wohnzimmer design software
so, today i want to talk about process,my process, kind of how i got there... and how it's changedover the last few years. in order to do so,i want to kind of rewind back to 2009... and show you guys an excerptfrom a piece called "195". this is kind of.... when i was at mills and kind of... figuring out for the first time reallythe kind of music that i wanted to make - i'd been making music for years, but it was the first time that thingsstarted to make sense and to gel for me.
and so i was doinga lot of vocal processing and starting to work with maxfor the first time, and... i was reading a lot of donna harawayand catherine hayles, and... around that time, at millsand in other kinds of programs, there was this discussion happeningaround laptop music. so, whether or not it was embodied,whether or not it was engaging... and it probably seemsreally passã© now in 2015, but it 2009 and was still,this kind of like, hot debate...
as to whether or notthe laptop was an instrument... and how it should be used on stage. so, y'know, reading haraway and haylesi was really trying to come to terms with what live laptop-music meant,what laptop-music performance meant. and so, one of the first pieces i made,was this "195". and i'll just play a little excerpt here. so around that time i was also... y'know, that was the kind of work thati was doing within the institution and then, outside of the academy
i was also playingin several different bands, one of which was called bodywith mat dryhurst, whose nameis gonna come up a lot in this talk. and so, we were playing, y'know,kinda like, dirty acid-techno in clubs and i was trying out some of the samemax patches in those situations, and playing the laptop. and, even then, i mean,i know it seems crazy now, but even then,having a laptop in a club... at least where i was in san francisco,was still really looked down upon,
people were like"why aren't you playing hardware?"... it was still this kind of struggle, so i feltlike i was having to defend myself, for the decisions that i was makinginside the academy... and then also on the weekendswhen i was playing out for fun. but, all i was really doing was kind oflike, making the music i wanted to hear... and combine the elementsthat i wanted to hear... and do it on the equipment or themachine that i wanted to do it on. so... yeah, in the academy it was like i wasn'tallowed to play music with a pulse...
and i love music with a pulse, obviously. and then in the clubsyou'd be made fun of for using a laptop, so it just felt like this constant necessityto defend my position on things. and around this timeis when i came up with... the idea that the laptop is actually the mostintimate instrument that we've ever seen because it's kind of mediatingall of our daily experiences, from skype calls to emailsto all these things... and so i was trying to, kind of,come to terms with
what that meant as an instrument. so a lot of the work that was happeningaround this time that went into my first album movement... was actually like,a really intimate investigation of this relationshipthat i had with the machine. even though some of the sounds arevery abstracted, it was still, like a very intimate, and "soulful" kind of explorationthat i was doing in the studio. so i wanna playan excerpt from breathe. so a lot of the ideas that i was kind ofteasing out with '195' at my time in mills
a lot of that stuff went into the albumas a whole movement and it's kind of this weird collectionof experimental songs and dance songs, and... all kind of livingin this same environment, which was really scary for me at first i remember kind of like agonizing over whether or not to put movement onmovement or to put fade on movement, as i felt like they were these kind ofcompeting worlds. and it's funny, i keep going back to onetrack on this record called interlude,
and it's kind of one of the tracks whichwent under the radar and no one really wrote about,no one really payed attention to... but i think it was kind of, for me, at theforefront of my process at the time because it was, y'know,it had heavy vocal processing, but it was also using the voice to kind oftrigger turning points in the track with these kind of like,hard shift and cuts. so at the time, i was really excited to behaving this kind of 'public conversation' about all these ideasi'd been fostering in the academy and i was really excitedto tell everyone about
y'know, everything that i was thinkingabout, everything that i was reading. and it was kind of like, thrown intopublic discourse for the first time which is amazing and a huge opportunity,but it was also kind of this like huge slap in the face where it was like: "not everybody wants you to talk aboutyour music... not everybody want to hear abouteverything that went behind it". "not everybody has the same viewpointof music that you do". so, i got kind of, a lot of push-back for... for taking kind of aconceptual approach to music.
and i also got a lot of push-backfor having an academic background. so that was kind of like a new thing forme to think about like, "why is there this blow back?" because for me,the academy is also my job: like, i'm a doctoral student at stanfordand so, i have a side band and teach and itpays my bills, and so i was like wow, how could people be angry at mefor having to have a job. that just seems so normal. but, i do understand this kind of, impulsefor people to say, y'know
"let music speak for itself,stop over-analyzing everything" "you're ruining it with your babble"all this kinda stuff... and of course a lot of this kind of stuffis just trolling online and you should never read youtubecomments... but it did make me think about that,kind of, conversation that we often havein music press. how... how, kind of, conceptual musiccan be demonized or we can kind of... see it as something that's impure, or something that takes awayfrom the music itself.
