A Good Week

The world is so full of those of us who work in privacy and relative isolation that I honestly don't know - beyond a surmise - about how other people feel about encountering versions of their own work in the wider world. In my case, I hardly ever encounter it, so this was an interesting week for me - it happened not once, but twice, and it was pretty nice both times.

Back in the days when J. was in grad school in New York, John Schaefer's program on WNYC-fm New Sounds was a favorite late-night listen. I heard so much of music I have come to love and value on that show, and it was a great way to end a long day. And I was tickled to death back in the 1980s when John actually played some of my cassette-only releases.

So you can imagine that I was kind of happy on Monday I got a couple of notes from sharp-eyed friends bearing pretty wonderful news: some of my recent work was going to be featured on an episode of New Sounds! I'm not embarrassed to say that I cracked open a Grolsch, sat on the couch with J., and really enjoyed myself - not least because I was in the company of musicians whose work I really enjoyed. I hope that's not too vain. You can hear an archived edition of the program, should it strike your fancy.

The second of the week's pleasures all started with a problem: at the end of the 2005 AES conference in New York, my flight was cancelled, leaving me with a good bit of a day and nothing much to do. My friend Luke Dubois, whose radar for the wonderful is finely calibrated, suggested I might enjoy an exhibition entitled Obsessive Drawing at the American Museum of Folk Art. The work
really impressed me - in particular, the work of New Zealander John Thompson. So I meditated on the work, and a week or so later started on a Jitter patch which would do something similar to what I'd seen as a kind of homage. I posted an early version of the patch to the Cycling '74 Jitter forum, and also thought it'd be of some interest to Christy Matson an artist I'd originally met when she attended a Max/MSP day/night school that I'd assisted with several years ago. Christy wrote back to ask if she might use my patch to create some objects, and - of course - I said yes. And waited to see what would happen.

It was worth the wait. Yesterday, J. and I piled into the car for a whirlwind trip to the Hyde Park Art Center to see what she'd done with the Jitter patch as raw material before the exhibition closed the next day.

The things that Christy had made from the humble Jitter patch were really beautiful - these elegant and rich black pieces shot through with the gleam of metal when struck at just the right angle by the light [they're tough to photograph, as what I've included here might suggest].

Several of the large works are actually interactive audio pieces - touching them allows you to interact with work from her collaborator in this project Mark Gallay.

Since there was another exhibition that involved a sequence of loud bands playing in a performance space next door, the audio was turned off. So the interaction portion is left for next time. There is a sample of the work here, though.

Between sitting quietly with J. and hearing my work on a program that was really central to forming my own sensibilities and seeing an idea of mine transformed into a beautiful bunch of objects by Christy, it was a good week.

Missing but not Inaction

Wow. It's been a while - I have to keep reminding myself that I should try to overcome my usual view that my life isn't that interesting to total strangers and just get on with trying to construct a narrative that doesn't involve various manifestations of hysterical misery.

My new solo release Amalgam: Aluminum / Hydrogen is available on the Palace of Lights label. You can find out more about it and listen to a sample by clicking here.

In less object-oriented terms, 've been doing some performing here and there - most recently as one-half of The Desert Fathers, a duo with trumpeter Jeff Kaiser. Our inaugural appearance before actual humans was a part of the second annual Boise Experimental Music Festival.

You can see some pictures of our performance here. It was a great time, and my personal thanks to Krispen Hartung for his hard work and hospitality. You'll probably be hearing from The Desert Fathers in the form of some acoustic Icons, at some point.

The "two laptops and a mandolin" trio it's been my pleasure to tread the boards with has christened itself pendergartontaylor (or just PGT for short, inna prog stylee) and continues to make the joyful noise and generally thrive. Most recently, my pal Brad Garton's 50th birthday neatly lined up with his hosting an evening of the Roosevelt Arts Project in the Borough Hall of the amazing community he lives in, Roosevelt, New Jersey. We did two pieces for the evening's program, and you can listen to the first of them by clicking here.

