another big birthday....

today is the 50th anniversary of the cassette tape. for most of us who grew up in the 1970's, this was the first method of recording one's voice and playing it back, as well as creating "playlists" (which most of us elders still call mix-tapes).

i discovered this cassette in a box behind a box behind a box... it's a tape of two songs recorded circa 1981 of our band - seditionaries. one track was called "the problem" and was one of the few songs i didn't write the lyrics (these were written by the guitar player, dave bornstein). "trigger happy" was written in response to johnny thunders heroin habit - which would eventually become a problem with our band as well, leading not only to the break up of the band, but several years later,  the overdose death of one of the members.

these recordings were done during a short period where dede troit of UXA was our bass player... and you can see her on the left side of the xerox cover - and me, standing next to her.

one of the things we reveled in was the ability to customize cassettes - not only by making covers, but using with sharpies, spray paint, etc. (things you could do to a 7" or LP cover, but not the sound object.

from childhood (probably around 7 or 8 years old) to 1990 or so, my recorded life existed on cassettes. i have a tape from 2nd or 3rd grade recorded with a friend, making jokes and stupid songs. i have recordings of baseball games made while watching games on TV (with the recorded leaning up against the TV speaker. the first music i ever made on my own was with two cassette players in 1982, playing a sound on one tape and then re-recording the sound while making another - to create a kind of multi-track recordings. i also remember that every layer added created more noise and more distortion, emphasizing the tape-hiss and the fragile wobbly sound. in 1983 i used my first multi-track recorder - also run on cassettes, and i have several years of really awful awful songs. in 1990, i released my first solo recording of so-called experimental music and, yes, this first release was also done on cassette. and so, the medium was essentially the sound carrier and sound archivist for the first half of my life (so far...)

after all of this, you might think that nostalgia has come into play in relation to some recent works that have been "cassette specific". initially, last year i uncovered several boxes of unmixed tapes of those early awful songs. the 4-track ran at a faster speed than a normal cassette, so that when i placed the 4-track recordings in my regular cassette deck they were very slowed down, pitched down and some of them had tracks running both forwards and backwards at the same time. i decided, because these were my own recordings from many years ago, that i would use them as a kind of collaboration with my younger self and my self now - (you can hear some examples and read more about that here).

along with working with my own past, i became interested in using cassettes again in my work - mostly as i've started working with less gear and wanting the work to approach fidelity in different ways, as well as using sound in space... and i'm also interested in the sonic qualities that are specific to the format, as well as certain playback capabilities. last year, while working in berlin, i was invited to create a short performance honoring the sound artist rolf julius, and i decided that since he wrote and spoke a lot about "small music" that i wanted to do a performance that was not piped through the PA system, so that it, and that the sound would feel more acoustic in that the sound would be emanating from a small walkman-style recorder - similar to an acoustic sound emanating from an object. this way the sound would not have a lot of dynamics and would remain intimate... wanting the feeling that people might have to lean forward to hear it.

many of the kinds of cassette players and recorders that are still available are portable and meant to be used for recording meetings or lectures and thus, the recording and playback speeds can be manipulated, offering less sound quality and more recording time. also, depending on the recording mode, slow play and fast play can also be used to change pitch during playback or recording. for me, it is these types of buttons, and their relationship to a moving object that that feels, at least to me, somehow more human than listening to or recording music on my phone (the recording mechanism doesn't make a sound!).

for the julius performance i used 3 cassette players, each with a recording made of an electric bass, that was recorded without being plugged in. i recorded it in "fast play" mode, and then played it back in the "slow play" mode, changing a sort of high pitched brittle sound to more of a cloud. for the performance i used 3 cassette players with sound coming out of each. they were simply on a pedestal and i was able to shift their volumes up and down (or on and off), i could shift the pitch by changing speed, and i could make the sounds feel more spatial by simply moving them around the small stage. since i didn't have the sound running through a mixer, i was constantly handling these objects, improvising while moving them around the space, and moving the knobs and switches in a way that felt more physical than working with a mixer, and i was really excited about the potential of manipulating recordings simply by carrying them around the space or simply moving them from the pedestal to the floor.

