Tell
us about yourself.
Cut my analog teeth on my friend Doug
Leedy’s Buchla Music Easel in the late 70’s. Couldn’t afford a ME so hocked the house and got a Serge
Modular Music System in 1979.
Remember going to Haight/Ashbury and picking it up from Serge. The only book/manual at the time was
Allen Strange’s Electronic Music: Systems,
Techniques, and Controls which
I ate, drank and slept with.
I came to electronic synthesis from Early
Music (Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque). Have always been fascinated with timbres! My days are still filled with listening
to, exploring and creating new timbres.
My day job for the past 40 years has been
the Resident Composer for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland,
Oregon. That position has given me
endless opportunities to delve into all kinds of musics, both acoustical and
electronic. In the 80’s I wrote a
lot for the KRONOS Quartet and did a little encore piece for them called
“Galaxians” with a musique concrete tape accompaniment. In 1983 they recorded my Dracula score
for the Festival.
It seems like I have always been
experimenting and exploring music and sound, from performing Electronic Valve
Instrument with Anthony Braxton’s Pacific Northwest Creative Orchestra to local
free improv groups: Trapezium, T2 and sonoluminescence
http://www.sonoluminescence.us/
For more about my musics:
or
Your
new release Analogie is recorded using the Buchla 200e. How long have you been using
the 200e?
I’ve had the 200e for about seven years but
in the past year I have devoted daily practice to exploring and deepening my
understanding and technique of this amazingly open-ended, complex
instrument. The hope was to
finally be able to at least harness a bit of this instrument in service of my
express needs and desires. This
new album, analogie, is a step in
that direction.
What is it about the 200e that inspires
you? Do you have a favourite module.
It’s endless potential for patching
connectivity and its responsiveness – it is like a finely crafted acoustic
instrument. My favorite module? 266e Source of Uncertainty – I routinely
get lost in it for hours.
Is
it your weapon of choice for anything synthetic when recording or do you use
other synthesizers?
I tend to obsess for months or years on a
particular synthesizer in my arsenal.
There was a period of 4 months in 2004 where
I just woke up every morning and created a new piece of music on my Moog
Voyager in response to the daily photo send down from NASA’s Mars Rover. Eventually, Edmund Eagan in Canada
emailed me and suggested he do a visual re-mix of the image each day. Thus we began posting a daily image and
one minute soundscape. As it
progressed Edmund began to animate and do marvelously creative morphings of the
daily images:
Lately, I’m returning to my Serge and VCS3. I feel an obsession coming on.
What
have been some of your favourite synthesizers over the years.
Besides the one’s mentioned above. My other favorites are my Jupiter-8
which was the second synth I got after my Serge. And I really love the Steiner-Parker Synthacon and Synthasystem – something
magical about Nyle Steiner’s filters.
Do you use computer programs to create
sounds or just modular synths?
I use computer programs to sample both the
synth sounds I create and the strange sounds I get from my instrument collection:
waterphones, hiciriki, anklung, gongs, sho or the environment.
What do you like to listen to?
It changes. Lately, Risset, Subotnick, Stockhausen, Mumma, Takemitsu…yikes, stop me! I’m sonically omnivorous!
Do you have a favourite sound, natural
or synthetic?
White noise and all its derivative sounds:
wind in the pines, the sea, interior jet hums, rain, rivers, explosions, breathing.
. .
Is there anything you wish for that has
not been made yet?
I’ll have to think about that.
