Another progressive and very beautiful collection of compositions from undersung genius Daniel Lentz. Missa Umbrarum, or “mass of shadows,” is named in part for its use of 118 “sonic shadows” in the title piece, produced using a 30 second tape delay technique. It was originally written in 1973, and a first version of “O-Ke-Wa” was written for eight voices in 1974, so I’d assume that “Postludium” was written around the same time. Though it includes a singing of the Agnus Dei, the piece explores similar tonal territory to “Lascaux,” which appears on his excellent On The Leopard Altaras well as on some later releases of Missa Umbrarum.
A mystical invocation of the Christian Last Supper, much of the titular mass employs a severe, fixated kind of devotional singing that makes me think of Geinoh Yamashirogumi, though it also includes wine glass resonance, with the pitches shifting as the singers drink. On the first repetition of a phrase, the lowest notes of the segment are played, and then the singers drink from the glasses before adding the next layer at a higher pitch. Though there are only eight voices in the piece, between this layering technique and the use of the tape delay “sonic shadows,” we eventually end up with a very large choir, cut through with the weightless ring of the glasses. Lentz has long been interested in both the sonic and aesthetic value of wine in performance–please refer to this bananas interview for more information.
The other two pieces are gentler, more pillowing explorations of vocal dialogue, the soft bubbling percussion of Native American bone rasps, and an even more expansive wine glass resonance that very much evokes a cathedral full of sound. When asked about the closing piece in an interview, Lentz had this to say:
Interviewer: “O-ke-wa (North American Eclipse),” a piece for multiple voices, drum, bone rasps and bells, is based on the O-ke-wa, the Seneca Native American dance for the dead. Ritual appears to be implicit to this 1974 piece in terms of structure and explicit in terms of performance.
Lentz: In [both versions of “O-ke-wa”], each singer is a soloist having his / her own text and melody. The melodies become the harmonies via the singers extending the notes of each of their melodies. It’s to be performed with the performers moving around the listeners, allowing individual lyrics and music to always be somewhere else when it sounds again. It is also how the original O-ke-wa dance was done in the Seneca Native American death ceremony – usually from dusk to dawn for them. The ritual element of this piece is very important to me, as it is for “Missa Umbrarum.” I am a small part Seneca, briefly a Catholic as well. The piece works best in a resonant environment.
My newest episode of Getting Warmer for NTS Radio is a two hour long late summer ambient special. Long, lazy instrumentals with river sounds, crickets, cicadas, and bees. Ideal for heavy, thick weather, and for mid-day napping in it. If anyone remembers the two hour mix I made for LYL Radio awhile back, this feels like the more summery counterpart to it. You can download an mp3 version here.
Tracklist:
1. Hiroshi Yoshimura – Time After Time
2. David Casper – Green Anthem
3. Masahiro Sugaya – Straight Line Floating In The Sky
4. Roedelius – Wenn Der Südwind Weht
5. Yutaka Hirose – In The Afternoon
6. Inoyama Land – Glass Chaim
7. Haruomi Hosono – Wakamurasaki
8. Gabriel Yared – Un Coucher De Soleil Acchroche Dans Les Arbres
9. Maurice Ravel – Miroirs: III. Une Barque Sur L’ocean (Paul Crossley)
10. CV & JAB – Hot Tub
11. Virginia Astley – Summer Of Their Dreams
12. Satoshi Ashikawa – Still Park Ensemble (excerpt)
13. Ernest Hood – August Haze
14. Harold Budd & Brian Eno – A Stream With Bright Fish
15. Alice Damon – Waterfall Winds
16. Jansen / Barbieri – The Way The Light Falls
17. Yoshio Ojima – Mensis
18. Toshifumi Hinata – End Of The Summer
19. Carl Stone – Banteay Srey
20. Gervay Briot – Science
I hope that if it’s still torrential downpouring where you are, this gets to you in time to be a helpful addition! Peter Walker is a Boston-born steel string guitar legend who left home at 14 to begin his lifelong project of musical study and research. He traveled, toured, and hitchhiked through America, Mexico, North Africa, Algeria, Morocco, and Spain, but it was seeing Ravi Shankar perform in San Francisco in the early 60s that sparked his fascination with Indian classical–he went on to study under both Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan. In the mid-60’s he embedded himself in the Greenwich Village folk scene, becoming close with Sandy Bull, Karen Dalton, Joan Baez, and eventually Timothy Leary, for whom he served as a “musical director.”