It looks like the next PGT outing will be a brief performance at the 2007 NIME (New Instruments for Musical Expression) Conference in NYC. I'm looking forward to it.

Apart from that, it's been business as usual - staring slack-jawed with awe and wonder at the BBC documentary series Planet Earth, taking some pleasure in traversing the list of people Clive James thinks we shouldn't forget (there are some excerpts published here, in case you're curious), and enjoying some recent musical offerings from Arve Henriksen, Jim O'Rourke (realizing a graphic Takemitsu score, no less), Menomena, Hal Rammel, and David Torn (among others).

Oh yeah - I managed a quick trip to the Netherlands to do a workshop in Delft.

Well, okay - I guess it has been a gay, mad whirl.

Embarrassing admissions about luxury items

I am normally given to enjoying and admiring those small and perfect things that the world presents to us free of charge or those things which are the gifts of attention. While I'm sure that insanely expensive hotel room on the shores of Lake Locarno is very nice, this cup of coffee has its charms, too.

Having said that, It gives me some vaguely guilty pleasure to type the following phrase:

prescription varilux bifocal Oakley sunglasses

There. I've done it. Move along, nothing to see here.

Spark trio performance now online

It's taken me a few days to get around to getting it up, but an MP3 version of the trio performance with my pals Brad Garton and Terry Pender at the 2007 Spark Festival is now online and available on my new and expanded MP3 downloads page.

Part 1 (15:25)
Part 2 (12:39)

Reasons for a lack of stardom...

...a lack of talent? Possibly, but that's not what I wanted to say.

I am in the process of working on some new material and patchery, and I have realized what one of my problems is; I spend too much time listening to things in their raw state. This week, it's been revisiting and enjoying the pleasures of Nathan Wolek's granular toolkit for MSP, reminding myself that the whole granular thing may well appear to be "overused" because people only opt for a tiny subset of what's possible [as Marcel Wierckx' work suggests, which was always my view of FM synthesis in earlier times]. To that end, I'mve been taking materials I'm really familiar with and rather exhaustively tweaking parameters very slowly in various combinations, and spending a good amount of time living inside/alongside the results. For hours and days.

I expect that by the time I think I've got it figured out, some part of me thinks that no one else will be interested; my inner midwesterner shows up, pronounces the results "nothin' special," and moves on. This "slow preparation, fast execution" stuff is tricky.

How I missed on-air fundraising

Owing to the spectacular snowstorm this past weekend, I was effectively trapped in Minneapolis. I am extremely grateful to Dave Pederson for filling in for me.

Things were fine when I drove up earlier in the week to participate in the annual Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Art, where I was going to perform with both of the live ensembles I'm currently working with - a trio with Tom Hamer on percussion and Mark Henrickson on visuals, and another trio [for this occasion, a quartet - hooray!] with Terry Pender on mandolin, Brad Garton on laptop and Luke Dubois on visuals. The quartet with Brad and Terry and Luke went swimmingly, and we even managed that particularly miraculous situation of being able to turn the bed in Brad and Terry's room into a recording studio for some sessions while Terry was in town.

Things got a bit interesting later in the week. Due to circumstances beyond their control, neither Mark nor Tom was able to make it to Minneapolis, which meant an impromptu solo set. Luke Dubois came to my aid and provided some visuals which I believe went a long way toward distracting the audience in instructive ways, but all seemed to have gone well (note to self: a consequence of playing with great people is that you feel all the more exposed when you return to solo work). The Spark Festival is a great collection of stuff, full of very friendly people and interesting music, and very short on attitude. My thanks to Doug Geers and his crew, and to J.P. Hungelman and his band of merry clubsters.

Given the storm and all the unpleasantness between Minneapolis and Madison, there was no way I was going home on Sunday, which is why you turned on the radio and got Mr. Pedersen instead of me. I made a cautious dash home yesterday, and things are kind of back to normal, except for the shevelling. Next week on RTQE, it's back to business as usual, thanks to our listener sponsors.

