Sounding

So much music. Nowhere to begin. Everywhere is a beginning, none end.

Ever felt overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of works out there? I do all the time, daily in fact. I tend to find new listening by discovery through association, especially through publishers and artists that cross stylistic boundaries. Sometimes I feel like I have a certain knack to picking things out, almost to the extent it feels random, but in context it really never is.

Sound sticks with me like nothing else. Some have the ability to remember words by rote and spit back movie quotes from things I haven’t seen in 20 years, others can pick out anyone they’ve met before in a crowd. I never forget a sound, you could say I have phonographic memory.

It’s almost like having perfect pitch, but I can never relate anything absolutely to a specific frequency. Those square pointy hat people in tall robes would call it having ‘relative pitch’, but I think it’s more like aural memory. Sonic textures, bits of audio, melodies, harmonies, chord progressions, vocal personalities, wind players’ tone… I have a hard time not making an association when I hear things, it’s like having a cochlear imprint.

So I am constantly searching for new things, seeking out what’s new to my ears, both when performing and listening. The amount of people out there doing the same thing astounds me… I could listen for weeks and weeks, day in and day out, and not find anything interesting until after several months at it.

And we are all being pressured to do it so fast, the releases come at us with unrelenting speed.

It’s been a while since I’ve sincerely blogged, as I’ve been somewhat obscured by computing lately. You’d think with all these computers around me, I’d be blogging all the time; but what I really want is less of them around me so that it feels like something more special than just another thing I do on the computer.

For example, this weekend was my birthday weekend (born in 1971, for those counting), and it felt very good going on “computer silence” for two days after the Friday night party. In fact, I didn’t do much of anything except plan my set for next Saturday, play Super Mario Bros Wii, and work through the pileup of recorded Showtime serials with my wife.

A good deal of people I know that make music on computers do so as a second life to their work day on them. Multitasking on computing problems at the same time as applying yourself creatively – and otherwise using software, interfacing with recording gear, attached hard drives, sound drivers, etc… all while you’re also concentrating on finishing that perl script for your job (if you’re lucky enough to be in an environment where your work computer can double as a creative tool), and of course keeping up with “the scene” in blog format or forums or twitter and social networks, not to mention keeping up with what feels like an exponentially growing volume of album releases – is not a very sustainable way to work.

Switching between brain processes like this often makes me feel fractured, like I am not quite in touch with the things that I identify with creating art. The myriad problems of computer technology are an infinitely complex layer of interaction which I can frankly do without. The irony of this is that before I went into a highly disciplined performance school, I had a “designed” undergrad major in music, focusing on Composition and Music Technology (a type of degree that’s now been heavily formalized in many universities, and is no longer rare at all). From that point forward, technology became a very important part of my musical description.

At some point, however, technology took over. It’s taken me many years to see in retrospect that what I was doing isn’t quite what I loved to do as a performer and an artist, and splitting my attention between things wasn’t helping my attempts at doing great things. As an extension of that, I believe my will to do original things was diminished by the layer of complexity and confusion brought on by an intervening computer operating system. Pretty soon, the issues I faced in my day-job became the same issues I faced in music making on the computer, and it wasn’t long that I couldn’t handle that union of cognitive space. I’ve now found myself not wanting to open a computer at all after I get home from work.

This may have a lot to do with circumstantial things: my day-job work environment isn’t great (bright fluorescent lamps, no privacy, high stress when on-call, poor management, general chaos), and I’ve had to sideline my musical activities in lieu of getting back up to speed on things I need for this job. When I get home, I don’t want to do much except unravel from the day, my motivation to create is low – not necessarily because I don’t want to make music, but because the enormous task of what to do with it after I’m done isn’t something I feel like dealing with any longer.

So I’m looking forward to this week in particular: in the coming days I’ll continue preparation and practicing for my set on 12/12, where I can just play music and not worry about computers in the process. I have some hurdles to overcome – fixing/patching the new modular so that at least *some* of it works, paring down the complexity of my instruments – so I will be forced to focus on music in the way I love: brainpower in the pursuit of creativity.

Audiobulb has released a free sampler of music from eight artists on the label, including a track off Supple (see post below), subtly arranged and expertly mixed by label owner David Newman. Others included are: Jimmy Behan, Biosphere, Ultre, NQ, Mark Harris, Hans van Eck and He Can Jog. I’m honored to be among the talent in that lineup, and the music is just awesome.