This was the first of two full lengths he recorded before a 40 year hiatus, until he was later coaxed out of retirement by Joshua Rosenthal of Tompkins Square Records in 2007, at which point he went on to release a slew of new material and tour extensively. Though his interplay with Appalachian (and more generally American) folk, Indian raga, and flamenco was still taking shape upon the release of Rainy Day Raga (his follow-up “Second Poem To Karmela” leans into Indian traditions much more explicitly), I love it for its raucous joy, tumbling lines of masterful fingerpicking building into extended crescendoes before a long cooldown. A very appropriate indoor rainy day soundtrack. For fans of Robbie Băsho, Leo Kottke, and Sandy Bull.
My newest episode of Getting Warmer for NTS Radio is a mix of some of my favorite disco, funk, soul, boogie, and house. It’s meant for a day at the beach, a barbecue, or attempting to persuade your hydrophobic dog to swim in a creek with you. I hope you like it! You can download an mp3 version here.
Tracklist:
1. Soul II Soul – Back To Life (Acapella)
2. Taana Gardner – Heartbeat (Club Version)
3. Mtume – Love Lock
4. Brenda & The Big Dudes – Weekend Special
5. China Burton – You Don’t Care (About Our Love)
6. Greg Henderson – Dreamin’
7. Double Vision – Clock On The Wall
8. Guardian Angel – Last Funk
9. Band Of Gold – Never Gonna Let You Go
10. Wish & Fonda Rae – Touch Me (All Night Long)
11. Dusty Springfield – Baby Blue
12. Stevie Wonder – Love Light In Flight
13. Pastor T.L. Barrett & The Youth For Christ Choir – Like A Ship (Without A Sail)
Super bare bones meditative instrumentals. Ocarina, Tibetan bells and bowls, bamboo flutes, and koto. I haven’t been able to confirm a release year, but my best guess is 1988. It looks as if the pair later released a record with a similar tracklisting in 2010, though the songs that have the same titles as these seem like modified versions. Predictably gorgeous room tone. I love how intimately you can hear the inhales and exhales of the flutist–despite being recorded in San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, there are moments where, rather than feeling drowned in cavernous echo, you feel as if you’re sitting a few inches away from the musician. From the liner notes:
We only use the pure sounds of instruments wrought from the earth: clay, wood, bamboo, precious metals. As we performed in the Cathedral, we experienced an interplay between the instruments and the reverberation of the Cathedral itself, as if the Cathedral were a sacred instrument.
The Tibetan bowls have been used in Buddhist meditations for many centuries. The ocarina, also called “huaca” in the Andes, means “breath of spirit.” In the Andean burial grounds, huacas call forth the Divine and assist the passage of souls to the next world.
The Japanese koto, a 13 stringed instrument made of Paulownia wood, came to Japan in the 8th century from China. The four-foot-long side-blown bamboo flute has only four finger holes, and uses the same pentatonic scale as the shakuhachi. We use Eastern as well as Western musical scales.
Edie Hartshorne has lived and studied in Japan, Europe, and South America, and has played Japanese and Western music for over 25 years. She uses music to create group rituals and ceremonies, and sacred spaces for individuals. She works with poets and artists exploring the synthesis of music, image, and words.
Janet Bray has worked with sacred sound for over 30 years in music and healing. She synthesizes disciplines of music, Ashtanga yoga, meditation, dream work and integrative hypnotherapy. Janet’s commitment is to guide those who seek inner growth and harmony.
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.
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.
photo by Tomohiro Ueshiba
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.
Tower Records, Shinjuku, Tokyo, ca. 1991
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!
Pristine, jewel toned celestial new age from personal hero Laura Allan, who, in addition to being a gifted songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and singer, also made instruments for the likes of Joni Mitchell and David Crosby. Allan sadly passed away in 2008 after a six month battle with cancer. I’ve been enjoying reading through threads of comments written by those who knew and loved her:
Laura Allan was a true talent, could pick up any instrument and play it, and had a voice that only an angel would dare to have.
Getting ready for our 40th high school reunion, I saw Laura’s name on the list. I remembered in an instant her mesmerizing face as she played her kalimba out on the grass where we all hung out at lunch. Inspired, I went out and bought one which I have treasured and still sits on my bookcase. We became friends and she took a bamboo flute which I had with holes punched in some of the strangest places (no wonder it wouldn’t play) and she taped up the ones that shouldn’t be there until it found its voice. Laura was a very different and enchantingly beautiful friend who made a lasting impression on me.
