INTERRUPTIONS #2
Once Upon a Time in CA
Curated by Chris Brown
Just as the struggle for the Western U.S. in the late 19th century revolved around the construction of the railroad, the struggle for global domination was waged around the development of the new electronic communication technologies during the late 1970s and 1980s in Silicon Valley. It was a free-wheeling time for start-ups run out of garages by a bunch of do-it-yourself geeks and venture capitalists.
Hanging around its edges and feeding off the surplus of its aircraft and electronics industries, a gaggle of music experimenters were dreaming of a future where technology might enable new kinds of musical freedom – freedom from orchestras and scores, freedom from scales and temperament, freedom from the academy, freedom from the music business, and, most of all, freedom for noise. Free improvisation was the lingua franca where jazz musicians, junk percussionists, instrument inventors, and computer hackers could come together to play.
It was within this rag-tag musical stew that six idealist musicians, seduced into computer programming, connected their primitive 8-bit microcomputers into a network in search of complexly beautiful, automated behaviors. They were inspired by the home-brew orchestra of Harry Partch, the indeterminacy of John Cage, the electronic noise of David Tudor, with side helpings of the mysterioso of Captain Beefheart and the sonic ritual of Sun Ra. Living within a hippie backwash nirvana philosophy but confronted by the reality of wars launched from their own backyards into El Salvador and Nicaragua, their music was a quixotic swords-into-plowshares fantasy morphing uncontrollably into shouts of joy and rage.
Lest there be any doubt that this was still the Wild, Wild West, in 1978 one politician climbed through a window into San Francisco’s City Hall carrying a loaded handgun, shot its mayor and recently elected gay supervisor pointblank, and was later acquitted of first-degree murder for both crimes based on the ‘Twinkie’ junk-food diminished capacity defense.
The AIDS epidemic emerged to cut a swath through the arts community, fueling both its paranoia and intensity. The Disney cult lured ever in the background, an implacable siren of pop. Still, the beauty of chaos remained a passionate quest that promised an escape from too much control, and not enough nature. Can musical life arise from industrial waste? Does harmony exist within the interactive chatter of cane reeds, bronze rods, computer algorithms, and resonating streams of electrons?
This podcast presents one insider participant’s movie of this once-upon-a-time musical scene. Excerpts from public performances, home and garage recording sessions, and parking lot sound installations are mingled like so many strands of pasta, sprinkled with bits cheese from a Sergio Leone soundtrack to provide epic flavor. Moments of coincidence among impossible sonic bedfellows created the sauce.
John Richards/Dirty Electronics
The improviser and maker John Richards describes the challenge of recording a performance-based practice and opens up his Dirty Electronics praxis through props and projects. He also tells us about the Luddites and Leicester, touches on his views on functionality, control, and safety nets, and talks about his approach to speculative circuitry, authorship and composition.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with the British sound artist and maker John Richards/Dirty Electronics that we were unable to include the first time around.
John Chowning
John Chowning shares the experience of being a pioneer in a discipline at a time when using computers to generate music was a leap into the void between creative eccentricity and scientific adventure.
Luke Fowler
Luke Fowler talks about music, computers, and instruments, about infrasound, ultrasound, and thresholds of the listenable, about archives and obsessions, about affect as a film editing criteria, and about the enormous complexity involved in representing a person’s life. We also talk about the forces that make some artists disappear from the cultural canon altogether in spite of having created fascinating, ground-breaking work.
Elektronmusikstudion (EMS)
In 1953, after attending the first Swedish Radio and Fylkingen Society electronic music concert with Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer, Swedish artist Öyvind Fahlström wrote a manifesto for concrete poetry. More than a decade later, the Swedish Radio broadcasted his pioneer radio piece “Fåglar I Sverige (Birds in Sweden)”. In the decades that followed, the complexity and broad spectrum of productions coming out of the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), founded by Karl Birger in 1964, made it a hub for artists. But while the text-sound scene was in and out of the Sound Workshop, Knut Wiggen, the first director of the EMS, channelled his energy into the futuristic dream of creating a world-class computer music studio for experts and scholars.
David Burraston
Artist/scientist David Burraston talks about his rainwire project and how using rain as a creative medium has led him to an ongoing research that could overcome some recognized shortcomings in the field of rainfall measurements. He also talks about complex systems and creative practice in science, with an overview of CA and its applications, including his findings on CA rule space self-organization using modular synthesizers and CA sequencers.
Sound has no hidden face...
We investigate concepts of time, non-linear and non-Western, the latency of transmission or the use of acoustic and electronic delay, daily rituals and nature, a recorded slice of time and networked collaborations.