NEGATIVLAND and LYDIA LUNCH at the Extreme Futurist Festival, Los Angeles, Friday 12/21/12.

After finding parking right outside the Los Angeles Center Studios complex, we were put through a metal detector security check and then found ourselves inside the Extreme Futurist Festival, a three-day showcase of weird and unusual behavior appropriate to the Mayan apocalypse schedule. Survival Research Labs would perform the day after the apocalypse, but Negativland was right on time, although their performance was moved up from 11:30pm to 8pm and they actually went on around 9. Time is shifty in Extreme Apocalypse Land. This gave us time to hear about 20 minutes of Lydia Lunch's set, so we entered the temporary dome building outside and there was Lydia, accompanied by a lone electric guitarist (Weasel Walter), swearing her heart out against The State and Patriarchy, as she has done since the late 70s. I had just been reading a WIRE (magazine) Primer, wherein Alan Licht devotes several pages to Ms. Lunch, who hit New York like a firestorm as the leader of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. "Performance art" was a new thing and there was a lot of intermedia experimentation, with combinations of spoken word and music, dance and film. Ms. Lunch's brand of sonic disturbance blends goth darkness and a dead seriousness similar in ways to Throbbing Gristle with the threat of violence in the form of sex and drugs as weapons of resistance. Lydia's lent her image and aura to Richard Kern and Nick Zedd's "Cinema of Transgression", a nihilistic take on subculture filmmaking reminiscent of Kenneth Anger. It was impressive to see that Ms. Lunch has survived her ballsout approach to life. She presented a series of similarly aggressive pieces, one dedicated to "the war weary and the battle fatigued". In another, she blurted that "I have a gun, because when they come to try to take me away, I'm not going without taking a few of them with me."

Back in the main building, the death metal band Malfaktor finished its set and Negativland got underway. Mark Hosler, Jon Leidecker and Peter Conheim did a marvelous set of found audio collage pieces, accompanied by live Booper feedback bursts, samples and keyboards. (I thought the Booper was also a radio call-in interface, but Peter informs me: "The Booper is strictly a feedback-generating device made from amplifier and radio parts. You might be confusing it with the other David box, the Teletour box.") Mr. Leidecker's Roedelius was flanked by two Mobiuses, a Cluster reference if you don't mind my saying. In the interest of disclosure, I have performed with Mr. Conheim in a film band called Wet Gate and I've also performed with Mr. Leidecker, who does solo music under the name Wobbly. Mr. Hosler is a founding member of Negativland, going back to 1980 or so, and Misters Leidecker and Conheim have participated in the Negativland radio show Over The Edge (with Don Joyce) for years before joining the group as performing members. This trio seems to have a good rapport and be guided by the same interests and goals. Their set was underpinned by a track of cut-up found audio pieces which they then embellished with noise from the Booper units and Mr. Leidecker's dulcet keyboard accompaniment. There was also something like a rhythm machine digging into its industrial patches. The set featured a piece on the melting of the ice caps, a real estate development called Sycamore, a version of the old chestnut Guns (Peter informs me: We didn't actually do the "Guns" piece; we did "The Gun and the Bible", which I think was on the FREE album), a list of rock band and entertainment names, and someone shouting "I want a piece of meat." The subtler segues and nicely cut-up sentences and juxtapositions made for some good head scratching. There was a fine balance of politics and humor to the set and the extreme futurist audience was appreciative enough for an encore.

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

JOHN CAGE 2012:
Atlas Eclipticalis, Variations IV, 0'00"
Southwest Chamber Music, Jeff von der Schmidt, Artistic Director
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Pasadena Art Center College of Design

John Schneider presents the Thursday morning Global Village music show on KPFK in Los Angeles, and probably does the best job of playing new and avant-garde music to radio audiences in southern California. Last Thursday, the 8th of March, he had Jeff von der Schmidt, director of Southwest Chamber Music on as a guest, and they talked about this year's 100th birthday celebration of John Cage's life and music, significant to LA because Mr. Cage was born and lived here until he was 18. Though he eventually moved to New York, Los Angeles is John Cage's hometown. Southwest Chamber Music is presenting a series of Cage concerts this year; along with a group of artist/musicians at Cal Arts, they have staked out an eventful year of surprises dedicated to Cage's music and memory. Mr. von der Schmidt did a nice job of describing Cage's importance as he promoted the concert on Saturday, featuring the significant ensemble piece Atlas Eclipticalis. I was fortunate, as a listener-member of KPFK, to call and win a pair of tickets to the concert.

