Guest mix by Cheval Sombre (recent / upcoming)
Tracklist:
1. Michael Tanner & Alison Cotton – Masts of Rown-Tree
2. Bongwater – The Drum
3. Kraftwerk – Tanzmusik
4. Paul O’Dette, Andrew Lawrence-King and David Douglass – The Glory of the Sun
5. Palace Music – West Palm Beach
6. Julianna Barwick – Adventurer of the Family
7. Zbigniew Preisner – L’enfance
8. Richard Youngs with Alasdair Roberts ft. Donald WG Lindsay – Kinning Park
9. Sonic Boom – Ecstasy in Slow Motion
Suzanne Ciani is a five-time Grammy award nominated composer, electronic music pioneer, and neo-classical recording artist whose work has been featured in countless commercials, video games, and feature films. A self-taught pianist with classical music training from The Longy School of Music and Wellesley College, Suzanne discovered electronic music in the late 60s and quickly became immersed in the worlds of sound synthesis and computer music. With her instrument of choice, the Buchla modular synthesizer, Suzanne revolutionized the advertising industry, and her sounds were featured in spots for General Electric, Sunkist, Clairol, and AT&T, amongst many others. Perhaps her most famous piece, the Coca-Cola “Pop n’ Pour” sound effect, was featured in hundreds of Coca-Cola commercials throughout the 70s and 80s. In the 90s, Suzanne transitioned from synthesizers back to the piano and formed her own record label, Seventh Wave. She’s been recognized as Keyboard Magazine’s “New Age Keyboardist of the Year,” provided the voice and sounds for Bally’s groundbreaking Xenon pinball machine, played concerts all over the globe, and carved out a niche as one of the most creatively successful female composers in the world. Her most recent release, Live Quadraphonic, is a live recording of Suzanne’s first solo Buchla performance in 40 years, released in quadraphonic sound on 180g vinyl and includes a hardware decoder to decode two channels of audio from the vinyl disc back to the four-channel recording, and can be purchased here.
Interview by René Kladzyk, a NYC-based musician, perfumer and geographer who performs under the moniker Ziemba. Her elemental orientation is decidedly watery these days.
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My entrypoint to your work was through Seven Waves, which I imagine is the case for a lot of your listeners, so I’m wondering if you can tell me about the conceptualization and creation of that record.
Seven Waves was my first album, and I had waited years to do it because I had to be in a position to afford to make it. By the time I got there, my vocabulary had changed. I had stopped doing pure Buchla, and I was frustrated that the public didn’t understand the music technology. The whole analog thing was a little too abstract. My roots were classical, so without much thought process what happened naturally with Seven Waves was that I synthesized my classical roots with my technological background, my ten years working with the Buchla. That’s the vocabulary of that album: it’s romantic and melodic. I wanted to make technology sensual because I was making the music for myself and I wanted to feel relaxed, calm, happy and safe, and to create an immersive space that I could just be in. It took two years, partly because I could only work on it on weekends, and partly because it was expensive, and I had to do things as I could afford them.
I call the compositions waves, because each piece starts slowly and builds to a climax and then recedes in the shape of wave. I made waves on the Buchla of course, and each wave had a special personality for the piece. In the end I connected all the pieces so that they flowed in and out of the waves as one long uninterrupted piece. It was entirely electronic, and I thought of each of the electronic instruments as musicians in a way, so I credit every instrument–
Every instrument! (laughing)
Every instrument, including reverb and things like that, because it was all an essential part of the sound. I remember that in the early pieces, the notes were entered in a Roland MC4 or an MC8, do you know that?
I don’t.
Well, almost all of the music was written out, and for each note you had to put in a number for the pitch, a number for the duration, and a number for the volume. A lot of it was a very painstaking, and some of it was just flourishes where you create a gesture in the moment. I had a commercial music business by then, and my business partner was named Mitch Farber. Mitch was this wonderful guy, a jazz arranger and a great go-to guy for doing layouts. I would write out the music on my piano, but we needed a layout on score paper because there was so much information to enter. All these numbers had to go beside every note. He did the layouts of the score in the music paper, and I have those scores in a book. It’s not the type of score where you could perform it per se because…well I guess you could–
Would you ever consider doing something like an orchestral Seven Waves performance?
It could be orchestrated.
Both in the context of Seven Waves but also more broadly, so much of the symbolic and poetic language around you is watery and associated with waves. Has your elemental orientation shifted at all over time? Do you think about the current work that you’re doing with quadraphonic Buchla in a similar type of symbolic language?
It’s a different vocabulary, but the waves are there. My concerts always start with the waves because that’s where I’m comfortable, and the music rises out of the waves. That’s always been my approach. So the waves still figure in my work, though I don’t approach performance classically, the way I did with Seven Waves. It’s still note and pitch based, but much more loosely. I think of it more as jazz than classical: it’s more improvisational and in the moment, working with the machine and getting the feedback from the machine. As I do these performances, certain things start to settle and become familiar, but the experience is always a little bit unexpected. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do.
Do you have any guiding intentions or rules for how you approach these more improvisational performances you’ve been doing recently?
When I came back to this genre, this idea, I consulted a paper that I wrote 40 years ago.
I tried to track down that paper on the internet, actually. You referenced it in an interview, and I was like, “I wanna read that!”
Oh yeah? It’s in the Finders Keepers LP liner notes, for The Buchla Concerts 1975. Andy Votel, who published it, included the paper.
Suzanne has kindly shared this paper, which she calls The Buchla Cookbook, with us.
This is the first time this paper has been made available online.
So I use the same sequences that I used in the 70s: four 16-stage sequences. I also still use a lot of the techniques that I developed over my years of playing the Buchla.
One of the things that I think is so special about the quadraphonic performances you’re doing is how spatially specific they are. I’m wondering if you can describe the space you’re trying to create with these performances in non-musical terms? Like, what does it look like to you, or feel like, or smell like…
Spatial control was always part of the Buchla, so from the beginning we worked in both quadraphonic space and imaginary space. You could create big, small, close, far away, all that, as part of the music. It’s different from a lot of spatial manipulations nowadays, where it’s mapped onto the music in post-production. The Buchla actually generates spatial characteristics, so it’s rhythmically in sync with the music. I use different kinds of space for different kinds of things, instinctively–sometimes it’s a continuous space, sometimes it’s a discrete space, jumping around in a different rhythm. And it’s alive. Without the space there’s nothing, because the output of this type of machine is essentially monophonic. Stereo was fabricated to spread things out over a span; it wasn’t meant to move sound. Quadraphonic in electronic language is meant to be a parameter, like pitch and volume and rhythm, so it’s really part of the music.
It’s all about the motion of it–
It’s all about the motion. I always say that, with the Buchla, it’s not about the sound, but the way the sound moves. And Don knew that. We weren’t trying to imitate a sound or make an amazing sound and then play it on a keyboard. The sound was a byproduct of the way it could move. So you have voltage control, with which you could move the sound quickly, slowly, whatever, and the sound changes with the movement.
That was something I was really struck by when I saw you perform in New York. I think I told you after the show that it felt like an ecosystem. The nature of how it was alive with so many different characters, and the chaos in it–it felt very organic to me. I’m curious what some of your nonmusical creative influences are.
Well, I have art roots. My sister is a visual artist, and I grew up in the art world. My first projects were with sculptors: Harold Paris, Ron Mallory, Joseph Robinson. Maybe people you don’t know, but Ron worked in mercury, and we did a film called Lixiviation, which then became the title of the album that Finders Keepers released—
Oh, I heard the album but didn’t know it was a film soundtrack.
Yeah, that’s where it came from. I’ve also worked with dancers. Nature and the sea are very big inspirations. One of my spiritual mentors was a photographer, Ilse Bing, who was from Germany. I met her when she was in her 80’s and I was in my 30s.
She was a mentor to you?
She was, because she was a true artist, and she worked in technology. She was called the “Queen of the Leica” and I’m the “Diva of the Diode.” She was a brilliant woman who worked in a man’s world and had this incredible edge. She discovered solarization before Man Ray, and she never got credit for it. She had a very successful career, and she was somebody that I could talk to about my work. She was an intellectual, and she always would say, “Tell me, tell me about your work!” I always wanted to talk about my boyfriends, but she kept me focused. So I had such an identification with her, as you do with a mentor. Who knows what mentoring is, or how that happens. She just was. It’s who she was.
It just happened naturally?
Yes, it happened naturally. I collect her work, so I have a huge collection of her photographs. I collected them before I even knew her. When she was 60 she stopped photographing, and it was a total crisis for me, because I was young and idealistic. I thought, “How can you?” I didn’t understand, because I saw myself as somebody who was going to go forever in my art. What I’ve realized in maturity was that she didn’t stop her art, she just shifted gears, kind of like the way I shift gears. There might be people who are disappointed that I’m not playing the piano right now, and making my romantic music, but I’m doing what I do!