5 or 6 months later i was invited to create a soundtrack for Krišs Salmanis' short film "Long Day" and i decided to use 6 cassette walkman-style decks to perform the soundtrack by placing the small cassette recorders in various locations around the room. once the room was darkened, i began moving the recorders into corners and in the center, expanding on the vocabulary learned from the earlier performance, and fascinated by how wonderful the sound sounded as it was being carried around the space, put down, and moved again. the speakers on these units are small and not meant for high fidelity. the cassette was always burdened with a lot of hiss, and these small speakers tend to emphasize the high frequencies, and hence the hiss - which is also quite wonderful. in all of this i found myself in a situation of "active-mixing" as opposed to passive mixing - which generally needs only the use of ears and hands. in this way, i was able to approach an electronic performance as if it were an acoustic performance. using small portable sound-generating objects and placing them all over the room.

a new piece of music from an old piece of music

today, the ica website for the soundworks exhibition is live, and the site contains a plethora of great sounds from great people. every track is available to hear in its entirety, and  many of the tracks have notes (you have to click the little "i"). much of the work was created for the event (which was commissioned in response to an exhibition of bruce nauman's work). my own piece is indicative of a group of works i've been working on using some of the original 4-track cassette masters of my earliest recordings circa 1983. here are the notes, and a link to the track is at the bottom of the post:

"From Past to Present (At Half Speed and Sometimes Backwards)" was composed entirely of fragments of 4-track cassette masters that were recorded from 1983 - 1987. These tapes were some of my earliest home recordings, and were mostly songs, and mostly attempts to step away from the punk scene, which was where I first cut my musical teeth.

Many of these early recordings are pretty embarrassing, and a few years ago, I was cleaning out my storage space and found three file boxes of cassette masters (nearly two hundred tapes). My first thought was to toss them - as my 4-track recorder has long since gone by the wayside, and the tapes ran at a faster speed than a regular cassette deck... and thus the recordings could only be listened to on my cassette player at half speed. On top of that, the 4-track used both sides of the cassette running in one direction, so that when played on a regular deck, one track was usually going forwards and one backwards.

A year or so ago I was invited by a label to make a piece for a cassette release, and as usual I took a lot of time before coming to a starting point that felt relevant. Eventually I started thinking about the 4-track masters, and began listening to some of these slow, running backwards, masters that offered certain spectres of my earliest sound works. while much of what i heard was unrecognizable, every once in awhile a sound or sound incident offered recognition.

After deciding to work with the material, I approached the making of new works more like constructing a scrap book or photo album of fragments, rather than electronically or digitally manipulating the material towards some kind of transformation (which is how I usually work). Thus, I did no processing nor did I add any new sound elements. I simply cut things apart (virtually) and pasted them back together into new forms and via new relationships to each other.

Since the recordings were originally songs, you can hear bits of guitar, voice, bass, a Casio keyboard, kids toys, and many things I’ve certainly forgotten; but it seemed important to allow those sounds to remain as they were, for they reveal so clearly the sound pallet of my past.

After creating two short tracks for the cassette release, I became more interested in the history aspect of what I was doing, so I decided that for “From Past to Present (At Half Speed and Sometimes Backwards)”, I would pull cassettes from different boxes, hoping that the sources would come from different periods of my musical evolution (and I should also mention that 95% of the tapes were not labeled with dates, titles or any information).

Now, I consider these tapes less an archive in relation to a history of finished works, and more like a surplus of personal history that I can continue to converse with and modulate towards future works.

I still find the nature of the cassette object as being one of the most intimate of sound carriers of my own lifetime, perhaps because like many people my age, cassettes were the things one not only recorded music onto, but re-recorded music onto - so that music could be shared by sharing a modified object - which was generally listened to in private (and trust me, an iTunes playlist is not a mixtape!).

I suppose the other aspect of intimacy and sharing was in the fact that a cassette could also be re-used, recorded over, so that if things were perfect and beautiful, you would end up up with tiny bits of the old stuff mixed in with the new... so here are some fragments of my past, with all the artifacts of this intimate carrier, intact."

you can hear the piece on the ica website - here

my first solo cassette release since 1990!

very excited to announce the release of a solo cassette of two new tracks, on the banned productions label. the cassette is available through the label for a measly $5!!! available on the label's website - here. this is a great label, releasing works from a ton of local experimental musics - as well as from the nether realms.

