Carl Stone Interview, Part 2. Los Angeles, CA March 24, 2010
OO: When did you finish your stint at KPFK?
CS: Well, I was music director there until 1981, but I continued to do programming there for years after. I had a program there even after I moved to San Francisco, I was doing it on tape until maybe 95 or 96. So, from 76 until 78 I was a programmer, from 78 to 81 I was the music director, from late 81-82 until maybe 95 or 96 I was a programmer again.
OO: And then, did you depart? You said you continued doing your program for quite a few years.
CS: When I moved to San Francisco I continued doing it on tape.
OO: What was the name of the show?
CS: Imaginary Landscape was the program that I did. I did several different programs but Imaginary Landscape was the one I did for the longest. And then when I moved to the Bay Area I started doing programming on KPFA.
OO: I remember hearing you because I was living in the Bay Area at that point. Didn't you take over somebody's late morning Music of the World, you started doing avant-garde etc. and world music, whatever interested you…?
CS: I did.
OO: It can be hard to play avant-garde or experimental music in the morning, can't it?
CS: It's tricky, yeah. There's certain kinds of music that works better than others. When I did the Sunrise Concert on KPFK, that was from 6 in the morning until 9. Certainly, great bombastic music like Xenakis or noise music you wouldn't want to do at that hour. But you could find a mix of early music that would work well with some new music, be it a little John Cage, a little Lou Harrison, some Gavin Bryars, there was actually a lot of stuff you could do at that hour, with care.
OO: You bring up Cage and others, and I realize, we had talked about getting together again to discuss certain things we hadn't in relation to your time at Cal Arts. Specifically, James Tenney, I don't think we got into him at all when I first asked you questions and you said you had some interesting interactions with him or that he was significant in some way.
CS: Yeah, he taught a seminar which I was a member of and that was a great experience. He introduced his thesis called METAHODOS, a theory of formal organization, and he published a book or a treatise: METAHODOS and then META-METAHODOS. So he talked about his theories. And in the group: myself, Earl Howard, Curtis Roads, Joseph Paul Taylor and some others.
OO: I can imagine that as inspired as he was, it had to rub off. I mean, his time at the Bell Labs is one of those lightning bolt history moments where somebody has got their hands on all the real stuff, it's not a fluke of timing but a brilliant experience I'm sure. Did he talk about that?
CS: Yeah, he talked about his work at Bell Labs. He had two kind of signature pieces that were made at Bell, well maybe his signature piece from Bell Labs was a piece called "for ann (rising)", which is based on an acoustic phenomenon called the Shepard tone, where a tone rises in continuous glissando and then through a trick of perception it appears to be rising infinitely. As it starts to get to the upper end of the acoustic stratosphere, a subharmonic which had before that been imperceptible becomes perceptible. And so the effect is one of infinity. He built a whole composition based on this phenomenon. So we talked about that and how he did it, and also anecdotes about working at Bell Labs. What I didn't really know was that he also had done a number of pieces that used appropriated music, including sampling Elvis. He had a piece called Blue Suede, which I knew, but another piece that used Vietnamese music. So he's a kind of proto-sampler, a proto-mixer. These pieces were done in the maybe 50's or early 60's and I think less consciously, more unconsciously or subconsciously it had an influence on my own approach, because that's one of the things I do, almost always. is used found or appropriated musical material as a starting point.
OO: Take a phrase from it say, and make variations on that that go on as exponentially as you can…
CS: Right.
OO: So Tenney would come into a room and audition pieces of his for you and then go on about them, is that what it was like at all?
CS: I'm trying to remember exactly his technique. It wasn't always revolving around a piece of music of his, we might analyze another piece of music or just talk about general principles about acoustics in music and about instrumental music versus electronics, and about organization of sound. His key thing was formal organization and how we perceive structure in music. It wasn't always done in the crucible of his own work but sometimes it was.
OO: How did he jibe with the Buchla legacy that was going on there? You had these recording studios that were outfitted with Buchla (equipment), was he more of a tape and oscillator person?
CS: He wasn't really doing any electronic music there at that time.
OO: Really, he was theoretizing?
