Thursday, December 17, 2009


(Still from Evolution of the Red Star. Adam Beckett 1973.)


Carl Stone Interview 8/27/09 Los Angeles La Brea Farmers Market by Owen O'Toole

The context for this discussion was the recent Adam Beckett commemorative exhibition at The Academy of Motion Picture Sciences. Beckett's ground-breaking animated films were restored by Mark Toscano of The Academy.

Owen O'Toole: We were both at that screening, myself by virtue of knowing Mark Toscano, who worked at Canyon Cinema at a time when I was on the board of directors there, and I assume you came to that screening as a) having been a composer on one of the films that was restored and b) being part of that whole milieu.

Carl Stone: Adam was a friend and I knew him actually in high school, we went to the same high school together and then knew him at Cal Arts (California Institute of the Arts) as well, and then we worked together, I did that soundtrack for Evolution of the Red Star, and so it was Mark in fact who, well both Mark and Pam (Taylor Turner) contacted me about this, she contacted me for memory about Adam and trying to piece together his life in retrospect. She's a film historian based in Virginia, one of the moderators. So she had contacted me and then also Toscano contacted me about some technical stuff around the restoration of Red Star. And he was very kind, he invited me over to the Academy, showed me the work that they had been doing. They've been doing a lot of great work restoring not only Adam's stuff but a lot of very important experimental filmmakers: Brakhage and others, and working from the original materials which is mind boggling when you think about it.

OO: It's so great that at least motion picture film has tremendous life span. It's not something you can say for magnetic tape is it?

CS: No.

OO: Though I guess Mark was working with mag stock originals from the lab that contained your original soundtracks on them.

CS: I believe so yes, he got a hold somehow.. I guess Adam must have had the foresight to keep those things at his mother's house or maybe they were stored at Cal Arts, that would make more sense.

OO: Or a film lab where prints were... doubtful?

CS: I just don''t think Adam would have done that. I would have thought he kept them at his place in Val Verde, and thank god he didn't.

OO: Is that the place that burned down and he died at?

CS: That place burned to the ground, yeah. So he must have kept them either at Cal Arts or some other location and they were saved and available to be used.

OO: Mark also mentioned that he'd discussed with you the other works you'd done from that period, and you also mentioned that they're in your garage. Could you talk about that material? You're saying that the restorable aspects might be in question on some of this material.

CS: Well again, as you alluded to, audio tape stock in the '70's had some pretty severe manufacturing flaws that require a lot of care and attention to get around these days. There's a whole industry built around restoring old mag tapes which tend to ooze gummy residue.

OO: The adhesive.

CS: Yeah, and the actual magnetic filings will fall off leaving the tape meaningless. So you have to bake them and then you basically have, my understanding is, i've never done it myself...

OO: And then you get one opportunity to play it back.

CS: You've got one chance to play it and load it onto some presumably non-destructive medium like electronic...

OO: Computer.

CS: So my masters are there. They were all done at that time, they were all using 3M tape which is especially notorious.

OO: That's quarter inch stereo recordings?

CS: Generally the way I worked is: the studio I worked in had 2 half inch 4 track tape recorders recorders and then two or three half track tape recorders plus a synthesizer of course. All my pieces were made usually recording through the process of overdubbing onto the 4 tracks and then the final product would usually be a 4 track version accompanied by a mix-down 2-track version, which would be easier to send out for people to listen to or play in a concert.

OO: Just to jump back, how did you come to go to Cal Arts as a musician or sound artist at that point? Was there already a burgeoning program led by somebody, was there a teacher there who was a luminary?

CS: Yeah. well I graduated high school right at the time when Cal Arts was starting up as Cal Arts and so everyone was very excited about this new citadel of the avant garde that was going to be opening up. And I didnt know that much about the history of electronic music or who was doing what, but I had come across..., I mean I knew Cage's work and some of the computer music done by people like Milton Babbitt, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Pierre Henry I'd heard a little of, but I knew that I loved synthesized sound and I was very interested in the idea of sythesis. I had come to be interested in electronics because of my work playing improvisational rock keyboards when I was in high school. I was influenced by the keyboardist for the Soft Machine, a guy named Michael Ratledge. And the things that he was doing, sort of simple in retrospect... He basically hot rodded a console organ and then put it through fuzz, distortion and wah wah and things like that, and so it was kind of a new sound world. And that led me to be interested in synthesis and Cal Arts was opening up, I knew they were going to have one or two big synthesizer studios, and I knew I wanted to go. I was just graduating and had no other plan. And so when I was there I came to know who Morton Subotnik, who ran the program, was, and met a lot of people like Charlemagne Palestine, Ingram Marshall..., they were TA's there. Serge Trepnin was also a TA there and he went on to build and design his own synthesizers.

OO: Modular sythesizers?

CS: Yeah, they were sort of Buchla 2.0. I think he took a lot of the best parts of Buchla 's designs and improved on them.

OO: I think of the keyboardless ribbon when i think of Buchla. Was there anything else that was specifically unique to his intruments?

CS: Yeah, a lot of things. Moog was optimized for people who wanted almost an extended organ, (that was) using a black and white keyboard. It was very much oriented towards diatonic music, twelve tones, and the oscillators themselves were calibrated to provide...

OO: Whole tone increments.

CS: Right, or half tone increments, whatever. Of course you could get in between, but it was different from Buchla which said the world of sound is a blank slate, we're not going to calibrate, we're not going to make any concessions to western music by including a black and white keyboard, we're just going to go back to ground zero.

OO: So Buchla's piece is interesting as a microtonal instrument essentially or potentially.

CS: Well yeah, it made microtonal music as easy to do as.. It made tonal music harder to do and so as a consequence it gave a kind of promotional bias towards microtoal music. And so yes, all the music that those of us who were at Cal Arts in those days tended to.. nobody was doing Bach transcriptions or arrangements or even writing tonal music at all. I mean some music might have tonal implications but you almost had to work hard in order to do that.

OO: And Subotnik brought the Buchla machine to Cal Arts.

CS: Yeah, he's the one who arranged it. He and Buchla had a working arrangement that went back to his days at the San Francisco Tape Center and on through New York, and so he brought Buchla in and purchased... Actually we had 3 studios of Buchla equipment.

OO: Was that a high point in production of Buchlas or was it just good timing in terms of that equipment being (available)?

