Simultaneous Opposites and 21st Century Cinematicians

This text is an introduction to the ideas behind the Simultaneous Opposites engine: what they are, and where they came from.

Formal cinema, as evidenced by structural filmmakers in the fourth quarter of the 20th century, was an expression of the mechanical tools that were available to them: the film camera, the optical printer, the splicer, the A/B rolls. Today’s formal practice recalibrates the practitioner as a cinematician: neither fixed as cinematographer or editor, special-effects artist or projectionist. The cinematician of today spans the entire cinema gestational process in a single gesture: digitizing, processing, analyzing, playing, editing, presenting, deconstructing, discovering and experimenting without the imposition of hardware and processing compartmentalization. In this developing environment, the experimental cinematician programs a cinema engine that defines a new relationship to post-mechanical cinema, and spirals into a truly experimental and developmental relationship where the medium and the self can no longer be differentiated. The cinematician develops both the sensible experience and the generative media with every new piece.

The cinematician is an adaptation of independent cinema to the speed and power of 21st century digital media.

I create and employ software engines to examine mediated artifacts forged at my zone of proximal development. My Simultaneous Opposites engine (2008-present) is a performance/navigation system for real-time traversal of existing video files, sorting through the audio and video a single frame at a time, in a arrhythmic spiraling motion. The center frame between the two ends of the spiral becomes a temporal focal plane, with the length of the jump a temporal depth of field. The navigational path is the result of a preprogrammed algorithm interrupted during traversal by triggering and modulation by computer keyboard, mouse, and MIDI guitar.



On my website (www.robertedgar.com) are over 50 examples of the output of the developing Simultaneous Opposites engine. Each sequential video file exemplifies a stage in the ongoing experiment I've undertaken. During early work at Synapse Video in the 1970s, I integrated strategies of experimental filmmakers with those of the newly developing medium of post-television video. In the early 1980s, I sold my 16mm Beaulieu camera and bought an Apple //e. Teaching myself programming, I produced Memory Theatre One, an early seminal work of interactive computer art. Supported by the positive reaction from the small but developing group of artists who programmed, I set about to develop systems for extending Eisenstein’s montage categories to include the attribute of real-time cinema generation.

The first of these was Living Cinema, which blended video footage collected diary-style on video discs, texts from musings, audio recordings, cells to create short animation loops, graphics etc, and programmed software supporting the selection and combination of all the elements in real time in performance. I was also able to save the performance decisions and cursor moves, and re-inject them into the system later during the same performance, for a spiraled revisitation. Living Cinema had performances throughout the United States.

After a stint as multimedia specialist with Commodore Business Systems working with the video-oriented Amiga, I programmed and integrated a new system, SAND. From my website:

“The central theme of SAND: OR HOW COMPUTERS DREAM OF TRUTH IN CINEMA comes from a well-known quote that Cinema is truth 24 times a second. I grabbed stills (and sometimes generated images using 3D animation programs) of a sequence 6 frames long. I changed things in front of the camera between the shots. I then took the separate images and allowed the computer to imagine what happened between the frames--I did this using a morph program. Usually morph programs are used to change one object into another, but in SAND I used it to create an explanation (a visual one) for the changes that happened between the information that the computer had (it had only the separate stills). Of course, it didn't always guess right: things may move from left to right, when they actually were pulled apart, etc.



“The mistakes--the artifacts from the morph--create their own poems, from their difference between what actually happened and what it "guessed" happened. My goal in the piece was to invent a new poetic space, which I believe I succeeded in doing here. And of course, there are parallels among all the media channels in the piece, as rememberances, arguments, occurrences, repeating riffs appear and advance in time”.

Unfortunately, soon after a working system was completed, I had to sell the Amiga-based system in order to purchase a business-oriented computer for my new Silicon Valley-based company Iconceptual. Only a few examples of the SAND exist.

At that same time, my video camera was stolen. I used the next few years to focus on music and musical systems. My next compositional system—consisting of software, MIDI-guitar, looping pedal and computer—generated a single piece. My "Duchamp Examination" is a demonstration of how a composer can dissect, examine and re-produce a precomposed (but not prerecorded) piece through a combination of analog and digital mastication and redigestion, in real-time solo performance before an audience. The Duchamp Prelude is a kind of electronic alapana, in which I explore the chordal sequence of the source piece "If Duchamp Drew Beautifully" through an overdriven TM-2 bandpass filter. I performed The Duchamp Examinations live online for an international audience through Electro-Music.com, as well as performances in California and New York.

Simultaneous Opposites, then, is itself the current evolution of a series of performance systems that I've programmed and integrated. A specific precursor is found in my 1972 16mm film of the same title. The 1972 Simultaneous Opposites was single-framed from a single tripod position. A second exploration incorporating this same approach, Intersticies, blended similar footage into video manipulation, and was produced at Synapse in 1975. Digital videos of these earlier works can be seen at www.robertedgar.com.

An Open Source Energy Game

Chart #7 is interesting: note that over 55% of the energy produced in the US is wasted.
What do you think?
I'd love to see an open source Wikipedia type of dashboard of energy usage solutions. Something modularly developed, starting with low-detail objects that show energy sources, usage, and environmental impacts for the US. A group would have to manage the APIs, and expert groups could analyze proposed module algorithms for accuracy before an offered replacement would be allowed to go live. But a site like this would allow for a better public understanding of energy policies and better judgement for political action.

The link to the article and charts is here: http://www.scidacreview.org/1001/html/energy.html

May 1, 2010

It's Saturday morning, yellow light on green leaves. Morning NY TImes and coffee. Sigh. Trying again to make sense of the patchwork that is the news. The differences that lead us to our informed actions: between truth and meaning, between science and technology, between technology and sufficient care, between energy source and energy need, between belief and validation.

We have so much technology, and so many people. If we'd been through this life before we'd know how to use it correctly, but we don't have that knowledge (apparently that data doesn't transfer...). So we need to spend more time imagining the worst. Then, once we imagine these hells, we need to spend the money and time for both prevention and rescue.

The forethought before starting unnecessary wars. Before drilling a mile undersea. Before creating specialist systems for redirecting billions of dollars from the many to the one. Before moving the carbon from underground into the atmosphere.

The bigger the technology, the bigger the bang. Only the specialist technologists are near enough to the action to know or at least study how to build in the protection before the unintended fuse is lit. If they did this without the government, we wouldn't need a government to protect the rest of us from the unimagined hells technology unleashes.

But how many times do we have to see it: the technologists don't do it, they are too specialized and focused on the drill bit, and not on the asymmetrical accident.

And the businessmen funneling money into the technology company don't do it, because the money spent in prevention reduces the profits, and the time spent in prevention means that someone else might get there first.

And so we are left with the government, whose trigger is the cataclysmic event. Without the government, there would be no prevention at all, only scars, the memory theaters of our surprise.

Foucault: "But if you ask me, does this new technology of power take its historical origin from an identifiable individual or group of individuals who decide to implement it so as to further their interest, or facilitate their utilization of the social body, then I would say no. These tactics were invented and organized from the starting points of local conditions and particular needs. They took place in piecemeal fashion prior to any class strategy designed to weld them into vast coherent ensembles".