CS: Well, he was writing a lot of instrumental music at that time. He wrote a series of solo pieces that were very important, that he introduced at Cal Arts, including a piece that I just heard performed a couple of weeks ago up in the Bay Area, it's called Never Having Written A Note For Percusssion and it's one note written for tam-tam, giant tam-tam, and a very, very long crescendo to maximum quadruple forte and then a very slow diminuendo. William Winant performed it at the Berkeley Art Museum a couple of weeks ago and it was written originally for John Bergamo, the percussion teacher at Cal Arts. And a solo bass piece and some other solo pieces that I'm blanking on at the moment.
OO: So this was in the early to mid-70s, when he was expanding more into the field of fully composing?
CS: I think electronic music was an important formative stage for him but not something that he really continued much after he left Bell Labs. He wrote a lot of instrumental music, that's what he's mostly known for.
OO: I had the fortune to see his 70th birthday concert at Mills about 5 years ago and I wasn't familiar with a lot of his composed music, had maybe one or 2 of those nice Hat recordings, but there was one piece for solo violin, where a harmonic glissando is performed on every string from the lowest to the highest and it was just.. here's the instrument! It's pretty amazing.
CS: He was very fond of glissandi. I think that glissando as a musical technique shows up in quite a lot of his music, and maybe the influence of Xenakis who also did some incredible work with glissandi.
OO: I tend to think of Tenney as the major mind of modern American music that is overlooked by the larger system, whatever that means, that's not a very clear term: the larger system. But I think of somebody like Alvin Lucier, whose I Am Sitting In A Room is certainly significant, but I think a lot more music students have heard that piece and understand its place than have heard "for ann rising", for instance. When you brought up for ann rising, it seemed to me that it's every bit as significant in a way in terms of what it can give to a musical thinker. I guess it's an apple and an orange on some level.
CS: Yes, I think it is to a certain extent an apple and an orange. And it remains to be seen in the long run who history is going to bear out. I will agree with the general principle that Tenney is overlooked and not given enough attention. Whether that'll correct over time remains to be seen. When Bach died he was very obscure until Mendelson resurrected him many, many decades later. History is very strange and one can only hope that things will, in the course of longer periods of time, tend to find the proper balance.
OO: Is there anything else that you wanted to mention around your experiences with James Tenney before we move on to something else?
CS: Apart from the graduation party where everyone got so drunk that we ended up naked in a pool and he was cavorting with my then-girlfriend.
OO: Oh, really?
CS: Yeah. I was not happy with that and neither was his wife, who was also there. (Laughs)
OO: Who's that famous artist who he had.., the woman who did Beyond Meat Joy, remember that?
CS: Carolee Schneemann?
OO: Yeah. That wouldn't have been his wife at that time, would it?
CS: No, his wife at that time was Ann Holloway.
OO: I'm not familiar with her.
CS: Well, she died. They both came down with cancer right around the same time, and so did their dog.
OO: Who?
CS: Holloway and Jim.
OO: Really.
CS: And their dog. First of all, Jim smoked like a chimney and he got lung cancer which eventually killed him. But they also spent a lot of time in the desert in New Mexico. They loved the desert, him and Ann, and one theory is they may have stumbled upon some…
OO: Atomic residue.
CS: Radiation, yeah. I've heard that theory expounded. Anyway, she died tragically at a young age. He did remarry. He was quite popular with the ladies. And he came down with cancer which was in remission for a long time but eventually got him.
OO: It was a pretty close circle, everybody at the school it sounds like? I mean, that wasn't a one-time event, it was a fairly free associative environment between…
CS: Students and teachers? Yeah, perhaps too much so. Fraternization between teachers and students was something that was frowned upon but I don't think it was patently illegal like it is now. And it certainly happened a lot.
OO: He was kind of a free spirit, shall we say.
CS: Yeah, I think so. And I think if he hadn't been as drunk as he was, and we were all totally smashed, we all would have behaved ourselves a little better.
OO: I guess that happens. Moving back closer to the present. When you ended your tenure as a member of the staff (at KPFK), you shifted into being a full-time composer at that point?
CS: I took a job as the director of the California office of an organization called Meet The Composer, and that was part time work and the rest of the time I was free lancing as a composer. And I continued with Meet The Composer for about 12 years until I moved to San Francisco.