That’s actually something that I wanted to ask you about. Can we talk about love a little bit?
Sure. I don’t think I know anything about it, but sure.
Well, there’s so much romance and sensuality in so much of your work, but–this was the trickiest question for me to formulate. I wanted to talk to you about love as a concept, but also romantic music and the different ways of expressing it, and whether with the compositional approach you have now, you’re intentionally moving away from a romantic expression.
Well, yes! I think when you’re young and you have all those hormones, and you’re into that trajectory of finding your prince and all that, that’s a certain energy system. It’s wonderful, but it doesn’t last forever.
Like the planet Venus ideological approach.
Right! And what you find out, or what I found out as I was older, is that I love, but I don’t love in that focused, one person or one place kind of way. It’s more open now. There’s still love, but it doesn’t have to be that–what is that–the symbolic or male/female…
Movie love?
Movie love! (laughing) I love romcoms. I love the whole idea of love, and my favorite guy, what’s his name? The British guy that does all the…
Colin Firth?
No, the British guy that does all the romantic comedies.
Hugh Grant?
Yes! I love Hugh Grant, and I don’t know why! Because he doesn’t fit any of my images of an ideal. I just like his spirit, I guess. So yeah, I did have a divorce and it was a bit of a crisis because I had the perfect marriage in a way. It really was the crystallization of the utter total fantasy of love. Then when it broke, it was devastating. At the same time, I think I outgrew that idea of love. So I’m happy, I’m not looking for anything, and I think I found it! (laughing) And I love it all. I think it’s wonderful when you’re young. It’s a rough ride–it can work synchronously, sometimes perfectly, but most of the time it’s filled with illusion and bumps. But it’s worth it.
It is worth it. If I can ask one last thing, I was wondering if you have any advice you’d like to offer to women working in the music industry, or even in the art world.
We’re on the crest of a wave right now, and it’s a very important historic time for us. I haven’t seen this type of energy since the 60s, when we had another crest of the wave. Everything is waves. So now that we’re on the crest, I say don’t forget. Go with it, be yourself, take your rightful place. If you’re looking for validation as an artist, the only authentic place to start is with yourself. You must meet your own standards of excellence, because no one outside yourself can corroborate your artistic message. Women have trouble with self confidence because they’ve been trained to believe themselves to be lesser. It’s a very insidious thing. You have to remind yourself that you’re never less than. We also need to learn how to respect other women. Because women don’t even respect women.
I think women are trained to turn on each other on a dime, and are very competitive with each other in ways that aren’t necessarily helpful.
But you know why? It’s because we’re playing in a different playing field. We used to be competing with men, and we were trying to get an edge there. We’re not doing that anymore. We’re competing with each other instead of with men; and we’re not trying to take over a man’s world, we’re creating our own world. It’s wonderful; it will be a world equal to the man’s world, and different. We’ll support each other; we just need to respect the talents and the abilities of women, and to respect ourselves also. We’re having a very important and formative moment right now. We’re making a shift amongst ourselves and in the world.
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Thanks to Suzanne Ciani, René Kladzyk, Rachel Aiello,
and Matt Johnstone for facilitating this interview.
Text has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Carl Stone is one of the pioneers of live computer music. He studied composition at CalArts with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney and has composed electro-acoustic music almost exclusively since 1972. He was among the vanguard of artists incorporating turntables, early digital samplers, and personal computers into live electronic music composition. An adopter of the Max programming language while it was still in its earliest development at the IRCAM research center, Stone continues to use it as his primary instrument, both solo and in collaboration with other improvisers. In addition to his work as a composer, Stone served as Music Director of KPFK-FM in Los Angeles from 1978-1981, director of Meet the Composer California from 1981-1997, and President of the American Music Center from 1992-1995. He is currently a faculty member of the Department of Media Engineering at Chukyo University in Japan. His most recent retrospective compilation, Electronic Music from the Eighties and Nineties, is out now on Unseen Worlds and can be purchased here.
Interview by Christina Vantzou and John Also Bennett, who recently collaborated as CV & JAB on Thoughts of a Dot as it Travels a Surface.
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CV: How long have you been living in Japan?
CS: It’s coming up on seventeen years. I’ve been coming to Japan since the 80’s to work on projects, and in the spring of 2001 I got a six month residency at IAMAS, a media art institution in the middle of the country. While I was there I was offered a job as a professor at a university, so I kind of never went back to the US.
JAB: So you live in Tokyo–what are you teaching there?
CS: Well, the job that I was offered in 2001 actually wasn’t at a music school or even an art school. I’m was in the media department of the School of Information Science, which is now a straight ahead School of Engineering. I’m teaching things like music technology, programming for music, sound design, and acoustic aesthetics. I’ve recently started guest lecturing at Tokyo University, where I teach a course on music technology, and it’s also geared towards programmers and people in the sciences than towards artists.
JAB: You’re mainly working in Max/MSP now, right?
CS: Yes. I don’t know a lot of other programming languages. Max/MSP is one that I specialize in. (laughing) I’m a monoglot.
JAB: Have you always worked with emerging technologies in your music, or was there a period before you started using computers where you were like, playing a saxophone?
CS: I studied piano from the age of five, but I wasn’t very good and didn’t like practicing, so it didn’t go that far. But then in junior high and high school I played in some bands. I played with the musician Z’EV who you may have heard of—he sadly passed away recently. He played drums, I played keyboards, and we had a bass player by the name of James Stewart. The three of us were a power trio: organ, bass, and drums. No vocals. I played washboard and drums in a jug band, so I have an instrumental background, but I switched to using synthesizers when I first started college in 1969. After that I started performing with turntables, which wasn’t necessarily cutting edge technology, since turntables had been around for quite awhile, but people weren’t really using them in live performance in those days. When the personal computer came along and became smaller and practical, I started using that in the 80’s.
CV: And you studied at CalArts?
CS: Yes, that’s right. My teacher was Morton Subotnick.
CV: I read that while you were there, you started working with samples when you had a job transferring LPs to cassette.
CS: Yes! (laughing) Using found music was a starting point. I wasn’t sampling while I was doing that, I was just fulfilling a job backing up LP records. But it gave me the spirit of the idea, because I was noticing these sound collisions and combinations. I would have two or three different turntables playing all at once while I was doing these backups, so I noticed that it was interesting and I got the idea to try different combinations in my own music, to make new contexts for familiar music or unfamiliar music. That’s what got me off the launching pad, even though I wasn’t really composing at the time–I was just doing my job.
CV: Did you ever use any of the material from the job in your music?
CS: Well, there were a few of those records which I had never heard before that stuck with me and they do end up showing up in later works. For example, there was a great release of music from Burundi and I really fell in love with that album. The sample that I used from that album actually shows up as a starting point for my piece called “Banteay Srey,” which I wrote 15 years later and is part of the release that’s coming out on Unseen Worlds pretty soon.
JAB: That’s amazing. That’s the first piece on the record, I think? It’s a vocal sample?
CS: Yes.
CV: We both do a lot of sampling as well, so listening to the upcoming release I was really struck by how contemporary and relevant it sounds. The technology hasn’t changed all that much.
CS: I think that the technology has changed and evolved in ways that makes a lot of things easier to do, but in those days with much more limited technology I needed to try to find creative solutions for what I was interested in doing. I’m glad that it still sounds fresh and new. The technology has evolved, but what I’m trying to do and say with my music has remained more or less the same.
CV: Have you ever had a chance to reach out to any of the artists who made the recordings that you’ve been using over the years?
CS: Yes. Not in every case, but in some cases I have. I wish I knew where I could find the little girl from Burundi, but that recording goes back to the 60s and she’s probably not a little girl anymore.
JAB: How recognizable is that sample? I’ve never heard the original, so I don’t know if it’s distorted beyond recognition.
CS: I don’t know. I like the ambiguity: it sounds vocal, but you can’t be 100% sure that it’s a vocal sample. It’s been through a lot, it’s been slowed down, looped, it’s been subjected to a certain amount of computer treatment. I’m not sure that if you heard the original you’d say “Oh, that’s it!”
CV: I feel like the beauty of sampling is that you get to put it through your own apparatus, with your own choices and particular aesthetics, and you become a filter of sorts. I love what we’ve heard from the catalogue. I’m wondering if you generate a lot of material and are really picky about what gets released, or if you work more minimally and deliberately.