No gods in heaven, just this deep night.
Waves meet the island, or miss it.
Seasons strike the land, or kiss it.
Blind planets spinning in darkness and light.
-rbe

Learning and Communing

In reaction to Judith Warner's good post:
The Shame Game - Judith Warner Blog - NYTimes.com


I absolutely support Michael Moore. But I see an addiction supported by people and media that forces statements into dichotomies. One should find a common ground because that is usually the first step to breaking apart a false dichotomy that is presented by ideologies, media, talk-show hosts and, yes, directors.

Overgeneralized dichotomies are useful for focusing on a topic or problem. But if you stop your understanding there, you are stopping at the level of chiche. Once you have a topic in focus, go in closer and see the real landscape, the real texture and anthro-poetic STUFF that you don't see from the conceptual distance. Use the dichotomy as a target that lets you destroy the myth.

People should be in school long enough to learn how to learn, and practiced enough at it to be addicted to it. Getting out after one only learns to cast or repeat cliches is a waste of time, and in my opinion, dangerous to the world culture.

Lastly: I believe that Michael Moore goes beyond his bravado--his films have matured greatly from his early work. I love his statement that communism isn't the opposite of capitalism, democracy is. The statement reframes an old argument and dares you to come inside for the argument. That is honest filmmaking.

The Resonance Model of Communication, Ontic Experience, and Mirror Neurons

The Resonance Model of Communication, Ontic Experience, and Mirror Neurons

Third in a series

The worst communications model is the one that is used in almost all communications textbooks today. This is the “transportation” model, illustrated by a person’s head on the left, another person’s head on the right, and a double-headed dotted line arrow between them. The explanation is that one person has a concept, that through a medium this concept is carried to another person and deposited there. Noise is usually pictured within the medium, an element that distorts that which is transferred or transported.

This mechanical model is a major contributor to the misunderstanding of the art process, and leads to major failings in our culture as a whole.

In a slim volume published in 1973, Tony Schwartz criticized the transfer model, and suggested a model based on Marshal McLuhan’s “acoustic space”, wherein the person/recipient is within a circular field of center-moving concentric circular waves, moving from the outside in.

It should be obvious that the “transportation” or “transfer” model is just wrong. There is no physical transfer from brain to brain. The physicality is not realistic. Little object-units don’t get checked in at the station and sent to the brain where they are received. The blurriness of the human interface in this model is stunning in its ubuiquity.

---

I sent the following question to a number of friends:

“In experiencing works of art (and the rest of the world), there are sometimes phenomena that you find that say "I exist". It can strike the viewer/listener/etc. that the phenomenon exists, and that because of that (goin' down that old lonesome Cartesian road...), he (the viewer) also exists.

“Kant referred to the apperceptual, as the being conscious of one's act of perception. But is there a word that refers to the sensed object/event that generates the moment of self-awareness?”

Rabbi Pinchas Giller: “Soloveitchik used to say ‘ontic'...?”

Soloveitchik has a text distinguishing between ontic experience and ontic proof:

The trouble with all rational demonstration of the existence of God, with which the history of philosophy abounds, consists in their being exactly what they were meant to be by those who formulated them: abstract logical demonstrations divorced from the living primal experiences in which these demonstrations are rooted. For instance, the cosmic experience was transformed into a cosmological proof, the ontic experience into an ontological proof, et cetera. Instead of stating that the most elementary existential awareness as a subjective "I exist" and an objective "the world around me exists" awareness is unattainable as long as the ultimate reality of God is not part of this awareness, the theologians engaged in formal postulating and deducing in an experiential vacuum. Because of this, they exposed themselves to Hume's and Kant's biting criticism that logical categories are applicable only within the limits of the human scientific experience.”
(The Lonely Man of Faith, p. 32, note)

To the extent that one accepts that the aesthetic experience I’ve described is a variety of (or analogous to) the ontic experience referred to here by Soloveitchik, one can understand the difficulty of referring to a personal experience that cannot be included in a text that refers to that experience. The artist, moving to experience this for him or her self, works to manipulate the medium to spark that experience. To explain the experience, or to prove that it exists, is not a terrible thing to do. But it is not in itself part of the experience.

From the photographer Robert Polidori:

“Hard to answer your question.
I don't know "a" word.
But one phrase comes to mind.
M. Snow once wrote something to the effect

‘Do You see What I see?’

It's about trying to share perceptions.

Some times when someone is explaining with words something- a concept
or the perceptive result of something,
the listener can sometimes respond...

‘I see...’ "

Snow’s Wittgensteinian language game again separates the experience from a reference to it. That gap between the pointing and the invisible pointed-to.

From the writer Ethan Place:

The only word that comes to mind (that's MY mind, thank you very much) is self-reflexive or self-reflection. This guy, though not discussing art, suggests intellectual intuition:

“At its most basic, intellectual intuition can be described as a subject’s self-referential, performative actualization (N Pepperell would probably say self-reflexive here, but I figured, Why not be different?). It identifies the self with the self’s activity and what this activity produces such that the self, which is to be understood as activity simpliciter, actualizes and becomes aware of what it means to be a self through its own activity. Intellectual intuition, then, designates the self’s immediate, singular awareness of itself as both a producer of meaning as well as the content of what it produces. It encompasses - and unifies - the twofold awareness of the fact that the self simply is the activity of producing meaning, and the content of this activity. Intellectual intuition is, in other words, the union of process and product.”

Alexei, http://nowtimes.wordpress.com/, Process and Product — Or the Self-Reflexivity of Fichte’s Intellectual Intuition

Alexei’s process is a production of self-referential meaning. This reminds me of the sudden bloom of a feedback loop that occurs when you point a video camera into a monitor attached to it…at first, the image shifts a bit, then suddenly the camera sees itself seeing itself seeing itself and a rushing kalidescope pours through the video image. By spatially manipulating the camera, one obtains not only this exhilarating sudden flowing, but a continual variety of colors and patterns as the feedback continues. Big hit back in the ‘70s.

Neither Ethan Place nor Alexei are making the claim that this intuition is the aesthetic experience. It may be, or it may be a special case variation of it. The activity described does seem isomorphic with the aesthetic experience, although the perception that the self is both producer of content and the content may not be a requisite take-away.

Both media maven Dan Restuccio and Video Producer John Mabey suggested the Japanese word “Mu”. I Googled the word and found a reference that said it was derived from the Chinese word for “nothing”. This sent me digging into my wallet to find a disintegrating paper scrap on which my Chinese professor, in college, drew for me the Chinese hieroglyph for “nothingness”, or in Mandarin “wu”. This is not the “wu” character for the number “5”, but one that is similar to a purely negative adjective (with a radical character that refers to fire or burning)…hence “nothingness”. My understanding of the Japanese word is that it is the answer to the koan:

“A monk asked Joshu, “Does a dog have the Buddha nature?” Joshu retorted, “Mu!”

As the phrase is in Maine “You can’t get there from here”.

John went on to suggest the word “empathy”. For me, this hit home. It not only worked for the aesthetic experience, but also for the “resonance” model of communication described by Schwartz.