the pieces were specifically created for this cassette release. these two pieces are part of a trilogy of cassette related pieces that began with the piece i did for the ICA show over the summer - using old 4-track cassette masters from the mid-1980's as material for new works.

each piece was composed using an old cassette-master of songs that i recorded in 1983/84 in my bedroom. because my 4-track cassette deck ran at double speed, when the tapes were played on a regular cassette player, everything ran at half speed - with the left side running in reverse, while the right side ran forwards. i listened to the master tapes and captured various snippets, which i then used to build the pieces. the original recordings were made a year or so out of high school, and a year or so after leaving the “seditionaries”, the los angeles punk band that included me as its lead singer. the 4-track masters were first attempts to move into a territory between the darkness of bauhaus and joy division and the jangly dissonance of early felt, gang of four, orange juice and josef k. while i’m not entirely sure what songs were on these two tapes (almost nothing was labelled), the weird slow recordings still managed to offer a few bits that sparked memories, although most of it was unfamiliar enough that it felt like new material. i tried not to process any of the original sounds other than some eq, so that the quality of the sound sources (a casio, my voice, guitar, drum machine), as well as my original sound making actions, were still able to “speak”. thus, none of the sounds have been dramatically altered.

a new cassette release on farpoint recordings...

just got the word that my cassette for farpoint recordings is going to the place where cassettes are made... it should be released in a month or so. it will be available from farpoint's site. you can get info there, as well about their other artists, and i would also suggest taking an ear peek at their output. great stuff... !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

you can find their website here

the release is not yet on their website yet.

all of the music is from a cassette that belonged to my father, featuring two well known 70's bands... the music was processed via the modular synth, mainly with filters, and controlled voltage.... 

COMING SOON from SONORIS... steve roden / in be tween noise 6 CD box set (1998 - 2003) 6 CD box set

very excited to announce that this june, the french label, sonoris, will release a 6 CD box set of rare and unreleased recordings from 1988 - 2003.

track list:

CD1 :
1. and go the great man (1990, the secret of happiness, first cassette)
2. trees (circa 1987, cassette, unreleased)
3. counting the ways and listening (1993, unreleased)
CD2 :
1. tube / fan / voice (1995, unreleased)
2. ash loop red island swarm (1994, unused track from the recordings for ‘humming endlessly in the hush’, unreleased)
3. cloud forms (1994, unused track from the recordings for ‘humming endlessly in the hush’, unreleased)
4. tree: sleep in heavenly peace (CDR, edition: 30, 1999)
5. of space enclosed (exhibition catalog: ‘translations and articulations’, 1997)
CD3 :
1. that i couldn’t breath (unreleased, 2002)
2. bird sleeping, bird walking (unreleased, 2001)
3. hanging garden [version] (unreleased, 2000)
4. view [bard version] (unreleased, 2002)
CD4 :
1. mint and ferns (unreleased, 2000)
2. chamber music (unreleased, 2003)
CD5 :
13 compilation tracks 1995-2003
CD6 :
9 compilation tracks 1999-2003

coming soon: a new cassette

what goes around and returns...

updating my website and re-entering content, i'm trying to include documentation and track notes on every release of my soundwork - solo projects, collaborations, and compilations (it should all be up in a month or so).

in the re-discovery of my very first release - a cassette from 1990 with a small xeroxed booklet, i found this quote by rilke that, at the time, felt very relevant to my own concerns:

"the nearer one approaches pure art, the more purpose falls away from the thing, until it stands there alone, to fulfill itself."

even though this was 22 years ago, i can't imagine a quote resonating any stronger in relation to my current concerns. now the question becomes how much longer until i am bale to get through the front door...

new cassette available NOW

http://thelevelofvulnerability1.bandcamp.com/album/some-small-subscapes-dedicated-to-george-nelson

new cassette... a minute is actually an immense space of time.

here is the link for the page on bandcamp here

each side is 10 one minute pieces done with the modular.

the title and image is from the film, hour of the wolf from ingmar bergman.
in the film, there is a scene with liv ullman and ingmar bergman are silent for one minute while listening to a ticking clock. beautiful.

when mathews followed stendhal's plan and mentioned the walkman...