CS: I have a lot of unreleased material that I’d like to get out there. I seem to have a certain psychological resistance to releasing my current work. When I release something, I know it gets fixed in people’s minds and memories, and I’m more comfortable doing that with music that’s 10 or 20 years old, which I’ve already moved beyond. For some reason—and I’m not sure it’s a really good reason—I’m less inclined to release the music that I’m working on right now, because I don’t want to fix it in people’s minds. I’d rather perform it live. On the other hand, I do sort of regret that people are maybe becoming more familiar with my older work and not really with my contemporary work, so I should probably put more effort towards releasing all of it.
JAB: “Mae Yao” & “Sonali” (featured on the new collection) are some of the first pieces of music you released, right? How does it feel to look back on those old compositions from where you are now?
CS: Chronologically, “Woo Lae Oak” is the first, from 1981. “Mae Yao” is from 1984, “Sonali” is from 1987, and “Banteay Srey” is from the beginning of the nineties. It’s been a nice experience for me to revisit these older recordings, contemplate how they fit in with what I am doing these days, and to be able to share them with an audience. I’m really grateful to Unseen Worlds for their continued support in releasing these tracks, along with their earlier release of my pieces from the seventies and eighties.
CV: Do you keep things archived and stored in categories or folders, so you remember what’s what?
CS: Well, first a piece will get a working title, which describes the process I was using or the sample I was using, or something like that. Eventually it will get titled using my silly system.
CV: We heard you use restaurants you like as titles.
CS: Yeah, I don’t really like coming up with titles that mean something or describe the piece or are any kind of poetic reference to the music, so I have a random system in which I pull titles from a list, and that serves as a way of identifying it. The list happens to be a list of restaurants that I enjoy. A lot of the restaurant names are in a language that’s foreign to me, so it moves the titles further away from meaning and description, and they become more abstract. “Banteay Srey” is the name of a Cambodian restaurant. I don’t even know what it means in Khmer.
JAB: (laughing) Do you go to a lot of restaurants? Are you an exploratory eater?
CS: I am an exploratory eater. I think that’s a better description than a “foodie.” I don’t really like the term “foodie” that much.
JAB: (laughing) Neither do I.
CS: I do eat out a lot, and I do like to eat new cuisines. I’m relatively fearless in terms of what I’ll eat. I recently went to an eel restaurant here in Tokyo and once of the things they serve was the actual bones, the spine of the eels deep fried and eaten like bar snacks.
CV: Was that restaurant added to your list?
CS: It hasn’t been yet, but it probably will be. The problem is that with my early pieces is that a lot of those restaurants have gone out of business or aren’t that good anymore. People will sometimes go to a restaurant that I named a piece after and say, “Hey, Carl, I went there and it was lousy.” But if the song is from ten years ago and the chef is gone…
JAB: All the same, I look forward to a Carl Stone song titles culinary tour. We played a few shows in Japan awhile back–one at a gallery in Kyoto and a few in Tokyo, including one in a temple. A good friend of ours helped us set it up–Chihei Hatakeyama.
CS: Oh, yeah. We’ve played a couple shows together. Where did you play in Tokyo?
JAB: We played at a Buddhist temple called Ennoji, and then we played at a small jazz club called Velvet Sun.
CS: Yeah, I’ve played there. With Chihei, actually!
JAB: We also did a show on Dommune Radio, which you’re probably familiar with. It was streaming live, and we met Ukawa.
CS: (laughing) Yeah, a character.
JAB: I read that you did a performance with Wolfgang Georgsdorf, and that he was playing a smeller organ.
CS: That’s right. He invented this keyboard that triggers aromas instead of notes. That kind of thing has been done before, and usually what happens is that you pump in a smell, and then another smell, and then another smell, and they all mix together until you end up with a big mess, but what’s interesting about his is that he worked with an aroma technologist and an engineer to work it out so that he could not only mix smells as he wanted but also replace smells with other smells. He has a great palate of aromas, and they’re not all nice smells like roses or honey. He had things like wet dogs, rotting leaves, sweat, horses, and mushrooms. He would mix them the way a painter would mix paints on a canvas, or the way a composer writing a symphony might orchestrate. It was really interesting to work together, first in his atelier out in the countryside and then in Berlin, where we presented in a church. The performance was about an hour long and the audience listened almost in the dark. I was using a lot of environmental sounds mixed in with electronic sounds. I think it was a really nice experience for the audience.
JAB: Did you prepare specific smell and sound combinations beforehand?
CS: Yes. We had a scenario worked out in advance, so there was a certain amount of improvisation, but he worked pretty specifically, at least with the flow of the smells. He asked me to keep that in mind for my musical accompaniment.
JAB: I love the idea of improvising with someone playing a smell organ, as if you’re a jazz trio but one of the band members is pumping in the smell of manure, and you react to that with sound.
CS: Yeah. Some of the smells he had were like wet earth.
CV & JAB: Aaaaaah.
CS: Because that has a smell, right? And the smell of cut wood. A lot of outdoor smells that we kind of take for granted as we pass them by.
JAB: Smell is such a strong trigger for memory…
CS: Very strong. I think it’s the strongest trigger, actually, more than sight or sound.
CV: It’s nice when it’s connected to a performance, so that particular memory comes shooting back if you happen across the smell. I was curious how often you find yourself recording. I’m sure it depends, but is it on a very regular basis? Do you have to be in a certain mood?
CS: A lot of times I’ll be working in my studio and then something interesting happens, so I’ll just fire the engines and start the recorder. Then sometimes I’ve allocated specific hours for recording, usually when I’m working with another artist. I’ve got various artists that I work with and we’ll block out times for recording sessions in the hopes of making a record. In terms of my own work, I usually don’t plan to record, unless I’m working on a very specific predetermined project, like a soundtrack. I’ll usually just be working, and then if it gets interesting I’ll record it. It’s kind of my process, to do it that way.
JAB: A lot of your earlier works are kind of very much process oriented—for example it’ll start with an idea that’s a sample, and then it’s the sample twice, and then multiplied by four, and then by eight. I’m curious how often you find that you’ll start with an idea like that and then follow through with it completely, versus having some flexibility for the process to shape the idea. Are you strict with sticking to the concept of a piece, or do you leave time to play with it while you’re developing it?
CS: That’s a very good question. Actually, it’s sort of both. Usually I start with what you could describe as a kind of play process, where I’m just playing around, maybe with a sample or with an idea for a process itself, and I don’t have any particular goal in mind. I’m just exploring what’s possible and having fun, and then at some point an idea will suggest itself—how to take this and shape it and make it into a finished composition, and where does it fit in with other material? Is this one sample or one process enough for an entire piece, or is it just one element of a larger piece? Who knows? The answers will emerge through the course of this play. I’ll try plugging in different samples and seeing what the results are. The only problem with this working method is when I’m on a deadline, maybe working on a film soundtrack where they give you a request for a certain emotional feeling and a certain duration. But because I don’t always know where I’m going to end up at the end of my process it’s hard to fulfill those kinds of requests–which is maybe why I don’t do many soundtracks.
JAB: Do you find the technology shapes the idea as you’re working with it? Or, another way of asking this might be, do you think your music is inherently tied to the technology that you’re using?
CS: That’s also a good question. I think the answer is that my work depends on technology to a great extent because I’m trying to work with things that aren’t in the realm of human performance, and aren’t necessarily possible for humans—I’m interested in things that are slower or faster or higher or lower or broader than is humanly possible to perform. In that sense I rely on technology to achieve those things. It’s not technology driven in the sense that when the technology changes or becomes obsolete, I go out of business—it just means that I adapt my process to whatever is available. So I don’t think the technology is driving me, so much as enabling me.
CV: Is there anything else you’d like to add, Carl?
CS: Hmm, you’ve asked some good questions. I hear that one of you is going to Belgium soon?
CV: Yeah, I live in Brussels. I go back and forth, but I’ve been there for about fourteen years. Are you going to be in Belgium?
CS: Yeah, I’m playing at a festival–not in Brussels, but in a small town. You know Meakusma Festival?
CV: Yeah–we’re playing! We’re playing two sets, one with our collaborative project (CV & JAB) and one as my solo project, where we’ll play synthesizers together with a string ensemble.
CS: That’s great! I have a unit called Realistic Monk with a Japanese sound artist who lives in Germany, Miki Yui–we’re playing September 9th. I’ll see you there! We have an album that’s coming out on Meakusma.
CV: Oh cool, they’re doing such great work. John played there last year so we can tell you it’s a wonderful festival. It’s in the countryside, but a lot of people come out from all over Europe. There’s a lot of good music. Well, it was really nice to speak with you, Carl–I really relate to a lot of your processes.
CS: I’m glad to hear that, and I’ll have to look into your music and hear what you guys are up to. Sounds like we have some mutual concerns!