The next answer I received was from Peter Matussek, the aesthetics scholar presently living in Siegen, Germany. I quote from his response here at length:

“Dear Robert,
please excuse me for being late as usual.
Your question points directly into what I also do claim as being the essence of art: creating self-awareness - in German: Selbstaufmerksamkeit. I think I mentioned this also in my writings on memory theaters.
There is a poem of Rainer Maria Rilke that expresses very clearly what you describe:

Archaischer Torso Apollos

Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,
darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber
sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber,
in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt,
sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug
der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen
der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen
zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.

Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz
unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz
und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle;

und bräche nicht aus allen seinen Rändern
aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle,
die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.


The poem describes a torso and the process of the substitution of the parts that are not visible (esp. the head and the eyes) by the imagination of the recipient.

In the last two lines the direction of looking is immediately turned around: "there is not a single part / that does not see you. You have got to change your life."

Kant may be a good reference insofar as he describes the perception of the perception of beauty as going along with the perception of an inner balance between mind and emotion (Verstand und Gefühl).

But even more I see a ground of explanation in the new theories that explain "empathy" not conventionally, as a vague psychic intuition, but as a coordination af gestures. If you have read about mirror neurons you get an idea of what I mean. This new founding suits to older theories of art history, for example Aby Warburg's "Pathosformeln" , i.e. gestures in pieces of art that "live on" through the history of mankind, because they meet collective memories of the body (Warburg had some contact with C.G. Jung, but more important is his contact with Richard Semon who coined the term "ekphoria": the process of recollection by feeling a similar bodily "energy". The famous neuroscientist Danile Schacter has recently written a book on Semon as a "neglected pioneer".)”

Mirror neurons are a class of cells discovered in 1990 in the laboratory of Giacomo Rizzolatti, a neuroscientist at the University of Parma, Italy. Dr. Rizzalatti observed the cells firing in macaque monkeys both when they perform an action, and when they see another monkey perform that same action.

In his findings, published in 1996, Dr. Rizzalatti writes “Mirror neurons allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation. By feeling, not by thinking."

U.S.C.’s. Michael A. Arbib, Ph.D., writes

"For communication to succeed, both the individual sending a message and the individual receiving it must recognize the significance of the sender's signal. Mirror neurons are thus the missing link in the evolution of language. They provide a mechanism for the sharing of meaning."

While still using the “sender” and “receiver” language from the transport model of communication, Dr. Arbib provides an understandable mechanism for how one comprehends a message. Supporting the “resonance” model, the individual, through empathy, engages his or her own corresponding internal model. This model does not just work for visual sensing, but extends to words, sounds, sensations and metaphor (V.S. Ramachandran, Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego).

The existence of mirror neurons, and the continued study of how they work, allows for a model of communication that, rather than relegating concepts of empathy, synaesthesia, metaphor and the aesthetic experience to the outer edges of normal communication, place them squarely at its essence.

The case for art education can now be more clearly formed, from within this new model for communication.

Can you see what I mean?

Myth, Self, Art, Synaesthesia, Metaphor

- second in a series -

“In general it can be said that myth, as experienced by archaic societies…is always related to a “creation,” it tells how something came into existence, or how a pattern of behavior, an institution, a manner of working was established; this is why myths constitute the paradigms for all significant human acts; …that by knowing the myth one knows the “origin” of things and hence can control and manipulate them at will; this is not an “external”, “abstract” knowledge but a knowledge that one “experiences” ritually, either by ceremonially recounting the myth or by performing the ritual for which it is the justification; …that in one way or another one “lives” the myth, in the sense that one is seized by the sacred, exalting power of the events recollected or re-enacted.”
Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, pp. 18-19.

“I know a lot about objects, how they get to be what and where they are.”
Michael Snow, Letter from Michael Snow to P. Adams Sitney, Film Culture No. 46, Autumn 1967.


The mythic way of knowing articulated by Eliade is not “knowing” the way we know a recipe for a cake, or the number of miles to the moon. It is a knowing that exists in time, and exists while it is part of the knower’s experience. It requires someone to know it.

Synaesthesia, or the triggering of one sense by another, has many similarities to Eliade’s mythic experience. Through it the person experiences one stimulus as another; a flash of color as a sound, or an odor as a tactile sensation. And similarly, this connection between two disparate elements requires a person to experience it, or it does not exist. Recent research into synaesthesia posit anatomical structures that may provide for it:

“In a fascinating theory Maurer & Maurer (1988) suggested that normal infants are typically synaesthetic, with subsequent neural and synaptic pruning leading to more segregated senses in most of us (see also Maurer & Mondlach, 2005). Those few who are synaesthetic as adults are, then, those whose cross-modal connections do not wither in the same way. This theory provides a developmental mechanism and behavioral correlate for the hyperconnectivity proposed in a number of the theories discussed by Hochel & Milán (2008).”
Alex O. Holcombe, Eric L. Altschuler, & Harriet J. Over, A Developmental Theory of Synaesthesia, With Long Historical Roots. Cognitive Neuropsychology, accepted 8 Aug 2008.

Like the mythic experience of knowing, the vanishing point of synaesthesia is within the person who experiences it. It does not present itself as an objective fact, independent of the person. It empowers the person with a sensory knowledge that is personal and meaningful, and that is self-evident. Having a synaesthetic experience provides a personal history that enriches a person’s relationship with the world, a relationship that supports one’s trusting one’s senses to provide meaning about the world through its own act of creation.

This world of inner meaning is one that children know well, and it is a world that is rarely nurtured by our educational and parental institutions and practices. Even our art and music education often avoid developing these experiences, focusing instead on the more measurable skills that lead to professions.

The relations provided by the synaesthetic experience are isomorphic with metaphor. Synaesthesia provides a mode of knowing that and how two disparate phenomena share an essence. Metaphor places one language object in the syntactical space of another, leaving the individual to make sense of the unexpected displacement. Often this making sense invokes internal sounds and images, memories and imaginings, meanings and humor.

With art making, the artist engages a medium and becomes more sensitive to it, more aware of its subtleties, What is it that the artist moves toward in art making? The artist navigates, through a medium, toward the mythic state of creation, in order to experience that creation, to cause it to be, and to sense it becoming. It is not an objective truth that the artist finds. The art work is not the final object. The artist is no more a factory than Warhol was.

It is the focus on consumable product that has anaesthetized the American culture from valuing or even knowing these related experiences: the creative moment in art work, the ritual re-enactment of myth, the sensory meaning of synaesthesia. It is as though these states don’t exist, as if they are meaningless.

The desperate need this culture has, as we head into this darkest of times, is for art practice.

The Rarified Art of the Individual

Here’s the kick: those people who stole your money? Under cover of the culture of illusion, and through the products they sold you that delayed your own self-creation, they stole your lives.

-First in a series-

With the deflation of the consumer culture that is happening all over the world today, Americans have a chance at adapting for the resulting environment.

Americans (and certainly other cultures, but certainly Americans) have for years accepted the practice of delaying the construction of a self, by spending their money—and lives—purchasing distractions. Art has been capitalized and made into objects for purchase, created by a small and distinguished tribe of specialists.

With the loss of purchasing power—so people have less ability to purchase distractions—preceded by a surge in the availability of low-cost media production tools (video and audio production, post-production and that folk-art distribution system the web) we have a corresponding surge in art making (with a lower-case “a”).