OO: You had the period, which I would guess was relatively short, when you were using that Publison machine to do a lot, which was transitional away from the studios at KPFK, is that right?
CS: Yes, that's right.
OO: And you had your home studio developing on some level.
CS: Yes, that's right.
OO: You said the Publison was stolen several times.
CS: (Laughs) Yes, several times.
OO: What did your home system begin to consist of after that? Was it a reel-to-reel deck or 2?
CS: Well, after it was stolen the last time, by that time I had started to insure it. So I got a pretty substantial insurance check. Cuz the thing was expensive, you could buy a car with what that thing cost, in those days. So that was when I made the transition to computer for composing. In 1986, the MacIntosh had arrived, MIDI had been developed, there were rack mountable synthesizers and samplers like the Yamaha TX-816 and the Prophet 2002, and so I started working with those units using a MacIntosh computer to control them. And I developed studio pieces like Four Pieces came out of that era. Most of that music was composed in 86/87.
OO: Woo Lae Oak was earlier, right? That was still KPFK?
CS: Woo Lae Oak came out, I think it was composed in 81, came out on LP in 84. And that was done at, yes, KPFK. So the studio that I developed at home with the money from the stolen Publison was an Apple MacIntosh based…
OO: MIDI synthesis system of some sort.
CS: MIDI synthesis and sampler.
OO: So were you sequencing things and then putting them through effects and processes?
CS: Some sequencing, but sequencing was kind of boring because sequencing is sequencing, especially in those days it really was very little you could do to a sequence other than play it back, but I used a set of algorithmic tools which were developed by a company called Intelligent Music on the East Coast and they had a program called M and a program called Jam Factory and I used these programs for composing and performing.
OO: Was that something you just discovered on your own? Is this talk between friends and somebody shares an idea..? Or did you feel like you were carving out your own…? Was it at all a lonely pursuit or is it something that you find a small coterie of friends and you figure it out? (Laughs.)
CS: There weren't that many people doing live computer work at that time. Computers weren't really portable, they were kind of luggable.
OO: So you'd bring a computer out if you got a concert? You'd bring the system out with you?
CS: Yeah. I had a bunch of rack flight cases. And I'd haul the computer onto the airplane with me.
OO: Like a 2C?
CS: No, like a Mac Plus, kind of that form factor. Like the original MacIntosh.
OO: Like a box or a toaster oven? A big toaster oven.
CS: A toaster oven maybe on its side. You could haul it around. It wasn't fun.
OO: You didn't have a lot of problems with losing connections inside it? You could travel around and the thing would boot up and function for you?
CS: The Mac was OK. Some of the other gear got a little dinged up. The other gear would have to go down the conveyor belt with the suitcases and everything.
OO: So you'd hand carry the…
CS: I'd hand carry the computer, yeah.
OO: Interesting. And then i guess that just transformed over time into the system that you're using now?
CS: Eventually, laptops came into being, and then using a laptop as a MIDI controller first, and then they became powerful enough that you could actually use them to do live DSP. And now they can do…
OO: All the peripheral stuff went away, suddenly.
CS: Yeah, eventually. That was always my goal. I always looked forward to the day and the day has arrived as of a few years ago.
OO: I realize that performance is your thing on some level. You haven't spent your life making sure that you release tons of CDs, or have you?
CS: No I have not.
OO: Is there a philosophy behind that? Some people seem to crank out records. I guess each person has their own predilection for how they get their music out there. You started that group out of school, what was the live music presentation group?
CS: ICA, the Independent Composers Group.
OO: Which was about creating concert situations for music, right?
CS: Right.
OO: Is it fair to say that you think music is most valuable as a live listening experience?
CS: No, not necessarily, because my roots as a composer are in recorded music, but I do like live music and the potential of live music because of its fluidity and the fact that it's not fixed and you can adjust. Performing to me means the ability to express, change, shape in real time. I don't know why I haven't done a lot of CDs. Just because I had so much trouble getting them out and getting them distributed. It seemed sort of like pissing in the wind. A couple of my CDs got some distribution and still exist to this day, like Mom's on the New Albion label can still be found, though it's not easy to find. Practically all my CDs got in the hands of labels that went out of business, well most of them are just all gone now. And now CDs..