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Todd Barton is an accomplished composer and musician whose lifelong investigation into sound has taken many forms. He has built Renaissance musical instruments, lectured on the musical notation of the Middle Ages, and written numerous scores for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where he was Resident Composer for over 40 years. His DNA-derived Genome Music has been the subject of numerous articles and exhibitions, and he has released several albums of Zen Shakuhachi meditation music. Since 1979, he has been composing and performing works for analog synthesizer, and is currently a consulting artist for Buchla USA. He’s a generous and dedicated educator, and in recent years has contributed a wealth of knowledge about Buchla, Serge, Hordijk and Haken synthesizers to various online platforms. Among his discoveries is the Krell Patch, named for the self-generating circuits that Bebe and Louis Barron created for the 1956 film Forbidden Planet. In the early 80s, Barton began a collaboration with author Ursula K. Le Guin that became the recently reissued Music and Poetry of the Kesh, a “speculative music” for the fictional peoples of the 1985 novel Always Coming Home. In addition to Le Guin, Barton’s collaborators include Anthony Braxton, Zakir Hussein, William Stafford, and Lawson Fusao Inada, and his compositions have been performed by the KRONOS Quartet, Oregon Symphony Orchestra, San Jose Chamber Orchestra, and the Shasta Taiko, among others.
Interview by Peter Harkawik, a Los Angeles based artist working in sculpture and photography.
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Hi Todd, thanks for being here! To start, where are you, and what are you working on these days?
Hi! I’m in my studio in Oregon. I have a solo Buchla Easel performance coming up at Modular 8 in Portland on June 10, and I’ll be performing at The Tank in Colorado in the Fall. I just finished a composition for Tone Science Module 2, and now I’m working on a collaboration with UK painter Edward Ball. The rest of my time is spent teaching modular synthesis and exploring sound in the studio.
Can you tell me a little bit about your process for making an album like Music from the Studio? I get the sense that it was culled from a larger assortment of recordings.
Good intuition! I actually made it years ago for immediate friends and family, including my grandkids. They had heard my work through the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and when I’d play them the more serious, more abstract electronic work, they’d nod and say, “Yeah, that’s cool.” (laughs) I wanted to make something more accessible for them. It’s all the Music Easel or Buchla 100 or 200 series, and there might be one on there that’s made with the Haken Continuum.
How does the specific cultural history of the Buchla factor into your work? I’m thinking of the Tape Music Center, Experiments in Art and Technology, and the ethos of the 1960’s. Is it kind of baked into the instrument?
Absolutely. Don Buchla created the 100 system for Morton Subotnick at the Tape Music Center. His approach to synthesis, which was so different from Moog on the East coast, is immediately evident to anyone who has ever touched a Buchla instrument. One of my favorite quotes from David Tudor is something like, “I don’t try to make the synthesizer do what I want it to do, I listen to what it wants to tell me.” If you listen to a Buchla, it will start rewiring your synapses.
How has making electronic music changed since you first started working with synthesizers?
The person who turned me onto the Buchla back in the 70s was a guy named Douglas Leedy. His major album is Entropical Paradise which was done on a Buchla. He popped in and out of Tape Music Center, so there’s one degree of separation there. I bought my first synth from Serge Tcherepnin in Haight-Ashbury in 1979. For the first 10 years it was a Serge and a Roland Jupiter-8. By 1985, the Yamaha DX7 and the Korg M1 had come out, and everyone went digital. Sure, Stockhausen, Subotnick, lots of folks had taken the analogue synthesizer to great heights, but I felt there was more to learn. I was raising my hand and saying, “Wait! We haven’t found the edge of analog synthesis yet!” People looked at me like I was the village idiot. They took pity on me and gave me their analog gear, and by the mid-80’s, I had a wonderful collection to experiment with. Now we’ve come full circle and everyone’s getting back into analog. Eurorack is taking off. Morton Subotnick is having a great second act, touring all over the world with both older and newer work. People are starting to push the analog envelope further, and doing it through the lens of all the genres of music that have cropped up since 1980—hip hop, dub, trance, etc.
As a new generation of musicians discover the Buchla, what do you see as your role?
Don Buchla created a musical instrument that he said had no “preconceived ideas.” He wanted people to figure out how they wanted to interface with it. You see that with Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Alessandro Cortini—they’re bringing their own voice to the palette. For my part, I’m obsessed with sound, with the “Buchla Paradigm.” Every day I explore with sound in the studio. Since I retired from the Shakespeare Festival, I’ve been making little videos, putting them online, sharing my discoveries and hoping people take them to places I never considered.
A friend of mine told me that her first boombox came with a CD of music by Paul Lansky, as a demonstration of the burgeoning potential of the CD format. I thought that was funny at the time, but now it strikes me that all electronic music is in a sense a kind of demonstration. How do you draw the line between the music you make, say, for the purpose of showing off the capabilities of the Buchla, to what is considered a song?
Well, for me, demos are demos. If I’m exploring sound, I’ll stumble onto something with one of these synthesizers, be it a Serge, a Buchla or a Hordijk, and I’ll think, “Oh that’s interesting,” and I’ll make a demo of it. Sometimes I’ll do a voiceover and say, “Here, let’s patch this together,” or, “Here’s what it does, these are the knobs you want to explore first, but feel free to take it further.” Sometimes the demo will just be the camera on my hands on the synthesizer, but I’m still exploring some specific aspect, and each aspect becomes another arrow in my compositional quiver. The word compose is Latin for “to put together.” When I compose, there’s definitely intent there. Sometimes the structure presents itself as you’re sculpting the sounds. I might say, “Well, what if I start here, and then go towards this.” I might change a few things on the way there, but the process creates the form.
I grew up performing acoustic music and composing for string quartets, small ensembles, and orchestras. Everything was written out. When I’d write a note, it would tell a musician what fingers to put down on their instrument, how loud to play it, etc. But when I started composing electronic music, I was composing from the perspective of the sound, not the musician. I was creating a sound that wasn’t, say, an oboe, or a clarinet. It might have some sonic gesture, some glitch or grit in it that’s not even possible on an acoustic instrument. Composing electronic music is a completely different ballgame because you’re creating at a granular level, making up the instruments as you go. A composer can use the twelve-tone system in a serial way or in a more harmonic, melodic, modular way, but it’s still just 12 notes. A synthesizer can get everything in-between, all the bizarre timbres and tone colors of your imagination.
This touches on something I saw recently in a documentary about Canadian composer Martin Bartlett. He spoke about the potential for electronic music to erase the distinction between composer and performer, presumably because the composition process can be done by way of patching in real time. Is this how you think about performing with a synthesizer—“composing” for an audience?
Absolutely. It goes all the way back to Stockhausen, the idea that a musician can actually “hold” sound, create sound from nothing. I create compositions that end up on CDs, cassettes, or LPs, and often the bulk of that comes from improvisation, and I might layer it, remix it, tweak it a lot. Other times, when I do a performance, let’s say for 30 minutes, I feel that I’m performing a composition, even though it is completely free improvisation. The Buchla Music Easel has all these beautiful colored sliders, switches, knobs. Sometimes before I start I’ll have a ten year old come up from the audience and move everything around. Then I turn the volume knob up, and start from there. I follow that sound to a composition, to an improvisation.
You did a project in 1997 where you composed a roughly one minute piece every day for a month, then released it to CD and the web. In the liner notes, you encourage the listener to “reprogram” the CD by listening out of sequence. Is this kind of interactive listening something you’ve explored further?
I don’t know that I’ve explored that since. This was the 90’s, so the idea was kind of ”make your own playlist.” In a way, it was an excuse to use every synthesizer in my studio, even the neglected ones. I woke up every morning and I had until 10 o’clock to finish the piece, and then I would put it online. For each synth, I had to re-learn or re-figure out what it was telling me, and go with it.
My first experience with electronic music was probably in the late 90s, early 2000’s. I remember going to noise shows, where the setup was almost always a solitary person on the floor surrounded by electronics that were being fiddled with. Do you think electronic music is prone to this kind of relationship, where a performer is in a sense in dialogue with themselves or their own “feedback loop,” or can it be more of a social process?
I think it depends a lot on the venue. I do Easel duets regularly with my colleague, Bruce Bayard. A few years ago, I got four performers together. That was a bit of an homage to the Electric Weasel Ensemble, which was Don Buchla, Allen Strange, Pat Strange, Steve Ruppenthal, and David Morse. Those five were actually the first to get Easels. When I was in Berlin in October I did a little talk and a solo set, and then afterwards there was a jam with six other synthesists. Almost every city now has a synth meet. LA has Modular on the Spot. I think they meet in those big drainage ditches that don’t have water in them.
We call that “the river.”
