening in my own, in circuitry that is inside of me and the inside of my body and I think that there are these rhythmic relationships happening all the time within myself, and I try to be aware of them on different levels, consciously and subconsciously, and I think that's where my sense of rhythm really comes from.

 Thinking about rhythm, I wanted to talk to you about the communal aspects music making one hears with your duo project "Spool" and the work you make for yourself. In some measure, there is a sense in which one of that kind of work is heavily moment-based and collaborative... I'm thinking that as you do more improvisation on the continuum, it's more on that end, and then you find yourself in a situation where you essentially work alone, and in a situation in which technology extends what you can do in terms of allowing you to multiply yourself, and also extends your ability to make and manipulate certain kinds of noise. I mean you may not be able to play the contrabass, but you can come up with something that will function like that instead of having to find a contrabass player.

Well, if I wasn't an electronic musician I'd have to be a pipe organist because I am very fascinated with this process of being able to create complete works myself. There has never been a generation of musicians that's been able to do it to this degree, because it's very recently that recording technology has come about and that electronic instruments and synthesis technology have achieved the degree of sophistication that they have now, so I feel very lucky in that respect, because now we can create pieces that are very musically or spectrally complete, that are very complex and rich, by ourselves. I am a pretty reclusive person, my process just happens to generally be very solitary - even in Spool I end up doing a lot of the engineering and production and mixing of the pieces by myself because John Ridenour lives in Chicago. It's not because I'm a control freak, or an egomaniac - I love playing with people too and a lot of the music I make which I consider to be the strongest I've done has been due to the contributions of other people. When I play jazz I'd much rather play in a trio with a bass player and a drummer than playing a solo piano, because you can just do so much more. But there's something in me that gravitates towards solitary and contemplative activity and I think that there is a place in my musical life where these pieces are conceived, executed, and created entirely by myself.

There's a certain freedom you can achieve in that solitary frame of working that is just different from collaborating with others, and I think there's some things about it that are worthwhile. I would hate to ever do just one or the other. I would hate to just be a purely solitary musician, and never work with other people in a group, because I think that they are both very interesting modes of working musically. I would like to keep exploring them. One other thing I have to say, though, is this idea that as an electronic musician, or even as a pipe organist... or even as a pianist, the idea that you are ever truly solitary is really an incomplete and spurious notion, because you didn't build the piano, and even if you did you built it like another one... and you didn't build the pipe organ, you certainly didn't build all the electronic instruments that you're using, the sounds that you're using, things that you sample... you're drawing on the richness of the world around you and things that other people have created, and so you're still working in the context of community. You can never really get away from that, so even though I'm creating music by myself, often I'll be working with recording sounds that have come from collaborations with friends of mine, and I'm using instruments that other people have made, so there really is this richness that can only happen by the contributions of many other living human beings. So I don't want to give the impression that electronic music is really as solitary and isolating as it seems, because there are a lot of connections.

There's a sense that there are some people - here's the plug part that gets edited - in which some people probably encounter the work that you do in terms of signal processing devices that you've put together, somewhat idiosyncratically I might add, for Pluggo, in the sense that there are people who probably encounter you live by virtue of the recorded material you make, and now, by virtue of the tools you've invented, to make things that strike you as interesting. I'm curious as to the point in your musical development where this change occurred. First, your background in computer science means that you can do things that the average consumer of electronics made by other people can't do. But what is was that made you start making things that you couldn't acquire...

Well, it's a pretty recent development in my musical slash technological life, I think... in the same way that I said before that I'm a musician before a technologist, I'd rather be guided by music than technology; I'd rather prefer that to be my focus. I think that my musical output is a more full expression of myself and what I find interesting than what I can do with software technology. Be that as it may, and that said and disclaimed, I've been surprised and rather delighted to find that in the software that I've written I still see my character and creative expression. I see the same voice in my software and technological output as I do in my music. I look at them and I think the same person created these things. I like that because it indicates to me in a very personal way that technology has the capacity to be as creative and full of character - and idiosyncrasy as you say - as something like music. I have this same feeling when I see software that other people I admire have written. Things that are very idiosyncratic have an artistic and aesthetic integrity to them and a richness and a beauty that are the hallmarks of a creative person with a sense of vision. The reason I think this is heartening is that this is not always the case; in technology and software there's a lot of people making things that just seem as soulless and empty as it is often slandered, either tongue in cheek or not, like your previous question to me.