CS: I think it was an economical shot in the arm to the Buchla business and allowed him... We had the first generation, the so called 100 series and then a year or 2 after that everything was upgraded to the so called 200 series which was a big improvement. And then later on there were other series and Buchla continued his development. Yeah, i think it was kind of a perfect moment actually.

OO: Was Evolution of the Red Star..., was that early on in your time at Cal Arts?

CS: About midway. I believe Evolution of the Red Star was '72 or '73 in my memory.

OO: I think it said '73 on the title card.

CS: That sounds right.

OO: What years were you there?

CS: '70 to '75.

OO: And was Subotnik there that whole time?

CS: Yes

OO: And it was a pretty exciting place to be?

CS: I found it to be, yes.

OO: Who were some of the other music students who you talked with and i assume worked with on things a lot.

CS: The graduate students, like Charlemagne Palestine, Ingram Marshall i mentioned. Students kind of at my age level more or less, undergrads, were...

OO: Barry Shrader was mentioned.

CS: Barry Shrader was a teacher. He had more hands on with the Buchlas and taught the class of fundamentals. He taught an electronic music history class and others. You should interview Barry if you can. Other students: Chas Smith , William Hawley, Earl Howard, Joseph Paul Taylor... I'm just talking about the electronic music studio now. David Mahler...

OO: Are these people that you are still in contact with at all?

CS: Pretty much, some more than others.

OO: Are most of them active?

CS: Well again, some more than others. Joseph Paul Taylor, who was just known as Paul Taylor at the time, seems to have dropped out of music unfortunately, he was a great musician. Earl Howard is very much continuing. William Hawley is not doing electronic music anymore as far as i know but he is still composing. Chas Smith... you're familiar with, he's doing stuff.

OO: Well maybe that's an appropriate point to ask about the world that I know him through, which is the Cold Blue record label, and another person involved with that: Daniel Lentz. Is that a world that intersected with yours much other than knowing Chas Smith at Cal Arts?

CS: Well the roots of Cold Blue go back to Jim Fox, who started the label and pulled the artists on the label together. Many of those artists like Rick Cox and...

OO: Was Peter Garland part of that?

CS: Well, Peter was at Cal Arts. So... Jim Fox was going to the University of Redlands and he was a student of Barney Childs. And so he and Rick Cox and a couple of other people, Barney Childs' students, they were out there. We didn't know them. Barney Childs came to Cal Arts a couple times and did little guest lectures, but i dont think there was that much interaction between the student bodies of the 2 schools. Later, Jim came to LA and brought his coterie with him but then also embraced Chas Smith who was a student at Cal Arts, Peter Garland who was a student at Cal Arts but did not do electronic music. Daniel Lentz was older than everybody else, little bit of a different generation actually, already had a reputation and was based out of Santa Barbara.

OO: Did that become part of the Venice and Santa Monica new music scene, the Cold Blue people? There was a record shop in Venice that I visited in the early 90's and it seemed like it had bins deeply devoted to some of this music and I hadnt seen that elsewhere. There was Rhino Records, and some other record stores that sold new music, but there was this one record shop off of Main St. that I thought must be affiliated with Cold Blue Records.

CS: Certainly did not exist in the 70s at all. Record stores in the 70s, there was Rhino, there was Poobah in Pasadena, there was Aron Records. That was pretty much it. Rhino was kind of your go to place for experimental, improv, electronic stuff. Poobah was also good. That was pretty much it, come to think of it. And Arons.

OO: So Jim Fox, he came to LA well after you were done with Cal Arts...

CS: I think Jim was starting to make his presence felt in the late '70s, maybe very beginning of the '80s, and I graduated in '75.

OO: And where did you take yourself to after finishing school, was there a next step?

CS: Well after finishing school my main activity in the music community here was to co-found an organisation called the Independent Composers Association, ICA, and we started it in about '77. It was a number of ex-Cal Arts students joining together with some UCLA students, a bunch of people who just graduated, who quickly discovered that the only way to get your music performed was to produce the performances yourselves. So a number of us gathered together as a collective and...

OO: Started doing concerts?

CS: Exactly. So, Jim Fox was not a core member of that group, but I think along the way we started some alliances with him. Then in 1978 I started working at a radio station, at KPFK, the Pacifica Station in Los Angeles, and I became the music director there and so my vantage point was as the music director of the local Pacifica station, and I wasn't really working on a daily basis with the ICA anymore, I was more cooperating with them on doing stuff.

OO: When you left Cal Arts did you go back to using the Buchla in those studios occasionally? What did you set yourself up with in terms of home equipment that allowed you to continue being an artist?

CS: Right, It's a very good question because it required a big paradigm change of thinking, because working at Cal Arts, basically I couldn't work there anymore once I graduated. So I had to figure out a way to continue composing. I'd become sort of spoiled. I mean, the synthesizer at Cal Arts was many hundreds of thousands of dollars in its day. Of course today for a thousand dollars you could buy the same amount of power, but that's what it cost in those days, plus all those tape recorders and everything. I really didn't know what to do for a while. But being at the radio station, the radio station had tape recorders and it had LP record players and it had a big music library and so that was... I said: this is what i've got, what can i do? So the first pieces that I consider part of my professional output and which I think are important pieces at least in my own musical history are the pieces that I did in the upstairs production studio, pieces like Sukothai and Woo Lae Oak which came out on LP that you have. Those were done at the studios of KPFK and I used KPFK... again, just a couple of tape recorders and a record player, microphones, because I didnt have... Nobody had a home studio then. You couldnt have a home studio unless you were very, very wealthy, a studio musician, or affiliated with some major institution.

OO: What did they have, some Revox decks?

CS: KPFK had a bunch of Scully quarter inch machines, that's all.

OO: And you did everything that one does with open reel tape recorders: tape delay and loop making...?

CS: Well, i did a lot of loop making, yes. Basically the technique that i worked on that sort of got me started, which is emblemised, if that's a word, with my piece Sukothai, and is also used to a certain extent in Woo Lae Oak, is a multiplicative process I call layering, where basically... the way I did Sukothai was I took a recording out of the music library and I just played it on the turntable and I copied it onto tape in stereo. Then I rewound the tape recorder, I mixed the 2 channels of the stereo tape onto mono and I recorded it on the left channel of the 2nd tape recorder. I rewound again and I recorded it on the right channel. It was a harpsichord recording, so I went from having one harpsichord performance to having 2 slightly delayed in time. Just like a delay effect, right? Simple cannon. And then what I did is I took that recording, I rewound and mixed the 2 harpsichords to mono and I recorded that on the left channel of the other tape recorder and rewound again and recorded the 2 on the right channel. So now I had 4 harpsichords and the rhythmic..., the pattern of delay had become irregular, right? 'Cause it was done in 2 passes.