"stendhal meant something different than this. he meant, not writing about anything, but adding twenty lines to a work under way. then his rule guaranteed high productivity (at least at first-draft level): 20 lines x 300 days = 6,000 lines - about 200 pages, or the better part of one of my novels, if not his. did he follow his rule? if he did, did it prepare him in some way for the incredible fifty-two day binge on which he dictated la chartreuse? (why does dictation, practiced by two novelists, perhaps my favorites, so frighten me? go ahead, see what happens. your Walkman won't tell.) does writing every day foster a style that is one's own - that is, a way of writing uniquely artificial and at the same time "natural", like g.p.'s unhurried sentences and stendhal's hurrying ones? maybe. i'm skeptical, because i remember starting to write a novel "spontaneously" on my typewriter and finding that what came out was, syntactically, late henry james (that other dictator). i also feel that behind these daily warm-ups there is another or several other writers whom i'm imitating unawares, especially as i approach the zone of the page where the twentieth line is coming to an end, and that an end is more than a cessation, more too than a conclusion (conclusions being unacceptable to those who practice modernism), the expression of a wry awareness that although you and i feel and speak, any speaking of our feelings will be imperfect, fragmentary, and expressive only through its failure to express.

harry mathews, 8/9/83, in 20 lines a day.

the text above is the entirety of one page of harry mathew's 20 lines a day. in the book, mathews attempts to write following stendhal's dictum for writing "20 lines a day, genius or not." mathews book is certainly genius. his writing is precise, yet all over the place subject-wise. part diary, part literary experiment, and part prose-like ruminations, reading the book is really reading a writer's process of thinking as writing, and as much as mathews fears the idea of dictation as a writing process, the book reads very much as if mathews was speaking.

with only one or two exceptions, each "chapter" or segment begins and ends on its own page, which reminded me of how much i love to read books that can be read all the way through, as well as in single focused moments. several of gerhard roth's novels are also broken down like this. (i would love at some point to compile a list of books with chapters or segments of a page or less...)

i haven't read a lot of writing from the 1980's, but mathews' mention of the walkman (as opposed to the tape recorder) is pretty wonderful. i remember the first time i saw and heard the first consumer model of the sony walkman while in highschool. it was 1979, in gym class. another kid's dad had just returned from japan and had given one to his son. i remember him putting in a cassette and watching the headphones slowly move around the group of us, watching each kid's face react to the sound until the headphones were ritually placed upon my head. i remember how incredible the sound seemed when the phones went over my ears, and i imagined audio sound could never be better. unfortunately i don't remember at all what the music was.

i don't think i've ever had such a response to a quality of sound in relation to the positives of a "new" technology. perhaps what made the walkman so much more exciting than the development of the cd was that it took an already existing personal medium (in terms of building tapes of favorite songs for the car, house, etc.), and made it sound a zillion times more personal. it wasn't just the quality of sound that was amazing, but the seemingly tiny size of the machine itself, and its setting the table for a new kind of portable private musical experience. i remember sitting in this huge nearly empty gym and listening to music, knowing that the person sitting close enough to touch me could not hear what i was hearing. we were all together, but for a few moments, each of us listeners got to transcend our known reality towards a new one... we were transported.

of course, the walkman also set the table for the ipod, and the current situation where music has mostly become a soundtrack for other activities. it has led us towards inhabiting a situation, where music simply plays while one does things, not because they are listening, but because music can now be played everywhere or anywhere. it is now possible to have music accompanying every minute of one's life, and hence, the activity of listening to music has certainly been diluted by its availability at any time, in any place, in any form. obviousely i'm not the first person to bemoan (as well as embrace) the situation.

what's also interesting in mathews' slight mention, is that he writes of the walkman as a vehicle for recording into and then listening back to what one has just, or perhaps recently, created. i remember my mother, who was my grandfather's secretary, sitting at her desk with headphones transcribing her father's words into typed letters for him to sign; and i think about the stories of arthur russell walking down the streets of ny with headphones on, listening to mixes of his own music while being immersed in the city, to get a sense of whether or not a mix was "right"...

new thing...

i have a new cd release on the line label, called proximities. here are some notes:

Proximities was recorded in 2010 during my time as the artist-in-residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. I began by recording a performance of a series of tones played on an old battery powered Paia Oz synthesizer with a built in speaker, determined by the letters A-G as found in a text by minimalist sculptor Donald Judd. I recorded the tone sequence several times during sunrise, amidst 50 of Judd’s stainless steel sculpture in an old army barracks that has been converted into a museum. The performances were recorded with an H4 digital recorder, my iPhone and also a cheap Sony micro-cassette recorder. The space was one of the most resonant i have ever been inside of.