How to ruin an-air fundraising(and save your evening)

Last night was the first of two weeks' worth of on-air fundraising for WORT-FM, when all good radio hosts talk a lot more than usual and wait for the phones to ring.

The normal and appropriate thing to do is to go with shorter pieces [for me, that means "less than 10 minutes," in case you're wondering] that are exciting and upbeat.

But that sort of bothers me. I'm quite well aware of being so generally unexciting, thanks - the Q stands for "Quiet," after all. But it's more the idea that the normal goal something that stops one in one's tracks. So I decided that I'd try to integrate this into my fundraising appeal... to play something that would bring things to a standstill by the force of its Ch'i/prana/integrity/whatever.

And I had just the thing: Susanna and the Magical Orchestra's 2006 all-covers release Melody Mountain on Rune Grammofon. Go buy the disk. No, really. Susanna Wallumrod [yes, she is related to that guy who drums on ECM discs] and Morten Qvenild from Jaga Jazzist, very minimal instrumentation, and a production job from Helge Sten that displays the Prince, Leonard Cohen, Joy Division, Kiss, and AC/DC covers like diamonds on inky black velvet.

I played her cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," and it even fetched people from other parts of the building/phone answerers into the studio to ask, "What is this? It's exquisite...." And, in honor of a later pledger, I ran her take on "Love Will Tear Us Apart Again."

Upbeat and exciting? Well, maybe not. But music that is about what I think I try to do on an ordinary evening? Oh my, yes.

Disk death (a chance to listen again)

My preparations for the Boston workshop last week were enlivened by disk death, which involved two important things: the arrival of a new Macbook Pro, and the death of my iPod library. Well, actually, the death of part of the library.

So I now have to start reloading a large portion of my iPod library from CD again. Not something I look forward to doing, but it's been an interesting chance to look at those shelves again.

One thing I didn't expect to consider is my habit of what I put on the iPod. Previously, I had this notion that I'd be going through my library and keeping only the cuts on a given recording I liked. But going back to reloading stuff, I'm struck again by hearing the things that I left off the first time. The last specific example was some material from Talk Talk's "Spirit of Eden" that didn't make the original cut.

What was I thinking? Probably saving space. But I've decided to be more selective about including entire albums, and leave off the individual cut selection for a while.

In turn, I've been thinking about the notion of novelty vs. diffusion; My reloading puts me in the interesting position of simultaneously adding new work alongside things that have been off my radar for a while. The verdict: diffusion trumps novelty. There's just more in the past to be surprised by.

Don't just look out the window - check the curtains

I'm in Boston to do a workshop, and did the Hotwire thing to find a hotel room. Owing to the insane cold snap that blankets most of the east and midwest scrambled my flights, my flights were retimed and rerouted, but (apart from a theme-park-ride landing) all went well. The hotel I'm staying is pretty nice. I was particularly drawn to the historically themed curtains. Never thought of putting historical documents on my curtains. Ah Boston, crucible of our liberty....

This reminded me of a little song about Curtains by Peter Gabriel. Just a fragment, really - it shows up on the B-side of the Single "Big Time," I think (Yep... Ah, online discographies).

Oh, draw the blinds
We can shut out the night
Oh, pull up the blankets
Pull the blankets up tight

And there are angels on our curtains
They keep the outside out
And there are lions on our curtains
They lick their wounds
They lick their doubt

The image of the vanquished nursing their hurt and doubt has stuck with me.

The last place this showed up was in a computer game - Myst IV. No kidding. You can see the sequence (and hear the tune) here.

Little Pleasures, part N

This is not about perfect or guilty pop songs, although it does have something in common with them -- the idea that some small well-crafted things expand to fill a much greater place in the sensorium than you might imagine.

My favorite T-shirt.

Mint juleps on derby day.

"The Thrill is Gone" suddenly coming out of a radio on an Interstate in the middle of Wyoming in the dead of night while you're driving cross-country alone.

An extra hour of sleep on the coldest morning of the year.