Reflections is exactly as it should be, veering in between lyrical, devotional folk (“As I Am”) and more cosmic new age spirals (“Nicasio”). Though there are synth lines tucked in around the edges, Allan’s zither takes center stage, and as such there’s an acoustic roughness to this record that I love. I also love the reverb quality, particularly that on Allan’s vocals. Featuring Paul Horn on flute (he really goes off in “Passage”), Steve Halpern executive production, and Geoffrey Chandler on synth (you may know him from his excellent Starscapes, released the same year). Dappled with sunlight and pale green, Reflections is prime summer new age. Ideal for fans of Dorothy Carter and David Casper. Thank you Andy for the reminder about this!
For fans of The Coconuts who haven’t yet dug into their origin story, this is an excellent place to start. Kid Creole was the brainchild of August Darnell, a Bronx-born composer and an absolute genius with big band sounds, Latin jazz textures, and cuttingly clever lyrics; The Coconuts were the band’s trio of backing singers. It was difficult to choose between Tropical Gangsters and their excellent 1981 release, Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places, but this record includes some of my favorite singles from the group, including the stupidly good “Annie I’m Not Your Daddy,” previewed below. Elsewhere, find stomping, four-on-the-floor disco (“I’m A Wonderful Thing, Baby”), samba-funk breezer “I’m Corrupt,” and closer “No Fish Today,” a smirking account of class struggle cleverly packaged as a breezy tropical funk sailboat soundtrack. Steel drums, lush string arrangements, irresistible percussion, and an omnipresent sense of humor, this is ideal May listening.
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.
For the past few years, I’ve been fascinated by a certain thread of post-minimalist music that has taken the form away from its challenging, austere roots and more toward the melodic, etherial, and uplifting. Daniel Lentz, Mary Jane Leach, Paul Dresher, Elodie Lauten, and Andrew Poppy (whose Lost Jockey LP remains criminally out of circulation) have all made contributions in this direction. Wim Mertens is as responsible as anyone, publishing American Minimal Music, a text that helped introduce Europe to minimalism, in 1983. Perhaps my favorite though is Another Sunrise, a piece composed by Peter Garland for Aki Takahashi and Essential Music in 1995.
Another Sunrise continues a long intersection between Native American and minimalist music. Harry Partch and Moondog both constructed instruments inspired largely by those of indigenous peoples; the latter spent a summer in 1948 camped outside a Navajo reservation in New Mexico in a failed attempt to interest them in his music. Garland studied composition and ethnomusicology under Harold Budd and James Tenney at CalArts in the early 1970s, making extended stays in Mexico and eventually settling in Santa Fe in 1980, where he directed a performance ensemble. Sunrise benefits greatly from his long friendship with Aki Takahashi, a gifted and prolific avant-garde pianist who has collaborated with Tōru Takemitsu, Morton Feldman, Alvin Lucier, and Carl Stone. She is joined by Judith Gordon on piano, and four percussionists, apparently the product of an arrangement previously set up for a Paul Bowles piece.
Another Sunrise is, from its first note, a showcase for the marimbula, an instrument of the Caribbean that shares a heritage with the African thumb piano. Its opening five bars form a simple theme that is the piece’s primary generative element. The titles of its short segments offer formal clues: mariachi, ballad, rumba, bolero, coda and finally, gospel. Vibraphone and marimba declare themselves halfway through “Ballad,” joined by dueling pianos. If it were not for the supreme beauty of the melody, Takahashi’s playing here would be almost violent, an urgent reminder that the piano is, after all, a percussive instrument. “Rumba” borrows only rattles and tempo from its namesake, followed by a quiet interlude in “Bolero.” Another Sunrise makes powerful use of its silent passages, and its circular, modal nature make for many moments when the piece feels it has concluded, only to continue in a thrilling steel drum crash. This is most true in the coda and final “Gospel Medley,” a deeply moving summation that calls to mind a congregation of enthralled worshippers. Part of my love of minimalist music is its ability to reveal itself upon repeated listenings, making it the ideal soundtrack for work that requires long stretches of sustained concentration, and this is certainly true here.
Sunrise is accompanied by two other Garland works, “Dreaming of Immortality in a Thatched Cottage” (1977, recorded in 1997) and “I Have Had to Learn the Simplest Things Last” (1993, recorded in 1995). “Dreaming” is a somber polyphonic work, beginning with a naked vocal harmony and slowly introducing an Indonesian angklung, marimba, and harpsichord. This marks Garland’s return to working with orchestral instruments after a period of abstinence apparently inspired by a brief friendship with Partch. “Simplest” was composed shortly after the death of John Cage in 1993, and is the collection’s most pared-down, most direct piece. It is broken into four segments that feel like a single supposition with divergent conclusions. Its final component, titled “I Found Them Like Seashells On The Beach (J. Cage)” is a passage of startling and profound quietude, and a fitting end, both for its subject, and this collection.