and that's something i've been thinkingabout over the past couple of years. and, we've all been to concerts beforewhere there was like, some really boring abstract somethingand then this huge program... that justified you sitting there for twohours and having to watch something. and that's not what i'm talking about,i think... i think that music should beable to stand on it's own legs, and it should be ableto immediately touch people... but i don't think those thingsare mutually exclusive. i think that you can haveideas about your music,
and you can havesomething that's visceral, and immediately impactful as well. for me, that's kind of like the holy grail. so i started asking some questions. how can the concept of a work informthe production of a piece to the extent that it's actually audible? so that one kind of main question, this is a question that sound artistsare grappling with all the time... it's not necessarily new or unique to me.
and how can we take ideas from extramusical material or ideas and use that to generatenew aesthetics, new approaches, new production techniques that speakto our lives today, situated where we are in 2015? and so that doesn't mean that all musichas to be conceptual to be good... it doesn't mean that all musichas to be made on a laptop. but that's just how i'm able to approachmusic and can kind of... find purpose and find a meaningto drive it forward. so, in terms ofapproaching these questions,
like, one really clear, low-hanging fruitis obviously text and lyrics. so, i wanted to kind of...yes, that's great... but i also wanted to figure out howthe production itself, the production techniques themselves,could actually... be embodied with these ideasthat i was kind of working through. how that could actually be audiblein the production and the performance. so, the next piece that i was working onwas chorus. and it was kind of inspired by this...this is a screenshot of my laptop that i made for this.this isn't a candid one, i staged this.
but, this is familiar to everyone,like a million pages open, doing a million things at once,this kind of like... some people call it incoherence, or wecan think of it as like a 'new coherence' where everything is happening at onceand everything's flattened... and all on this windowthat we have to the world. and so, my partner mat dryhurstwas working on some software and a process called "net concrã¨te", that he madesome pieces with and presented several years ago at the guggenheim.
and the idea behind the net concrã¨tesystem is that it kind of uses this... uses this approach of surveillance:surveillance is self surveillance... so a lot of people use surveillancefor fitness programs if you wanna like, track how many steps you've taken orhow many calories or whatever. that's the term for surveying yourself,so it's this idea of self surveillance, recording all of the audio that was kindof funneling through the laptop... and then splicing that together to createkind of like a new pallet. and so where as musique concrã¨te formany of the pioneers was about kind of abstracting the soundfrom the meaning, from the origins...
this was more about kind ofbringing that back together, and actually acknowledging the meaning and acknowledging where those sampleswhere coming from... and the familiarity of those sounds. i also treated the vocal productionin kind of a weird way. i don't know if you've heard the track,i'll play a couple of clips... but i kind of like, chop off the attackand decay, so it's this like "stuttered"... to kind of emulate like a skypeconversation or y'know, like a non-seamless stream of audiothat you're receiving online.
i then i decided to marry thatwith the kick-drum which is alsonot the "usual" production technique: usually you'd wanna kind of like... snakily weave the vocal and the kickthroughout each other, but instead i wanted it to be this kind of'kick' and like, smack in the face with the voice with this kind of like'chopped off' voice for impact. then i also used every kind of voicei could get my hands on: vocals, tons of different processes of myown voice, vocal samples to create this kind of like "digital choir"...
as kind of like the backing vocalists. and what i was really trying to dois capture the sound of the internet that, yes, does involve kitschand yes, does involve jingles but also is like a really terrifying placeand a really emotional place. so i wanted to kind of - not flatten -an internet aesthetic... into something that's just kitsch. let's see if i can play the right... i didn't wanna play... i'm gonna turn the volumeoff for a second...
because some of these early clips... there's me layingon the floor with a chair... i don't know if that already passed... but that was... mat was away on... on a work trip...and we were talking on skype and i... you know when you have those reallylong skype sessions... that start to go for like, an hour, and thenyou just start doing a really weird thing... i was just playing with a chair in theliving room and he was... video-capturing the whole thing.