Younger generations who have grown up with computers create media easily, without a clumsy “always learn before you do” approach that was so helpful to the mechanical universe. Those at ease with computers jump right in and probe, trying one thing, learning its effect, and then trying another, burrowing into the web to find what it has to offer, or the software to find what they can produce. Alan Kay has rightly despaired of the loss of pre-planning, of an architectural approach to problem solving, in this dive-right-in approach. But the computer environment is one that rewards digital spelunking.

Instead of simply watching television for hours at a time like their parents and grandparents, a larger group is able to make their own and share it in online society. The online sites for displaying one’s own videos, or the thousands of sites for distributing one’s own musical tracks—these are the real killers of the music companies and movie theaters. That which had been the creative domain of Artists now have the floodgates open and the artists pouring their creations into them.

It is important to note that once someone has a minimal set of equipment and software, one can create for only the cost of one’s time. While every audio and video professional will argue that the quality that consumer and prosumer products can’t match that of the truly professional (and hugely expensive) equipment and software, it is absolutely the case that with today’s prosumer equipment one can produce media of higher resolution and lower noise levels than could be professionally delivered in the 1960s. Compare a HD video on Vimeo.com with a playback of Bonanza on any CRT.

What is more important than the resolution of the new technology is the ability to produce in media iteratively. As a film student in the mid 1970s with a disabled father and a mother who was an art teacher in a public school, I didn’t have money for multiple answer prints. Filmmaking was a process of trying something, then trying something ELSE. Even editing in video, which could be done for free where I was studying, was a long and painful process involving grease pencils, two reel-to-reel decks and multiple reels of video tape that had to be wound and rewound to start points for each edit. I worked in film and video with every moment of my free time (and still do), but today the ability to revise as one goes is incredibly supportive of quick learning and quality improvement, especially when combined with a distribution and social review system that allows the creator to obtain informal and instant feedback on work in progress. And all work is work in progress.

What happened, though, was the domination of the culture of the specialist, the pouring of money into huge Hollywood projects where, by concentrating the work of hundreds of people into the production of stories of individuals, we have a slight-of-hand that further supports the unobtainable hero. Hundreds of minds and specialists are not one mind, and we addict society to watching the magical existence of screen stars to appear to make their own decisions, and overcome their own problems.

It’s not that I don’t like Benjamin Button or even Hollywood films in general. But the illusion that it has always used as its attraction has created the illusory economy and culture that is now, for a moment, shown its real structure. Here’s the kick: those people who stole your money? Under cover of the culture of illusion, and through the products they sold you that delayed your own self-creation, they stole your lives.

The aging generations who now have time but no money will logically experience mostly their loss. But a child who doesn’t have paints will scribble in the dirt. And before aboriginals were taught to paint on canvas, they painted on sand.

The desperate need this culture has, as we head into this darkest of times, is for art (small “a”) education.

A CD Review: Ys by Joanna Newsom

This is a fantastic album. The lyrics are the best I've heard since Don Van Vliet. I make the comparison seriously--the rhyme schemes, the way that the word meaning and the word sound support each other, and the choice of words and phrases from localized folk technologies.

"so, with the courage of a clown,
or a curor a kite,
jerking tight at its tetherin her dun-brown gown of fur
and her jerkin' of swansdown and leather"

Newsom studied harp, compostion and Englsh at Mills College in Oakland, and lived next to the gentle minimalist Terry Riley. She says that when she started her own composing she worked more in a folk tradition than a strictly classical one, and you hear this in her recordings--made of small, modular verses that vary and develop from one to another. The longer song structure reminds me of another older song writer: Robin Williamson from the Incredble String Band. Small songs linked one to the other, without a need for a standard A-A-B-A development.

Against her harp finger picking and chording, and her quirky and expressive voice, there is an intricate orchestration by Van Dyke Parks...Newsom says that they worked on it over a year, and that it took that long is easy to believe. It is astounding to me the amount of orchestral variety Parks uses throughout Ys, it is a course in orchestration techniques, all kick and side lighting providing shape and chiaroscuro to Newsom's vocal key. Never muddying, he syncopates and counterpoints, while extending the simpler folk chords into expressive vertical harmonic cliffs...just incredible.

Electro-Music 2006 and Brian Eno and Will Wright: A Discussion

I started this month with a cross-country trip to attend an electronic music conference in Philadelphia, and last night, June 26, back in San Francisco, I attended a chat between Brian Eno and Will Wright. I’m using these last couple June days to sort through these experiences, and see what’s left in my pocket.

WWW.Electro-music.com is an online community “dedicated to experimental electro-acoustic and electronic music”. The community was started by Howard Moscovitz, an electrical engineer who began composing electronic music in the 1960s. Howard wanted:

“..to become a member of a community of musicians much like the Impressionist painters had in France in the 1890s, or the Serialists and Expressionists had in the early 20th Germany and Austria. I couldn't find anything that was appropriate so I decided to start an online community myself, since I had some programming chops.”

The site has grown quickly, providing 1.5 million page views in June 2006, and growing between 10% to 20% per month.

In 2005, Howard held the first Electro-Music conference just outside Philadelphia. Electro-Music 2006 (EM-06), then, was a second annual event.

Most of the music at the conference was—as advertised—somehow shaped by electronics. There were acoustic instruments played into microphones—something that would get an “unplugged” rating on some cable stations. There were musicians who played electronic instruments, or who played acoustic instruments that were modified by electronic modules, or people who played into, through, or from laptop computers.

I heard compositional strategies ranging from scores that were notated on paper to scores that were saved as digital audio or MIDI files on hard disks, to sounds without definite pitch thrown into an improvised brew pit shared by 3-4 other co-improvisers, to people re-modulating scores as quickly as they could play them live. There was an installation wall of printed bar codes and a hand-held scanner that would play them.

The conference provided three days of music from 12 noon to 12 midnight, often with multiple performances and jams happening in parallel.

The audience at EM-06 was attracted to what people brought to the table that was unique. Fuck the phrase “He’s just being different.” You ever try to be different? Ever try to do something that is fundamentally other than what other people are doing? “Just being different…” as if it’s a left turn at the pre-paved crossroads, ready for your slot car to be pulled around, finding the easy way forward. Well, anyone with a breath of honesty who has tried to do something different knows that it’s almost impossible. So to find a cluster of people who are working toward that goal, and who appreciate it in others, is great. Especially where everyone isn’t wearing black…

If I hand you a flute, you know about what to do with it. Or a guitar. You pick up, and probably hold it fairly correctly, even if you’ve never picked one up before.

But with electronic instruments: whadaya do with ‘em? Sit down at a granular synthesis program, and what do you do? What should you do? How do you know when you’re doing it right? The ‘60’s heard Switched on Bach but ya know, it probably did more to miscast electronic music than even Disney did when he calcified the development of animation. Just pulled in the cash by doing the wrong thing publicly and successfully at the most crucial time. And like so many crucial moments of the last 40 years, the opportunity for sustaining ambiguity passed. The measure for success was established, and the art form that could have developed was replaced with the simple model of the craftsman wrestling the instrument’s interface into playback that best matches the notation. This would eventually lead to Yes and the triumph of persistence over patch cords. But the interesting stuff was pushed away from sight and understanding.

Give a man a hammer and everything becomes a nail. But give Duchamp a bicycle wheel and it becomes a sculpture. Or Picasso bicycle handlebars and it becomes a bull. And so what do you do with a ring modulator? With a Buddhist electronic prayer-box? When asked to play with a bunch of musicians when you haven’t agreed on a key, scale, tempo, or which way to face?