OO: And in discrete channels these kinds of effects do incredible things, the same information coming... It's one thing if they are both panned equally to the 2 channels, that's one type of delay, but the discrete left and right delay, it's a pretty awesome sound structure.

CS: Well, especially if you keep going. Because that's what i did is I rewound the tape again and I mixed down the 4 tracks of the harpsichord into mono, and then I just continued this process over and over and over and over and over and over again until I had 1,024.

OO: Wow.

CS: It only took 10 times, but it took all night to do that. And basically... then what I did to make the final piece is I just took it serially and assembled the final mixes: 1,2,4,8,16, and all the way through, and that's the piece. So I didnt use all the techniques available to the contemporary musique concrete artists, there are so many of them. I just concentrated on 2 or 3, looping and layering being the main ones. And so I built a bunch of pieces just based on those techniques.

OO: In the time at Cal Arts, did Subotnik bring a lot of other artists through to influence the students who were there? What about Alvin Lucier?

CS: Alvin Lucier, definitely.

OO: New York people...

CS: Well, yes.

OO: Gordon Mumma, is he a west coaster?

CS: Yeah, he's originally from I think Ann Arbor, but taught at Santa Cruz for many years. Gordon Mumma definitely came through. Steve Reich, Philip Glass, they all came through. Lucier probably came through, I dont have a specific memory but we certainly knew his music because in history class that I took we listened to I Am Sitting in a Room. You know that piece?

OO: Yeah.

CS: Well that was very influential, and the piece I just described to you, my piece Sukothai was very influenced by that kind of serial process assembly.

OO: I dont know how much later this is, and I dont know if its the first piece of yours I heard, but it's on one of the Trance Port tape releases, i think it was called LA Mantra... But anyway, the piece Wave Heat, it's a pop song, what is it: Linda Ronstadt?

CS: Heat Wave is... Well, she may have done a cover, but the original was by Martha and the Vandellas.

OO: Right, it was a Motown track. So that's along the same trajectory in terms of your tape work. Was that done at KPFK?

CS: Well, that was done by..., that was like 1982, and the KPFK pieces I described to you were done in '79 and '80. Sukothia was '79, Woo Lae Oak was I think '80 or '81. Then what I was interested in is the idea of real time performance, and I didnt really see tape as being a truly... I mean, I did some performances mixing tapes in real time, but there was a certain lack of spontaneity and a certain lack of control. You're working with these very fixed objects, like tapes. There was no random access in those days, you had to rewind tapes and fast forward tapes to get to the location you wanted, and it seemd to me first of all that LP records... They weren't truly random access, but at least you could pick a needle up and put it down somewhere else. You could go backwards and forwards. So I was kind of a proto DJ, because I started fooling around with turntables and I thought: how about using turntables for live performance? Didn't occur to me to make my own records, that seemed out of the question, nobody was doing it then and making a record would mean... Usually it meant you had to print 500 or a thousand copies in those days. A lot of money.

OO: But you were doing a radio show as well as working at the station, right? so playing music was the most natural thing in the world...

CS: That's right. And just fooling around with turntables was very natural too, and doing mixes and things like that on the air, we did stuff like that. But what happened was I discovered a stereo digital delay with some special features, and again this is 1980, '81. Digital delays now with looping, you can get 'em for 100 bucks, maybe if you want to buy a hand version you might pay 500$, 600 or a thousand if you're really splurging. You had to work hard to pay 5,000$ for a car in those days and that's what this thing cost. But I did some fundraising. My dad helped, I got family friends.

OO: For the station studio?

CS: No, for my self.

OO: Oh, wow. That's incredible.

CS: Raised the money...

OO: What was that thing called?

CS: It was called a Publison DH-89.

OO: Do you still have it?

CS: It got stolen from me twice. Not once but twice. They broke into my house in Hollywood, they stole it, it was insured, I got a new one and they stole it again.

OO: Wow. They knew what they were looking for.

CS: Well, they wiped me out, they took everything. They probably didnt know what it was. Who knows where those things ended up? There weren't that many of them in the market place, in fact there were so few of them in the marketplace... They were sold mostly to rich rock musicians. And once, they had an office in LA, a sales office. The company was French, but they had a sales office in LA and once I went to the office and met with the guy, they were friendly. And above the guy sitting at his desk was a huge sign that said: What do Peter Gabriel, Stevie Wonder, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Carl Stone, bla bla bla, have in common?

OO: Really? You were up there?

CS: I was up there. Not because they even knew who I was. They knew that I'd bought one and I was like one of twenty people in the world who had one.

OO: That's sweet. Do you have a picture of that somewhere?

CS: I don't have a picture of it, goddam it, but somewhere...

OO: I think you need to photoshop one up. With Publison...

CS: I should. But they also ran ads in some electronic music magazine or studio sound and I do somewhere have a clipping of kind of the same thing.

OO: With it you were able to make similar effects as you were getting with that channel separation..., or was it a new...

CS: Well I sort of moved on from that. I wasn't trying to duplicate that effect so much as I became interested in chopping, looping, repeating, and so Wave Heat was a kind of early version of some of the pieces that you can find on my website now, if you go there, the pieces from the '80s, Shibucho and Dong Il Jang. Go to my website and you'll find them, the pieces that used that Publison.

OO: Is Wave Heat on there?

CS: Wave Heat's not on there

OO: Do you have a decent copy of that? It was put out on cassette in a fairly decent sounding edition that I played on the radio for years. Ha ha.

CS: I have the master somewhere, the stereo master somewhere. My archive version is probably from the cassette.

OO: Well it makes sense, in terms of that change of equipment, because you can hear the combing things that are happening in that piece and it's pretty fascinating. I enjoyed it a lot and I think it's what drew me to your work. It might be that piece alone, there may have been some other... Were there some other releases? Just to focus on that for a second: Trance Port tapes and a produce, he wasn't a Cal Arts person, was he?

CS: No, as far as I know, I don't believe he was. Where did he come from? I'm not even sure. He just contacted me out of the blue.

OO: OK. Because he did an interesting job. He also produced a couple of CDs of his own work that are somewhat interesting, kind of sample space music. And then he invented packaging for cassettes, this was during the time when cassette was the radical exchange medium, and everybody, especially people at radio stations, used them to trade material.