Anyway, to get more to what you are talking about, I think that I was drawn to work creatively in the realm of technology because of its capacity for self-expression, and also because if I look around at the technology that is available, I find it wanting, I wish to contribute to it and bring into being things that I think should exist, or ideas that I think should exist, or ideas that I think should be expressed in this realm. Basically, what it boils down to is that I always think that things aren't quite weird enough. In terms of technology, there are a lot of straight or expected conventions that are played out. What you can do with musical technology or sound processing tools and what I find most interesting as a consumer of them is that they are truly innovative, or that they make large leaps or do things that are extraordinary. So that's what I'm trying to do in technology as well as in music, is show what is possible, to try and find genuinely new things. Not all of them will last - not all of the music I make will, I think, stand the test of time, and I can't even predict what might. Not all the software I make will, but I think that some of it will, so I have to just basically make everything I can think of that strikes me as interesting and put it out there and let it play itself out in the culture at large and see what rises to the surface.

I think that there's an additional relationship occurring which is that if I can make interesting innovations in music technology, it just happens that those are the tools that I use to facilitate my primary expression in music, the creation of music and sound, and so by participating in the process of the tools that I use I'm enabling myself to go further and achieve a broader range in the music that I create as well. Whereas if I was not participating in this level of creating, my own tools would be restricted. It takes a lot of work to get those two processes to really feed back into each other in a useful fashion, because music feeds back into technology as well. The things that I do with computers are informed by what I've learned about music, and what's happening in my musical life, and so I think the challenge is that they really are two different worlds. While I'm writing software or putting things together on the computer, that is not the same mode emotionally or cognitively as when I'm making music - you have to shift gears a lot and if you're trying to be a musician making technology or vice versa, you have to start to be aware of this process.

If you start working with technology you have to be careful that it doesn't sweep you away, because you start to get really excited about things, and if you're becoming a true geek, that means you're probably going to spend a lot of long nights writing code and playing with little systems. That's great, but I know a lot of people who have gotten lost in that and lament its effect on their music making. If you start working on tools indefinitely, then your process of creating music and working within your purely musical world can sometimes be left behind. Like I said, they overlap a lot and back into each other, but they're still somewhat separate, and when you're working on music... when I'm working on music properly and working in the world of musical ideas, trying to shape things according to the sound, I'm not developing tools simultaneously, I'm using what's available to me. There's an extent to which you can do those at the same time, but at least for myself I consider them to be separate processes, and I have to constantly direct a balance between those so that neither one completely overshadows the other, because if you leave something behind it will atrophy. If you get out of the technology game your skills will deteriorate and become obsolete, and if you stop playing music your chops will deteriorate, and your momentum on your path as a composer... so it's really quite a balancing act to try and maintain these separate lives, but it's also a pleasurable challenge.

Okay, so we have three things to listen to, look at, and to read.  Is that right?

Okay, look at is maybe the easiest because that's the furthest away from the core of my being, just because I'm a little more into language and music, so those are harder. Probably my favorite piece of computer-based art or graphics, visual art, is Scott Draves' "Bomb," which is a multi-platform, cellular automata-based graphics program that produces organic moving imagery based on a variety of algorithms that are recombined in a way that I think is rather ingenious. Scott's become a friend of mine and we've worked together a little bit, and I have a great appreciation for cellular-automata in general. I just happen to think that his program is the best instantiation of it so far, from an aesthetic point of view, and I think that just by looking at something like that you can gain all sorts of insight into the way the world works. Other than that, I would look at the structure of plants in the real world. I also feel like I gain a lot of insight about things from the way that trees bifurcate at their branches, and if you look very closely at a flower or a tree then you will see encoded into it just a logical structure that if you understand, you can make relationships between that and music, and between that and so many things about the way the world works. Just try to imagine the DNA sequencing, and the intra-cellular processes that created the patterns that you're seeing, because it's all being generated out of these very simple replicating units that occur in all of life. So I like looking at plants.

These are in no particular order, I guess. The other... I would say that all of the elements are pleasurable to look at. Anybody can stare at a fire or ocean waves endlessly, but I like looking at the sky a lot, and that's probably also because I fly paragliders - I have a new and much deeper appreciation of wind and meteorology than I used to. If you don't want to fall out of the sky, it helps to formulate a model of what's going on. Just the motion of fluid dynamics is incredibly fascinating, whether it's the sky or watching liquids combining, it's kind of a very similar phenomenon. I just love to see things swirling around... the chaos of dispersion... so wave behavior in clouds and in water is particularly fascinating. It's great when you combine them like flying maybe 1000 feet above the coast here in San Francisco, and you're flying through the air and seeing the clouds above you, the sun shining through them, and at the same time you can look down and see the patterns of waves crashing into the cliffs in the ocean.