Also recently, Xynthetic produced their Second Statement, a stunning cross-section of the artist roster that displays the wide variety to be had on the netlabel. My track “Herbsttag” is a taste of some dub to come, so keep yer eyes peeled for more Craque on Xynthetic.

A new .microsound project has come around again, this time to celebrate the 50th anniversary of William Burroughs’s novel Naked Lunch [player will auto-start].

Uncle Bill was a huge influence on the way I thought about putting things together to arrive at previously impossible conclusions, plus I was drawn to his relationship with my favorite beat, Paul Bowles. In fact, I wrote a piece for Comma called Sevenroughs just after he passed to the next level. This time around I still used the number 7, but applied it to divisions of the time limit, 3 minutes. I also kept to the fractured use of text (Sevenroughs uses The Western Lands), and the title is the first two words of the score: Making Pink [6.4MB 320mbps mp3].

To prepare a score, I started on page 1, with the last printed entity on the first line, page 2 the last entity on the second, and so on. Punctuation was taken alone, words only half-hypenated, and once I had reached the bottom of the page, I’d start back up on the first line. There were several happenings of the [ ." ] combination, so those became major delimiters of form. The outcome [fixed-font best for viewing] is a full cut-up of Naked Lunch, upon whose text I layered improvised sounds, with additional form and structure derived from the placement of the randomly intruding punctuation.

In addition to these recent projects, I’ve posted an archival recording of a live gallery show at Fetiço in Chicago, 2001. It’s in three parts, and is the most recent entry on CraqueCast, also subscribable and previewable in iTunes.

A special treat for blog readers: my collection of ringtones, RINGTONALITY! Great name huh? Well, these are loopy sort of poppy sometimes glitchy electronica beat things that I’ve made along the way, and are pretty loud with all sorts of variety. There are two versions available for download: the “m4r iPhone” version [6MB zip], and the FLAC version [42MB zip] for those who want to convert and use on another platform, or just want them otherwise. Feel free to pass them around.

-

Despite being laid off from my job in May, I’ve been trying to stay positive and keep active doing things: gardening, reviewing stuff for job interviewing like perl and networking and other unix/linux peculiarities, job searching of course, but also a good bit of music making. Other than some possible releases of newly improvised excursions, I’ve been attempting to make contact with some local galleries (Orange County, CA) for presenting experimental sound work and/or events. So as you can see, creativity continues to attempt its way out of my subconscious, and I continue to be hopeful that the perfect job is right around the corner.

Presenting: an electro-acoustic album of experimental sound sources and improvisations punctuated by iterative percussion, i.e. glitchy ambient slightly funky dance music.

Supple is the way I’ve seen things come together over several years after moving to California, and owes some to dance forms that made this area of the country so important to electronic music development and culture. They are presented in a sort of story-form (I’ll blame my operatic tendencies for that), where endings and beginnings aren’t so easily discerned, and overall structure blends them in a sort of high-contrast, watercolor way… which I think is matched in visual form by gl0tch (check out the release page to see different versions of the cover art morphing), giving it all this primordial evolutionary cybernetic aspect that I love, as if everything is a petri dish of mechanically chaotic musical questions.

The tunes span from when I first moved here in 2002 up until 2008; “Navfrakure” was laid down as a  one-night brush stroke back on a chilly October night, and grew into something quite deeper. Although “Lusid Crystalin” is the oldest, written within a month of my relocation from Chicago, “Topless” contains samples culled from a recording session with the trio Comma – recorded in Brooklyn way back in I think 1999.

Many of these tracks contain and/or are built with free improvisations I do on my homemade instruments and improvisation rig (read my blog further for some descriptions and pics). It’s an on-going process, building a morphing performance engine, a lot of which was originally from and inspired by my work with Comma, Gray Code, and the free improv scene in general.

Objects and constructions are sampled, voices rendered, and recently my simple DIY analog synths have given an entirely new dimension, all combined together with an array of acoustic instruments (mostly guitar, cello, prepared piano and african hand percussion), and processed with hardware looping and delay devices. In some cases the improv remains relatively intact, in others it is pieced out and chopped as if… Burroughsian perversions, perhaps? Joycean slips of the tongue, a composting of ideas and pursuasions that melt together as if merging stained…

“Sextant” is a poem I wrote around 2004:

Blue chrome carriage
Mouse brown hair
Dark shadowed eyes
Cold mean stare

White-armed glove driver
Sunshine in your car
If the signal never signaled
Would you have gone that far?

The Audiobulb release page contains links to eMusic, iTunes, Thrill Jockey and boomkat sites for purchasing the album. There’s also an interview with me including other details about the album and music making and creativity and things like that, with clips from some of the tracks I’ve mentioned here.