Yes! I hear they play at different outdoor spots all over LA. They’re mostly solo artists, but they have a community. I think the solo paradigm is equally valid. I’ve been plenty of places where there’s just one person on the floor surrounded by DIY stuff, foot pedals, doing their thing.
I’ve been reading about Terry Riley’s 1958 improvisations with Pauline Oliveros, about how the rule was that they wouldn’t speak before or during the session, only after. It’s interesting because my first exposure to minimalist music was in the context of these very tight, very contained performances and recordings. As I learn more, I’m finding out about the social history, connections to Stuart Brand, things like the Homebrew Computer Club, that history of California experimentation. These were also jam sessions.
You know, Don Buchla created speaker arrays and mixers for the Grateful Dead, for processing their sound.
Wow, really?
Yeah. And the other person doing that was John Meyer. His speakers are the gold standard these days. He was working with Don.
Do you think about the aesthetic experience a musician has with an instrument, especially one like the Music Easel or the Continuum? I don’t mean the look of performing with it, but the personal experience of the musician.
I think about timbre and wanting to, what I’d call, “follow the sound.” If I’m doing an improvisation or I’m composing notes on paper, there’s a continual feedback to the sounds that are happening. I try to guide or sculpt the sound into something new, or at least new to me, and the feedback keeps going. Sometimes I try to sculpt it in one way, and it goes in another, and I think, “Oh, that’s interesting.” I come from a wind instrument background. I grew up playing trumpet, and I’ve studied shakuhachi for 30 years now. The gestures I make, have made my whole life, are connected to breath. If you really practice, you can hold long notes on the trumpet, but eventually the breath runs out. The oscillator on the Easel will keep going as long as there’s electricity. I just finished a piece that I sent off to the UK for a compilation. It’s full of long, washy, drone sounds, with harmonic timbres that go from very consonant or thin, to very dense and complex. Those shifts are probably not unlike a slow breath.
I’m noticing, especially on an album like Analog Horizonings, the influence of Indian classical music.
I was exposed a lot as a teenager to Indian music, ragas, and I personally played tamboor in some sessions, so it’s an influence for sure. I’ve done some meditation music too. My friend who plays sitar, Russ Appleyard, studied and toured in India for years. He and I also at one point in our development locked into didgeridoos. There were a few years there where that was just it. There were stories about aboriginal cultures that would play didgeridoo from sunset to sunrise. I remember we got about three hours once. It was mind-altering.
I’ve been listening to an excerpt of your extraordinarily beautiful tape from 1986 called I/Shi-Ho: Meditation Environments. Can you talk a little bit about this piece? Are all the sounds on this tape made with a synthesizer or are there vocal samples as well?
I think I was influenced a little bit by Brian Eno’s Music for Airports and things like that. I didn’t have much technology at that point. The samples are actually (laughs) either an 8-bit Ensoniq Mirage, or maybe a Korg Wavestation. Pretty primitive compared to today. Maybe a Roland Jupiter-8 made it on there for a drone or washy thing. I was probably using the first iteration of a software DAW called Cakewalk. Version 1! The title came from the I Ching.
I don’t know anything about making music, but I have accidentally built some sculptures that turned out to be musical. It strikes me that there’s a great many reasons to make your own musical instrument: achieving a different sound, actualizing a kind of philosophy or worldview, producing visual spectacle, or just for ergonomic reasons. Can you talk about the instruments that were made for Music and Poetry of the Kesh?
When it comes to instrument building, I was more of a dabbler. I made baroque flutes and trumpet mutes–that’s really a niche there–and renaissance recorders. That informed a part I wrote in Music and Poetry of the Kesh where I described Kesh instruments. Ursula Le Guin and I would bring instruments that we had “found,” in our imagination, from the Kesh culture. I would describe them, and explain how they were built and what sounds they made. Of course, as she was working on the book, I was working on the music–this was from 1983 to 1985. We didn’t have time to build these instruments and beta test them, so I did it all on a Roland Jupiter 8. Once the book was published, people actually started building these instruments, and they ended up sounding like what I had dreamed they would sound like! Since then, I haven’t built any instruments per se, but anything can become an instrument—found metal, found wood. These days, in the electronic world, it’s people with their Arduinos and Raspberry Pis. That’s beyond me.
Really?
I don’t have a lot of technical experience in that way. I know what a resistor and a capacitor do, but I couldn’t build anything from scratch. I’m a composer and performer fascinated with sound. I have a working knowledge, and I’ve soldered up synthesizer modules, but that doesn’t mean I know exactly what that resistor’s doing when I put it in there. People will cold call or email me with two pages of “Is that plus or minus five volts?” I read it all, and say “I’m sorry! Please contact my friend so-and-so.”
You’ve said you’re not interested in producing a traditional score where the timbre would be open to interpretation, but if that’s the case, how do you notate your music? Is there some other format or way of making a score that interests you?
Well, there are formats out there. I’m not categorically against scores for electronic music—
(The interview is interrupted because Barton finds a black widow spider.)
Those are serious. I was bitten once, it was horrible. I had a fever for a month.
I think I got it. Where were we? Oh, scores. A score for electronic music, and I’m being totally reductive here, is a graphic score. A score might say, “Start with this curvilinear gesture, play it for 30 seconds, then that’s followed by this series of plots,” etc. There’s a huge history of that from the 60s on, with some really amazing scores out there, but it presupposes you’ve got musicians who have worked in an improvisational way and are open, imaginative, and creative about how to interpret it. Sarah Belle Reid, who teaches at CalArts, started a score project called The Postcard Project (which was inspired, in part, by James Tenney’s Postal Pieces). She sent me a postcard of a graphic score, and I then interpreted it using the Music Easel and sent it back to her, along with a graphic score I made for her to interpret. She did this with lots of composers. That’s one way.
When I’m writing an acoustical score and I write middle C, I know how the flute player is going to finger it to get that note. I can add extended techniques to it, but it’s still going to sound like a C. On a synthesizer it’s a different story, especially with different setups. Let’s say I’ve got a EMS Synthi, you’ve got a Buchla, and my friend has a Hordijk, and somebody has some weird collection of Eurorack stuff. There’s no telling if everyone has the components to do the gesture I’m looking for. I did write a piece for four Music Easels, since the Easel is designed as a complete instrument. That’s something like, “Ok, we start with these knobs set at these marks, and we take two minutes to fade in these sounds, and then we’re gonna take forty five seconds to change the setting on the reverb, which is going to change the sounds dramatically, and then there might be points of free randomness for a minute, but we’re all gonna go back toward this next setting of the sliders and knobs.” In a way, it was as specific as when I used to write for acoustic instruments. But that’s only possible if you’re all working with the same instrument.
Can you tell me a little bit about your drawings? Do you see this as a parallel practice or does it inform your music?
It began as postcard art, about ten years ago, when my mentor and good friend was diagnosed with prostate cancer. We both love fountain pens and the way ink flows when writing or creating art, so we swapped postcards every day for at least three or four years. It began as a form of therapy. I don’t consider myself a visual artist, but I started on a journey. The good news is, he just turned 80, he’s in great shape, and still composing! The other aspect is my fascination with the work of Wassily Kandinsky. When I started, I hung up a big print of “Komposition 8.” I would just sit there for awhile and think about a dot. Where would the most interesting place for another dot be? I’d add a line, maybe a triangle. I think I was remixing “Komposition 8” in my own way. Kandinsky worked in charcoal, oils, acrylic, pastels, pen and ink. I started exploring different media. I did that every day for years, and I think I’m happy with some of what I did. (laughs) When I make music, I’m sculpting sound. When I make a drawing, I’m sculpting ink.
I think I read recently that the first Buchla design was a lamp, a rotating disc with holes in it, and a photoresistor. So from the very beginning the synthesizer had an “eye” in it, a connection to visual phenomena.
I think whether it’s dance, poetry, music, it’s all just sculpting energy. Of course, it can take a little while to get your technique together!
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Thanks to Todd Barton, Peter Harkawik, and RVNG Intl. for facilitating this interview.
Text has been condensed and edited for clarity.
A springtime mix compiled in April of 2018 by Nick Zanca of Quiet Friend, whose recent debut you can hear and buy here. Featuring warm textural jazz, pastoral synth pop, and gorgeous choral accents. You can download an mp3 version here. Illustration by Guy Billout.
