Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    


Hi Carl,

I was curious to hear what you thought of electronica and its relationship
(if any) to modern composers.  The Wire in particular tries to draw a line
between this music and composers like yourself.  On other hand, some
composers (such as Stockhausen) find it insulting to say that there is any
kind of relationship between the two things.  Do you see any connection
yourself?

Best wishes,
Jason Gross

Perfect Sound Forever
online music magazine
perfect-sound@furious.com
http://www.perfectsoundforever.com
  

    

Congratulations to saiyuk for nailing Tears of a Clown, which is in fact
the sole source for the last section of Dong Il Jang. Have you considered a
career in rock journalism?

With that I will have to run away for about 24 hours, as I have some lecturing outside of Tokyo. I'll be back around this same time tomorrow,and will be glad to answer Jason7s questions and any others.

Dewa....
  

    

Wow!  I am SO impressed!
  

    
(slinking away totally red-faced, since I also heard Smokey in
there...)
  

    

I actually *was* a rock journalist for about 20 minutes...well, actually, 
for a couple years on the side, i.e., college. And I *thought* that's what 
I was going to do. But then, some time around 1977-78, the double whammy 
of Gloria Gaynor and the Sex Pistols made me lose the faith. So I went to 
film school. 

But Smokey, he's still one of my main men. 

I've also been trying to ID the samples in Shibucho, besides My Girl. (I
get obsessed with this on a puzzle level, which certainly makes my
*aesthetic* experience of the pieces *different*, since it involves me
adding another layer of fragmenting and repetition onto them.) There are
two other sources that I have no doubt about, but there have to be at
least one or two others in there that I haven't nailed down.
  

    

Hoping that this doesn't constitute poaching on Carl's topic, the mentions
of film soundtracks made me recall a short I reviewed in 1994: 

>      Martin Arnold's 1993 <I>Passage a l'acte<I> is another ingenious
> elaboration on musical techniques -- essentially the cinematic
> equivalent of hip-hop. Arnold takes a brief, dramatically insignificant
> clip -- probably less than a minute in length -- from the film <I>To
> Kill a Mockingbird<I> and stretches it out to over ten minutes by rapid,
> rhythmic repetitions of tiny fragments. His manipulations completely
> change our relationship to the material: pieces of words and sound
> effects become percussive; motion within the frame turns into some
> impossible, abstract ballet; and our eyes have the leisure to examine
> every static detail of the <I>mise en scene<I>.

IN retrospect, the experience of watching that film reminds me so strongly
of listening to Shibucho and Dong Il Jang that I am wondering now if I 
misidentified the director's inspiration, when I assumed that he was using 
hiphop as his model. 

CArl, do you know -- or anybody else out there, for that matter -- if 
other artists have used this as visual technique? 
  

    

Shibucho is relatively easy to train-spot, as there are only three tunes
contained therein. Gambatte, dude.

I wasn't aware of Martin Arnold or his work until 1994, when <verve> showed
me "Passage a l'acte" and we screened it along with some other films and
some live performances by me for the S.F. Cinemateque at the Art Institute.
I'd like to meet Arnold someday, as I think we were both working in very
similar territories in the 80's. Not sure about now.

I have been told that the Austrian video band Granular Synthesis  has used
the same cumulative techniques in some of their performances. But I haven't
seen them.
  

    

And to asnwer Jason's question, I think that there are some very clear
connections between  - ok, I'll use the term - serious electronic music and
electronica. I think that young people today are enjoying the expanded
musical vocabularies and grammers that electro-acoustic music gave the
world. So while Stockhausen may despise the work of the current generation
of electronicaistas, his own work has played a part in their enablement.
  

    

Wow! Only three tunes? Well, My Girl has long since been identified, and 
ABC is pretty clear toward the end. So everything I thought I heard in 
between must have been just my imagination. 
  

    

Correct when capitalized.
  

    

Oops, but you know what? I just realized I gave you a bum steer. There is an
additional tune in between JMI and ABC, another Jackson 5 track, the name
escapes me now, a ballad .....damn,  I'm blanking.
  