CS: Yeah. I hated them, I hated cassette. I always did. Sounded shitty, was very hard to find an exact location, they broke, they jammed, got caught.

OO: So you tended not to use it..?

CS: You couldnt help it because it was what everyone else was using, and for years if you wanted to send out demos of your work you had to do it on cassette, couldn't avoid it, but I never liked them. And I was so glad when the compact disc came out as a medium, and when the cd burner came out I was really happy 'cuz then I could make my own CDs and get rid of the whole cassette thing forever.

OO: I failed to ask questions about this: Mark Toscano specifically encouraged me to ask you a little bit more about collaborating with filmmakers and soundtrack work in general. First, he mentioned 2 other films that i guess were produced at Cal Arts that he says you did soundtracks for: Amusement Park Composition and Decay, was that by Roberta Friedman and Graham Weinbren?

CS: Yes.

OO: And then Accident by Jules Engel.

CS: Yes.

OO: Did you talk with Mark about those when you met with him recently, or...

CS: Not recently, we didnt talk about it recently.

OO: Is there anything about those 2 film soundtracks that you recall that were especially neat, maybe in relation to Evolution of The Red Star? Do you remember those soundtracks, those films at all?

CS: It has been many years since I've seen or heard those films. It was a revelation listening to Red Star after many years, and it's obviously an early work of mine and in some respects I hear it as such. But on the other hand I dont think it sucks and I see in it the kind of seeds of a number of tendencies that I've followed in later years. and some of the tricks and techniques that I use today have their origins maybe in that soundtrack. I dont know what it would be like..., I would be very curious to listen to Amusement Park, or to see it. I recall, Red Star came together in a way that felt right. I think Adam and I, we may have had some spirited discussion, but we basically understood each others ideas and it all came together in a way that I think we felt good about. As I recall Amusement Park was a bit more of a struggle, it wasnt quite as natural a process, and Accident also came together pretty well I think. But the thing about Accident that disappointed both me and Jules Engel, who was the filmmaker, was that the small details of the sound that I put in the soundtrack did not survive.

OO: Because of the bandwidth of the 16mm...

CS: Because of the bandwidth of the optical soundtrack, yeah. And I being very young and very inexperienced really didnt understand that I was going to lose the detail that I wanted. And Jules was..., I think we did it twice: we mastered it, we got the optical print back and we sat down and we listened to it and we both said: what went wrong? Jules probably paid for it out of his own pocket. We had to go back and we just tried the whole thing again to see if we could get a better version and it didnt work. It was just too much to ask for an optical soundtrack.

OO: So when Adam Beckett's films all listed a mixer...?

CS: Don Worthen. He's the guy who did the Accident soundtrack too.

OO: Was he a professional in town somewhere?

CS: His roots were in Hollywood, he was a professional sound man in Hollywood for many years, good reputation. And Cal Arts hired him to run the film sound department.

OO: So they had a printer head at the school to burn soundtracks onto?

CS: They didn't burn the soundtracks, but he did all the mixing. He did the transfers on to mag stock and the mixing. They had maybe a 3 channel..., you know these big machines, you thread them up, it would be like 35mm mag stock going through all these...

OO: Pretty impressive.

CS: Uh huh, in those days it was phenomenal. And they had a mixing room and so on.

OO: So he was supposed to understand some of the limitations of the medium and he did his best...

CS: He did his best, absolutely, and we just didnt... I didnt have the vocabulary or really even the full understanding of what a microtransient was, to know that that's what we were losing. And that is exactly what it was, just that transient response both in terms of the overall bandwidth and the ability.. You just can't cut that into a 16mm optical track.

OO: I'm still having a little bit of a disjoinder in terms of understanding how Adam Beckett's work suddenly made its way towards the production of Star Wars. I guess George Lucas sort of swooped in and saw a creative universe under the direction of Jules Engel, was it?

CS: Jules Engel was the head of the animation department and yes, I think they sensed that there was...

OO: And It was an affordable work crew and they were interested in sci-fi to some extent. Some of the talk about Beckett was that he was a sci-fi enthusiast.

CS: Yeah... I think if he had been a stamp collector it wouldn't have made any difference.

OO: It was networks of friends?

CS: Yeah, I think that's what it was.

OO: What about your work as soundtrack? I saw the piece you did for dance with Akira Kasai and I assume you've done some other dance related compositions. I think, in the arts world..., just the possibility that dance can exist... It's a whole other world than film which is high finance. Dance is almost an aberration to the money system. The fact that human bodies on a stage can still be presented sensibly is a miracle. And so it's natural that artists would work together through those 2 mediums. Have you had any interesting run ins with filmmakers, where things happen? I dont know of any other soundtrack work that you've done. To me it would seem natural that your work would make its way to film soundtrack. Have there been any intimations in that direction or any courtings between yourself and filmmakers that either did or didn't materialize, that you want to mention?

CS: In commercial film: nothing. I never pursued it. And nobody came to me. I have done soundtracks for experimental film. Most recent was with 2 films by Pat O'Neil. Do you know his work at all? They were presented at the Getty here in LA and in England and also at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

OO: Was that compositions originally made for his films.

CS: Yes. And designed to be performed live or as a fixed soundtrack.

OO: You mentioned some live presentations, were those pretty wonderful? Did you enjoy them?

CS: Depends who you ask. I enjoyed them and we got good results. I mean, the exact same program presented originally in LA and in San Francisco. In LA some people dug it of course and some people walked out. In San Francisco everybody dug it. What can I say?

OO: And so opportunities to present live, performance based music is a primary interest to you or is that something that maybe requires a little more expense in terms of putting it together and maybe funding?

CS: Well it is fun to do and you have the added spontaneity of the moment, plus the added ability to really screw up royally and get all messed up. Which I've... I've done both. Both are interesting, having a fixed soundtrack that's perfectly polished and really great, is fine. Doing stuff live is fine too, I don't have a strong philosophical predilection one way or the other.

OO: So you're open to doing work as it comes to you.

CS: Yeah. I mean it would depend on the artist and our ability to communicate and our common aesthetic ground. I feel aesthetically, I really like Pat's work and always felt... I've always loved it. You know he was at Cal Arts as a teacher, he was Adam Beckett's teacher. And I loved his work then. I didn't particularly like his soundtracks at the time. I always thought: Oh god i hope someday I'll have a chance to do a soundtrack for Pat O'Neil. And it took 35 years but eventually I had the chance.