Lend Me Your Ears has a feature on Supple, as well as an interview that has different questions from the Audiobulb one, very little repeat info! super bonus! There’s also a free download of track 2, “Navfrakure.” Double Super Bonus!

I’ve set up a set in Soundcloud called “Downtempo Excursions” to post some sonic paintings created with free improvisation and minimal beats.

Let me know what you think! These are sort of what I’d call “composting” of materials, kaleidoscopically tapestristic, experimentally structured.

Here’s something I thought I’d never see myself do in my own lifetime: build a synthesizer from scratch.

Actually it’s a simple design: 2 555 timers in astable configuration producing square-waves. This means it’s a burst of sound every interval, pretty annoying and not very useful except for maybe starting earthquakes. So to give it a little flavor, I put a low-pass, 2-pole filter on the output of each oscillator, using a traditional operational amplifier.

A bit over a year ago it started out as a learning experience for me, I had never gotten into building things with analog circuitry – although I dated a chick in college who was an EE, so I was vaguely familiar with a breadboard. As a result, my design is über simple, and in reality was the design I could “get to work” from the opamp (a weird beast in itself, I will be tackling it again soon enough).

After a lot of experimentation and research on the web (these days a DIY’ers first reference), I came up with a 2-rail power design that provided 9V for the oscillators and 4.5V for the bipolar opamp (just left of the battery in the schematic). Moving left, the 741 opamp (NTE941) provides a low-pass, 2-pole filter to the signal from the 555 timer (NTE955).

The cutoff frequency of the filter is controlled with a potentiometer, as is the pitch of the oscillator. You can also see my modification in the lower left for a “range” switch, which wasn’t on the breadboard prototype, but made it onto my final PCB because I think it adds a lot more interest and possibilities.

This was an intense project, no doubt. I got some training on soldering little kits that got made into sculpture, and I am a proud builder and owner of a bleep labs thingamakit, and have recently built the wave sheild for my new arduino board (which I haven’t quite gotten to work yet, so I hope it’s my programming skills and not my soldering skills).

As much as I tried to plan out wire distribution inside the chassis where the pots and switches would not interfere too much with the PCB, sure enough I drilled the holes sort of on the wrong end of the enclosure, so the edges don’t match unless I flipped it, and of course I only discover this after everything is screwed into the front. So, fixing it meant pulling all the knobs and switches back out, and removing the PCB from its mount on the inside and flipping it 180 degrees, then re-attaching everything.

In the end it really didn’t make that much of a difference and the whole thing came together fairly perfectly anyway. What I haven’t really done is add any decoration or labels, which I do want to do… inspiration will strike when I least expect it, perhaps it will not only get illustration but also a name, and it will evolve!

at times i get overwhelmed by possibilities. the details drag me down, and i lose sight of the path. what causes this?

for instance, what music do i choose to write? do i use electro-acoustic elements, or do i stick to raw sound design? do these ways of working always produce the same results, even though i cannot hear them? do i limit myself by focusing on a working method that could easily shift into tunnelvision? why is it i think like this in the first place, because i hear opportunities of sound in what others are doing? because, hey, that’s a great sound, why didn’t i think of that?

we artists ask these questions. it takes a lot of self-confidence to go out there and sell yourself, but i’m still not sure what it is i do that makes my music what it is. i certainly try to find unique, DIY, individual ways of doing things, but i turn the corner and find someone building it better. some of the electronics instrument/effects building going on around the electronica community blows me away.

but what makes the music change? how does it develop? we’re moving into a world where musical styles – and listening – is more and more splayed, there are almost as many “genres” as there are individuals making music.

there is still something in the music that grabs the mind. it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what “inspiration” or “genius” a particular piece contains, to different folks these mean completely different things. i usually can’t locate it in my own work, i certainly don’t know where it happens or how to identify it. regardless, it shows up.

so, in a very real way, it doesn’t matter what it is i do, or how i do it, just that it is me doing it, in the most genuine way i can.

Freely improvised one-takes. Instrumentation includes homebuilt instruments, sampled objects and looping hardware.

This music sharing site is a great tool for posting various non-published tracks, as well as released stuff, and has a nice embeddable player and comment system. Really nice for being able to just slap some stuff up, I have one friend who has recently been doing the same with sessions on his new Serge Modular Creature, and another who posted “in progress” snapshots of a track he is working on.

Feel free to download and remix, just give the proper attribution.