Tracklisting:
1. Iasos – Tropical Birds At Sunrise (Excerpt)
2. Cocteau Twins – Cherry Coloured Funk (Seefeel Remix)
3. Jon Lucien – Kuenda
4. Milton Nascimento – Travessia
5. The Small Choir of St. Brandon’s School – Bright Eyes
6. Jane Siberry – Map of the World, Part 1
7. Prefab Sprout – Nightingales
8. Gregorio Paniagua / Lucia Bose – Nana de Una Sola Rota
9. Eberhard Weber – Quiet Departures (Excerpt)
10. Sachiko Kanenobu – み空
11. Popol Vuh – Höre, Der Du Wagst
12. Gareth Williams + Mary Currie – Raindrops From Heaven
13. Chas Smith – After
14. Janet Sherbourne – Ivory
15. Pat Metheny + Lyle Mays – “It’s For You”
16. The Toronto Children’s Choir – Friday Afternoons, Op. 7: Cuckoo (Comp. Britten)
Guest post by Peter Harkawik
Mark Renner first encountered punk as a teenager in Upperco, a country town in rural Maryland. Growing up on his family farm, he became a young acolyte of the British exports hitting not-so-distant Baltimore record store shelves in the late 70s, and was baited by an area musician-wanted ad declaring Ultravox a primary touchstone. This nascent band and a pair of other group experiments flamed out, and in their ashes Renner began recording independently around 1983 with a portable 4-track, electric guitar, and classic Casio CZ101 synthesizer. Aside from John Foxx-era Ultravox, Renner’s process was inspired by the period’s electronic pioneers venturing into deeper, romantic pop pastures, like Bill Nelson and The Associates. Apart from his writing, Renner explored music as a complement to visual language: many of the dream-like instrumental passages presented across Few Traces were originally implemented as sound elements for exhibitions of his paintings. Compiled three decades after the music was originally put to tape, Few Traces collects Mark Renner’s early music but strives not to simplify or reframe it. Mark is still an active musician and painter. The instrumental explorations remain on par with the great ambient adventurers of the period (Brian Eno, Harold Budd, Roedelius), while the vocal and guitar-centric songs transverse similar terrains to contemporaries like Cocteau Twins, The Chills, and The Feelies. You can purchase the compilation via RVNG Intl here.
Interview by JD Walsh (Shy Layers)
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Hey Mark.
Hey JD, where are you calling from?
Atlanta, where my home studio is. You said you’d booked some recording time in the studio the last few days, is that still what you’re up to?
Yeah, it’s an ongoing project. I started back in Baltimore in the spring of last year, and then I recorded out in the middle of a field in a trailer this summer, went to Glasgow in November, and then back again to northern Texas, where I am now. The great thing about this setup is that I can enlist the help of other musicians: a few other guitarists, a fellow by the name of Jared Flynn in Baltimore, and Julius Fischer, who’s a music minister in a Baltimore church. He’s a great arranger and pianist, and he plays guitar and saxophone and a few other instruments. Then in Glasgow I got to work with Malcolm Lindsay, who does film soundtracks and composes for orchestra and opera, so I had a wonderful experience reconfiguring and reworking with him. He discarded just about everything from the demos I gave him, just using the structures of the songs.
And after your work’s been arranged and rearranged by collaborators, it must be thrilling to get it back and see what they’ve brought to it.
It’s a great honor to have people even listen to your work, but to have them rethink it without disturbing your original framework, that’s really a pleasure, particularly with Malcolm. He’s a very gifted individual.
You said you had an art studio as well and you work on both—do you find it’s easy to work on music and art simultaneously, or do you need to immerse yourself in one or the other?
Years ago somebody asked me about this. At the time it was like having a jealous wife—if you spend too much time working on one thing, you feel a sense of guilt for neglecting the other. I always take a sketchbook and a travelogue with me everywhere, and I’m the same way musically, so there’s a pull and tug. Luckily now I can do both full-time. I have a visual exhibition of my paintings that I’m working on right now for the end of June, and that’s a looming deadline. The override would probably be my visual work, because I’ve been drawing since I was two or three, my mother told me, and because I approach music in a similar manner as I do color and impression. In the same way as with sketchbooks, I use an app on my phone to jot down song ideas. In the late 80s and early 90s I would call my house and sing an idea over the answering machine. (laughs) I also had one of those little—I don’t know how old you are, if you remember microcassettes? Those were good for that. I don’t know if you had a chance to listen to anything off the last few recordings—
I did.
There are quite a few elegies on Goldenacre. There’s a song called “At The Far Side of the Sea,” which is a true story about two of my high school friends. The three of us made all these nomadic, romantic plans to travel adventurously, build boats and sail around the world, but one of them kind of spiraled downward from the time we graduated high school until he eventually took his own life. He went out on his front lawn and set himself on fire. I don’t know if knowing that makes it easier to relate to the lyrics, or if it accurately did justice to him. At this age a lot of the lyrics I write are intended to be elegies to people I’ve known who have touched me. There are three or four of them on Goldenacre, a couple on Enduring The Going Hence, and the album I’m currently recording has quite a few as well.
When you have something as vivid as that, do the words exist before there’s a piece of music set to it? What’s your process when turning something on the page into the song?
Some visual artists dream their work. Most of my visual work comes from my imagination, but some are things that I come in contact with visually. One of my favorite things is hearing people express themselves, like in a museum or out in the world. I love dropping vocal sound bites into instrumental pieces. You can extract something deeply profound or poetic from things you picked up in conversation. Sometimes it’s a turn of phrase that might be vanishing from our cultural vocabulary. When it was raining, my grandfather used to say, “It’s not fit for man or beast out there.”
Right, I do the same thing, taking notes and phrases like that. But I normally start with a piece of music and try to retrofit lyrics over the melody. I’m interested in what it’s like to approach it the opposite way, starting with something that exists on the page, divorced from a musical context.
Sometimes you’re fortunate to be given a really good melody, and you’re fortunate enough to have the microcassette or the phone next to you so you can put it down. I’ve wondered about musicians like Leonard Cohen, Brian Wilson, or Paddy McAloon of Prefab Sprout—such great song crafters, to be able to turn you any way they want with the melody or the structure of the song. If I had to get more analytical, I would say act quickly before your idea vanishes.
Yeah, it’s really hard to distill process down to a sound bite. But back to Few Traces, I was looking through the insert that comes in the LP, the text by Brandon Soderberg about The Lost Years exhibition—how it was a literal combination of visual art and music. Can you talk a little bit about that?
I don’t know if you’re familiar with Baltimore—being a port town, it has a harbor along the Potomac, with an older section of buildings that date from the 1800s, some even earlier. It was kind of a sailor’s paradise, an unloading point. Anyway, I had an opportunity to do an exhibition at a gallery there, and I think it was shortly after I had just gotten my first 4-track and was thinking about the idea of combining the two mediums. My knowledge of the art world wasn’t very broad at the time, which was helpful because I wasn’t intimidated. (laughs) At the time the Walkman cassette player was everywhere, and I thought, what if rather than blasting the music in the gallery I just made it portable so people could drop it in a Walkman and walk around and view the work? That’s why the pieces from The Lost Years were meant to be brief, because you didn’t want to have to stand in front of the piece for too long, waiting for something that would never happen and might not be able to deliver.
So it wasn’t one piece of music per painting? They were free to look at the different paintings with whatever was on the Walkman at the time?
Yeah. Some of the titles overlapped, but it didn’t have to be strictly adhered to song-by-painting. There was a freedom to traverse the gallery.
That sounds like a fun process. Sound in a gallery is tough, and it gets tougher if you want to localize sound so there can be multiple elements happening at the same time, so I thought that was a clever solution. With regards to Few Traces, how does it feel to see so many years of work in one collection? Do you feel as if it gives you perspective, to see it all in one place?
The reception has been great and overwhelming. As an artist, you know that there’s no greater honor than to have someone invest in your work, to be able to understand it. I think Jean Cocteau said he wanted “not to be marveled at but to be believed.” One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in the process is to take care of your archives! A lot of things escaped this particular package that must still exist somewhere, but I haven’t been able to track them down. A lot of those pieces I haven’t heard in many years, not since they were mastered. Some of them were recorded on a 4-track cassette recorder without compression, so they have an ancient archeological charm to it. (laughs) Matt was very patient, and he really extended himself waiting for me to get it all together. I made a few different trips back to Baltimore to sort through all the work—I had a house there, so I wanted to see if I could locate some of the recordings, and I contacted a few people I used to know to locate videotapes. Mostly I wasn’t successful. What Matt put together mirrors what survived. It’s a great honor, to see that stuff that I sat in a little row house and composed at my kitchen table and never thought it would be of much interest to anyone. Hopefully it can be encouraging to someone too, now that even better, more affordable technology is available—that nothing should stop you from trying.
I completely agree, it’s wonderful. I’ve seen this in the video world as well. In some cases the so-called professionals have some fears, like, “Here comes everybody with their cheap technology, invading our precious space,” but I sort of welcome it. If there’s an easier, more obtainable way for someone to do something creative, I say go for it.