OO: That's kind of what it's all about: to work with the people who you've admired and learned so much from, to be able to give back into their work and become part of those lives. Pretty nice reward even though... it's not the most lucrative career in the world.

CS: Yeah, that's a very polite way to put it.

OO: So, you have a teaching gig in Japan, which is probably wonderful in some ways. From my point of view you've done a great job of getting your work out there and being involved in growing communities of sound art, at least here on the west coast, Los Angeles, San Francisco. I don't exactly know what your relationship is with east coast people, i'm sure you have contacts, friends there who contact you. But making a living is difficult as a sound artist or composer of electronic music, isnt it?

CS: Well, it's so difficult that I gave up trying. I mean, I basically for years... of course i was never 100%. I mean, I worked for a radio station, I ran the California office of Meet the Composer which is a funding organization, I did freelance consulting. and stuff. But I for many years was sort of proud of the fact that I never taught at a university, I didn't do any Hollywood soundtracks, I was kind of scraping by on my own music ... as music. But it was getting harder and harder and it got to the point where it became almost impossible really. And fortunately I did get an opportunity, I was offered a job to teach at a university in Japan. Which you know... if teaching at a university can be a drag at least teaching at a university in Japan would be a challenge.

OO: Language wise?

CS: Language, culture, business culture, everything. So I decided to go for it. It also coincided with the takeover of the Bush Administration, 9-11, the rise of...

OO: The right.

CS: The rise of the right. And the fall of the media in this country, so it seemed a good time to put a little distance between me and the US.

OO: How is the technology for music for you these days. Do you see the tools for the composer to be immense and fruitful? Is it absolutely a good time for say: a young person wanting to explore... making music? Is there great equipment, and, I mean, software winds up being a big part of composing electronic music doesn't it?

CS: Yes.

OO: I realize MAX has been a huge part of, and other MIDI driver type... That's actually more of a virtual synthesis program, but are there any other tools that you've run across over the past 10 years. I don't think i've talked to you since... didn't you do a piece in Japan with like 100 iMacs playing ..

CS: Well, 50 but who's counting? For a long time the music software that I was using was only available for a Mac platform. Now it doesn't matter, any platform. The tools that I use are available for any platform, like MAX.

OO: If someone threw a laptop of any type at you and an internet connection, could you get going relatively quickly?

CS: Yeah. of course. I've stuck with the same platform for a long time, MAX/MSP as you said. I haven't really felt the need to move beyond that because I'm able to do everything that I want to do with that, and it runs on a Mac, it runs on windows, and it runs on Linux, so...

OO: Has cycling (cycling 74) been a responsive company to your needs? Have you needed to contact them about things over the years.

CS: A few things. I beta-tested one of the early versions of MAX. And from time to time will send them a suggestion or a complaint. Their user base is very large and a lot of cool ideas come from them. I've found that their improvements have pretty much tracked my needs even without me having to say a lot to them.

OO: I know that there's a lot more that we could talk about of the past 20 years. Maybe next winter we could do another one.

CS: I like this. Sure.

Friday, August 07, 2009










Rascalities, Part One.

Steve Gore was in the process of collecting a huge amount of archive material by the Rascal Reporters into a 16 CD set to be called Rascalities. He sent me the first volume maybe a year and a half ago, the first 4 CDs, although I didn't have much time to go through it then, being a new dad. I recently have begun re-listening to this material and intend to write a proper review here as it comes along. I do not know if Steve had finished organizing the full set of material, all 16 CDs, before the accident which took him away from us. But I do also have a pile of cassettes that Steve made for me of unreleased material. Some of it is flat out amazing and will take some time to revisit. I intend to carefully go through and catalog this collection. I consider it some of the best music I've ever heard and wish more people could hear it.
So I am now dedicating a certain amount of this blog to reviewing the collected work of the Rascal Reporters. Coming soon. Get ready.

Thursday, July 09, 2009

The Fred Frith Tapes, Part 2.

Here is Fred Frith's reply with corrective remarks to my recent blog post.
I truly appreciate the time Fred took to inform me of the details surrounding these histories and mentions and hope people find some good information here. Perhaps much of this information is available elsewhere but it was largely news to me.
______________________________________

hi
thanks for taking the time to write about this stuff. It's always appreciated. Can't help noticing, however, that there are rather a lot of outright non-facts included. Since you took the time to write it, I will take the time to comment!

Fred Frith and Chris Cutler performed in a science lecture room of Barnum Hall in the winter of 1979/80. It was to have been an Art Bears tour, but Dagmar backed out for health reasons.

—This is a nice idea, but completely untrue - we were never going to perform as Art Bears at Tufts. The only way we could have done that would have been with Marc Hollander and Peter Blegvad, with whom we had recently toured in Europe, but that would have been moot since the "group" ceased to exist immediately after that tour, and we were never booked for any American dates.

Skeleton Crew, Frith's duo with Tom Cora (which was expanded to include Zeena Parkins later) visited Boston a number of times when I was student there. They made 2 very good records, Learn To Talk and Country of Blinds, which contain some of Frith's most political songs. He had moved to New York around the time of Reagan coming into "power" and attacked a lot of the Reaganist values through Skeleton Crew agit-improv. Frith incorporated rough cassette recordings into Skeleton Crew live shows and recordings. You might hear Reagan mumble: "We're still free in America", followed by Frith's manic peel of laughter before launching into a song.

—A couple of myths:
1, that Skeleton Crew was an improv band. We weren't. We performed songs, and, since we played all the instruments, those songs took an endless amount of rehearsal. Our records should make it pretty clear that improv was the exception in the group rather than the rule. This was composed music.
2, the voice heard saying "We're still free" is not Reagan, but Jerry Falwell, and the cassette recordings weren't rough, they were purchased by us directly from the Moral Majority, of which Tom was a member!

The influence of Bob Ostertag can't be downplayed in Frith's incorporation of mixing rough tape sound into his music. Ostertag was an early user of samplers and field recordings and there are some great records of Frith and Ostertag together, particularly "Getting A Head" and "Voice of America".

—Henry Cow introduced field recordings into our live performances as early as 1974, several years before I met Bob and heard his music. When I first heard his music he was playing a Serge synthesizer. His interest in samples was radically enhanced when said instrument blew up in London and he was compelled to use cassette machines for our London concert. This concert became the LP Voice of America.