Jeff Plansker accompanied me to the show and he told me about the Art Center's remarkable bridge building, designed by Craig Ellwood, which we drove under as we came in to park. The concert was presented in the Williamson Gallery, where a set of historical space photographs are on display. The gallery was split into 3 rooms by large wall divisions and framed photographs were displayed on all the walls on the interior and also on the exterior walls of the gallery. About 50 chairs were placed in sidelong rows in each third of the gallery and maybe 7 chairs with music stands were in each gallery for performers. (There were a total of 22 performers.) Mr. von der Schmidt made some opening remarks, inviting us to "make our choices" as to where we sat for the first piece and explaining that after that we were welcome to move around, as would the performers. The show was designed as a trio of pieces composed between 1961 and 1963 which Cage had spoken of as a trio which could represent Nirvana (Bliss), Samsara (Chaos) and Individual Action. We sat in front of violinist Shalini Vijayan in a chamber that included bassoon, baritone sax, trumpet, trombone, flute and double bass. At a certain start sound, Ms. Vijayan started the stopwatch on her iPhone, and for the next 42 minutes, Southwest Chamber Music, along with 15 players from the Hamilton Arts Academy intoned the tidal variations of Atlas Eclipticalis. Mr. von der Schmidt did tell us that this piece could be played for 5 hours, but that tonight they would give us a digestible chunk. He never explained that the score was created by tracing star charts onto music paper, although the space photographs were a reasonable approach to that information. Cage's minimal ensemble music is difficult. There's not a lot of form to grasp onto. It can seem like a lot of orchestral tuning up. And I find that it takes some time to get pulled into the feel of the music, which involves somewhat random super-impositions of parts being played in sequences or patterns rather like small sound events in the natural world. Or city sounds heard from an open window many floors up. There is no heavy human hand. It is some of the first "ambient" music perhaps, a field of shifting sounds that can be taken as a background for thought. Cage believed in giving certain freedoms to his players; while he clearly sketched the rules for a piece in performance there were often also choices for the performer to make as to how long to play a note or section. Maybe this is a kind of jettison of the role of the single concert master or conductor over an ensemble. There were several nice moments to Atlas Eclipticalis, when sounds made in adjoining rooms imposed themselves on the closer instruments of our own chamber and made for surround or elsewhere effects. The freedom that Cage was already promoting by 1961 is incredible; the baritone sax player was often stamping his feet as part of the score and other unorthodox techniques were inserted. I wish I hadn't heard the somewhat cliche sounds of the flexatone and whistle tube, both thrown into the mix like a couple of kitchen sinks. But the 42 minutes of Atlas Eclipticalis went by all too fast. I had just begun to get into its metre. And although there were no revelations in the music, no tone clusters that struck unheard-of chords or patterns landing like new fallen snow, it was nice to hear this music presented in a concert setting. Variations IV followed, which involved the players moving freely about the space and playing just about anything they wanted to. The audience also mulled around the space, looking at space photographs or stepping out for free beer. To close, Jeff von der Schmidt performed his version of 0'00" which involved reading a long passage about meditation, I assume written by Mr. Cage. It was a bit pedagogic and we grew tired and departed. Our 2 person concensus found that the music may have been better served if presented in a more formal listening situation, like a concert hall. Experimental music presented experimentally can become a double overkill. While the space photo gallery was a nice idea, the program in general did not advance the music particularly. Perhaps a marathon of Atlas Eclipticalis would have worked better in that space, although again I think I would have preferred it in a hall. This music is not presented frontally often enough and it is worthy of that attention. There's no reason this can't be concert music. The art school environment is great for students new to the music, and it was presented in a fun, inviting way, but for us olde fartes a more austere and intense program is preferable. Of course Cage's work benefits sometimes from presentations akin to Fluxus festivals (like the Songbooks presentation at Cal Arts in February, which I missed), where the border between "performance art" and music is blurred or gone. But after the circus, some of us just want to hear sounds being put together in new ways, which is what Cage was drawing maps to get to. Art circuses lend themselves towards repetition, they arrive at the same station. And the action is largely external. Maybe we're best off with a good stereo system and the silence in between a few good John Cage recordings. The music can then work on you internally, go inside and change something. I do hope to see more of Southwest Chamber Music's presentations during this Year of Cage. Their love and appreciation for his work, their desire to present it in exciting ways, does not go unheard.

THE END OF AMOEBA AS WE KNEW IT, Part 2.

Yesterday, I brought a bag of CDs and LPs to Amoeba Records in Hollywood, hoping to trade out some of my record collection for hard currency. I had about 60 CDs and 30 LPs with me and figured the lot would be worth several hundred dollars to buy groceries with for the next several weeks. This small collection was not a pile of detritus, including about 4 early Miles Davis recordings, Major Works of John Coltrane, the Art Ensemble live in Japan, Dolphy, Basie, Wayne Shorter, Sidney Bechet, Toru Takemitsu, Charlie Parker, Brian Eno, Ornette, Jobim. A very diverse group of records in great shape, which I thought might merit 4$ each or so. I told myself that I wouldn't accept anything less than $300 and dropped off my stuff, the consignment officer telling me to take a look around the shop and they'd call me on the intercom. Imagine my surprise, when called, to be offered $138 cash. Wow. I had no idea records, CDs or LPS, had descended in value to such a level. Like everything else I guess since no one seems to have money to buy anything. I was also expecting to see a line of people waiting to sell records there, but I guess people know at this point they will be offered very little money at a retail store like Amoeba. I want to support the brick and mortar record store, but I couldn't just give away a piece of my collection, purchased carefully over so many years. I realize that a place like Amoeba has a huge overhead to pay for, and while they did amazing business the past 15 years, which allowed for their expansion out of the Bay Area into Hollywood, who could have predicted the slump of the world economy and thus have saved appropriately? Prices for records at Amoeba has not gone down. A new CD is still stickered at $12.99 or so and good used CDs are still 9 or 10$.