Right, you can’t really have an elitist attitude about it. It’s funny, sometimes I’ll listen to something and think, “Man, I spent two hours trying to play that by hand, and now you can program it into a sequencer so quickly…” (laughs)
Right, and quantize everything, ha! Well, thank you very, very much—I’m such a fan, and I love the collection. I’m excited to see your new work, and I love your visual work as well, so good luck on the exhibition coming up!
That means a lot, thank you.
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Fearlessly individualistic and fiercely independent, Pauline Anna Strom self-released a vibrantly diverse series of LPs and cassettes between 1982 and 1988. Long regarded in hushed, reverent tones as one of the finest yet most obscure composers to spring out of the West Coast home-produced cosmic synthesizer music of the 80s, Strom strove to create a sensationally heightened world of alternate reality, pulling from a past and future that isn’t quite ours. Strom’s internal vision is likely so vivid in part because she was born blind, something she feels has strengthened her musical abilities. RVNG Intl. has recently released an expansive and gorgeous 80 compilation of her work, named for her sometimes-moniker Trans-Millenia Consort, a title she uses as a “personal declaration that I have been in previous lives, that I am in this life, and that I shall in future lives be a musical consort to time.” You can buy the compilation here.
Interview by Caroline Polachek (Chairlift, Ramona Lisa, CEP)
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Where are you right now?
You mean physically where I am right now? I’m in San Francisco, at home. My studio is here. I do everything here at home at the apartment. Thank god this city has rent control!
Do you live near a park, or nature at all, or are you mostly indoors? I ask because I’m very curious what your relationship with nature is like.
Well, when I was married and had a husband that could see and we drove places in the car, I’d spend time at the ocean and different places like Muir Woods. Since I’m on my own now I don’t get to go as much. But my deeper connection with it is in my mind, and my brain, combining experience in time gone by and what I hold onto, and what I can sense and feel. Does that make sense?
Absolutely. Are there any specific sonic memories of nature you go back to a lot?
I used to take a recorder, a Sony TC-D5M, and headphones, and record wherever we were and bring the sound and process it, whether it was the ocean, or just the air and trees, or animals, those kinds of things, and just give it space to breathe and to live in with a lot of different effects by giving it the depth and precision of timing. Does the make sense? A challenge to me would be now to create those same sounds, not through sampling or recording, but actually creating them using synthesizers, using all the parameters, time signatures, wave forms, frequencies, everything like that. The challenge is to create sounds, create water. Not just the wave, but to create water—does that make sense?
Well, as a listener I get the impression you’re already doing that in your work—for example, very literally with the Aquatic Realms record.
All of the sounds that you heard in Aquatic Realms were all created sounds on the Prophet 10.
Yeah, I could tell, almost because they seemed kind of uncanny. The first thing that hit me was an awareness of “Okay, she’s recreating nature with what at the time was very new technology.”
Mmhmm!
But the more I listened to it, it made me think about how the deep sea world actually sounds quite like electronic music in the first place, which then flips inside out again when you remember that nature is actually informing technology development, whether we’re conscious of it or not: deep sea creatures with all the lights, or geometric perfection, efficiency, all that. It sent me on kind of a spiral.
Yeah!
But your records preceding Aquatic Realms almost seem to exist in a kind of pre-nature place, or post-nature place, like plants, animals, trees, human voices don’t belong in that world. It’s too pure. I imagine a primeval earth, before life exists or after it’s been destroyed.
That’s the way I think. Usually I create things with my mind and then try to create them in sound as I go, but what you’re expressing is exactly right. I’ve never felt at home in the present time. It’s always like, “I’m here but I’m not in the right place.”
I think a lot of people feel that, they just don’t manage to find an escape. Do you ever feel like that’s the task as an artist, to create the place you feel at home?
I think so. I’m the kind of person who could go to Mars and be perfectly content as long as I had my animal, my music, perhaps a mate, someone I could love, and be able to read.
What kind of animal do you have?
She’s a Cyclura, a lizard.
Does she make any sounds?
The closest she’ll come, and I’m going to have to try to catch that sometime, is you know, Mommy picks her up and carries her around and she’ll go (whispered) “hhhhhheh” (laughs). Like, “This woman is dragging me around like a rag doll!”
She sighs! A sighing lizard!
Yes, she does! That’s as far as her capability goes. But I believe that these sounds…probably I could even get a stethoscope and listen to her heart, record that kind of thing too, the blood flowing through her body. But what I’m trying to say is that I’m not really in tune with present time and modernity as we know it today, but the the far flung past, distant future, the primitive.
But both those states only exist in our imagination, and in that way could you say they’re just extensions of yourself?
Yes. Yeah, I do.
You mentioned earlier the idea of “timing”—the way you might handle samples within time, and that’s something that feels quite unique about your work. I come from a pop background where the dynamics, the changes between patterns, is what creates excitement or emotion. You get big moments of impact and movement. But the thing that struck me about your music is how you’ve so completely smoothed out dynamics, and the changes really sneak up on you like watching weather. It doesn’t guide the listener the way pop does.
Right, right. In other words, you follow a formula.
Not a formula, it’s just a different language—almost like a dance using dramatic synchronized gestures verses a wash of ambient ones.
Ah, I get it.
It’s a different way of using the same tools. But what I’m curious about in your work is how you use synths like voices coming in and out to create a fairly static picture that always has a very even amount of motion going on—it never goes dead or peaks; it’s like watching an aquarium. And with that in mind, going back to the idea of timing—what does it feel like for you when you’re working with a single layer of sound and deciding its timing? What’s your relationship with knowing when to bring things in and out?
It’s just kind of intuitive—I let it flow and it just happens, without a preconceived way of doing it. It’s right. I live in it. When I’m creating it I live in it, I surrender to it and become it.
Have you ever worked with voice?
Just my own. I’ve worked a lot with processing my own voice. There are a few where I used heavy effects and allowed my voice to come from different areas, and I also sometimes mix with my headphones on. But yes, just allowing the voice—not in the way you would think of singing, but making it like an instrument.
What about synths as voice?
Oh! I don’t have any problem with that at all, especially because there’s so much we can create. In those recordings I used a Prophet 10, a DX7 and an E-mu Emulator…that was all analog equipment. But now I can do all the same things digitally, so I’m learning a whole new world where I’ll have much more control—but it’s structured in a totally different way.
What’s your setup like now?
Right now I don’t have much, just a Korg Kross and an Ultra Novation, and the thing with these machines is (sighs) the manuals. I want the parameters manuals and the operations manuals, and of course there’s no speech driver in the machines. I wish those companies would put something like that in there, because everything is on a display so I can’t get really deep into something the way I want to. So I have a friend that’s patiently, verbally recording the manuals for me.
Would you ever make those audio manuals accessible to the public?
You can download them from the companies once you do the warranties and all that, but then they’re secured. I wanted to download the manuals into my Victor Reader Stream, which is a device made by Humanware. I wanted to download it into my Victor so I could go through it page by page, but the manuals don’t transfer across devices. So that’s why he’s verbally recording it for me. I don’t think I could upload it for the public, but I do think if they made speech drivers for the machines to allow for a setting you could use as you scroll through the display, it could tell you what’s there and how to get to things. And that wouldn’t be hard to do.
Would you ever collaborate with a synth company to make a system like that?
Yeah, I would. See, with the device I use, I download lots of books from the library and bookshare, podcasts and news services. I can do all that on the Victor and their manuals are burned into the software internally. So when I got the Victor and learned it, I went through the user manual and it showed me all the correct keys with error messages and everything. If they can do that then surely it must be possible with other electronics. But back to music! I really do like the Korg, and another thing is I wanted a workstation. I like it, I really do, and it’s great to be able to save everything on the SD cards.
Is it at all like using an 8-track?
Yeah, my Yamaha QX1 was an eight track recorder. It was digital but it used a floppy disk! (laughs) But I’ve alway been one to save things. I don’t feel comfortable unless I’ve got that backup, like, “I’m going to lose it all!”
At the time, all this gear, especially the digital stuff, was brand new territory. How did you first start experimenting with it and learning it?
I fell in love with the Prophet 10 right away. After that there was the CS80 then the DX7…I’d learn as I’d go. I’d learn through repetition—you could explain something to me technically and it’d probably go right out of my head, but when my hands start doing what I know to do I learn that way. And I just experimented and gradually worked through it all.
Do you ever have dreams where you’re programming?
No, but I get lost emotionally, and I work at night. I live downtown and it’s noisy, so the quietest time to do anything, when the energy is slower, is at night. So I’m a night person because of that, in a lot of ways. But if I start at six in the evening, it could suddenly be six in the morning and I wouldn’t even be tired. Time sort of stands still. It goes by and you don’t even…you probably experience this.