Ostertag also founded the school of No Photos, a period in which Frith and Cutler refused to allow their photos to be easily captured, often holding a hand in front of their face, a clearly political gesture asking people, and photographers in particular, to listen to the massage of music rather than focusing on image and personality. A great example of this is Ostertag's appearance in the film "Step Across The Border", where he is rehearsing with Frith and others and when the film camera turns on him he shoos it away, Don't Look Here. I definitely appreciated this stance for a time, but it's funny how trying to avoid The Eye can sometimes bring more attention to oneself. A strange circular game of control.

—no idea what you are talking about. I have never heard Bob or anyone else refer to such a "school", and the idea that I have refused to allow my photo to be taken is refuted by the literally thousands of photos taken over the whole span of my working life from 1973 to the present. The moment in Step Across the Border is probably the only moment Bob ever made such a gesture, and it was probably done by way of letting the filmmakers know that he was not involved in the music they were supposed to be shooting. I have a policy of not allowing photographers to use flash, or to move around in front of an audience when I am performing. The reason for that is because it is distracting both for me and for the audience, who are there to hear music not to watch photographers. This is fairly standard practice among most professional musicians that I know. In fact I know many who are much stricter than I am. My technical rider states that photographers are welcome to come to our sound-checks and take as many pictures as they want. If I'm so against image and personality, how come I'm in (so far) 5 different documentary films?

Henry Cow, the great English band Frith (and Cutler) led from 1968 until about 1978, learned amazing things about using the recording atudio as a compositional tool. The influence of German group Faust, Virgin Records labelmates, must have been considerable. Faust incorporated incredible tape echo effects and droning oscillator noise in their work and this crept quickly into Henry Cow.

—I loved the 1973 era Faust, and they definitely had an impact, but when it came to using the recording studio there were plenty of models that both they and we shared, especially Phil Spector, George Martin, and Frank Zappa, and not mention the electronic music of Stockhausen and Berio, all of which models were a great deal more pertinent to our studio work, especially early on. Incidentally, Chris didn't join Henry Cow until 1971.

This was the era of "My Life In The Bush of Ghosts", Byrne and Eno's dissertation on the use of found (or stolen) sound, and Holger Czukay's "Movies" is another example of the great use of tape recordings of ethno-musical sources as well as field recordings mashed into the mix. Today "mash ups" may be everyone's middle name but in 1980, with the arrival of the Professional Walkman and other recording devices, this was all new territory.

—It's perhaps useful to note that Gravity was made at approximately the same time as both of the above records and it also contains a vast number of sampled recordings, many of them from a well-known tape archive to which I had access for a time. Samples included on Gravity include Iranian demonstrators, various recordings of dance music from renaissance times, and field recordings of native american singing and drumming, as well as a whole catalog of nature recordings from the Arctic, including seabirds and seals. Much of this material had also been used at Henry Cow concerts in the mid-70s, as I said earlier, using reel to reel tape recorders on stage.

"Speechless" (Ralph Records LP, now on Fred Records CD) includes numerable exquisitely creative uses of documentary tape sound, and so serves as a great snapshot of its time and place (mid 80's NYC). Police: "Get back, get back"/(cut) Woman: "I don't know where to go." There are sprawling sections of street protests Frith recorded in New York. Even the Satie-esque "Domain de Planousset" is suffused with tapes of night birds.

—Being a hopeless pedant I can't resist pointing out that they aren't birds but frogs!!

Frith collaborated with the Michigan studio duo Rascal Reporters on a number of tape-by-mail projects, including a re-working of Frith's New York protest tapes into the track "No More War", which appears as an extra on the recent "Speechless" re-issue. Frith told me that Steve Gore sent him a 1/4" reel tape of very complex time signature playing, asking for a guitar solo to which FF responded by cutting the tape up into fragments and randomly re-attaching them. A large part of that appeared on the Rascal Reporters LP "Ridin' On A Bummer" and Frith's re-do of that is the classic "No More War", which was discussed at large on an internet bulletin board where Frith and Gore clashed over the merits of improvised vs. composed musical activity. Anyway, there was a fruitful friendship between Steve and Fred, one which made people think, even if contentious. (The recent death of Steve Gore is a huge loss to the American progressive music community, if such a thing exists.)

—Hmm. Interesting! I did one collaboration with Steve Gore, and one only. I don't know what conversation with me you're referring to but one or the other or both of must have been on drugs! I did indeed refuse to do a guitar solo, but I certainly didn't cut up the original and reassemble it. I left it completely alone. What I added was a recording of a siren in upstate New York being tested. It is a very long continuous downwards glissando and it has the effect of always pulling the chords into its psychological orbit. I found it absolutely haunting, and added recordings of a demonstration in New York to create a kind of "narrative" feeling. I was very pleased with the result. I sent it to Steve, and as far as I remember he used exactly what I sent him, as did I when I put it on the Speechless re-release. I'm not aware of any difference between the two versions. I have no recollection of any conversation on an internet bulletin board with Steve. I always found him to be an intense and eccentric and supremely creative fellow.

Morgan Fisher created a great LP of "1 Minute Masterpieces" called "Miniatures" which includes Frith's looping summary "The Complete Recorded Works of Henry Cow", a tongue-in-cheek rush through their sonic catalog which should be heard.

—Certainly not a rush, and no loops either. A meticulously constructed tape piece which used some part of everything Henry Cow ever recorded assembled according to a strict mathematical template and took a lot of studio hours to complete.

"Step Across The Border" should be mentioned again as a good glimpse of Frith at work. I recall the film containing a number of seagull appearances, and the sound of seagulls is something Frith returns to again and again. See also his track on the guitar compilation "Guitar Solos 3", called "Alienated Industrial Seagulls". All of Frith's solo guitar recordings deserve consideration for his ability to use the instrument to invoke other sound sources, like strange radio broadcasts coming through his guitar pickups.

—1. there is one scene in the film with seagulls
—2. Alienated Industrial Seagulls is just a silly title, and has nothing to do with the actual birds
—3. strange radio broadcasts are not invoked by the guitar. They are exactly that - strange radio broadcasts, amplified by holding the radio over the pickups. Old trick..

Perhaps the strangest Fred Frith tape I have in my collection, and never see on any recordings lists, is from a Japanese cassette compilation called Omni 1. It's actually a Tim Hodgkinson piece, with organ and saxophone solo in heavy reverb, called "Pampkin The Great", and Frith chants with Dagmar Krause various terms of sexual "pathology", "Nymphomania" for example. I'll have to transfer that tape to new media sometime soon.