OO: Are really going good-bye. It's pretty bizarre.
CS: I'm thinking about cranking up recordings and releasing them, because it's never been easier to release stuff, although it remains to be seen if anything you release actually will get listened to. I like to think of a systematic thing, where I'll put out a new track once a week or once a month or once a quarter or something like that and hope that people will listen to it.
OO: Do you have any thoughts about it as a model for subsistence as an artist, that's something I'm certainly thinking about. Getting music online, where it has a digital existence in a world where… It seems that kids these days (think), "A record? What would I need that for?" It's like a new philosophy, it's probably just pragmatic that "I can only carry so much stuff, OK?" Whereas you and me come from the generations that said "I'm collecting the shit that I think is really cool" and so we've got record collections that are like dragging a piano across the desert.
CS: Yeah, it represents a big commitment, and quite a burden, actually, hauling that stuff around. And I don't know if in the future that's really going to be… I mean, things can boomerang and there can be nostalgia and a kind of retro appreciation for older media like LPS or CDs, but I think as a practical matter I wouldn't rely on those things. And downloads, to monetize them, you talk about subsistence, it's very, very difficult. I don't think anybody's figured out really how to do it.
OO: You have to drive a lot of people to your website to make it add up to anything. As far as a living is concerned.
CS: I think, forget about a living. It seems very, very difficult. I think to a certain extent CDs can help, online music can help promote your… It's kind of the reverse of before where people would tour in order to promote their CDs and try to boost CD sales. Now, recorded music, downloaded usually for free and traded, serves to develop interest in an artist so that people will go hear his shows. And pay money for that.
OO: It seems like a smart mindset to have, that what you really are offering is yourself in person, presenting your music, and then at least you can attach a value to that which hints at what an artist making a living means. As opposed to "Here's my 99 cent song". it doesn't make a lot of sense.
CS: Right. Plus, listening in a concert is a special experience and especially if it's done with care and in an acoustic environment that's special. Listening in your living room is great, or in your car or a bus. You know, I just did a concert at the Berkeley Art Museum and really tried to use the acoustics of the museum.
OO: Which are difficult.
CS: Which are difficult, but I worked hard at it and people seemed to appreciate that. In the end, I thought the results were good. Very, very difficult but all the more reason why once you harness it you can have some success.
OO: I saw a photograph of you performing in there and I saw that you sat at a table in that little corner with that orange blob sitting there.
CS: Yeah, that orange blob, which was pretty much of a drag.
OO: It made an audience tend to lie down and go to sleep.
CS: Which was great. I was afraid it would prove too uncomfortable, but people did lie down and they reported that they enjoyed it.
OO: That's kind of a phenomenon. I know people have done things with marathon concerts where people are invited to bring sleeping bags and stuff.
CS: Yeah, Robert Rich has done sleep concerts for many years. And there's a guy in New Orleans Tanner Menard, who's done sleep concerts. I think in the 60s they were doing them too.
OO: I guess Lamonte Young's work would lend itself in that direction, too. Cluster, I remember when Cluster toured back in 96 and I saw them in Santa Cruz, I was sort of shocked at how many people were just lying on their backs. It seemed kind of rude to me for some reason, but I suppose it's a perfectly wonderful way to take in music.
CS: I was glad.
OO: Oh, that was you lying on your back. (Laughs)
Using the computer, you're able to get a pretty high end audio feed out of your computer? Do you have a decent sound card or is that available stock on a MacIntosh? Or do you have to customize your computer?
CS: Yeah. There are a number of audio interfaces that run the gamut from a couple of hundred dollars to a couple of thousand dollars. And for live performance, you can get some very good ones for not that much money.
OO: But you don't use an outboard D/A type thing?
CS: I do.
OO: So that's kind of essential. A really good converter.
CS: Yeah.
OO: And then you could do anything with that that the converter allows, from multi-channel sound…
CS: Well, I have one that's 8 channels in and 4 channels out, and when I don't use that I use the one that's 4 channels in and 8 channels out, which is the one I used at the Berkeley Art Museum.
OO: So when I see a picture of you and there's just a laptop, where's the MOTU or whatever..?
CS: The picture you saw at the Berkeley Art Museum, all the sound equipment was at the other end of the hall.