Yeah. I experience it with editing especially, where you lose so much time listening to long stretches over and over again to just make one adjustment to one little thing.
The way I did it all—I guess you classify it as overdubbing? I never know what the completed piece is going to be. I just start with an idea and work with it, then build upon it track by track without a plan, just going on what feels right. That’s how I basically did it, and how I’ll do it again once I go digital. Did you ever work with a TX816?
No, what is it?
Ahh, Yamaha only made a few of them. I’ll tell you, when I eventually make money, the Yamaha—they have a wonderful workstation—that would be the be-all-end-all for me. When they came out with the DX7 they also came out with something called the TX816 which was a big box and it had eight little DX7s. You controlled them through the DX. I’m hoping that I can figure out a way in time, cause I made a lot of sounds for the 816 and you played them through the DX7 and the keyboard…and, oh, I got creative! I got lost. There are some really unique sounds in that thing. I can get lost in creating sounds. Equally intriguing is getting lost in the sounds, and that thing really allowed you to build and build. In other words I would create a sound but it wouldn’t be just one—it would go through all eight boxes and allow you to create some kind of sound you’d never think of. God, I love it, I love that stuff! It’s almost like a drug.
Speaking of drugs, you do have a couple tracks—
(laughs) Oh yeah, I know where you’re going…
I was just curious because some of it feels bleak, and I wondered if you were being critical of drug experience or people’s reliance on them—
You’re talking about Plot Zero and “Mushroom Trip” and those pieces? I wasn’t being critical. I looked at those pieces like a mind trip without chemicals.
Were you going based on other people’s descriptions or your own memories?
My own! (laughs) There’s a very short piece—I’m sure it’s lost, it’s not out there—it’s called “Domestic Peace.” It’s probably all gone, because you know the tape deteriorates, but I put a plate on the table, utensils, and I set all my effect so you’d feel like you were setting that plate down in a vast canyon.
Wow.
And I set the utensils, then I stir fried some vegetables and added that, then poured a glass of water, but then made the water seem to go from one side of the room to the other, and then I added in a baby voice (makes baby voice), and the only music in the whole thing was synthesizer flute very subtly in the background at one point. But what I was creating was a scene. I’d love to do more of that, create different scenes. I remember once a friend of mine was having a Halloween party and he knew I had an imagination, and he wanted a piece for the party, and he called me 24 hours ahead of time so I had to put it together very quickly. I created a heartbeat and a few gongs on the Prophet. They were going to have a guy laying in a coffin, and I created an attack on a woman. I did the voices of both the male attacker and the woman, and then to decapitate somebody I dropped a cabbage in a bucket of water. I created this whole scene and they loved it, but other people I played it for either hated it or were fascinated. But that’s something I want to get back into—making scenes and elements and scenarios with sound. There’s a lot in my mind I could come up with like that.
How do you feel about the potential for virtual reality or interactivity, the fusing of that technology with music?
I think it’s perfect. I’ve had this preconceived idea in the back of my mind. I’m not a live player, but I think I could interact with things like that. Not the same as a concert, but like what you’re describing. My lizard’s name is Little Soulstice, with a “u,” like “soul.” I could picture this project involving lizards and reptiles in a soft way, with them floating in the air in virtual reality. Little Soulstice floating through the air, creating sound and music and light. There’s a lot that could be done with that kind of stuff.
You mentioned light. What’s your relationship like with light?
I see things in my head. I dream in color. I see things and know how they should be. I just…know. If I go out on the balcony right now I know the sun is there because I can feel the heat. The blindness to me is a nuisance more than anything.
When I listen your work I imagine an immersive 3D environment, which I know isn’t an accident. You’re so tuned to environmental sound. The kind of focus it must take to create the depths of these environments—
I think I know where you’re going. On the album with more Asian material, Japanese Impressions, it has those pieces “Tea Garden” and “Warriors Of The Sun.” I’ve never learned or experienced any culture or nationality of music, but I can sense how to do it myself. Does that make sense?
But you must have listened to music from other cultures, no?
I mostly listen to classical. A lot of Bach, Chopin, a lot of early music too. Gregorian chant, a lot of very early medieval stuff.
So many electronic musicians specifically reference early music and Bach. Why do you think that is?
Maybe it has something to do with the frequencies and the harmony? I’m not sure. There must be a connection in that way.
There’s something futuristic about—
It’s timeless.
Beyond being timelessly enjoyable, something about the intervals just feels…
Ooohhhh yeah. Speaking of timing, when I had all that equipment, I didn’t just look at the Prophet or the DX, but everything at once. I had a whole rack of that stuff, but I looked at the whole thing as one big synthesizer. I’d use the effects a part of the composition. With the QX1 when you edited, creating intervals that weren’t even played but just layered using effects, the whole setup is one big instrument. I did it all as part of the composition. It’s so expressive, there’s so much you can do. And now of course with these machines, everything in that rack is software now—you can do all that and it’s all in that little thing, in one keyboard. You don’t need tons of stuff like you did before! My hangup about computers, though, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, is the obsolescence that’s built in. I want a solid state machine that I can rely on fifteen years from now. Even if I got something else, I want to be able to transfer work…you see where I’m going? That’s what I resent about all of this.
That’s a good point. A violin you can pick up fifty years later and it’s still a violin.
Yeah. We’re forced through obsolescence. I don’t have a smart phone and I don’t want one. I have a little flip phone. We’re on a landline right now, plugged into the wall. But I can’t do this “every three years you gotta buy the latest thing”…when it comes to making my work I need something I can rely on, that I can trust, so I’ll never have to throw all my past work out the window. Ugh! That’s a big part of my upset with the whole thing. (laughs)
I’ve been screwed by that a few times, and yet I keep coming back to it without a second thought. It’s something everyone takes for granted too.
You mentioned that one of the pieces you heard, Aquatic Realms, where you hear the water dripping? When I created the water dripping on the DX, when I created water dripping with my fingers—you’ll think I’m crazy, but I could feel the texture of the water in my fingers as I played. You can’t do that on a computer. You can’t feel that kind of connection on a computer.
They do make very good midi controllers now that give you the contact a piano or a nice synth would have.
Mmm.
But zooming out a bit, I wanted ask you about the RVNG reissue. How do you feel having the music repackaged for a new audience?
I’m very happy with it. I think it’s a beautiful job and I have no complaints about it. But you know, maybe because the label is out east and I’m here, I know it’s real but I sort of feel a disconnect. Nobody’s fault, but the reissue is a reality out there, but not for me. When I can begin to create new things, that’s where I connect with reality.
Do you have plans for new music?
Ohhhh yeah, once I can get these manuals!
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Guest post by Andy Beta (Twitter / IG)
Last year was brutal in almost every aspect, from the social to the international to the personal. Amid such rubble, there was a bit of a silver lining, in that I achieved a noteworthy professional achievement: interviewing Ryuichi Sakamoto for the Gray Lady. We sat one afternoon and sipped tea at a café near his West Village home and discussed his stunning new album, async, and also drifted onto some other topics. He talked about his recent interest in La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #5 as well as the works of Japanese sound artist Akio Suzuki. “One of his early pieces was a big concrete cube in a gallery and he pushed it so it made a sound of friction on the floor,” Sakamoto enthused. “It’s beauuuutiful music.”
We even briefly touched on one of my favorite solo albums of his, 1985’s Esperanto. Originally commissioned for a dance performance from New York-based choreographer Molissa Fenley, it’s one of Sakamoto’s earliest forays into sample-based music and it’s as bewildering, playful, formidable and forward-looking as anything in his catalog. He told me that the computer he used to make the album was massive, holding his hands out wider than his body to show the size of the actual discs that stored mere seconds of sound. The album also features tasteful percussion work from Yas-Kaz and some guitar slashes courtesy of Arto Lindsay.
There’s news that Light in the Attic will be reissuing an incredible amount of Japanese music over the next few years and while I’m sure that Sakamoto’s work will receive some long overdue reassessment in the west (almost none of his groundbreaking 80’s work is available for streaming, which is just ridiculous), I wonder if an album as far-out as Esperanto will be high on the priority list. That said, recently graphic designer and album illustrator Robert Beatty enthused about Sakamoto’s work and this album in particular, which prompted a reply from Visible Cloaks’ Spencer Doran:
esperanto fun fact: all the tracks are actually 15 minutes long. they recorded it before was finished and didn’t know how long each dance section needed to be edited to so they intentionally overshot the length of each piece. the tapes still exist!
Here’s hoping that full 15-minute immersions into pieces like “A Rain Song” and “A Carved Stone” might re-emerge one day. Until then, enjoy for a limited time this visionary work from the master.