Found in a situation in which one is abandoned, one makes a gesture, and that gesture becomes the form of the art. The art form. Kip Rosser gestures in front of the theremin and it becomes a Japanese brush of audio-ink. The programmer links his objects to behaviors and they become rows of music-houses, awaiting habitation by the musician’s playing. OK, we’re streaming, lights come down, Hi, I’m Robert, thanks for inviting me to perform here…

Here is Jonn Serrie playing Hollywood’s take on ambient music. Here’s Vostek changing tempo every couple of measures—wonderful music, but I’d never ride in a car he’s driving.... Here’s Ace Paradise cranking downtown music. Project Ruori with clips of great music separated with ‘70s-ish performance discourse. Astrogenic Hallucinauting pushing electrons through a shell-collectors eclectic tabletop of dozens of chewing-tobacco-sized boxes…and in the background and against the walls, Hong Waltzer and Doctor T interpret much of the music as it’s played, anticipating and empathizing.

With the “electro” consistent across the performers, the approaches to composing and performing varied greatly at Electro-music 2006. Following a post-avant garde aesthetic, all approaches were welcomed, with enthusiasm and encouragement. Whereas Boulez had suggested that each piece of music should have its own unique orchestration, this was in fact the case here: I don’t remember any two performances with the same setups. When this is the case, with a conference of this size and density, there is basically something else going on. If there is no single instrumental teleology to triangulate for perspective, and the variety of technical architectures insisting on as wide a variety of compositional strategies, what happens is that the event parses into its own present.

It’s not that there is no history that applies—no one is that naive. But this is not the music school with hallways of practice rooms, each with a piano. Nor is it a pop stage with Fender electric guitars. Each performer/instrument interface basically differs from the others, and this fundamental eclecticism insists that this is a different game. As each performer approaches his/her instrument, there exists no history of playing it. And so for each, there is the decision of what other musical tradition s/he brings along. Will it be one involving perceivable pitches, or one of music concrete, or one of patch cords real or virtual? The choice that is made in each case determines whether the performer is trying to wrestle the instrument into duplicating an established model, or exploring it to have it deliver sonic experiences previously unprovoked.


And so now I’m transitioning to San Francisco, on June 26, to a conversation presented at Herbst Theater by The Long Now Foundation (www.longnow.org). Will Wright (Producer of the computer simulation games “Sim City” and “The Sims”) and Brian Eno (producer of albums “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” and “Music for Airports”) are talking about compression, about creating smaller and smaller algorithms that in turn produce longer and longer experiences. And with those long experiences, the inability to anticipate their form. Eno speaks of pieces that will generate unexpected sonic patterns for thousands of years into the future, and Wright speaks of the computer game of Life. The evening metaphor is that the artist creates a seed and then is an audience for what grows, instead of constructing and perfecting a short composition and then presenting it to an audience of others. In this way, art is a process for generating what the artist does not know, or would not think to generate, through the standardized approaches of craft.

I don’t remember either Eno or Wright mentioning John Cage. Eno probably assumed that there was no need to mention a name that would be familiar to so many. Instead, Eno mentioned Steve Reich’s tape-looped “It’s Gonna Rain” as his starting point. A simple system (two duplicate tape loops starting together but phasing out of time as they play asynchronously) that produced unexpected audio phenomena.

While Reich may have been the one to spark Eno’s imagination, the compositional strategies Eno presented this evening seemed more reflective of Cage’s approach. With Reich’s early phase works, one knew the system that was playing out, and in hearing the piece could jump from experience to perception, in that you could understand what was generating the sonic phenomena through listening to it. Cage’s work, on the other hand, remained experiential, with the generative principles not available through the sonic material.

In this way Eno’s work was also closer to Cage’s than to Wright’s. Sim City starts with your data fed into blank fields provided by the game engine. When you’d entered all the data you wanted to enter, you turned the engine on. The game engine then processed your values and fed them to its city rules, leading to growth or ruin. While the aesthetic was much more conceptual than sensual, you could open windows at any time and read the status of the city, perhaps coming to understand how your values locked in the simulation’s fate. And you could make changes as you go, reacting to the patterns you saw, in efforts to ward off failure or accelerate success.


Both events were future-facing. Positioned as they are after the fin-de-siecle, they are also still in the shadow of the 20th century, force-animated by the overwhelming flood of creative strategies codified in the performances, compositions and documentation of that period. Searching for a barrier-present that will block the stream from the past, the artist finds new technologies, and formulates new algorithms.

For just a moment, as the artist sits at the new tool…s/he doesn’t know what to do. For this brief moment, as the world churns just a step away, the artist is failingly human. For this moment, the artist sees self and other, feels the past and begins to synthesize the present. The tool parses the past according to its new architecture, and as the artist continues to gesture and paint—sounds and colors, dancing and sculpting—a new form is cut from the old, and a new portrait is produced where the blade hits the past.

Review: LSG New Music Series February 23, 2006

ReviewOutsound Presents: LSG New Music Series @ Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco

8:00 pmEmily Hay: Flutes, vocalMarcos Fernandes: PercussionRobert Montoya: Computer/softwareBob Marsh: electronically modulated vocal

9:00 pmMarcos Fernandes: PercussionRobert Montoya: Computer/softwareRent Romus: SaxaphonesErnesto Diaz-Infante: acoustic-electric steelstring guitar

8:00
Emily Hay, Marcos Fernandes and Robert Montoya traveled up from San Diego to perform with a couple of San Francisco locals for the February 23 2006 implementation of the LSG New Music Series. It made for a wonderful couple of hours of excellent, compelling music.
For the 8:00 show Emily Hay began by blowing her alto flute shakuhachi-like into her microphone. She progressed into including vocalizations with the flute blowing, and later alternating between the flute and vocalizations. Her vocal sounds ranged from english-like phonemes to sounds of laughter, but often coming back to a crystal-clear operetic voice, pitched and carefully articulated. Throughout the first set Emily alternated improvising between her flutes and her voice.

Bob Marsh seemed often to track Emily's vocals, but did so by almost mumbling into a microphone which pitch-shifted and otherwise modulated his voice into pitches that did match, and timbres that almost matched those of Emily. While Emily was working hard to get volume, articulation and pitch, Bob kept up seemingly without effort, through excellent control of his electronics. The two played off each other, with Bob at times creating electronic loops, and Emily sometimes repeating.

Behind Emily and Bob, Marcos Fernandes had percussion instruments set up on and under a table, with a microphone picking up the sounds and feeding them into a Lexicon reverb module. occasionally with prerecorded sounds. The tabletop was recorded hot, with small sounds of rubbing a mallet across the face of a drum being picked up and amplified sometimes into the foreground of the sonic output. Marcos was well balanced between percussion and foley (sound effects) work, using pots, pans, drums, gongs, bells and other instruments and objects obviously chosen for their focused sonic qualities.

Robert Montoya sat in back with his computer, using Ableton Live software to loop a sound sample, select segments of that sample, and modifying its attributes in real time. his sounds were urban, percussive, often sounding like scraping metal, but never muddy.