—I have never heard of this, and certainly had nothing to do with it. Just somebody using my name I'm afraid.

there we have it.
cheers
Fred

Tuesday, June 30, 2009




To celebrate the release of the 40th Anniversary Henry Cow box of live recordings, I've decided to brush off this unfinshed article I started over 10 years ago.


The Fred Frith Tapes

I was introduced to the music of Fred Frith and Henry Cow by Hahn Rowe, when we were both freshmen at Tufts University, fall of 1979. My musical tastes were wide compared to most of my high school friends but I was unprepared for the vast range of strange music I would encounter over the next few years, thanks to Hahn and others involved in the Tufts radio station WMFO. There was an excellent show on MFO called Mental Notes, co-hosted by Michael Pailas and Andy MacKenzie, and this weekly show highlighted all of the best avant-garde groups and musicians particularly of the "progressive rock" dominion. I heard Gong and Robert Wyatt and Magma regularly. I got involved with the radio station.

These notes will focus on stray and sometimes overlooked aspects of Frith's work as it relates to taped music, studio production tricks and other tape oddities. I have collected most of Frith's recorded output and seen him perform live over 20 times, and although I'm not the eager fan I once was, I remain indebted to Fred Frith for opening certain sound windows for me.

Fred Frith and Chris Cutler performed in a science lecture room of Barnum Hall in the winter of 1979/80. It was to have been an Art Bears tour, but Dagmar backed out for health reasons. People at WMFO hosted and recorded the concert and Hahn got me to go. I have a cassette dub somewhere. Upon entering, Cutler wrote Noise 101 on the blackboard. Frith played guitars on the table and Cutler used his drums in a very abstract manner and they moved through their series of duet experiments culminating in a kind of anti-jig. This era of performances is captured pretty well on the record Live in Prague and Washington, which is a tough listen but is astounding work to see invented live, especially if new to experimental music.

Skeleton Crew, Frith's duo with Tom Cora (which was expanded to include Zeena Parkins later) visited Boston a number of times when I was student there. They made 2 very good records, Learn To Talk and Country of Blinds, which contain some of Frith's most political songs. He had moved to New York around the time of Reagan coming into "power" and attacked a lot of the Reaganist values through Skeleton Crew agit-improv. Frith incorporated rough cassette recordings into Skeleton Crew live shows and recordings. You might hear Reagan mumble: "We're still free in America", followed by Frith's manic peel of laughter before launching into a song.

The influence of Bob Ostertag can't be downplayed in Frith's incorporation of mixing rough tape sound into his music. Ostertag was an early user of samplers and field recordings and there are some great records of Frith and Ostertag together, particularly "Getting A Head" and "Voice of America". Ostertag also made a record called "Sooner Or Later" which is one of the most unlistenable records ever produced, sampling from a tape of an El Salvadoran boy burying his father killed in the civil war there.

Ostertag also founded the school of No Photos, a period in which Frith and Cutler refused to allow their photos to be easily captured, often holding a hand in front of their face, a clearly political gesture asking people, and photographers in particular, to listen to the massage of music rather than focusing on image and personality. A great example of this is Ostertag's appearance in the film "Step Across The Border", where he is rehearsing with Frith and others and when the film camera turns on him he shoos it away, Don't Look Here. I definitely appreciated this stance for a time, but it's funny how trying to avoid The Eye can sometimes bring more attention to oneself. A strange circular game of control.

Henry Cow, the great English band Frith (and Cutler) led from 1968 until about 1978, learned amazing things about using the recording atudio as a compositional tool. The influence of German group Faust, Virgin Records labelmates, must have been considerable. Faust incorporated incredible tape echo effects and droning oscillator noise in their work and this crept quickly into Henry Cow.

This was the era of "My Life In The Bush of Ghosts", Byrne and Eno's dissertation on the use of found (or stolen) sound, and Holger Czukay's "Movies" is another example of the great use of tape recordings of ethno-musical sources as well as field recordings mashed into the mix. Today "mash ups" may be everyone's middle name but in 1980, with the arrival of the Professional Walkman and other recording devices, this was all new territory.

In New York, Frith began producing records for other groups. I think of The Muffins record 185, which has great contributions by Frith as a player and also in the use of tapes, like the appearance of what sounds like a creaking ship mast on "Antidote To Drydock", a sound which also appears in Frith's sound collage masterpiece record "Speechless". (The LP "Gravity" should also be mentioned for the appearance of early tape sound, rain on a tin roof for example, an early drum machine?) Frith produced records by many groups during this period (early to mid-80's), including V Effect, the Orthotonics and France's Etron Fou Leloublon.

"Speechless" (Ralph Records LP, now on Fred Records CD) includes numerable exquisitely creative uses of documentary tape sound, and so serves as a great snapshot of its time and place (mid 80's NYC). Police: "Get back, get back"/(cut) Woman: "I don't know where to go." There are sprawling sections of street protests Frith recorded in New York. Even the Satie-esque "Domain de Planousset" is suffused with tapes of night birds.

Frith collaborated with the Michigan studio duo Rascal Reporters on a number of tape-by-mail projects, including a re-working of Frith's New York protest tapes into the track "No More War", which appears as an extra on the recent "Speechless" re-issue. Frith told me that Steve Gore sent him a 1/4" reel tape of very complex time signature playing, asking for a guitar solo to which FF responded by cutting the tape up into fragments and randomly re-attaching them. A large part of that appeared on the Rascal Reporters LP "Ridin' On A Bummer" and Frith's re-do of that is the classic "No More War", which was discussed at large on an internet bulletin board where Frith and Gore clashed over the merits of improvised vs. composed musical activity. Anyway, there was a fruitful friendship between Steve and Fred, one which made people think, even if contentious. (The recent death of Steve Gore is a huge loss to the American progressive music community, if such a thing exists.)

Morgan Fisher created a great LP of "1 Minute Masterpieces" called "Miniatures" which includes Frith's looping summary "The Complete Recorded Works of Henry Cow", a tongue-in-cheek rush through their sonic catalog which should be heard.

"Step Across The Border" should be mentioned again as a good glimpse of Frith at work. I recall the film containing a number of seagull appearances, and the sound of seagulls is something Frith returns to again and again. See also his track on the guitar compilation "Guitar Solos 3", called "Alienated Industrial Seagulls". All of Frith's solo guitar recordings deserve consideration for his ability to use the instrument to invoke other sound sources, like strange radio broadcasts coming through his guitar pickups.

