from the margins to decenter

One way to know you're getting old [insert whingeing here]: This isn't
my 5th grade teacher's Mrs. Hoffman's New Yorker (Sasha
nails it pretty well, though).

after silence, part N

If I thought my life were really interesting, I probably would have said something during the last six months about (these are in no order):

• Robert Fagles’ death and how much I’m reminded again by reading/hearing his recent translation of the Aeneid that I’ll miss him.
  
• An enjoyable steampunk anthology
  
• Michael Chabon’s audacious alternative history romp/murder mystery [which deserves all the accolades it gets]
  
• The release of Max 5
  
• Doing Max/MSP workshops in London and Copenhagen in a time of awful exchange rates and being buoyed by wonderful students, the help (in London) of Nick Rothwell, and morning and evening walks into town (down the Tottenham Court Road to Soho, or across the Bridge past the lake in Copenhagen).
  
• The opportunity to see The Nels Cline Singers here in Madison, and to hear the band set the place ablaze.
  
• Discovering the pleasures of Paavoharju – who, while not pinning the quirk-o-meter, are certainly a great listen across the great linguistic abyss.
  
• The Punch Brothers’ sublime “The Blind Leaving the Blind”
  
• New recordings from The Hub, Autechre, and its recontextualizations, Collections of Colonies of Bees, Morton Feldman, Ry Cooder , and the Scott Fields Freetet, (among others).
  
• The amusing progress of my own career as a muso – specifically, how unabashedly proud I am of the duet with Jeff Kaiser, the first PGT release [these people are still willing to perform with me, happily], and a solo online release with Stasisfield.
  
• My sadness at the untimely passing of Swedish pianist Esbjorn Svensson. What a shock and a loss.
  
• George Lewis’ marvellous, meticulous, and lively history of the AACM.
  
• The arrival of a good place in town to get a Mojito or Caipirinha.
  
• How miserably hackneyed and uninspired my recent attempts at solo recording have been.
  

See? All I can do is point to things.

Farewell, and thanks for everything....

I know we're long past the point in our cultural history when information is thought to reside primarily in texts, but that's how it is for me - even trying to think about certain kinds of practice or ideas summons to mind a book for me even more often than I think of a person.

So it's almost impossible to imagine analog synthesis without seeing a copy of Allen Strange's book Electronic Music: Systems, Techniques, and Controls in my hand, all dog eared and the non-acid-free pages doing their color-changing thing. But today I'm thinking about the man who wrote it - Allen Strange. I'm greatly saddened by the news of his recent passing from among us.

It's often the case that, as a reader or listener, you form an image of the person who made the object of your attention. I think we are always doing that, in some way or other, or it's possible that this is one of the tendencies that marks me as a dinosaur in the new century/Dispensation - that desire to embody things as people. While my life is strewn with the debris resulting from the discovery that the person I imagined was kinder or more generous or decent or less [articulate in your favorite source of disappointment here], my own limited encounters with him were always a pleasure. I remember him as being nicer to me than his books were, and he really had nothing to gain from being particularly charitable to me. Maybe that's why I'm sad - I am afraid that this quality is a threatened natural resource.


Here is a live recording of Allen with one of the live ensembles he worked with - Biome. It's from the 70s, four Synthis.


The thing in the midst of this that made me smile is the following comment in the guestbook where I read the notice of Allen's death, and it seems the proper note to close this on.

silver lining:
God's Buchla will finally be patched correctly.
let the thunder roll

When we say "winter in Wisconsin," this is what we mean....

When I talk about living here in Madison, I almost always include some kind of caveat about having four card-carrying seasons, and mention that the middle of January can be brutally cold. This week has been what I'm talking about. Owing to the weekend's particular sequence of ice/warming/rain/cooling/snow/even more cooling, my shoveling blog would be about venturing outside to scrape confectioner's sugar out from around the slush tracks now rendered into dinosaur footprints. Although we are reportedly venturing into the "It might warm up as high as the freezing point of water...." range this coming weekend, the temp swing yesterday was more in the character-building 15 below to 5 above range. I could do with a bit less character.

I have some things to keep me warm, however - a pair of reissues from Carl Stone (his very first recording ever Woo Lae Oak, the arrival of the second revised edition of Brian Eno's 77 Million Paintings that includes a bunch of source images I haven't seen (Yes, I've actually run the thing for long enough the first time out that I actually recognize the new images) and some new audio source material (which will be familiar to people who are familiar with the processed voice material that shows up in installation recordings such as Music for Civic Recovery Centre or the soundtrack project Music for Onmyo-Ji). In case you missed it the first time, it's worth considering picking up a copy.

The other recent companion has been the new Autechre outing Quaristice, which hits the streets as a physical object the first week of March but is available as a FLAC download or MP3 download right now. There's a lot here to digest, but I really like the range and breadth of the work.

D'oh!

I could have found a great way to blog that didn't involve my anxiety at having such a boring life and not being a very interesting person: I could have written about shoveling snow - according to the student newspaper for the University at which my wife teaches, there have been 41 shoveling opportunities since 1 December.

Last night after midnight, we got a coating of ice, which warmed before dawn. Hard going? You betcha. But the rain did this weird thing where there was a layer of warm water below the coating of ice on the car. When you tapped the windshield with a scraper, it cracked and slid right off the glass or the car.

No point in shoveling - it's a hockey rink with several inches of water on the ice. And the story is that it's going to start snowing on top of this sometime this afternoon. This will almost certainly mean 40-pound shovelfulls of sodden snow. I may forsake the new Nick Bartsch's Ronin release on ECM Holon [its loose-limbed minimalist improv is perfect for walk shovelling] for something loud and snotty [old Oasis? It's the right snarl, even if I hardly ever listen to it]. We'll see. I now regret trading in the Zamboni for our little hybrid.

6 months of non-silence....

If you think that your personal phobias, hysteria, and foibles are not so interesting that everyone in the world is dying to know about them, blogging can be a real dark night of the soul. What is worth saying?

That you're content in ways that were unimaginable back when you were a child and assumed you'd grow up to be inexplicably tall and blond and living in a domed city with a flying car?

That seems to go without saying, since one is really talking about the texture of areal life. Some textural elements:

We're breaking the record for the most snowfall in a Madison winter ever.

My little group with fellow laptopper Brad Garton and mandolinist Terry Pender is going great guns. You can find some live recordings of gigs here and here and here and here.

We're also performing at the upcoming Spark Festival in Minneapolis, which is always an absolutely warm and wonderful time. This is also an opportunity to reconstitute a trio with my percussionist friend Tom Hamer and visualist extraordinaire Mark Henrikson for a gig at the Nomad World Pub, which I'm really excited about.

Jeff Kaiser and I have released a duet recording together as The Desert Fathers - quartertone trumpet and laptops. I'm very proud of it. We had a chance to play together again at the annual International Society for Improvised Music's get-together at Northwestern U. in December.

And on the home front, work on the next major release of Cycling '74's Max - Max 5 - is coming to fruition. I look forward to seeing this enter the world.

RTQE is going strong, with the best of 2007 list up, and new work arriving on a regular basis. It's such a pleasure to do the program. I'm so lucky.

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.