After the first set, Emily sat down, and Rent Romus joined with three saxaphones, as did Ernesdo Diaz-Infante on guitar. Rent sent out saxaphone sound arcs and blurts, always sent into an opening in the sonic spectrum created by the others.

Ernesdo's guitar strings were tuned down well below normal pitch so that when he struck them they were much more percussive than pitched. His right-hand work (strumming and picking) was his focus and was the most effective, setting up rhythms that provided tempos for the second set.

What struck me about this evenings' music--other than the fact that it was among the most continuously compelling of the evenings I've heard here over the last few months--was that the instrumentalists often played musical roles different from those usually selected for their instruments:

Marcos' percussion rarely provided enough repetition to create a tempo or rhythm. Rather, he delivered individual sounds that were each complex and defined enough to deserve attention on their own.

Ernesto's guitar played no melody, nor did it provide a chordal harmonization. As I stated above, he provided the rhythm and tempo, using the detuned guitar as a percussion instrument, and drumming out a beat for the others to weave around.
Rent's saxaphones provided phrases that rose from the bed of the sounds, arced above them and descended back into the source. Robert's software provided a mostly arhythmic backdrop for the others, but filtered and pitched so that the overall sound was rarely muddy--always a problem for electro-acoustic performances.

Bob marsh's electronically modulated vocalizations often approached the sound of a non-modified voice (though it always had just enough electronic artifacts to keep from sounding like it intended to imitate one). And Emily's flute and vocal work were almost electronic.
What I think made the night for me was that the acoustic elements were so carefully modified toward the electronic, and the electronic was so carefully modulated toward the acoustic, that what was accomplished was a masterful blending of the two. It was not electronic, and it was not acoustic, nor did it alternate between the two: it was sonic. And for me, that worked wonderfully.

I continue to look forward to what the next week brings this series.

CDs Available from these groups: WE ARE on Publiceysore (Emily Hay and Marcos Fernandes)REVERBERATIONS FROM SPRING PAST on Pax Recordings (w/Rent Romus)

Review: Quiet American/Gal*in_dog: LSG in SF

Quiet American/Gal*in_dog: LSG in SF
Thursday, Feb 2 2006 8:00 PM

This was another performance in OutSound's "LSG New Music Series" held on Thursday evenings in San Francisco. Outsound is a collective that presents performances throughout the SF Bay area. Information on Outsound may be found at www.outsound.org.

This series is held at the Luggage Store Gallery, 1007 Market Street (near 6th) in San Francisco, and curated by musicians Rent Romus and Matt Davignon. It has been running since 1991, and as such is the longest-standing experimental music series in the Bay Area. Past performers have included Cecil Taylor, Alan Silva, Henry Kaiser, Fred Frith and many others.

On February 2 there were two performances: one by AAron Ximm (Quiet American) and one by Guillermo Galindo (Gal*in_dog).

8pm Quiet American (field recordings/oscillators)

Aaron Ximm's performance on Thursday comprised two sound sources: field recordings he made while traveling, and a battery of sine-wave oscillators.

The field recordings presented sounds that were textural, nonrhythmic, and mostly retained a consistant amplitude, sound spectrum and timbre. There were, I believe, four separate recordings, each of which was played continually for several minutes, with the sum of the four running the length of the piece. In conversation after his piece, Ximm told me that the recordings represented air, earth, fire and water:

air: flapping of tarps in a strong wind, recorded at the Burning Man festival
earth: the sounds of a worker smoothing concrete in a sidewalk or new floor
fire: the sounds of fireworks clusters--also recorded at the Burning Man festival
water: the sound of a pool drain skimming off water overflow

These sounds didn't have a central pitch, but rather each occupied a stabile bandwidth. Ximm mentioned that he recorded each using binaural microphones, with one positioned near each of his ears, in order to pick up spatial references that reconstruct themselves when one listens to them over headphones.

Streaming below, above, and through this bandwidth were the oscillators. Ximm had a bank of about a dozen oscillators. Ximm created a triad, then paired each of the three pitches with the output of another oscillator pitched very near but not exactly at the same frequency, causing beat frequencies in the air. Other oscillators were then introduced throughout the aural spectrum to produce additional aural phenomena, weighting the various spectral areas differently as they were slowly introduced, swept through frequencies, and faded out. I found my awareness of the slowly spectrum moving from one tone to another, as the oscillators moved in and out of my concentration. As with the early phase-shifting work of Steve Reich or the films of Michael Snow, I became conscious of my scanning of the aural seascape, as a sound slowly achieved a level that was noticible. Not everyone is able to provoke an awareness of that relationship between self and stimulus, and Ximm's work, presented in the focused gallery setting, did so quite successfully, for me at least.


9pm Gal*in_dog (electroacoustic soundscapes/21st century composition)

Guillermo Galindo's performance setup contrasted nicely with Ximm's minimalist elements. Central to Ximm's performance was a MAX algorithmic construction running on a laptop.

Sources that fed the program sounds included recorded samples, a crucifix constructed out of rods and coils that made it a giant electromagnetic pickup, and a kalimba/thumb piano with an internal pickup. Galindo's MAX program modulated and repeated the input sounds, with source and output parameters triggered by a number of MIDI tabletop switches, foot switches, and at least one footpedal sending a range of values. The tabletop switches included some custom-made light-sensitive switches paired with two small and focused light sources, between which he moved his hands to shadow and reveal the light sources--thus causing the switch to send a MIDI message back to MAX.

Galindo's performance began with his starting a bed of sounds, then donning a skimask, goggles, and using both hands to pick up his custom crucifix. He brought the mic close to and away from a few electromagnetic sources (including a guitar amplifier, a hand drill, his laptop, and what looked to me to be an electric fan with the blades removed).

The output from the crucifix/mic was fed into MAX and into the speakers, making a kind of sound painting of the electro-magnetic fields radiating from the objects, and extending into the surrounding space, and the audience. It made the existence of the otherwise invisible radiation quite palpable, and crossed the territories between music, sculpture, and painting.

As might be expected from a musician with Galindo's experience and training, the sounds were themselves clear and differentiated, and throughout the evening never became muddied. More often than not, they had a tonal center, and were clean of any trigger sounds and early envelope clipping. I mention this not to denegrate composers who use such sonic attributes as compositional content, but just to note that in addition to Galindo's dramatics, he had a professional's attention to the quality of each sound in itself.

I wasn't able to discern--through listening--a logic in the MAX program used to sequence macro developments through time. Certainly Galindo was paying attention to every moment's sound, and it's switching in and out in his performances' micro-structures. I would have to experience the piece again to become sensitive to any larger developmental structures in the work that may have been there. I'll leave this, then, to the readers of this review, and simply encourage you to attend any future performances by either of these composers. And of course, to attend future Thursday night performances at The Luggage Gallery.



gal*in_dog AKA Guillermo Galindo
www.galindog.com

Quiet American Aaron Ximm
www.quietamerican.org/

Information on upcoming Thursday performances:
http://www.bayimproviser.com/venuedetail.asp?venue_id=7

Concert Review: Elzweig/Perlmutter and Lower Case Curry

This is the third in a series of reviews on the LSG New Music concert
series, held at the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco.

