Available for sale from 326 or the Canadian Music Centre
Electroacoustic music. On the 326 label. See here or click on the link enabled section titles below for audio samples.
Garbage music.
The poetry of the arbitrary, the false dichotomy of noise and beauty, the conceptual overload of constant mediation; these have all been creative concerns of mine for some time.
Recycled music, reused, reinterpreted, restructured…
In 1998 I composed a short piece of computer music called Reduce, Reuse, Recycle which made use of different types of data reinterpreted as sound. Images, computer programs, texts, all shifted identity to provide raw material for composition. Finding the idea appealing, I decided to use it again in a longer work, an undertaking which after much effort, a tour, thousands of small revisions, and several different live interpretations (with or without video, performers, extra material, private and public sound; the electroacoustic version of ‘working things out on the bandstand’) resulted in the final work.
Two points:
Such transformations are somewhat arbitrary, the results completely idiomatic to digital media. The data is ordered to be sure, but it is not necessarily the order of sounds as we know them, since I did not consciously map parameter to parameter, but accepted the data raw. ‘Noise’ is the norm, a medium in which one can mine for orderings closer to that which we know, but still anomalous: Harmonic spectra with unusual distributions of energy, rhythms simultaneously mechanistic and irrational, noise, hisses and crackles of every colour, beautiful, ugly, and inconclusive. The archaeological traces of other orderings, the logos of the data’s previous incarnation.
Semantics is subverted by process. The sound of an image thus converted has more to do with its dimensions, file format, and details of transformation than with its content; all other things being equal a picture of a saint sounds more or less the same as a picture of Hitler. Deciding whether to ignore my sources, when to hide them, when to hint, and when to reveal became an engaging, if ‘extra-musical’ concern.
Six sections:
A joke on copyright
A website said:
All materials on this Site, … (the "Content"), are protected by copyright…. You cannot use the Content, except as specified herein.
[…]
Any material submitted to this Site may be adapted, broadcast, changed, copied, disclosed, licensed, performed, posted, published, sold, transmitted or used … anywhere in the world, in any medium, forever.
My opening stands in powerless contradiction to such grandiose claims regarding The Content. Corporate logos become sound, anonymous, valueless, decomodified. A kind of overture, a preamble for what’s to come.
Media Bites
I followed the news as a new Palestinian intifada sprang up in the fall of 2000. Downloaded images, audio quotes, a barrage of rhetoric, hatred, old voices, old grievances. Each side drowns the other out as the media dutifully reports every statement, every version of truth, every hope for resolution.
This title comes from a quote by Ralph Nader arguing against the exclusion of so-called third parties from US presidential debates. ‘If nothing else it would keep the American public from falling asleep as they watch the drab debate the dreary.’ A slow song, recycled election material finding a new usefulness after the election is past.
Kevin Austin pointed out to me a problem shared by digital imaging and audio: If everyone uses the same software and plug-ins doesn’t everyone create the same art? Therefore an enthusiastic appeal to the potential of the arbitrary (seeking Cage’s luminous accidents!): Why not imaging software as audio processor? Sound becomes image (huge in dimensions), becomes processed image returned to sound, adding rhythm, texture, more noise. A dance track to any election, techno for aging politicians. Raw image files of political rivals argue noisily and without sense, while windows open on other interpretations, other ironies.
Krispy Kernels
The journal of an expedition seeking beauty in the noisy program structures of various operating systems and computer languages. Digital Signal Processing becomes digital signal. Findings poetically obscured and revealed. Usage may be covered under the GNU General Public License.
A Graveyard for Unwanted Sound
Donations of unused audio whisper and mumble while images of deceased composers sing anonymous self-portraits above. The fractured echoes of past material, old music, CDs found in the garbage creep into the gaps, gathering amongst the remnants of the music, decomposing and diffusing as the piece murmurs its final moments.
Buy from 326 or the Canadian Music Centre.