OO: Are you wifi-ing it?
CS: Yes.
OO: Ahh, that's interesting. So is that an airport type of...?
CS: Exactly, airport.
OO: So airport goes out, it's converted to an analog signal there, goes into an amplifier and to the speakers. And that's pretty much it.
CS: Right.
OO: We could talk about some other people. For instance, the INA/GRM group of composers, being all those French guys. When those INA/GRM LPs came out probably around 1980, I was quite blown away by that presentation, that sound art could be so conscientiously packaged, as an art form. Were those records available to you as well? Out here around that time there was Paradox Music mail order (in Southern California), did you ever deal with that at KPFK? It was a place that got a ton of imports. People wouldn't send that stuff to KPFK from France. Would you find it at good record stores? Did you buy those records, or hear them at the time?
CS: I'm trying to remember. In those days, first of all I'd go to Europe sometimes and pick up LPs there, and if you went to France of course you could get all the GRM stuff. But they were imported, I think through Harmonia Mundi if my memory serves me. And KPFK was serviced by Harmonia Mundi, we could get stuff from them. And Tower had a pretty good classical music section, with a pretty good avant-garde section at the time. And later on you could find stuff through Rhino and Poo-Bah and Aaron's, they all had some stuff. I don't remember doing a lot of mail order, I didn't work with Paradox. I would get stuff in Europe or through Harmonia Mundi or through some other distributors, or retail, you just go to the stores.
OO: Did any of those artists strike a particular chord with you? I'm thinking of Francois Bayle, Bernard Parmegiani, Luc Ferrari… those people.
CS: Well, funny you should mention those three, because those were the ones that made the biggest impression on me. More than some of the others, but Parmegiani was the single most striking and interesting for me, because of the skillful way he mixed concrete and electronic sounds, really seamlessly combining the two. You know, for a long time, in France especially, well, throughout Europe there was a very big schism between composers who worked with so-called music concrete, microphone collected sounds and manipulated them, versus composers who worked with purely electronically generated sounds. And they almost didn't talk to each other. But there were breakthroughs that happened in the 70s, Parmegiani was one, even Stockhausen started to combine the two, it was very controversial. But Parmegiani was such a master at blending the two.
OO: Is that something that the term electro-acoustic attempts to justify?
CS: I think maybe so.
OO: Which is a term you…
CS: Co-opted.
OO: (Laughs) You relate to.
CS: Right. I used it for the name of my publishing company and refer to myself as an electro-acoustic composer. Parmegiani, Francois Bayle, Luc Ferrari. And Ferrari's work was also released I think on a Deutsche Grammaphon recording, his Presque Rien as I recall.
OO: Have you ever been in contact with any of those people or do you rub elbows with them when you're in Europe?
CS: Ferrari, I had dinner with him one time, it was really great, him and his wife, another couple of dear friends, they introduced me to him. And I met Parmegiani one time when he came to the US, and he looked up my teacher Morton Subotnick. And Subotinick called me up and invited me to come over, so Parmegiani, Michel Redolfi, me and maybe Barry Schrader was there also.
OO: That was during the 80s when you still lived in LA?
CS: It was in the early 80s, yeah. Parmegiani didn't speak any English at the time and my French is not very good, so…
OO: But these are people with whom you feel some commonality of purpose.
CS: Very much, yes. I love their work.
OO: It's kind of a small group of people in the world. I mean, is it such a small group of people who get, who understand this…? Audiences grow, but…
CS: Audiences grow. And through the power of media outlets like The Wire, I think a whole new generation has come to appreciate composers like Luc Ferrari. And now there's a lot of interest in field recording and the use of natural sound, nature sound, animal and insect sound etc. Soundscaping. So, I think there's a new younger generation that appreciates these composers.
OO: We were talking earlier about the uses of the internet as a music distribution tool in relation to live concerts. It does seem more and more, as I talk to people about generating music and publicizing it or just getting it out, you do have to, to some extent, just give it away, the recordings. As I've been told by some people, you have to just, at least your past work, just give it away, at least in some form. What is an MP3 really worth? Charging a dollar for an MP3 is both a trivialization of the piece as well as it seems like it's too much for an MP3 because the quality of the sound can be so trampled upon.