And the specific item celebrated here: A freshly cooked batch of Irish Oatmeal, a dash of brown sugar, some chopped walnuts, and chopped dried apricots and golden raisins rehydrated in my favorite Bourbon.

Note: the quality of the ingredients makes all the difference. Fussy though it may be, Irish Oatmeal is a universe apart from the stuff I grew up with, and the nuts, fruit, and bourbon also figure heavily in making this a Platonic breakfast of which all other breakfasts are mere shadows.

Not a wall of sound. More like a fogbank....

This week's through-the-eardrum wonder is all about the primary colors of rock and roll, but with a reduced palette. Well, okay. Not reduced in number, anyway. It'e Rhys Chatham's gloriously drum-free recording "A Crimson Grail" on Table of the Elements. One large, sprawly ensemble of several hundred guitarists and what appears to be a lone cymbal recorded live in the Sacre-Coeur in Paris.

It's interesting to hear the clapping and cheering between sections, since you get a nice sense for the size of the performance space. The architecture of the sections isn't particularly surprising - slowly building masses of strummed clouds [diaphanous in the first section, darker in the middle, and building to a huge chiming and ecstatic single-chord coda at the end] that rise and fill the space, and I'm sure that any recording would almost certainly miss the precise mix of individual voices or groups peeking through the giant cloud of massed tonalities in the space [something that I think never records]. But it's a wonderful thing to hear, having something of the same effect of my other favorite giant-mass-of-guitar-like-things piece, "Symphony #3 (Gloria) by Chatham's one time bandmate Glenn Branca. But where the Branca uses his work as a vehicle to investigate the overtone series - a kind of Mahler to Arnold Dreyblatt's Webern - Chatham's performance continually reminds us of the humble electric guitar itself. It's a lovely recording. Wish I'd been there.

Listener Questions (part N)

"How come you didn't play any [artist/recording] when I called to request it? Do you think they suck or something?"

Although it was not always so, I plan every single RTQE program in advance. In part, this is because I'm programming from my personal library quite a lot of the time. In addition, I honestly try to make sure that things fit together with something that (at least at the time) seems like it has a logic, and the logic of free association is such that your request might not fit well, even if I did know it was in the station library.

So don't feel bad. I try to pay attention to requests and selections, and it's quite likely they'll show up the next week or thereafter."

A Well-known Address on Broadway

Something like 15 years after he entered my listening life, the work of Tetsu Inoue continues to be something I personally seek out and continue to enjoy. I confess to a certain general interest in how artists grow and mature over time (even in those situations in which only a slice of their collected work is of interest to me. The later "tonal" work of Arvo Pärt and Talk Talk's last two recordings Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock come immediately to mind here as examples], and -- in particular -- the work of artists who are apparently willing to venture as creators outside of the zone of comfort provided by decent sales or critical acceptance or the inertia of a "fan base."

Like a lot of his fans, I was unprepared for the arrival in 1998 of the Tzadik release Psycho-Acoustic; there'd been some general discussion that Tetsu might have decided that he'd gone as far as he could or wanted to within the zero-BPM ambient genre that he'd pursued with such success. But the release was a bolt out of the blue, jettisoning nearly every outward and visible sign of the work that preceded it [timbre, form, time scales] in favor of a completely different universe. It wasn't the case for everyone, I found the release [and the release of Fragment of Dots on Tzadik the next year] to be a real revelation -- a chance to hear someone you thought you knew reinvent himself right before your very ears. So I've never been among that group of people who wanted Tetsu to go back to conjuring giant fogbanks [If you're the sort of completist who is always in the mood for impoverishment, there's a complete listing of his ambient-era Fax releases (along with mention of which ones have been reissued on the Fax Ambient label) here.].

So it was a real surprise to have a new "oldskool" Tetsu Inoue disc cross the transom -- one which in both form and title hearkens back to his ambient days on the Fax label. While I am not likely to stop encouraging you to hunt up a copy of his wonderful 2006 release Yolo anytime soon, this is a lovely piece of work.

