ambient – Page 4 – Listen To This

[Interview] Todd Barton

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.

Guest Mix – Springtime by Nick Zanca

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)

Per Tjernberg – They Call Me, 1990

An ambitious and highly effective combustion of ambient jazz and a slew of musical traditions, whirlwinded together with dizzying, almost violent enthusiasm by Swedish jazz percussionist Per Tjernberg. Gamelan textures, Indian tabla, Aboriginal didgeridoo, Gabonese and Cameroonian sanza and mbira humming, Japanese strings, African flute, oud, and drums from too many countries to name.

While writing this post I realized that Tjernberg is also responsible for this reggae-pop treat (released under the wink-wink pseudonym Per Cussion) that I’ve had in my “tracks to do things with” pile for years. That he succeeds at such wildly different efforts (which are equally unabashed in their proclivity towards cultural borrowing, or, you know, appropriation; call it what you will) is a testament not just to his musicianship (though They Call Me is his first release under his own name, he was already well-seasoned in other projects) but to the grace with which he applies textures outside of their traditional contexts and shapes them into landscapes that sound simultaneously very terrestrial and slightly alien. (Relatedly, he’s also touted as the first Swede to make a rap record, which he did with the aid of American rappers, and about which I have nothing to say other than that I like the kalimba.)

There is, as you might expect, a lot going on here, but They Call Me shifts comfortably between wild freeform jazz and more subdued textural motifs, and I (predictably) think its strongest moments are when it leans into the latter mode. The title track, as well as “Didn’t You Know…Didn’t You Know” (previewed below) are very high highs. The closing track, “This Earth: Prayer,” is stunning in scope, managing to do so much with what is, for much of the song, just a didgeridoo, a lone brass instrument, and some light percussion. It evokes whales and also something even more cosmic, and I’m reminded strongly of Deep Listening every time I hear it. I don’t know that this record is for everyone, but if it’s for you, it’s definitely for you.

buy / download

[Mix for NTS Radio] Getting Warmer Episode 22

Here’s my latest episode of Getting Warmer for NTS Radio. I was happy to be able to do this set live out of their LA studio! This was a collection of very reverb-heavy songs, mostly synthetic reverb. If you like it, you can download an mp3 version of it here, with the spoken segments cut out so you can listen to it as an uninterrupted mix. Enjoy!

Tracklist:
1. Ryuichi Sakamoto – Out Of The Cradle (Canon E-Magic 2000)
2. Franco Nonni – Aria
3. Above & Beyond – Good For Me
4. Gail Laughton – Pompeii 76 A.D.
5. New Child – Nataraji Bengawan Solo
6. Love, Peace, and Trance – Kokoro Da
7. Rüdiger Oppermann’s Harp Attack – Troubadix In Afrika
8. Kenji Kawaii – Nightstalker
9. Art of Noise – Ode To Don Jose (Ambient Version)
10. Veetdharm Morgan Fisher – The Great Lakes
11. Naomi Akimoto – Izayoi No Tsuki
12. Daniel Lentz – Requiem
13. Osamu Kitajima ft. Minnie Riperton – Yesterday And Karma

Haruomi Hosono – 花に水 (Watering A Flower), 1984

In recognition of today’s vernal equinox, I wanted to share a cult classic from the Hosono catalog, originally commissioned in 1983 as background music by Muji shortly after the opening of their first storefront in Tokyo. The tape was packaged in a box set with an 80 page booklet, including photographs, an interview with Hosono, haiku, and work by Nakazawa Shinichi (who I assume made the cover art, though I’m not sure). The story goes that Muji only used one of the tracks for in-store purposes (presumably “Muji Original BGM,” previewed below), and while the tape is still hyper-rare, since then the music has circulated widely online, most famously on YouTube, and has been presented with several different track listings, some including two different versions of “Talking.” I’m including all four tracks here, though the original tape ostensibly only included “Talking” and “Growth.”