That's the hardest of the three, because I'd be incredibly hard-pressed to define three recommendations out of the entire world of music, so maybe I should just not even touch music at all, and talk about other things I listen to. For example, one of my favorite ongoing activities is listening to insect sounds, or other animals that make periodic, and continuous sounds - especially frogs, birds sometimes to a lesser extent, but frogs and insects really draw me in most readily. I've recorded a lot of insect sounds, I keep thinking about pieces I might be able to make from them. I don't know, I'm really fascinated by the variety and subtlety of the noises that converge in nature. If you're sitting there listening to a field of cicadas and trying to hear the patterns... because it's not just noise, they're communicating with each other, things are happening in their world, and you're just hearing the sonic representation... and trying to make conferences of adjunct stories of what really is happening, what's behind the sound.

Well, that Marvin Gaye CD is older than 20 years, but that's not really old and it's a little bit of a tangent for me. As far as old music, I would say Bach... the Indonesian Gamelan music we were talking about earlier, I have quite a fondness for that. There's so much indigenous music that's great - I really have a predilection for the Middle East and Eastern Europe, as far as folk music goes. My drummer friend Bryan Bowman turned me on to a CD called Gypsies of Rajasthan, that's great stuff - I love music from that area of the world. I love the duduk which is an instrument from Armenia (and Turkey). I got into it from hearing the famous Armenian duduk player Djivan Gasparyan and I even bought a couple of duduks and am trying to figure them out.

Yeah, I have two duduks and a box of reeds. The problem with those things is the reeds... at one point I could play, and I got some good tone. I recorded the duduk on one track of mine - it's actually one of my better tracks, at least judging from people's response to it - where after the introduction basically in the beginning of the song before the beat kicks in, I play this little simple line on the duduk and I just love it because I was able to get this big warm sound. The duduk is an extraordinary instrument, it sounds very different in real life than it does on tape, because on tape, like these recordings of Gasparyan...

Yeah, it's the most timbrally expressive, warm wind instrument that there is, but in real life it sounds much smaller and rather insubstantial, and that's because of the "proximity effect" of the microphone - the low end becomes emphasized and, as you say, bigger than life.

I think I like the idea of an acoustic instrument that is smaller than you think it is.

I'd like to hear a talented musician play one live. I've heard myself, it's not exactly the same. I still have to get out and hear that instrument sometime. At the same time, I would like to play it more, but the problem is the reeds: you pay like 15, 20 bucks a pop for the suckers and they're all different, and they end up drying out and getting screwed up.

I think they're generally just imported from Armenia.  I bought one of the duduks from Lark in the Morning. They have so much stuff, and they sell reeds too. I'd rather just travel to these countries. I'm sure you can just buy reeds there for 50 cents - of course, if you're a serious reed instrument player you make your own reeds, but I don't even know where you get materials for this stuff and it's just a whole path that I haven't been able to pursue.

That's good, that excuses me from thing number three to listen to, which might be silence, or your own brain, anyway, so that's a good call. To read, I think I'd have to first identify a book that we were discussing earlier today, which is Harmonic Experience by W. A. Mathieu, because I think that's the most informative and important book about music ever written - at least that I have seen. I haven't read all the books there are out there, but I got a music degree, and have seen enough to know what's been expressed about music. It's hard to write about music and read theories about music, and to analyze it, and to come up with things to communicate to other people, because so much of it is inexpressible or ineffable, and the people that are sensitive to that don't want to diminish or cheapen aspects of music by trying to narrow them into inadequate forms of expression by talking about it. I feel that way myself, but his book I think goes further into explaining what is really happening with music and why it is interesting to us, especially from a musician's standpoint, making music. I think he has more to say on the topic than any other source that I've come across. I was simply surprised to read that book after having studied music for almost all my life and gotten a college degree at a decent university, and I started reading that book and almost immediately it occurred to me that this is what music is about, and why didn't anybody tell me about this before. What it was to me was a validation of everything I was doing in music, because I think that when you learn traditional Western music theory, it seems very arbitrary - and in fact, it is. They are telling you, "here's the twelve notes of the scale, and here they are and these are their names, and these are the kinds of chords you have" - and a good teacher is also going to be saying: "of course, you know we're just talking about it, describing, and what you really need to do is play it, and listen to it and have this experience, and that's what real music is, right" So you do that, and then it's back to the analysis.