so there was a lot of this kind ofpersonal, intimate stuff added in as well and you can see akihiko's desktops,so kind of, bringing in the mundane but the really hyper-personalabout these work spaces and these work stations that we use. these are the places...we're spying on people's work places, we're spying on people'sintimate spaces where they're spying on the worldthrough their devices. so i'll play a little excerpt. i should also mention, the video is madeby mat dryhurst and akihiko taniguchi.
akihiko is an amazing visual artist who... he uses the photo-synth app and thenkind of 're-synthesizes' these 3d worlds that then you can kind of navigatea machinima-style drive through. ok, i'm gonna go on...and that's really fun to play. now that... thank you. that's really fun to play now thatcolin self, who's sitting in the audience, has joined our band and who can hit some of those notesa lot better than i can live. so, this brings me to home, which wasthe next single that i released.
and this was kinda where i was y'know going back over texts that i'dkinda put over here to rest for a minute like, wanted to pull it back in. i've always felt really weirdabout writing lyrics, it's never really beena strong suit of mine... so i was like, ok, i'm gonna try to writelike a "songy song" with lyrics and i'm gonna try to marry thatwith production techniques and see if i can have it all kind of livein the same world together. so... the way thatpiece kinda started is, i was...
teaching during the week and then i wastouring on the weekends... and at that time i didn't haveinternational roaming on my phone so i was like, y'know... grading paperson the plane going playing a show... then hopping back on a plane and likerunning from hotspot to hotspot trying to update my inbox and i felt like my inbox was more likemy personal home, my private zone than even my san francisco apartmentcos' i was rarely there. so i started kind of questioningwhat that meant, if that was actually my intimate home,and then in light of edward snowden's...
public service... y'know, that becamelike a really sinister reality. if that wasn't actually a private space. so it kind of turned into a betrayal song,or break-up song, love song with the nsa agentwho was spying on me. who, if they weren't spying on me,then is definitely spying on me now. so, y'know, some of the lyrics are:"i can feel you in my room" "why was i assigned to you?" "i know you know mebetter than i know me"...
i this kind of also harkens back to thelaptop as the most intimate instrument. because in some waysi do feel like the laptop does know me and know my habits andknows things about me that i don't wanna admit to myself, like... knows exactly how many hoursi'm streaming television, even though i might say i'm watching somany hours a week, those kinds of things. yeah, so i was kind of investigatingthat a little bit. so again, i was using mat's surveillance- net concrete patch again...
to create some of the sound design. there's some recordings on there againthat he like, sneakily recorded during conversations that we werehaving on the phone or on skype, there's like a laugh in therethat when i hear it still kind of like makes the hairs standon... on my... the hairs stand on...i don't know how that phrase goes. anyways, it makes my hairs stand. because i hear it and i'm like, oh mygod, that was such an intimate moment it wasn't like giggling in the mikein the studio, it was like this...
this really intimate moment,so when i hear that in a public space it still kind of is like slightly joltingand that was the point of the piece, i wanted to make something that wouldmake me feel uncomfortable. so, it's also the song with the leastamount of processing on my voice... which was also terrifying. kind of like showinga naked voice a little bit. and also it was the first time that... i ever was lip-singing for a video,i dunno, i felt really conflicted about it, i felt really cheesy singing alongso i only did two takes,
like, get me outta here. we recorded it in a friend's studio with like no make-up or hair teamor anything like that. but it was really importantthat it kind of captured this vulnerable, intimate moment. it wasn't just the production techniqueor the lyrics, but it's also the approach of the video and i wantedeverything, the performance of it... i wanted it all to be like this holistic thingthat was about the topic itself. let's see if i missed anything.
i can play an excerpt. so i'm gonna stop it there. so metahaven came up with the idea totake the logos that were released that the nsa wasactually using for some of their... covert programsand they had a dear intern cut out each of those individual stickers so that they could create this kind of likedata-rain with all of these logos. which i thought was so visuallycompelling so that was the first time that we hadthe opportunity to work with them,
and i'm gonna jump back to themin a second, but that kind of like... i don't know if you heard that kind of"monster rumbling"... 'from one side to the other' sound... that actually came out of...or the way to make that came out of a project that mat and i did in a gallery called sommer & kohlin berlin. so they had an exhibition calledrain, steam and speed... which was based on a famous turnerpainting and they asked us to do a soundinstallation, that...