The concert was held on January 26, 2006 at 8:00 pm. Following the
standard format of this series, there were two groups performing.
8:00 pm Solos and Duos: Marc Elzweig (bass clarinet) and Michael
Perlmutter (Saxophones). With Liam Staskawicz (trombone) Star Holder
(french horn) and Jesse Olsen (trap set).

This performance comprised a number of short pieces, that were in fact
solos, duets, and a small group including all those above.

I seem incapable of walking into this series on time. As we walked up the
stairs to the gallery, Mr. Perlmutter bent over the railing and greeted
us with a long lunar note from his saxophone. As we made it to the
gallery we saw that the players were distributed around the periphery of
the gallery, playing to the surrounded audience, with all
instrumentalists eyes on Mr. Perlmutter for cues.

Following this introductory hug, Perlmutter and Elzweig played together a
short piece that was based on a Bulgarian folk song--somewhat loosened at
the seams, allowing the tune to move between rhythmic, melodic and almost
ambient delivery. Several of the pieces spanned this range.
The next piece was a solo by Elzweig, slowly presenting the sonic
fullness of the bass clarinet.

The pieces from Elzweig's solo through the end seemed to focus on
technical strategies to blowing and fingering the instruments that
generated sonic qualities unique to the instruments.

Perlmutter presented a song with the word "Birth" in the title that began
with a full breathiness through the sax, and over the course of a couple
of minutes, led through a growing presence and complexity to a final
pitched note. The gallery is a great place for this kind of piece, as it
is small enough and live enough for the subtleties of such an approach to
be heard well.

The next piece sounded to me to have Klezmer roots, but continued the
breathy blowing of the previous piece. This was followed by another sax
solo with Perlmutter tapping the valves open and closed without blowing,
creating a percussive effect not unlike the sound of a picked electric
bass. This was followed by another sax and bass clarinet duet, and a
final piece performed by all members of the group.

While this group's music was not electronically generated nor enhanced,
it shared a materialist focus on the product generated by a physical
instrument. Perlmutter stayed away from the more common squeals of an
excited sax and he and Elzweig instead gave highly-magnified views of
what are usually micro-moments: the attack sound of the valve covers
hitting the opening at the beginning of a note, and the usually brief
startup that bridges silence and pitched sound. These, together with the
rich granularity of an extended note's vibration, were for me the primary
subjects of this first set of the evening.

The second set (9:00 pm) was by a group with my favorite name: "Lower
Case Curry". Nary an Indian in the group, though. MaryClare Bryzwa on
electric flute and MAX (running on a Mac notebook), Mike Sopko on
electric guitar, and Noah Phillips on prepared electric guitar.

LCC performed twice for their set. There did not appear to be a great
deal of interplay among the musicians, although each undoubtedly was
listening to the overall sound, and deciding what to play as a result of
that consideration.

Sopko sat in the middle of the three and for the most part played as fast
as possible, playing scalar runs of notes of equal length and loudness,
with short pauses from time to time. His delivery seemed self-absorbed,
which I don't mean as a criticism, just an observation. Like Pollock
delivering paint he ploughed into his single-note riffs and runs,
delivering a consistant sonic texture that seemed to pause when the riff
ran out, as opposed to sonic cues from other members.

Phillips' sounds were texture- rather than scale-based. He achieved a
remarkable range of timbres and textures using a variety of mechanical
materials (including I believe steel wool, a small egg-beater, and
various rubbing, tapping and bowing tools), as well as maybe a dozen
analog effects pedals.

Bryzwa started the set on flute, singing through it and delivering
breath-long notes, while also generating and modulating tones using MAX.
Her sounds mixed with Phillips' to create an atmosphere that wrapped
around Sopko's muted but furious 32nd notes.

The Noodles: Performance at LSG in SF

The Noodles: LSG in SF.

This is the second review on Outsound's "LSG New Music Series" held on Thursday evenings in San Francisco.

Outsound is a collective of "explorative sound artists" who present performances throughout the SF Bay area. Information on Outsound may be found at www.outsound.org.

This particular series is being held at the Luggage Store Gallery, 1007 Market Street (near 6th) in San Francisco, and curated by musicians Rent Romus andMatt Davignon. It is the longest-standing experimental music series in the Bay Area, having been operating since 1991. Past performers have included Cecil Taylor, Alan Silva, Henry Kaiser, Fred Frith and many others.

On January 16 there were two performances: one by Daniel Martin-McCormick, and one by The Noodles (Suki O'Kane, Michael Zelner, and Allen Whitman.

I arrived toward the end of Daniel Martin-McCormick's opening set, so I won't say too much about it. He was using an amplified electric guitar to produce non-melodic and non-rhythmic sounds, layering them with sounds from CDs, and using a variety of effects modules. I'm sorry I arrived late as I would have liked to have heard more of his music.

The Noodles set up two on the floor and one in a chair, behind his effects rack with wheels. All three musicians switched between instruments and sound-makers. The instrument-shaped sound triggers I noticed were bass and electric guitars and a MIDI breath controller. Other sound generating devices included ipods, radios, a function generator and a button-interfaced sample player Suki O'Kane played with her fingers.

Michael Zelner sent his breath controller MIDI signals through two MIDI sound boxes and to a MIDI signal distributer, through to a number of effects modules. The audio signals from his MIDI modules were passed into a Mackie mixer and sent out into the PA.

Suki O'Kane split her time between rubbing the strings of her electric guitar near the bridge, and using her fingers to send out arhythmic cluster-clouds of short samples from her drum machine. She also tuned a radio receiver in, out, and between stations.

For the first part of the approximately 50-minute set Allen Whitman played samples from ipods or similar devices. For the second part, he picked up a bass and repeated non-obtrusive measures.

The overall soundscape was, like what I heard from Martin-McCormick, without melody or clearly articulated rhythm. The sounds were not new-agey, they were more machine-and-city sounds for that. For my ears they were not ambient either, too loud for that. But they did stay as ground without figure, a shifting, low-lying set of slow-moving textures.I perceived no tonal centers throughout the piece, other than occasional music from (I believe) a radio tuner, that was faded in and out of the mix without further modulation. I understand that The Noodles often modulate sounds picked up from the area they are playing in, but I did not notice that, if it occurred. The music changed but I noticed no sonic or musical structures that implied either direction or temporal modulation. This was an improvisation for the moment.

Information on the Outsound LSG New Music Series may be found at
http://www.bayimproviser.com/venuedetail.asp?venue_id=7 and
http://www.outsound.org/ .

Jon Brumit's Vendetta Retreat: A Review

A Performance Review:

On January 12, 2006, Jon Brumit and musicians performed in San Francisco's Luggage Store Gallery. The lineup included:

Jon Brumit - director/drums/guitar
Joe Goldring - baritone guitar
Wayne Grim - baritone guitar
Suki O'Kane - drums/percussion
Lee Montgomery - sampler/electronics/laptop/radio

There was a third drummer, but I didn't catch his name.

This was the loudest concert I'd been at since Glen Branca. But interesting stuff. There were two sonic strategies that I thought worked well for the group. One consisted of single, enormously loud hits by all drummers together. All three drummers delivered a synchronized hit of kick drum, snare/or tom, and cymbol. Immediately after smashing the cymbol the drummer(s) muted it. In the small loft space, at this volume (also amplified with 15" PAs) the effect was to send the reverberation of the stacatto hits off the walls, hanging it in the air for several seconds. It wasn't an echo, but a shimmering blast. I doubt it could be accomplished without the amplitude. I loved it--though I do believe I've lost five years of hearing that I was kinda counting on...