It just seems like it's a different world, all these arbitrary symbols and descriptions - a system that you make, and then from that comes music. That's fine, but I think eventually this viewpoint is a little bit disheartening or unsatisfying. What happened with me when I read Mathieu's book is that I realized there is a reason that music is this way, that our systems of harmony have developed over time in this way, and that's because physical objects resonate in a certain manner, and they resonate with each other in relationships that are intrinsic to the physical world in which we live. The harmonic series is found in nature and the interaction of vibrating objects, which behave according to certain rules, and what he does is talk about those rules, which I already knew, but he traces the relationship between the way that physical vibrations interact and the music that we've made. I knew that, for example, musical intervals were based on the harmonic series. I didn't know how, I just knew that there was a harmonic series, and then there's these scales that we have, which are related, but not exactly the same. What he does is tell you why. Other people have done that too, but I think that the gestalt of his explanation is more complete and satisfying than anybody else's that I've heard. [His book] draws a more complete picture of the relationship between basically just intonation and equal temperment than any other I've seen.

I guess Philip Dick has caught my ear lately.  In particular I like Valis and The Divine Invasion, a couple of his later books which I think are among his best. Everything he has written is pretty interesting - I'm fascinated by his writing style, and what he has to say. I think he was a very deep and mystical person who had an understanding of the world that is extraordinary and unique. I don't know if I would recommend him to everybody. There are certain people to whom I recommended him immediately, but I don't think that kind of fiction is for everyone. I guess if I had to recommend a book most broadly it would be Monkey: Folk Novel of China. It's a translation of a story which is more like a collection of stories about this mythical stone monkey that comes to life. It encompasses a broad swath of Chinese mythology and Buddhism and Confucianism all thrown together, with a lot of humor - generally just a thrilling book to read. Very fun. But at the same time it has the same epic scope, or the feeling of significance as other spiritual literature like the Ramayana from Hindi literature. It is taking on these heady topics, it has plenty of depth and philosophical significance, and it's also very light-hearted. Monkey is a lovable character.

an-interview-with-john-eichenseer

An Interview With John Eichenseer

Ben Nevile

Amnon Wolman creates music with technology and for instruments with two distinctive features: first, a subtle and complex relationship with popular culture and second, a concern for the dramatic nature of sonic evolution. His first release on the c74 record label is "Dangerous Bend." In this conversation with Ben Nevile, Wolman discusses his romantic compositional techniques and reveals the unusual nature of his introduction to computer-based music.

Can we start with a bit of your history? Where do you get your ideas? What are your earliest musical memories?

I was born and raised in Israel. In 1968 I spent a year in Los Angeles which connected me to American popular culture in a way that was not present in my life before. I played classical instruments throughout my early years. I served in the Israeli army for three years - compulsory. Not a pleasant experience but not very traumatic either. I first acknowledged to myself that I was gay when I was 17 and to the world when I was 25. That was not a simple or easy route.

My first musical memories are of family singing. We had Friday dinners at home with the whole family and we would sing together. It was a highly physical activity. I felt the music in my body and mouth and ears more than hearing it as an outsider and an audience member. The first major classical piece that I was involved with as a youngster singing in a children's choir was Bach St. Matthew's Passion when I was 12. It made a huge impression on me and is probably the single moment when I realized that I needed to be a musician. It was like a drug, I felt elated.

So how did you become involved with computers?

In 1981 when I was completing my masters in composition at Tel Aviv University, the Lebanon war started in Israel. I wanted a way out, so I applied for a student exchange scholarship from the government of the Netherlands. I received the grant to do something in music that I could not do in Israel. I heard that there was a small group at the University of Utrecht - Institute for Sonology - that was working on computer music. At the time I was this strange combination of a politically minded, conceptual, somewhat minimal romantic composer... and I suspect I still am. I guess some conceptual music is highly romantic, and to be political implies some romanticism and naiveté too...

Anyway, I decided to go to Utrecht because I thought that using the computer to create music was a terrible idea, that it was cynical and mechanical. As often happened to me at that age I had very strong opinions about things I knew nothing about. I decided that I needed to know more about it in order to talk intelligently against it. But I was bitten by the bug, and the idea of creating sounds on my own has been very exciting and the highlight of my day ever since.

Tell me, was there something specific that caused you to change your mind?

Yes, it was working with sounds that changed my mind. I love imagination, and when working on a score for instruments imagining what it would sound like was a wonderful fantasy. But now, since 1982, I can put my hands in the dirt. I can design the exact sounds I want, and just listen to them evolve - not pitch, not rhythm.