2350 Broadway 4 is the fourth of a series of ambient collaborations with Fax label owner and canonical ambientalist Pete Namlook, and picks up there the earlier discs in the series [from 1993, 1994, and 1996, respectively] left off. Suffice it to say that it continues the work of its predecessors -- expansive and evocative single-take soundscapes of great grace and elegance.

The new release is a 2 CD set, but not in the traditional sense: it's a single stereo audio disc and a companion DTS 5.1 surround version of the same material. While both are nice, it's very interesting to hear the way that Namlook and Inoue imagine spatializing the piece. I'm considerably more accustomed to hearing multichannel works of the electroacoustic variety, where the grammar of space and placement has more to do with trajectory and velocity than it would with, say, diagrams of plantings in a large and formal English garden. If you're familiar with the earlier 2350 Broadway releases, you'll no doubt recall that careful placement and languid movement within the stereo sound field was a large part of the sound and feel of these recordings. Re-imagining them as 5.1 surround is not that hard to imagine. It's often the case that the differences between a surround recording and a 2-channel folddown are pretty radical; 2350 Broadway 4 does a considerably better job of making the transition down (or up). It's a fine addition to the series, it'll probably make people who found Tetsu's more recent recordings from the late 90s on to be problematic [i.e. people who are not me], and it's great to have the surround mix.

Since I really enjoy and value Tetsu's work over the course of the last decade, I think of 2350 Broadway 4 as more a note from a friend that reminds you of your shared past with them.

On a related ranty note, I continue to be amazed just how lousy surround stuff can sound on people's "Home Theatre" systems. I shouldn't be surprised to realize that lots of those things are judged by their owners to be great based on their ability to deliver butt-rattling low-end for big-budget pyrotechnics and shizzy high-frequency crap whizzing around intended to make the experience of seeing movies about beehives "more authentic," should I? But man oh man, some of that stuff in the middle range [where lots of interesting things like music take place] sounds just dismal.

Paging Mr. Proust, White Courtesy Phone....

Something amazing happened this morning.

As a result of the release of some recent work of mine as a part of the Palace of Lights FLOOD series, an old acquaintance from the days when I was involved in cassette culture got back in touch after a number of years. That kind of thing is always a rare kind of pleasure, if for no other reason than forcing you to compress some large period of your life into a single short newsy paragraph.

He pointed out that he still had all of my old releases from the 1980s. It was certainly flattering to think that he valued them enough to hang onto them, but also got me thinking that - as nearly as I could tell - I might well not have some of them amidst various relocations and repacking for sabbaticals, etc. He was going to transfer the cassettes to CDR, and offered to run copies of them for me.

A package of five lovely CDRs arrived in the morning post covering a little over a decade of released work of mine during the decade of the 1980s, sporting jaunty color covers derived from the original cassette liners. I was stunned.

This was work I've not heard in at least a decade, and probably a lot longer. Imagine that someone reported finding a whole box of your treasured posessions in the attic of a house you lived in while growing up and sent the box to you and you'll begin to get the flavor of the rare gift my acquaintance blessed me with.

What's made me slow down while listening has been the discovery of the extent to which hearing these brings back a flood of memories about how and when they came into being. Election night of Ronald Reagan's first term when the engineer and I got drunk in the studio and recorded this beery eccentric handclapping for a track, an odd record of my learning to program FM synths and discovering samplers, backing tapes for my wedding, and guest appearances of my friends' children, now grown.

There's no absence of cringe in the bargain, as you would imagine [I certainly liked analog delay lines and gauzy synth pads, it would seem]. But I'm going to be a long time repaying or paying forward this chance to meet my old self and listen to the stories he has to tell me. This is a gift I would wish on everyone (and yes, I'll probably put a few of them up on my downloads page, at some point. There's a lot to choose from. :-) ).

Thanks, Robert.

Listener Questions (part N)

"Why don't you play more lowercase recordings on RTQE?"