Sonically, these tracks are exemplary of Hosono’s brilliance with motif, minimalism, and movement. Those who are familiar with his records Mercuric Dance and Paradise View might find Watering A Flower to sit squarely between the two, both in terms of textural density and mood. The songs are sparse, to put it lightly–bare bones, really. They’re not as neutral, or even chipper, as one might expect for storefront use: they willfully stray into eerie, dissociative territory, suggesting hypnosis and foggy, dreamlike states. Dreamlike in the more honest sense of the word, as I think dreams are often more illogical, dry, and bizarre than the word “dreamlike” gives them credit for. Though the whole tape is beatless–a sacrilegious suggestion for the 2018 retail environment–“Talking” is marked by the insistent chiming of a metronomic tone; whereas in “Growth” the chime is slowed down and flooded with reverb, suggesting underwater sonar. Hosono doesn’t hesitate to lean into dissonance and atonality, and it’s plenty disorienting.

Still, by the time the appropriately drily titled “Muji Original BGM” arrives, Hosono has reminded us that he’s very good at making things that are very beautiful. For sixteen minutes the song cycles, mantric, through small variations on two different phrases, one much moreso than the other, and it’s weightless, unhurried, deeply affecting, and perfect. I’d love to go shopping for minimalist home goods in this world, though I’m not sure that I’d buy anything. Enjoy, and happy spring!

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[Interview] Mark Renner

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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Thanks to Mark Renner, JD Walsh, Matt Werth, Brandon Sanchez, and RVNG Intl.
for facilitating this interview. Text has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Motohiko Hamase – Reminiscence, 1986

Peak malletcore, except here fretless bass gets a little closer to center stage, dripping all over dense towers of avant-classical synthetic strings. A die-hard fretless enthusiast, Hamase has written several books about the subject and is perhaps most famous in Japan as a coveted session bassist. He’s worked with a daunting lineup including Jimmy Murakawa, Yasuaki Shimizu, Seigen Ono, Isao Suzuki, and Yas-Kaz.

Reminiscence was recorded at Tokyo’s Sound Design Studio, famous for being the home base for most of Kitaro’s giant catalogue. Despite its reputation as an ambient record, Reminiscence doesn’t adhere to stillness in the way we might expect. It moves freely and often in steep, vertical shapes, pulling just as much inspiration from avant-classical experimentalists as from gamelan and its subsequent American minimalism devotees. Though there are many moments of unflinching beauty, Hamase is unafraid to wade out into the deep end, moving seamlessly between woozy, noodling dissonance, transparent puffs of synthesizer rising like early morning fog, and tunneling tonal percussive segments. It’s a bit disorienting, in a good way. There’s a lot to chew on here, and thankfully Reminiscence only continues to open up with increasing generosity upon further listens. This is a longtime favorite of mine, but I only recently got ahold of a good quality rip, so I’m thrilled to be able to finally share it. Enjoy!

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[Interview] Pauline Anna Strom

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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Thanks to Pauline Anna Strom, Caroline Polachek, Matt Werth, Brandon Sanchez, and RVNG Intl. for facilitating this interview. Text has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Baffo Banfi – Ma, Dolce Vita, 1979

Guest post by Peter Harkawik

I recently found myself in line at an airport Starbucks, earbuds pumping the second and standout track on Giuseppe “Baffo” Banfi’s excellent 1979 album, Ma, Dolce Vita. The scene was transformed. I watched as headset-clad baristas twirled in a choreographed dance of whipped cream and chocolate sauce, gleeful panache emerging in their faces. Glowing QR codes passed under holstered laserbeam scanners. Boxes of soy milk changed hands in time with symphonic Moog crescendos, and petulant children spun on Samsonite between rounds of stereophonic cabasas. Such is the power of great music: to transform the ordinary into the sublime. I’m no expert in prog, Berlin School, Italian Library, or anything that qualifies me to write about this record. I just like it.