CS: Well, it's not just the quality of the sound, the value that it represents, but also the quality of the artistic work. It's a big problem. Jaron Lanier has written about this recently, about how the internet in a sense is stifling creativity, he argues because… it's not just composers. Journalists, critics are finding it very hard to monetize their work, serious work, because of the internet.
OO: Because of this exact issue of: you're either giving it away or you're getting a big grant or something. And there's no in between. It mirrors what's happened to our culture in terms of the upper end siphoning off all the money and there not being any in between any more.
CS: It seems like there is very little in between.
OO: If I can quiz you a little bit about the current technology. You've told me that the cycling74 relationship that you have has been quite positive and that their product, which I guess we can call MAX MSP, that continues to develop in such a way that it serves you pretty well.
CS: Mm hmm.
OO: And I think there's a pretty large community of people who have been drawn to this method of making music.
CS: Large is a relative term, I mean compared to what? For music software, the kind of Goliath for live performance of computer music in this day is probably Ableton Live, which is now integrated with MAX.
OO: Have you worked with that at all? Any comments?
CS: Well, it's a terrific tool, that actually was prototyped in MAX before it became its own product. And so it's kind of come home again in that now there's a program called MAX for Live, which allows you to program, using MAX as a programming language but it fits inside of the program Live. So it's a great extension for Ableton Live. And there are a lot of other software choices too. The biggest problem is keeping track of everything, especially for programming languages. So I'm doing my best because I have to teach this stuff.
OO: Say you were a visiting artist in my hometown of, say, Spokane, and we asked you to do a master class and a bunch of young, eager people showed up with their MacIntoshes. What would you take them through, and let's say the prerequisites were that they had to have some of these softwares. I don't know if this is what you do at the University in Japan. At the beginning of the semester, do you sit down and help people get outfitted and comfortable with the gear? Is that your job? To make people feel comfortable in the setting of being an electronic music composer?
CS: To a certain extent. Part of it is just them figuring out what they want to do and then figuring out what the best tools are for them to do it. And it may be MAX MSP, it may be a program called Processing that may be better for them, or it may be Flash programming, or it may be working with Python, or a program like Supercollider, or with Ableton Live or maybe just ProTools.
OO: Wha's that thing, open source programming the Princeton Laptop Orchestra developed? Have you encountered that group at all? Do you know who Gae Wang is, the guy at Stanford who co-developed this laptop orchestra idea?
CS: It's funny, there are laptop orchestras springing up all over, and they each has their own unique approach. Some are networks, some of them bring their own instruments and perform as instruments without sending data or networking with each other, so a lot of different approaches.
OO: They actually designed a six-speaker domed sound array that I became obsessed with and I built one for myself. It's got three stereo amplifiers, tiny little t-amps inside it, whatever capacitors and stuff you feel like upgrading it to and some car speakers mounted in this, the one I made is built out of an IKEA salad bowl.
CS: Do you subscribe to MAKE magazine?
OO: I have a copy that somebody gave to me but I don't see it very often.
CS: MAKE is very cool, and a lot of people are DIYing.
OO: There's audio discussions in there?
CS: Yeah, I mean, there's a whole movement in music making called circuit bending where people actually build circuits on stage and that's how they improvise.
OO: On stage, really? Just kind of crackle music?
CS: Right. Kind of like David Tudor did some of that back in the day, but now a lot of kids are doing it.
OO: Did you know Michel Waiswisz at all? Did you go over to, what's his place called?
CS: The Steim? I didn't work on any projects at Steim. I visited Steim. I first saw him perform with his Crackle Box. And then of course he developed his incredible interface called The Hands.
OO: Hands. That was unbelievable when I saw that in Boston. What year was that, 85 maybe?
CS; Something like that. Maybe a little later.
OO: That was one of those stellar moments that I'll always remember.
CS: He did a great performance here in LA as part of a computer music conference, that was pretty fantastic. It worked musically, it was very theatrical. This must have been 86 or 87. I remember thinking about what he was doing, he was basically playing a series of Yamaha tone modules working in the edit mode. Changing sounds, editing the sounds on the fly as he performed.
OO: It was pretty astounding.