i don't know if you can see the little,white speakers in there - it's always so hard to show a soundinstallation like, you just show speakers.... so we were installing thisfrom california and were both like... "argh, it's like terrifyingto install something from abroad." but we decided to use a mp-sonicset-up with the four speakers. and we wanted to havethese kind of like little... little, impossible creatures... run across the galleryevery 30 seconds or so,
irregularly that would just kinda be like"what was that?"... and i don't know how much experienceyou guys have with mp sonics, but... with four speakers it's not perfect butyou can still get this feeling or something kind of like,running though the room instead of it just being kind of likespacialized on the edge. so yeah, we created this processof how to get these, little, caged-sounding animalskind of running across the room. i'm gonna play a couple of examplesfrom the exhibition. that's one...and another one.
so that's like a mixture of foleyand synthesis, put through this process, but for home, i recorded myselfrunning around karma, so basically, it sounds like... i don't know, like a weird creaturewith like, ten legs and three arms, like... struggling to like, y'know rush acrossthe room in this monsterly kind of way. so, back to metahaven, so... home was the first videothat we worked on together, and around that time we decided thatwe wanted to work on platform together, one of the reasons why i was drawnto metahaven is because they...
they've been really successful atbuilding in their conceptual framework into the aesthetics, into the newaesthetics that they create in their work. so it was hugely inspiring at howkind of, holistic their practice was. and i was also really drawn to theirability to kind of seamlessly draw... their political interests into their workwithout making it too didactic or too dry. they're especially good at bringing inkind of an emotional aspect, i think... even though... all of the music i've made has beenfrom an emotional place. i think sometimes i would burythe emotion under some layers, y'know...
so that you'd have to peel backand discover it, but... they have a way of being overtabout their emotions in a way that doesn't come across as tacky or... untrue somehow. so i was really drawn to their abilityto be so direct with their emotions. this is a scarf they made to fund raisefor wikileaks. when the banking institutions cut offthe money to the organization. i love how it's obviously talkingabout transparency... but they also have such avisual language that's unique to them...
that also speaks directlyto what they care about. platform. so we decided to workon platform together, with mat as well. and for platform, there were like a millionideas being banded around... but one of the main ideaswas pop as a carrier signal. so, i've been thinking about, y'know...lyrics, production techniques, performance. all these things goinginto the concept behind the work, and so i started to wonder if that couldkind of like, spread out from there and start to infect other aspectsof the music-making process. so, one of the biggest things in themusic-making process
is your album release and this wholehoopla around it and all of the press, and everything and so i was like, wewere all kind of questioning, you know, what are some different thingsthat we can do with that. so one thing i wanna talk about is... this is like a... snippet, like this isn't everyone,but this is like... a list of people whose ideasand thoughts and message and love went into the album. and that was kind of one of the mainthings i wanted to think about, is...
we have this habit, especially inelectronic music, of liking to think of this lone genius, lone-like guru on amountain somewhere, like channeling... you know, channeling ideas and creatingall of this amazing work. and of course, there are amazingindividuals doing amazing work, but... i feel like ideas comefrom a community of people. y'know, a lot of the stuff that i do isdirectly impacted by different decisions that engineers at max-msp are makingor engineers at ableton. or, you know...authors that i'm reading at the time. so all of these things are kind of likefunneled into this community,
and that's how these works are made,and that's... they don't just kind of...or at least that's my experience, they don't just, kind of like,pop out of a vacuum or a void. so we wanted to try to takethe opportunity of the... of the press interest around the album totalk about some of the philosophers, and some of the authors and artistswho inspired a lot of the work, and that i worked withon a lot of the pieces. so one of those pieces islonely at the top, that i made with.. claire tolan - she's an amazing artistand developer and also...
and also has a asmr radio show onberlin community radio. so we were thinking about,well obviously, digital intimacy... embedding physical musicwith a political message, we thought could bean interesting new twist. so really it was thought of a asmr forthe one percent. which is kind of like a... i don't know if i'm allowed tocall myself bold but it's kind of a bold move to put thatat the heart of the album, y'know... the very center of an album to put in thislike, five minute, spoken-word
kind of like, weird, asmr piece. but i thought it was a really importantpiece to put in there because... yes, it was speaking to one percent, butit was also kind of speaking to how we're all guilty of this...the same thing, kind of like... making excuses for ourselves and tellingourselves that we deserve everything that we've been given, things like that. interference is another track. this one was really inspired a lot byjoe meek, who was... he was a production pioneer, he wrote"i hear a new world"
which was released in 1960. he came up with all kinds of newproduction techniques. he was marginalized for his sexualityand had a really tough life. but he was really able to imagine thiskind of like, other world, this new world... as early as the 1960s, kind of... creating sounds that soundhyper-contemporary today. it's also kind of a love songto digital activism... "in the seed where we livealways on"... and we also wanted to take theopportunity to have the video be kind of
super-embedded in the piece,so they kind of... one doesn't really livewithout the other, so... instead of just having lyricslive in the song, the lyrics kind of continue in the video. so mat and metahaven and myself, we wrote a continuation of the lyricsas a kind of manifesto... that's sprinkled throughout the video. we were also thinking about the spaceswhere we... enjoy art and music togetherand so those little ad-banners...
