Saturday, November 18, 2000

The first step is always to create or find a basic set of sound material. Where previously (in his work) sound material originated by means of sound synthesis, now sound material comes from anywhere regardless of its origins so long as it is expressive and its technical quality is acceptable. Sound synthesis is still used but not to the exclusion of other means of sound production or reproduction. Where previously synthetic sounds had to be made to sound non-artificial it is now necessary when working with a concrete sound not to make it too mundane. The challenge was formerly to bring sounds into the world while at the present it is to take them out of the world so to speak. From the beginning the term "associative" was applied to describe the music. The sounds were conceived of as "magnetic fields" (in the sense in which André Breton and Philippe Soupault used it) which held aural and visual associations. The sound fields overlap each other and therefore by operating on the one we could lead it in the direction of other sound fields creating associative complexes. The sounds also serve as image-generators. The tape entitled "Mirror Images" was created for an open project at the Bourges Festival 1999 and was given its premiere there.

Some months ago my girlfriend and I talked about a trip. A trip for two musicians who love each other. There is something very important about a trip: the destination. We would not have liked any particular destination; we would just travel all around the world and spend our time giving concerts in front of the sea.

Antonella (my girlfriend) and I recorded some words suggested by our dream, and then I started working on the piece you are going to listen to.

Perhaps our wish is just a romantic dream, a fable, or a tale for grown-up children.

Why did we choose this title? Because the listeners may wonder where the male and female voices were.

Cocaine is an aural expedition into the streets of Seattle. Armed with two microphones and a tiny card inscribed cocaine, folks read from the card while I taped the results. Unlike invisibly-edited field recordings, cocaine is an ear-popping mosaic of voices, vehicles, words and other sounds that lurk, appear and vanish on the sonic savanna. I avoided the typical procedures in electronic music where words get spliced into atom-sized plosives, sibilants, etc., or mangled and congealed into unrecognizable clouds. Concocting a Babel of voices is easy and boring. Unlike a documentary, cocaine has no narration, objective reportage or interviews: I wanted to preserve the meaning and the melody of speech, as well as present the unintended polyphony of Seattle’s streets.

Chair is the third movement of a larger computer realized piece entitled Unravelling. The piece was commissioned by choreographer Leslie Neil for performances throughout January of 1999. The spoken material heard in the piece was compiled by Ms. Neil who was inspired by the tragic illness of her mother who suffers from Alzheimers disease. This material was then recorded and processed in different ways using Super Collider (James McCartney), hoping to bring out the different expressions felt through the text as well as through the collaboration.

Corroded Grooves is an interactive installation that explores the spectrum that exists between the binary poles of noise vs. information and physical vs. digital. The installation combines digital and analog audio sources, rhythms and noises, patterns and textures, blurring such apparent oppositions and boundaries and forming unstable musical hybrids. The installation uses re-designed turntables to play a variety of materials and a user-unfriendly computer interface, playing upon the current DJ and technology hype. Through the extraction of sounds out of found objects and the randomized and interactive recomposing of the sounds, the traditional hierarchies of composer, performer, audience and computer are also broken down.

The idea for a cactus and tape work came about when I heard a performance of John Cage’s Child of Tree. I was immediately taken with the sound of the cactus in particular. Taken from its natural environment and placed in the confined and groomed existence of a pot, amplified with a contact microphone, the cactus took on a completely new and interesting character, however paradoxical. Without the amplification its subtle and poignant resonances go largely unnoticed. The relationship between natural objects and their unnatural extension is the metaphor which inspired Grandchild of Tree. I am deeply indebted to Nathan Davis for his amazing cactus technique and samples!

Night Ascends from the Ear like a Butterfly, composed in 1999 and dedicated to my grandmother, Tami, was inspired from Haruo Shibuya's poem, Coliseum in the Desert. The words Shibuya uses in this poem such as "night", "a time of music", "rain", "black fountain", "piano string", "useless choir" and "butterfly", gave me compositional ideas. These images were developed in my imagination separately from Shibuya's poem, and they were transformed into music. To me it is very interesting that once one finishes a piece, it leaves the creator, and it grows inside somebody on its own, maybe or maybe not as same as the creator's mind. The piece has its own life. I hope my piece has left me...

There are two types of visual images; visual images do not possess the sounds and others do possess the sounds. For instance, "night", "butterfly" and "a time of music" belong to the former type, and "rain", "black fountain", "useless choir" and "piano string" belong to the latter type. To realize the sound of which the visual image does not possess was challenging during the compositional process. The intention of the butterfly sound is to depict the surrealistic vision of a butterfly flying away from the ear. To me the sound had to be shimmering and transparent. To create the butterfly sound, a tremolo passage from Maurice Ravel’s piano piece, Noctuelles (Night Moths) from Miroirs was sampled and processed in the computer using various techniques including filtering, reverberation and pitch shift. On the contrary to the pitched tremolo sound, I also used the sound of small pieces of aluminum foil shaking up and down in a metallic bowl, which is non-pitched, to create the surrealistic vision of butterfly staying at one place, not flying, but moving its wings delicately as it breathes.

Piece for tape — Realised in Chevaleret Studio