After Utrecht I applied for graduate studies at Stanford where I was off and on until the end of 1989. From 1990 I've been teaching at Northwestern University, and from 1994 I also hold a position at Tel Aviv University.

How does your time at the two schools compare?

I feel safer as a teacher in Israel. I never question my language and my cultural references. My English is good, yet still I am not sure which words I may use with which person. When is it appropriate to use a slang word and which one, and what does it say about you when you use it? The same is true for cultural references. I know what it says about me if I say that I like the Beatles, that is safe, but when I say that I like Madonna, Tom Waits and Xenakis I know what it would mean for my students, and maybe my colleagues, but my other friends? People I meet in political activism groups? In Israel I feel that I know exactly what they mean, even though I may be wrong. I have less definition as a person here. For a long while it made my life easier because I could define myself, but now I miss being clear.

I really like the music on your C74 CD.  I find it incredibly soothing.

I can't decide if I like the description "soothing!"

Well, it's soothing to me. Most of the music I listen to is jagged... it's nice to hear something smooth. Is that not how you think of your music?

Interesting. It is not how I think of my music, mostly because of my politics. I guess for too long I've stood on barricades saying that music is an art and as such it presents many things, not just beauty and relaxation. But then I go and create music that is soothing... it feels weird in the context of my self-perception. But there is not a whole lot one can do about this. There is always a distance - huge I suspect - between the ideology and the art one creates. In the end I sit at the computer and listen to what I create and decide if it is what I want to create and ideology is never in the room during those times.

Is there anything that you've composed that comes more from an ideological standpoint, or has your creative process always been quite separate?

I think that the creative process is always an amalgamation of everything, the intellectual and the emotional. But I guess what I am talking about is the rigors of taste. That is, if I have an ideological or conceptual vision for a piece, by the time I work on it the final choices are about "what does this sound like" and "I like this" or "this is too much" or "this is too beautiful, what will the neighbors say." I don't have many voices of this last kind, the "what will my colleagues and friends say," but every once in a while I realize and chuckle when I finish a section and think to myself how so-and-so would like this...

But to make a long answer even longer, I think the final cut is irrational, and I've never finished a piece where I thought, "oh it does exactly what I decided in advance - so it's okay, even though it does not sound so great." I've always gone and fixed it, started all over, or scrapped it. I hate to admit my romantic streak, but the final decision is always left to my senses.

What compositional techniques did you use on this CD, both inside and outside of Max?

Mostly I used processed sounds. I have worked in the past with synthesis, but the last several years have been almost entirely based on processed recordings. I make recordings everywhere, with people and in nature, and then I process them in different ways. From filtering to different versions of granular synthesis using the recordings as the basis for the brain. I use a lot of time distortion, and different algorithms of phase vocoding.

I think that the idea of processing a recording of, say, a family conversation is very powerful. Somehow I feel that the essence of the sound stays. Even if I am the only one who knows where the sounds came from, some of the magic of the personality and the situation are folded into the sounds. Obviously the actual physical properties are inherent to the sound too. I think perhaps the most personal statement I can make about the pieces you called "soothing" is that I don't hear them as such because I listen to the sounds. A slight change, a disappearance of a harmonic, or an emphasis on a group of harmonics makes huge dramas in my listening experience and does not sooth me... but I know I hear sounds differently than other people.

Sure - you've made the sounds, so you understand them in a deeper way than anyone else, and your listening is therefore completely different. What has had the most direct effect on the romantic inclinations of your musical direction?

The most important musical influences were my teacher in Israel Abel Ehrlich, and John Cage- I met him in Stanford in 1985 and we remained friends until his death. Other influences have been friends and colleagues, usually young composers who were compatriots as students or faculty members and then a few of my own students. There are a few prominent names: Chaya Czernowin, Osnat Arbel, Yuval Shaked, Bill Schottstaedt, Joanathan Berger, Richard Karpen, Michael Pisaro, Jay Alan Yim, Kunsu Shim, Gerhard Staebler, Jeff Kowalkowski and Jenny Walshe. Most are not computer music people, and represent either an influence on my conceptual/intellectual side or the romantic side.

Listening to the greats, some of whom I had the luck to study with, has also obviously refined my process but listing them seems a little more removed from my day to day activity. With everyone on that list I can recall numerous conversations that altered some part of my thinking and helped me refine my own sense of music. I have no doubt that my personal relationships changed my sound world drastically. Most importantly there's my partner Eyal Levinson who helped me get back into listening after several years of trying to avoid music...