we're thinking, y'know,we're kind of questioning: is this how we want to experience thework of our peers, and the work that we love with constantadvertisements... so it's kind of a twist on a lyric video,cos' yes, we have the lyrics in there... but there's also tons of extra lyricsthat we decided to add. and it was also inspired by... john perry barlow's, 1996 - a declarationof the independence of cyberspace so this is the end of morning sunand it's also a quote from that text,
and it's kind of... y'know, it's a very utopian and idealistictext that seems really dated. but i really liked the positive and utopianaspects of it and... kind of... in a way, positing this question, like... do we wanna just acceptthe way that things are... or do we wanna try to fight to makethe world a place that we wanna inhabit. do we wanna just like throw up ourhands, that this is the way things are or do we wanna be optimisticand try to make things better in a way.
which is like really kind of likenot-fashionable thing to say at all. ok, so this is a piece that i wrote,i know you can't see anything right now, i'll play it in a second.... called writer's block. i was havingtrouble writing, i was supposes to write... for a... solo percussionist for stanford. and i was really struggling with trying tofigure out how to make sense of these acoustic instrumentsat my practice. it's not that i don't loveacoustic instruments, i do love acoustic instruments but i wastrying to make sense of like...
i didn't wanna just add to the canonof something that, in a way that, didn't make sense to what i was doing, so i was really bashing my headagainst my computer... to write this piece. and so i ended up writing it aboutthis writer's block that i was having... and so i decided to have itfor percussionist with laptop, mike and laptop speakers. so, he's... he's actually playing the laptop.
so he was physically playing the laptop,like,creating a filter... by covering the different speakersand different frequency ranges that were coming out ofthe left and right speakers. he was, y'know...modulating the amplitude by his... the distance between the microphoneand the speaker. so i was trying to kind of like, turn thephysical laptop into an instrument again. and i've done this in the past with...induction microphones. it's a technique that i learned fromscott arford who's a bay area... media artist and musician. and he usedto attach them to tv monitors,
and then create feedback-loopsthat he would play. so i use that sometimes and i'll map... i'll map the signal that i'll be gettingfrom the hard drive from my computer, i'll map that to various parameters on mysynth or, you know, like to an amplitude, gate or something like that,so just like kind of trying to... give the laptop some life. and this brings me to my last slide. this is an exhibition that mat and i had,at hamburger kunstverein this summer, and it was calledeverywhere and nowhere.
so again in terms of the productiontechnique, we were really interested in... infusing the ideas. and so the idea was, we went to this amazing festivalin kutna hora called creepy teepee. and it's this really amazinganti-fascist festival... the aesthetic of the festivalis really interesting cos' it has this net-art aesthetic. but it's very much filtered throughan eastern european perspective. and also there's a kind of immediacythere that i don't necessarily always
always recognize in the westbecause a lot of these kids were kind of on a daily basis,dealing with actual nazis, or were dealing with homophobesall the time, so... it was interesting to see this kind of likeurgency and agency associated with this aesthetic that'soften been associated with... kind of less pressing issues. so we kind of went backto the asmr idea and thought: what if you could actually infuse...infuse speech with asmr tingles so we found a way to kind of like,
make the voice speak though differentasmr foley sounds. and then that was on a 24.1surround sound dome, that was developed at zkmand using their zirkonium software. i guess what i was trying to cover todayis that... regardless of whether i'minstalling something in a museum, or doing something in the academyor writing a pop song, i feel like i try to take the same approachto all of those; i'm trying to... question every aspect of the practice, i'm trying to experimentwith different aspects,
and i'm trying to make it conceptuallysound as a whole. that doesn't mean that i'm reinventingeverything, every time. or that i'm not drawing on a long lineage in a long canonof electronic music history. but i'm trying to somehowmake it my own... and make it very situatedin the time and place that i am today. so... that's it.