During each successive performance/recording these small recorders were emitting the sounds of previous performances through their tiny speakers. At times I also hummed. Obviously the process owes much to Alvin Lucier's seminal work "I Am Sitting In A Room." Essentially, the piece is an accumulation of field recordings, and not only is the space itself audible, but also passing cars, etc. All of the processing in the recordings was "acoustically" generated by simply playing the sound in an extremely resonant and uniquely sounding space. The occasional popping sound, many of which can be heard at the end of the piece, are the sounds of Judd’s sculpture expanding while the sunrise begins to change the temperature within the space.

the cover image is from a failed film project/experiment, also created at chinati, using the same vowel structure as i used to generate the music to determine arrangements of colored gels.

the cd is available directly from the label, or from the usual outlets. you can also hear excerpts on the line site and see images taken during the recording process.

a sad day for small music...

"when i went to a garden in okayama, a crane landed and suddenly gave a loud cry. i was surprised that a sound like that could exist. and then the silence afterwards: in complete harmony in the space. then i understood the beauty of japanese gardens."
rolf julius, 1992

life and death are certainly strange things. last weekend i picked up a copy of a recent cd release of rolf julius' music for the ears and small music no. 1 - both ecordings from 1979. on monday, i spent the entire day in the studio painting, with the cd repeating for about 10 hours. every time i took a break from painting, i sat and listened to these stunningly beautiful and simple works in their entirety, and i realized how much his work has always inspired me.

when i first started to make "sound art" i wanted to be rolf julius. the first time i met him, for a small festival in berlin, i ran into him in a hallway, where it had looked a bit like he had dropped a small suitcase on the floor and all of his gear had fallen out of it in disarray. he was standing there bent over looking at the small speakers, wires, and small cassette players as if reading a map. after standing next to him for a few minutes, i realized that sound was also present, barely audible, and that this was his installation. it was a wonderful first meeting, like being kids and looking for small colorful insect in the grass.

his work always had this natural feeling of happenstance on the surface, and then it started to work its immersive magic on you. it was the least pretentious work i've ever encountered - certainly more "lower case" in terms of its presence than i could ever achieve; and as an artist and human being this humility was also always present. he was incredibly generous to me, not only over the years that we exhibited together, but most importantly when i was just beginning, and he simply treated me like an another artist.

monday, immersed in these two early pieces of his, i spent a lot of time sitting and listening. at one point i went over to my desk and started to write him a letter, as i realized how long i had been listening to his work in its various forms, marveling at his drawings, his writings, and just how hugely inspirational his work has been to me - not only since the beginning of my making sound works, but continually, still, now. i wanted to tell him that his work was like a beacon to me - like the painters myron stout, alfred jenson, arthur dove, lee mullican, who always kick my ass and push me forward, julius' work is always there as a kind of measuring stick, something to live up to. unfortunately i never finished the letter.

these early works of his contain the core of everything he would do from that point forward, and i wanted to thank him for the continued tactile nature of his sound, its fragility, its presence and absence, its repetition and abstraction, but mostly its minimal presence and some undefinable quality of the organic and natural, as well as how composition too can be humble. so many times rolf called his work "small music" and it wasn't bullshit artspeak... he really meant it...

so, this morning when i received some emails of rolf's passing, my mind went to those little pieces i remember first hearing at e/static, small tea cups with little lids and tiny speakers inside - so one could sit with the object, and with the lid off the sound barely audible but constant, and then to place the lid on the cup to silence the sound. its a very sad day for sound art, and it is a very sad day for ears.

i hope anyone who is unfamiliar with rolf's work will use this sad day to discover his quietly magical world, and for those of us who were lucky enough to know him, i know we will all continue to be inspired by the works he has left behind. his sound works will continue to grow ever more present, while his physical presence will certainly be missed.

before the ipod...

"an employee in western electric's oklahoma city plant, following verbal instructions produced by a computer, has both hands and both eyes free to concentrate on wiring a telephone switching system assembly. instructions produced and synthesized into human like speech by a computer have been recorded onto magnetic tape, which the employee plays back on the cassette."

"computers in technology - today and tomorrow"1974.