Banfi was a member of the hallowed Biglietto per l’Inferno (“Ticket to Hell”). As the story goes, Klaus Schulze took an interest, but when Trident folded in 1975, leaving their second album in limbo, the group disbanded. Banfi went on to release several solo albums on Schulze’s Innovative Communication label. Ma, Dolce Vita, the entirety of which is reprised on the compilation Sound of Southern Sunsets, is his second, and I’ve been able to find out very little about it. The cover suggests an Archizoom kiosk, half a Joe Colombo or perhaps something made by the German artist Rebecca Horn. (Apparently it’s a photo by Ezio Geneletti.) It is an album that very quickly outstrips its hazy psychedelic trappings.

Dolce Vita opens slowly with “Oye Cosmos Va,” which, like much electronic music of its era, would not feel out of place in a Carl Sagan special. Its plodding, trippy synthesizer loops quickly give way to the more expansive and exuberant sound of “Sweet Summer on Planet Venus.” A driving beat propels this airy, probing melody through multiple sonic landscapes. It’s a jubilant effusion of interleaved percussive elements that resolves quickly as the gas runs out on each layer. It will always leave me wanting more. “Vino, Donne E Una Tastiera” picks up with a syrupy, rattlesnake swagger, suggesting the dim saloon of a spaghetti western. “Astralunato” employs a contrapuntal bassoon-like sound that I’ve only heard used to such great effect by the British armchair duo Woo. It gives the song a sort of self-satisfied, delirious schmaltz that ambles along at its own pace. The album’s final track, loosely, “Fantasy of an Unknown Planet,” is a dark, arpeggiated voyage, accompanied by tentative high-hat and ersatz flute. 18 minutes in length, it builds steadily to a climactic bass line dropout and melodic redoubling.

If last year’s Blade Runner sequel is a testament to the enduring sound of the synthesizer, then Ma, Dolce Vita, like the original film, reminds us that the 1970s still sound like the future.

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David Casper – Crystal Waves, 1984

Another gem from private issue new age icon David Casper, one of the later follow-ups to his excellent Tantra-La. Like that record, Crystal Waves manages to blend a laundry list of instruments (cello, played by Jami Sieber; marimba, played by Scott Cossu; ch’in [yuequin, aka moon zither, played by T’ao Chu-Chen], h’siao [Chinese bamboo flute], ocarina, crystallophone) into something that never sounds at all busy. That unhurried spaciousness is even moreso the case for this record than for Tantra-La. While a very careful and thorough use of acoustic environment brings to mind open landscapes rather than large rooms, and while there’s definitely some highly detailed multi-tracking going on, the precision and directness of the sounds seem to belie their numbers–which is to say, Crystal Waves masquerades as a very effective minimalist line drawing until you stare at it for awhile and realize it’s a full-color impressionist oil painting. It’s rendered in tones that are so delicate, translucent even, that you might not realize right away that they’re there.

This is particularly the case on the second side of the cassette, which, for our purposes, is the “Crystal Waves I-IV” tracks 4-7. It’s composed entirely of tuned crystal glasses:

Each glass was played individually with meditative attention and recorded, grouped, and re-recorded in a lengthy blending process. In order to attain a broad spectrum of sound from a simple source, tape speed, equalization, and harmonic balance were changed to produce sounds reminiscent of bass and cello, flutes and horns, organs, bells and gongs, and other sounds suggestive of electronic synthesis. Sometimes as many as thirty glasses may be heard at once, each with its own pulsation and timbre, produced acoustically by finger on glass.

The depth of field and texture Casper achieves with glass alone is remarkable, as is his gift with drawing heat out of sounds that might otherwise be predisposed towards frostiness. He’s just as skilled with his treatment of strings as he is with glasses: in spite of the wide openness of these songs, there’s a direct suggestion of reassuring warmth that I find myself feeding on over and over in the wintertime. I also just realized that it’s been a year almost to the day since I posted Tantra-La, so clearly these records are seasonally significant to me. I hope you love this as much as I do.

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