It's a matter of politeness more than taste, on my part. Probably the main reason is the same one as the reason that I don't play more stuff that falls within the Japanese "Otaku" genre circle of light—some of my listeners drive cabs for a living, and they simply can't hear the work over the noise floor of their "moving office." Back in the days when the WORT transmitter link was considerably flakier than is the case now, they would helpfully call me to inquire as to whether or not we were still on the air. Having driven cabs for a living myself and knowing the despair that comes from slim radio pickings while moving between fares, I remain mindful of that segment of my audience and avoid things that exist predominantly in the low or high frequency ranges, or work that is exceptionally quiet.

Another reason to avoid extreme changes in dynamic range is that some listeners with sleeping children will occasionally turn up something that is very quiet, only to have themselves scared silly and to have their children wakened when the next piece begins at a (now] very high amplitude.

And yes, I do think of silly things like an audience when I prepare programs.

Rampant Careerism

Part of my New Year's resolution was to bring my behavior more into line with my pronouncements. Rather than merely speaking with admiration about online labels and artists who make their own work freely available in ways that don't include a UPC label, I decided that I would seek to do so myself. To that end, I created my own downloads page on my website, and also decided to pursue some online release opportunities.

The first one of those has come to fruition. A half-dozen excerpts from longer live performance recordings of my work is now available as a part of the Palace of Lights label's online release series, FLOOD. You can access those recordings here.

I'm very excited to be involved with Palace of Lights — it was one of my favorite American indie labels during the decade of the 1980s, and Kerry Leimer, its owner, has emerged in the new century with amazing new work. I commend both his new and reissued work to your attention without reservation. If you're a regular RTQE listener, you'll certainly have heard some of it.

Back in Black [Deathprod!]

I first ran into Deathprod (Helge Sten) on a remix disc which took as its source material the work of the Norwegian composer Arne Nordheim. Actually, I was initially curious about the Biosphere remix on the disc, but found myself actually preferring the stuff this Deathprod person did with the material. Dense, but very carefully constructed and mixed. In time, that led me to the improvising ensemble Supersilent, an ensemble that included Sten - one of those listening discoveries that is the start of a long and appreciative journey.

Trying to locate Sten's earlier solo work was quite a challenge - small release lots, some on obscure Norwegian labels, etc. But the release of his most recent solo project Morals and Dogma provided a marvelous respite from the endless search - the disc was also released as a 4 CD Box Set in tasteful black called, simply, Deathprod, which included not only Morals and Dogma, but his hard-to-find first two releases, Treetop Drive and Imaginary Songs From Tristan Da Cunha, along with a fourth CD of much older and unreleased work. The 2004 release, in its time, went out of print and once again, it became hard to connect with this sumptuous dark and strong body of work. In the meanwhile, I kept spinning it and ranting and raving about how great Morals and Dogma was, even though I knew that the truly serious Seeker After More among my audience was in for a bit of a hunt. As some of you know, this is one bit of my radio life that I always feel vaguely guilty about.

But ranting more broadly is once again an option - the 4-CD box is back in print, and well worth your time and listenerly attention if you have any love at all for beautifully and patiently crafted 0 bpm soundscapes. There is a more recent vinyl-only collection of a half-dozen remixes that I'll be spinning for you in the near future on RTQE. Stay tuned.

By the way - you can find an interview with him that might (or might not) shed some light on his methods and intentions here.

The Return of the Invalid Objects

I'm never sure whether or not starting the new year with a post on something old is appropriate or not. But it seems to me that a consequence of living online is that diffusion trumps novelty.

Voiceband Jilt, the CD of my work released on the c74 label last year, took as its source material a set of recordings called the "Invalid Object" series. It was a project of the Irish label Fällt, originally released in the form of 24 3" CDs, each of which took their title from one of the "reserved words" in Java. Although I included a weblink to a location for the original recordings in MP3 format in the liner notes for Voiceband Jilt, the Fällt site was down for redesign and retooling for quite a lot of the last year or so.

The great news is that Fällt is back with a nicely redesigned website, and a reliable link to the material is back, too. I would commend that material to your attention (you can find it here) once again.