Perhaps the strangest Fred Frith tape I have in my collection, and never see on any recordings lists, is from a Japanese cassette compilation called Omni 1. It's actually a Tim Hodgkinson piece, with organ and saxophone solo in heavy reverb, called "Pampkin The Great", and Frith chants with Dagmar Krause various terms of sexual "pathology", "Nymphomania" for example. I'll have to transfer that tape to new media sometime soon.

I have way too many Fred Frith records. He has been a central figure in my own development as a musical thinker and he continues to create sometimes astoundingly great music. His contribution to the "Rivers and Tides" documentary, while subtle and minimal, is wonderful. His homage to John Cage on the record "The Previous Evening" is an astounding piece of modern collage sound and a beautiful tribute. And the Evelyn Glennie film "Touch The Sound" has beautiful footage of Frith and Gleniie performing in an old factory, Frith en-lightening the moment by playfully tossing rolls of tissue paper down several stories.

Here is an abbreviated list of Fred Frith performances I have attended:
Frith and Cutler, Barnum Hall, Tufts University 1979
Frith solo guitar, Mass College of Art, 1980
Skeleton Crew, Mass Art 1982(?)
Skeleton Crew, Medford Jewish Center 1984(?)
Frith and Phil Minton, DC Space, Wash, DC 1984(?)
Frith and Hans Reichel, Nightstage, Cambridge, Mass. 1987
Fred Frith Guitar Quartet, Victoriaville Festival, Quebec 1996
Massacre, Great American Music Hall, SF 1997(?)
Frith/Ochs/Masaoka, Great American, SF 1998(?)
Fred Frith Re-Mix, Mills College, Oakland 2000(?)
Fred Frith solo guitar, Berkeley Rep Theater 2005(?)

I hope to consider Frith's compositonal techniques, including the ideas of "melody extraction" and "block melodies" in a future post.

For info on the Henry Cow 40th Anniversary set and other new music, see www.rermegacorp.com

Friday, May 29, 2009










Building the Slork Speaker Array, Part 2

I have pretty much finished the 6 speaker spatial array. I tried it out with 10k ohm resistors in each of the input lines, but it played extremely hot. I had to reduce volume levels within the ProTools sessions by about 13db average. After exchanging messages with my electronics-whiz brother about it, I went over to RS again and got what higher ohm resistors I could find. They had 33k ohm and 47k ohm to choose from, and I opted 33. After installing those, the levels were still at about 5db too hot. Tom suggested running the 33k ohm and 10k ohm (I'd started with) resistors in series, and so I did that and found the level to be pretty close to optimum. So I've got 43k ohms of resistance on the inputs.





So the array is now pretty much done. It sounds very good, better than I expected, with no buzz or rattle of parts on the shell or within. I did stuff some insulation that came from inside a sound dock type of speaker system in to protect some of the solders from touching each other and for damping. Once I've lived with it a while I may wood gloe the shell down onto the base, since it is now held together only with 5 small screws along the jack strap, but it is essentially complete and ready for playing out.





Now I just have to work on a radiophonic-type piece for presentation, which I have begun. It will collect several short electro-acoustic pieces I've done the past few years as part of "commercial work" and tie those together with longer abstract sections. It should be fun to create soundscapes especially with this spatial speaker array in mind. Thanks to brother Tom, Ge Wang at Stanford and the Princeton group for all the open source style information online. Could find myself grouping up with others doing this in the LA area and I have mentioned the idea of working with Wet Gate in this direction, as an electro-acoustic trio outside of the optical film bag (and as Black Gate). I appreciate the laptop orchestra ideas, but am drawn to more freeform approaches to solo, duo, trio etc work in this area. More on this as it develops.

Saturday, May 23, 2009








Building The Slork Speaker Array, Part 1



Several months ago I was looking at Apple's webpages for info on one-of-a-kind book publishing and came upon an article featuring the Stanford Laptop Orchestra, a project of Ge Wang at Stanford's computer music center. I became drawn to a revolutionary design for a small 6-speaker spatial array the group uses. Made from an IKEA salad bowl, 3 stereo triamp chip based micro-amplifiers and 6 car speakers, the design creates a sound source that I quickly felt matched my inner idea of an appropriate personal amplification system, and I decided I had to build it for myself.







There is a lot of good information about this project online, between the Stanford Laptop Orchestra pages, the Princeton Laptop Orchestra pages and various DIY audio boards where audiophiles discuss modifications of equipment, including the little amplifiers used here. The laptop groups use triamp chip amplifiers, which are tiny solid state amps about the size of a credit card and quite affordable. These were most likely made for use in flat screen tvs and other small speakered gadgets, but audiophiles got hold of them and found they have, with a few modifications, very good quality sound.






Over the next several months I acquired parts and studied the online materials. I was lucky to get 3 Sonic Impact V2 t-amps for 30$ each and good prices on the 6 speakers used by Stanford in their array. I added some 16v 2200uF capacitors to the power rail cap and cut out the volume pots, replacing each with a 10k ohm resistor, as per GW's suggestion. Building the input saddle or jack block was challenging, using radio shack and home despot off the shelf materials. An original pine base was discarded for a hardwood base as suggested again by GW.






This was a remarkably useful project besides the purpose of creating a usable amplifier-speaker for presenting live electronic music. I finally found a project that taught me the basics of amplifier electronics and I learned to solder. I had soldered before but was never satisfied with my work. Today I got very close to being completely finished with the speaker array, tied everything together and mounted several of the speakers into the bowl, screwed the bowl on to the base. I'm looking forward to hearing the completed unit in the next few days, testing it out with playback of a 6-channel recording in ProTools, and then preparing a piece for public presentation. The first live event may be a recording for pocketradio.org

Tuesday, January 27, 2009



























Brotzman Kowald Cyrille Trio, Somerville Theater

It was winter 1984-85 I believe. We used to hold events at the old Somerville Theater in Davis Square thanks to manager Lenny DiFranza's adventurousness. One Saturday brought this great trio of improvisors into the theater. Their work is chronicled on many FMP albums out of Berlin and we played a lot of this stuff back then on WMFO, the little Tufts radio station. I shot a roll of fotos using a tiny Minox travel camera and had the film printed to a contact sheet. Chris Rich, who arranged the musicians trip up from NYC saw the contact proof and said it sucked, so I filed it away rather than print any. Another mistake of letting others' hasty opinions squelch your work.