The second sonic strategy that worked for me was a sustained attack on guitars, drums and possibly electronics, lasting a couple minutes at a time. No definite pitches, no clear rhythm, but a wall of sustained noise that you could "search" actively listening to different parts of the sonic spectrum.

This second strategy took me back to a vinyl album I'd heard in 1970, of La Monte Young rubbing a gong for about 45 minutes. Again--as I remember--no definite rhythm, so melody, just a full spectrum of sound and resonance--like dark Morris Louis veils. I'm sure La Monte Young's performance was nowhere near the volume Brumit's group produced (and it would not have occurred to me to turn up speakers or headphones to that level), but the oceanic quality of the sound was similar for me.

Over the 30 minutes or so of the piece, I noticed maybe 12 or 14 distinct sections, and there were various other quieter and occasionally less minimal strategies played. For me, these two were the most, uh, striking. And like Branca, I don't think this particular piece would reproduce well as a recording. But in person, within this space, it was fascinating.

Brumit opened with a laptop piece that seemed a bit less raw, but I missed the beginning of the piece, so I can't really report on it, apologies.

The concert was a CD release event for "Vendetta Retreat", released on Edgetone Records.

Living Cinema 1987

Selling Out

The other evening at the Red Rock open mic I was talking to Bill, a singer with an incredible voice. He referred to Bob Dylan and mentioned "Selling Out".

I noted that the concept of "Selling Out" was hard to apply to Dylan, since he had a record contract within weeks of hitting NYC, before he wrote any of his most innovative songs. The question of "selling out" was around in the '60s and '70's, but its application has always been problematic.

Some artists create a space that is difficult for viewers or listeners to navigate. If that difficulty isn't too great (the level differs with different people and different media) people can be attracted to playing with the space, learning how to navigate it, and how its edges are determined. The attractiveness, as I've written before, is a function of Vygotsky's "zone of proximal development".

With the mass media that was present in the '60s, large numbers of people shared the same inputs, and pop artists emerged, like Dylan.

What happens, I believe, is that people eventually learn to navigate the artist's space. Artists also either exhaust it, or move to other spaces for their own explorations. The artist can lose the ability to create an attractive zone. Some artists find strategies that work throughout their whole lives, like Duchamp, Picasso, Zappa. Others have the space lose its foreignness for much of its audience--people domesticate it.

I like Beefheart's "selling out". After putting out some incredible sonic constructions, he put out an album called "Unconditionally Guarenteed" with a photo of himself holding handfulls of cash. The music inside was simple and dull, I've never heard anyone defend it. So when Beefheart sold out--explicitly--he lost his audience. Some sell-out. He later put out a couple of killer albums, after regrouping. And the space was back.

As an artist, you find a space to manipulate. Depending on the strategy of that manipulation, and the complexity it engenders, it may give you enough to work with for your whole life. Or you may work through it within a year, and never find another. But the relationship of the artist to that space is not one of money. You can't buy it, and you can't starve yourself into it.

I was looking through the foreign section of Frys' DVDs when I came across the Stan Brakhage DVD released a year ago, not long after his death. I had just asked Robert Polidori if he'd seen it, and coming across it in Frys was something of a surprise. I'm still surprised at times when I find something out here that I think of as east coast.

They did a wonderful job transferring the films to DVD, I'm surprised that DVD would handle the single-frames so well. The compression work is exceptional, as it should be for such a set of images.

I hadn't seen Brakhage's later directly painted work...God knows how many hours of Brakhage films I've sat through--possibly more hours than I've spent sitting in Greyhound busses. And I've done Greyhound busses.

The transfer was good enough for me to be absolutely transfixed by the images on my monitor. Brakhage films I always hear more than I see, even though they're silent. I guess there isn't much more for my eyes to bring to the images, my body instead reacts synaesthetically, and I settle into hearing the rhythms, pitches and timbres of the images as they pound past. What I get out of it, besides the sensual pleasure of the experience, is the sense that THERE IS SOMETHING PRESENT. There is a referent, somewhere between Brakhage, the painted film, and my self, that is present like a spirit, that, for moments at a time, while I experience the film, exists.

Not all art form provide that presence. Usually songs don't. Not for me. They aren't sensual enough, there's too much pre-agreement to the rules of the game. But sometimes there's an articulation that reminds you of the inner muscles in the throat, or a timbre that suddenly modulates from scratchy to smooth and hard, or a counterpoint that has you parsing the phrasing one way, then shifts and forces you to parse the same notes differently. Something happens between the form you hear and the ability to hear at all, and suddenly you glimpse into the interstice between the surfaces, as they shear and suddenly there is a depth there, a dimension that wasn't there an instant ago. And ya know I could fall into that depth, and so it isn't just another aspect, it's one that I have purchase in, and yet this is just sound. How can I have purchase in sound? But here it is, and I don't just hear it, I care about how it evolves, even though its only a sound.

So the Brakhage images remind me: there is this place, a place that has always attracted me, where for brief moments at a time, I am sensually aware of my immediate existence in a way where there is a break in time itself, which I recognize as an a-priori necessity for such a perception to take form. A fissure in the sensual stuff that is composed, a fissure that appears unexpectedly and invites my scanning senses to fall in, and at that moment I feel a vertigo that has nothing to do with the physical material of the composition except that I'm present. Because all that occurs in the presentation is a change: it is my self that supplies all the vertigo. And that is the moment I feel my existence, with its own texture.

Transcendence

Exhaust is America's transcendence.

Living Cinema 1989 

Art Process

Seen from a certain perspective, the generation previous to mine defined Existentialism, and my generation could take that focus and explore it as an art practice. Not just that existential moments existed, but that one could develop their poetry for ourselves.

Art, then, not as a hobby for distraction, and not as a career, but as an ongoing project of creating an image of what it means to be human. And whatever aspect that is the least successful for your last piece, that becomes the focus of your next piece.

So this process, repeated throughout a lifetime, leaves a crumb trail of portraits, and of course the sequence itself is as interesting as any one piece.

The creation of the work requires a certain seriousness of purpose...although I don't mean the type of seriousness that many people think of with art. I mean serious, I mean dedication to the series. Not a flake. And that's different than a dilettante, and where the dilettante and the artist part paths.

The younger someone is when they begin the art process, the deeper it sinks, and the longer it has to mature.

I was speaking with my friend Ethan Place the other evening, and we both knew people who had put off facing their meaning their whole lives, until they retired. And when they finally retired, they didn't know what to do. Sometimes they just die, for no apparent reason.

Children know instinctively what to do, they intuitively create art, and their laughter marks the moments that they perceive--it's all so amazingly natural. But people, one bit at a time, step away from that natural inclination to create, to grow the self. And life, when its distractions recede, becomes empty. There is no vector into the future, there is only the past and the empty room of the present.

There are many lives that are just too hard, and a person who is living through one of them may not have the ability or time to create. But where did gospel come from, if not sung by those who had the hardest lives, least time, and didn't even own themselves? Or the British and Irish tunes, rebirthing in the poor Appalachians? This isn't just a rich man's game.

What is it that causes us to want to shy away from meaning?