    

Michael Jackson solo track, Got to Be There? 
  

    

Bingo.
  

    
Carl, dang it, you just dangled this out there for us and didn't do the 
fill:

>  So while Stockhausen may despise the work of the current generation
>  of electronicaistas, his own work has played a part in their 
>  enablement.

Does Stockhausen despise their work? YOUR work? How do you feel about HIS 
work?
  

    
Another question I've got is this: why is it so many people on either
side of the "serious"/"pop" divide who do electronic music use Macs? I
see the performance shots in The Wire and  you see the white Apple
there on the Powerbook cover... Is there no serious software in this
area for PCs? 
  

    

Wow, quite a while since I checked back in here. Yikes. Sorry folks.


Ed, at this point the mac has the leading edge for people who like to roll
their own software for music. And that's because of the the programming
language Max/MSP, which I mentioned earlier. There is a UNIX version called
pd, but it doesn't have the nice interface stuff and is basically
unsupported, so the Mac version still wins hands down. There will eventually
be a Windows version of Max, so then the playing field might even out.

I just saw a press release that Apple has bought Emagic, the music software 
company.

 
  

    

And in the latest news, I'm back in the States for a couple of weeks of
project work, performing, and some radio interviews.

To wit:

SUNDAY AUGUST 11th  @ 21:00 PDT  [ MONDAY AUGUST 12th 4:00 GMT, 13:00 JST]
I'll be a guest on "Then and Now", which is Sarah Cahill's mostly classical
music radio program on KALW. I guess I'm supposed to be "Now". KALW can be
heard in the Bay Area at 91.7 mHz, and streams from their website at
http://www.kalw.org/.

WEDNESDAY AUGUST 21st @ 20:00 PDT [THURSDAY AUGUST 13th 3:00 GMT 12:00 JST]
I'll be a guest on"Lascivia", the program of populist, experimental and
ethnic music broadcast and webcast from KUCI, which can be heard in the
California Irvine area at 88.9 mHz and streaming from http://www.kuci.org

SATURDAY AUGUST 24th  19:00 PDT WEST HOLLYWOOD
I'll be performing some new work, including my latest piece NAK WON, at the
Schindler House, which is an incredible house/studio that was designed and
buildt by Rudolf Schindler back in 1922, and is now run by the MAK Center
for Art and Architecture. The concert is part of the 'sound' series that is
held there annually, produced by Cindy Bernard. They say the series usually
sells out in advance and reservations are strongly recommended.
Schindler House: 835 N. Kings Road  tel: 323/651-1510
http://www.sound2cb.com/sound/index.shtml

SUNDAY AUGUST 25th 14:00 PDT HOLLYWOOD CA
And finally, I'll be joining in at a Technology Salon, hosted by American
Composers Forum /LA. This particular program will focus on audio looping
techniques and aesthetics, and will be moderated by Richard Zvonar. RZ will
hold forth on the history of looping and delay processing, followed by
presentations by me, (using Max/MSP), guitarist Andre LaFosse (Gibson
Echoplex Digital Pro (EDP)), and bassist Peter Freeman (on the Electrix
Repeater) . This whole thing takes place at
ROCCO'S  [6320 Santa Monica Blvd  ACF/LA info tel: (562) 464-6644]

And dat's da news.
  

    
Such energy!
  

    
 Yeah, but a rare chance for folks in the States to see and/or hear
Carl do his stuff. 
  

    
Still waiting for that Texas performance...
  

    

Eating 3 pounds of meat at Cooper's BBQ in Llano was a performance, wouldn't
you say?
  

    
Yeah, but it was hard to watch you do your thing, since I was face down in 
my own pile of 'que!
  

    

Like I said, audiences are very different in the States compared to Japan.
  

    

Wonderful article on Carl in today's L.A. times:


http://www.calendarlive.com/printedition/calendar/suncal/cl-ca-
woodard18aug18.story?coll=cl%2Dsuncal
  

    

And the reviews are in:

http://www.calendarlive.com/printedition/calendar/cl-et-rick26aug26.story?coll
=cl%2Dcalendar

one line, of course.