In the last little while several composers have told me they don't enjoy listening to music any more.  What pushed you away?

For many years it was hard to listen to music "for fun" for me. It was too much work. I enjoyed silence. I still would rather get home to a quiet house. I know for a fact that it is hard for me to work on creating music while listening to music. If I wake up in the morning and listen to the radio it's hard for me to get into composing. This is why I've become a morning person, and compose before anything else. Also I think I became a musician because I like being active at this game, the playing of music. Listening to music is a passive activity, you don't get to do anything, and it's a different activity, a luxury. I know many musicians who are bored in concerts unless they are on stage.

Yes. So how does that relate to something like "the communal techno machine," where there was mass participation... or was that something completely different? 

Hmm... that started because I wanted to create a piece based on the Andy Warhol Diaries. These were not really "diaries" as such. He would call "the factory" every day and tell the person who was keeping the diaries, Patricia Hackett, what he did the day before and how much it cost. This was done because he was audited yearly by the IRS. But little details crept in. For example, and I am paraphrasing off the top of my head, "I had lunch with Jacqueline Onassis, she had a great hat, $10..." etc. It describes an important period of US history between 1975-1985, for me, and it describes it as a pointillistic picture full of insignificant or important details without a hierarchy. This period is when the liberal community's only ideology was "live and let live" and the right wing community developed a very clear ideology and agenda. It is also the period of the last big gay parties and the beginning of AIDS.

I decided to use the texts and realized it would have to be a really long piece - 11 hours. At the time Canton Becker was a student of mine, and he was a rave fanatic. I knew nothing about it and he introduced me to techno music and the rave scene. I suggested to him that in order to create music for the piece he should build the communal groove machine, which would, with the help of others on the internet, allow us to create the music needed for the piece. He built it under my direction. Indeed at the last moment I discovered that we forgot to add a transposing element to it, so most of the piece is in C...

Ha, that's funny.  How long did you say the piece lasted?

How were the people on the internet able to affect the music?  In what form was their input?

The techno machine had a library of rhythm sections, bass lines, chord progressions, and feels - tempo accents, etc. People would respond to questions by choosing or entering new bass lines, or new rhythms and then it would create the song that they imagined but could not hear. The resulting information was interpreted through a MAX patch written with Matt Moeller that allowed us to mix the songs. The final production of the songs was done with the help of other students, most prominently Andy Knight. The piece also involved three actors/singers for which I wrote parts and a series of videos created by H.D. Motyl.

It was a fantastic experience. The communal groove machine was interesting in many ways, but most profoundly, for me, because it gave me a glimpse on how many people compose and have a clear idea of what their music should sound like, even though they are not musicians. You must remember this is the internet before browsers, only text was moving around. As part of the machine we asked people to include a description of the songs as they thought they should come out, hoping to use it as an indication for the mixing and production. People were very forthcoming, very clear and precise. I was very excited: composition was no longer an artistic activity for specialists, it was open for anyone who had ideas.

You mentioned The Beatles, Madonna, Tom Waits... how has your relationship with popular culture affected your artistic output?

I have a relationship with popular culture. It is part of who I am, part of my thinking and musical world. How it falls into my work is hard to explain. The Andy Warhol Diaries is a clear example where an element of popular culture was the impetus for the piece. In other pieces it may be a sound, or a formal musical element using only four chords...

It's hard to explain. I don't write popular music, that is, I have not in 20 years. But I do listen, when I listen, and it's a part of my sound world. My friend the composer Michael Pisaro once suggested to me that in order to incorporate pop music successfully into classical music you have to let go of your respect and love for it. To my mind, most composers my age find that hard to do. So the pieces seem to be orchestrations of pop music with a large orchestra, or with computer music. It seems that I may have decided that perhaps I too can not do it, so I just don't try. I don't try to create popular music with my music, but I use ideas from popular music as metaphors for some of the pieces I create.

Learn more about Dangerous Bend, the Amnon Wolman CD on the C74 label, by clicking here. You can visit Amnon's personal web page by clicking here.

Amnon Wolman creates music with technology and for instruments with two distinctive features: first, a subtle and complex relationship with popular culture and second, a concern for the dramatic nature of sonic evolution. His first release on the <a href="http://www.cycling74.com/c74music">c74 record label</a> is "Dangerous Bend." In this conversation with Ben Nevile, Wolman discusses his romantic compositional techniques and reveals the unusual nature of his introduction to computer-based music.

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