CS: Yeah, it was really good.
OO: So, I'm in this master class, I'm a young composer and I want to break into MAX. What am I doing? Am I making object-to-object… Is MAX similar to MIDI in that you're mapping objects but in a virtual world? I find that there's sort of a stumbling area, where you almost need to be told: Oh,by the way, this is how you do it. It seems to me there could be easier, there are definitely easier interfaces, why something like Ableton succeeds as a mass marketed product.
CS: Yes, it's a matter of interface and I think also Ableton is optimized to satisfy the needs of maybe 80 to 90% of the musical community that's working maybe in clubs or as DJs.
OO: As a VJ programmer…
CS: They're doing repetitive music that's loop based.
OO: I do that.
CS: Well, stick with Ableton, because that's what it's optimized for. MAX is kind of a blank slate and you kind of roll your own from the beginning and you can do repetitive music, I mean: for example, me, but you don't have to.
OO: What's the learning curve for getting into it, I mean that you've noticed in your students. You probably have students who will veer towards the more product-oriented thing that we were just talking about. Whereas others will get into the, I guess MAX is more of a programmer's language, isn't it?
CS: Well yeah, it is a programming language. It just has a graphic interface. And I think that the people who are interested in growing their own and in bending circuits and plugging connections together and seeing what catches fire or explodes will be more interested in MAX MSP. The people who kind of want a comfortable interface with things laid out…
OO: In windows, isn't that the difference? It's like windows and buttons, as opposed to MAX which looks more like programming language, little dots and lines between things.
CS: Well it is a programming language and there is no standard interface. The interface is all worked out for you in a program like Ableton, which is great if you don't want to spend time working on that. As a teaching model, MAX MSP is more like… giving someone driving lessons versus teaching someone how to build a car and then drive it.
OO: I guess as a big democratist, it seems like the specialized computer language based thing is always going to remain in the… not so much in the hands, but a territory for a small group of people. I guess you just have to want to do it. And to put on the shoes and jump in and get yourself dirty and pay your dues and all that other stuff, and that's just the way it is.
CS: That's right.
OO: I'm kind of a Luddite, but you have to know a crapload about computers to do anything these days. I find myself in between. I already have such a long list of computer programs I'm supposed to understand. OK, which should I choose? It annoys the hell out of me. Because I believe it's an area in which I should be working. I guess it just takes a certain level of commitment and that's hard to come by these days when there's so many things to do with our time.
CS: That's right, there's so much stuff competing for your time. And you have to really roll up your sleeves and learn something like that. It's definitely a commitment, no question about it. programs like Photoshop, you can get in and get away with doing something that takes 30 minutes to learn but it's 2% or 1% of the program's capabilities. If you really want to squeeze the juice out of a program like that you really have to study it.
OO: The same is true for MAX, you'd say. You can jump in and do a little here or there… First you're using an oscillator that creates a tone, then you're adding…, you're simulating different generative systems. Isn't that what you're doing?
CS: That's one of the things. Remember that...
OO: You can do anything you can think of.
CS: You can do a lot of what you can think of. But, it's not that easy, you don't get that much out of your first ten minutes in MAX MSP as you would in ten minutes in Ableton Live or GarageBand or those kind of programs.
OO: But you'd recommend people... to plug away at it. And that's what you do with your students?
CS: Yes.
OO: Do you find students saying I'm having a hard time with this? Do you have to do a lot of that?
CS: Yes.
OO: It's not hand holding, what is it? Encouragement, keep at it. And look at this, you're not seeing that. So it's details.
CS: Yes, exactly. Going deeper and deeper, that's right.
OO: And that's what computers are: a lot of commas and dots, and...
CS: Elipsis and parenthesis.
OO: That each one means something and if they're not in the right place… To me, that's such a weird future where the artist is a parenthesis minder.
CS: Well, artists have always had to take care of the technical aspects of their craft, whether it was how you mixed your paints or how you chipped away at your stones or…
OO: True. Or getting a woodwind section to show up on time.
CS: That's the hardest part. Or getting a Thai singer to meet you at noon like she promised.
See previous Interview with Carl Stone at: http://underminds.blogspot.com/2009/12/carl-stone-interview-82709-los-angeles.html
