Tonight Elaine Radigue is performing in Chicago. In the 1950s she trained with Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, the big guns of French electroacoustic composition, and from 1973-1980 she produced a long minimal work for the ARP synthesizer, the Adnos trilogy (recently relased as a 3-disc set on Table of the Elements). Since then, she's continued to work with the ARP, releasing work on avant-garde labels like Experimental Intermedia. Tonight she'll be performing a new piece, L'ile re-sonante.

Like many minimalist composers from that time period, she has an interest in Buddhism, and so her work has a transcendental basis, an interest in "the Universal from which everything comes." Expect a write-up to appear in Imaginary Year, as part of the media diet of that work's transcedental drone lover, Thomas.

Grading update: 100 finished, 500 to go.

Labels: music_commentary

Saturday, September 28, 2002
1:12 PM
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Hey. I'm pleased to report that a short story of mine, "Side One, Track Seven," just won a contest held by Chicago Public Radio's fiction-reading program, Stories on Stage. This means that my story, and those of three other winners, will be performed at a reading Sunday, October 6th at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The performance will be taped for possible radio broadcast. (If it does make it to the air there will probably be a simultaneous webcast—I'll let you know more details as they come in.)

Labels: personal

Thursday, September 26, 2002
11:45 AM
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So this is the post where I admit that over the past year I've become a big Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan. I started watching at the beginning of Season Six and got hooked, and have watched most of Seasons Two through Five in syndication.

Last night was the premiere of Season Seven, which I enjoyed, although guardedly. The rebuilding of the high school, and the recycling of old enemies (or at least their appearance) may be signs of creative bankruptcy. But on the other hand, I trust the folks at Mutant Enemy, and they've yet to leave me disappointed.

Early speculation on the season is flying around like mad in this thread over at Whedonesque. If you go over there you can see something I wrote about Spike's hairstyle, of all things.

Further reading: check out this interesting New York Times profile on Whedon (use username invisible-city and password reader if you're not registered in their system).

"Over time, the show's mythology has become as rich and multilayered as any work of literature -- eternally complicating its own notions of morality, allowing characters to grow up in a way rare for television and generating enough internal allusions to fuel its own media-studies department."

Grading update: 79 finished, 521 to go.

Labels: media commentary

Wednesday, September 25, 2002
3:21 PM
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Like many, I spent my college days living with another person in a single room.

We used to set up a card table for playing games or working on creative projects, and sometimes we'd wake up the next morning and look at the table from the night before, and we'd find it littered with a strange array of items: puzzle pieces and cut-up religious texts and rubber bugs and electrical tape and plastic masks and empty containers that once held buffalo wings. We used to refer to this phenomenon as "crazy man table," because the weird items on display would hint at a single cryptic project of the sort you might find in progress in an insane man's workshop.

I've carried the term with me, and still use it to describe any tabletop evidence of radical parataxis. It's been in heavy usage around here since I started using Cool Edit Pro to revitalize my work with found sounds. In addition to the normal clutter of index cards, candles, and CD jewel cases, my desk is now littered with all sorts of soundmaking items including vibrators, a harmonica, a wind-up skeleton, the squeaky toy that Bonni sent me, and a handful of styrofoam peanuts.

Related: spent some time yesterday poking around the website of Brutum Fulmen, an electroacoustic act from CT. Main guy Jeff Wrench sprinkles some descriptions of his process around various pages of the site and they have some relevance to the Number None process.

Grading update: 75 done, which closes out this first batch of papers. 525 left to go before semester's end, including the 150 that will come in next week.

Labels: creative_process, personal

Thursday, September 19, 2002
8:49 AM
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Things I've put in my stereo this week include The Hands of Caravaggio, a collaboration between veteran improv pianist John Tilbury and MIMEO (the "Music In Movement Electronic Orchestra", a sort of supergroup of electronic musicians). Prepared guitar pioneer Keith Rowe writes about MIMEO, "post-techno Duchampism," "e-mail democracy," and the way the piano "reflects history" here. Other sets of program notes and sound samples taken from the piece can be found here.

Also in heavy rotation around the house has been the album .kgs from the Japanese group Minamo, an enormously appealing mix of electronic drones, simple acoustic patterns, and odd microsound-ish knocks and crackles.

Minamo's works can also be found on a compilation recently released by the Apestaartje collective. I don't own any Apestaartje stuff, but they seem like an interesting label—they recently encased a microphone in a block of ice, recorded the thawing process, and released the results as an album.

Labels: music_commentary

Monday, September 16, 2002
2:29 PM
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I'm working on a secret project.

Want to play along? Here are the rules:

1) Go to sleep.

2) Dream.

3) Wake up.

4) Record yourself retelling the dream.

5) Send the recording (in any format) to me at the address on this page. (If you record your dream in MP3 or WAV format, please don't e-mail it to me—put it on an FTP site and send me a link.)

All participants will receive a special gift around the winter holidays. I'm formally collecting recordings until the end of November, but participation is limited, and preference will go to those who submitted early.

You should expect your dream to be heard by other people (a small group), but I will be happy to honor requests for anonymity.

Grading update: 49 graded, 551 to go.

Labels: dreams, projects

Sunday, September 15, 2002
11:01 AM
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Well, yesterday I collected rough drafts of my students' first assignment.

