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An excerpt from the interview Cory Arcangel did with me at Rhizome.org [dead link - see below]: "The computer still has the shock of the new, or the shock of the bad in some cases. Art world folks know painting, photo, and printmaking lore, but are less secure--myself included--knowing what constitutes talent on the computer as opposed to some easy-to-do technical trick. I thought because everyone had Paint or the equivalent on their computer and had at least made a mark or spritzed the spraycan, they could see that I was doing something more ambitious with it. I was thinking of this guy in New Mexico who made perfect perspective drawings using an Etch a Sketch. If I could draw La Femme Nikita from scratch on this toy program and actually have people (well, guys) say she's hot, then a landmark would be achieved for both Paintbrush and the computer. The problem is I drew her so realistically people assumed I was running a photo though a pixelating filter.
"When I talk about craft on the blog, just to make it clear, I'm not talking about drawing ability but things like mosaics and needlepoints that relate to the computer on a much more fundamental image-making level, the grid level. I love the cross-stitch patterns and beadwork you can find online based on MSPaint drawings. In the late '90s I was impressed by the writing of cyberfeminist Sadie Plant, who opened up for me a whole organic, non-analytical way of looking at computation. She traces digital equipment back to one of its earliest uses, as punchcards for looms, and talks of the internet as a distributed collaborative artwork akin to traditionally feminine craft projects At the time I was drawing and printing hundreds of spheres at work and bringing them home, cutting polygons around them, and then taping the polygons back together in enormous paper quilts. In my press release for the Derek Eller show we called it 'corporate tramp art.'"
Update: New Link to Cory's interview with me.
Continuing my unbirthday celebration, this image arrived by email, with the caption INVINCIBLE. Another gem. Thanks to Diana and Matthew, and Luke for the badass figure.
"Permanent Chase" [mp3 removed]. The second in a projected series of "quieter" pieces for drum machine and Sidstation. The first was "Clip City" [mp3 removed]. They're not really quieter, they're just not as compressed as my other audio so they don't explode out of a pair of computer speakers. Bump the volume a bit and they're "loud enough." [Update: I've since made both of these tracks louder; these are the quiet versions.]
On "P. C.," yes, the lead is repetitive and dumb. It's supposed to be kind of a joke. And the key change at the end is also a bit of a joke after all the repetition (bad musicians use gratuitous key changes to hide a thin song). For those who might think I use only presets and dry, out of the package synth sounds, generally I like'em but these pieces actually got a fair amount of tweaking. As I explained in an earlier comment:
I've been using controllers (knobs and curves) in a lot of the work. Mostly cutoff filter/resonance, some LFO vibrato and sweeps. In "Permanent Chase" I used a controller to detune one oscillator, that's how I did my "key change." The drums in "Clip City" were filtered using LFO to change the envelopes, and "Permanent Chase" had three 45-second "movements" each using its own distinct filter settings (the Mutator effects filter in two of them plus Spektral Delay in the third). Each part was mixed down separately, run through noise reduction then cross faded so it appeared to morph out of the one that preceded it. This was all in the drums. The Sid had chorus plus the detuning. Maybe I should be proud that everything still sounds "out of the box."
My birthday falls, um, around Halloween (we ain't all sentimental on this blog so that's all I'm sayin'). Stephen and Andrea carved a pumpkin in my honor and named it Tom. Thanks, guys, it's beautiful.
I've been having an interesting discussion offline about the "confusing" nature of my recent music. A listener suggested that if it's German trance or house I'm going for, it should be more sophisticated and varied, with more filtering, pitch-shifting, layering of sound, use of quantizing to give more swing to the rhythm, and less use of factory presets. If it's conceptual art (as in Yoko Ono or Philip Glass minimalism--my examples), it should be a lot clearer that's the frame of reference. As it is, the listener says, the music is somewhere in the middle and needs to lean one way or another.
Maybe what set him off was a piece I just posted, called "Permanent Chase," which took a one bar "found" melody and pretty much beat it to death. Composing for me isn't about spending hours in the lab creating new synth sounds--it's more about taking what's there and using it to just to the point where you're about to scream and then tossing in one little change that brings some closure. Maybe with that piece I failed (too many bars before the goofy key change? maybe if snipped out about 8-16 bars?). I've pulled it pending further study 'cause I'm not sure myself.
Generally speaking, though, I like that middle ground he's talking about. My visual work has always occupied a realm somewhere between "failed commercial art" and "conceptualism that's too stupid to look at." I certainly started out doing music with that mindset. I've been grinding out so much of it lately that maybe it's starting to get "good," as in, one wants to hear it be "better." That may be the time to walk away from it. My hearing would probably thank me.