I teach three classes, of roughly 25 students apiece. Each of those students must complete four assignments over the course of the semester (five, really, but I've combined two into one two-parter). For each assignment they complete, they write a rough draft and a final draft, so eight drafts total. 75 students x 8 drafts apiece = 600 drafts. I can grade no more than four per hour, which means that I face 150 hours of grading between now and May. (Er, I mean between now and December. Forgot what semester it is there for a second. Gah.)

I have graded 16 papers so far. Only 584 left to go.

Labels: teaching

Tuesday, September 10, 2002
1:21 PM
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I just renewed the Imaginary Year domain for five years.

I must remember to apply for a Community Arts Assistance Program Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, to see if they will help fund the project. (Applications are available in October, due in December.)

Related piece: No Visible Means of Support, by Sue Thomas, which I link to, although the revelation that most new media writers aren't making any money shouldn't be news to anyone, and Talan Memmott's notion of "licensing" doesn't sit well with me at all.

I'm happy to give away the work for free, but it would also be great if it could generate some income, somehow. I wonder if there's a market out there for Imaginary Year T-shirts, or coffee mugs.

Labels: electronic_literature, personal

Monday, September 09, 2002
7:34 PM
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There was an article in the Chicago Reader a few weeks ago about the Chicago Fire Arts Center. It made me want to go out and do field recordings of their furnace, which can reach temperatures in excess of 3,000 degrees.

Relevant names: Vince Hawkins, founder of the center, and Nancy Phillips, executive director. Other "core members": Bryce de Reyier, Bill Anders, Zera Holladay. Dropping these folks a line is in my "must do" file (as opposed to my "things I would do if I had unlimited time" file, which longtime Raccoon readers may be familiar with).

Labels: projects

Sunday, September 08, 2002
8:50 PM
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I recently downloaded the trial version of Syntrillium Software's Cool Edit Pro, an excellent piece of multitracking / audio editing software. Over the past week or so I've been putting it through its paces, both on my own and with Chris.

The process of making music with a program like this is very very different from the process of recording music directly to the MiniDisc recorder. One way to work with it, I suppose, would be to begin by recording an entire track (a rhythm track, for instance) and then to build things on top of it, layering upwards. But mostly I've been choosing a smaller building block to work with: I've been starting with individual sounds. The program allows you to perform a vast number of operations on a single sound, and once you're satisfied with it you can take that sound and place it anywhere you'd like in the mix, in combination with any number of other sounds.

One immediate result of working that way is that I immediately begin to develop a nonlinear conception of the piece. Seeing the whole mix, laid out before me, and having suddenly been given the ability to concentrate on any segment of it, interferes with my understanding of a piece of music as something that begins and then moves forwards, developing as it goes. Whether this reconceptualization will be creatively useful remains to be seen—the fact remains that the act of listening is still linear.

A second result is that the emphasis in my soundmaking has shifted from performance to process. (From performing to processing, if you prefer.) The program dramatically increases my ability to perform procedures on a single sound, and I'm drawn to the dramatic, unpredictable effects produced by certain sets of these procedures. I'm a long-time lover of process art, so I have no problem accepting the application of algorithms as a suitable substitute for the intentionality of composition. See something like the 9 Beet Stretch (thanks Judith).

But there are dangers here. Too much emphasis on processing reduces the social dimension of music: if you can generate interesting sounds just by sitting in a room with yourself and your computer, why bother seeking out other musicians? I've long been surprised by the relative dearth of musicians and bands that compellingly balance the digital and the acoustic. The division makes more sense now that I'm beginning to understand the procedural differences of each type of musicmaking, but I still feel like the membrane that seperates different musical worlds should be breached as often as possible. Much of music's power lies in its ability to cross-fertilize, and any tendency towards insularity must be resisted. Last week, I saw computer music and performance combined in a beautiful display, when I had the pleasure of watching George Lewis and Roscoe Mitchell improvise (on trombone and sax) along with a Yamaha grand piano controlled by an algorithmic entity (programmed by Lewis).

Another possible danger is just the danger of becoming overwhelmed by the sheer preponderance of options. As I become more familiar with the various tools at my disposal I sense that I'll be able to use them with less bewilderment, but the sheer infinity of options inherent in multitracking perhaps reinvigorates the need for OULIPO-style artistic restraints, similar to those that govern Herbert's PCCOM (Personal Contract for the Composition Of Music).

Labels: creative_process, music_commentary

Saturday, September 07, 2002
10:40 AM
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My collaborator Chris took a look at that dub production site and consequently suggested we apply some of those techniques to sounds like harpsichords and music boxes, creating a sort of "Victorian dub."

This notion intrigued me, and I set out to do a little web research on early musical automata. Found this page, featuring samples from a restored music box, and then searched upwards from there and found that it was part of a larger collection of sites associated with the Mechanical Music Digest, an e-mail forum dedicated to, well, early musical automata.

Piles of information and strange sounds and weird links on that site. Glorious. Here, once again, is a reminder of why I love the web.

. . .

This also reminds me that when I eventually make it back to San Francisco, I hope to return to the Musee Mecanique to do some field recordings (although actually a little hunting reveals that I could simply buy this CD of sounds from the Musee Mecanique's collections).

Labels: music_commentary, technology

Tuesday, September 03, 2002
10:24 AM
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