Record collecting, doing radio programs, listening and thinking about music are major parts of the life I have lived. I am of a generation of music lovers for whom buying an LP was always a major aspect of identity. I have lived for finding new music, lifting the record out of the shop bin and exclaiming "Ahh!" after looking for it for so long. Collections are now stuff for rich people, museums and foundations. I mean, who can even house a collection of a few thousand LPs anymore? And what's the point? How many people maintain a turntable and a decent pair of speakers? You do what you can.

I can't imagine letting go of my entire record collection and accepting a virtual library of hollow-bodied MP3s. Maybe trim down to a skeleton selection of a few hundred LPs and CDs, but the wholesale shift to Going Mobile is not an option. Of course, I haven't been evicted yet.

Young people (and some excitable contemporaries) are content exchanging MP3s with one another and spend their spare dollars on iPhone apps. They cross the street at the same time as they read their e-mail, both are given a percentage of one's attention. Can the same people be present at a concert or a film screening? Do they feel anxious about the twitter feed they might be missing? I have to ask: What's "smart" about the new generation of mobile phones? They may allow us a million ways to interact with the internet and our un-present friends, but what are we losing in presence by being a slave to the "hand-held device"?

Committing a certain percentage of my life to buying music, supporting music both live and recorded, it is surprising to find that the record collection no longer holds much value. A friend used to say about his burgeoning collection: "It's like putting money in the bank!" Well, that has changed. And sure, some of these records will not be hard to sell. Single pieces sell depending on their rarity and niche importance. I sold 1 Sun Ra Saturn LP about 10 years ago, when the internet was still sort of new, for 130$. I just saw the new Sun Ra 14CD box at Amoeba for around $110. You can buy the world for $100. But raising $100 is another story. Some of us must now resort to scavenging, although I guess that word applies to what many of us do here on Earth.

Records are like vessels with holes in the middle. They only hold water, or function, when they are connected to larger home listening systems, the hole is plugged. People don't seem interested in listening to recorded music any longer. Or they accept music as part of a background within their larger experience. People watch movies and other programs on large LCD televisions partly because the medium envelopes more of our total sensory ability. We want to be consumed by experience. Maybe that's a reaction to being conditioned as consumers for so long. And a stand-in for what was once community.

Life is broken down into smaller and smaller units. Songs cost 99c on iTunes and each one is ephemeral as the smoke from a cigarette. Didn't Buddy Holly exhale this smoke? We have cloned the smoke.

The most vital and real recorded experience might still be a great sounding LP on a good home music system. Though many people can't stand the solitude that comes from hearing intensely great music, eyes closed into the dark interior.

Wet Gate Plays Berkeley Art Museum L@TE





Wet Gate, the 3 person projector band I play in, was invited to perform as part of the Berkeley Art Museum's L@TE Friday series, which featured Terry Riley and Ellen Fullman on the 2 previous occasions and has upcoming or just occurred events with William Wynant and Fred Frith, as well as Carl Stone among others. So we had to accept the honor of the appointment. We were scheduled for January 29th, with friends Anne McGuire and Jon Leidecker (aka wobbly), who do a bizarre nightclub song set.

We had several months to prepare our material, which was fortunate given that Wet Gate had not played together for almost 3 years and that I now live in Los Angeles, which makes rehearsing a challenge. Those months allowed us to go through olde material and choose what we still liked from it as well as check our equipment for functionality. 16mm projectors can tend to keep on chugging, thankfully, but they do require some minor standards of upkeep and storage. We also looked into updating our various methods of image alteration, more or less the mirrors we use to bounce images up onto the screen. Because Wet Gate, as a band, plays projectors at the front of the house, before the audience, not hidden in the booth at the back.

Wet Gate enjoyed some good years in the Bay Area, in some ways leading a wave of artists working in fields of expanded cinema. (I know that sounds pretentious but I believe true.) The group silt had been doing something else quite rare and otherly, with super8 mostly but by diverse means, and Wet Gate's appearance came as silt seemed to dissolve, then working more as individual artists and out of town. (Our approach was also uniquely sound-centric, whereas experimental film culture tends heavily towards the imago-centric. We identified more with the music scene, as a band.) There was overlap to the activities of these 2 groups, silt and Wet Gate, and as friends we encouraged each other. What I'm trying to say is that the late 90's and early 00's were the years when Wet Gate really developed as a group and innovated a very clear approach to film performance. (While it may be frustrating at times that the film and music worlds seem so separate, these fences between genres or mediums became the scaffolding we could walk upon and build something almost new... San Francisco is also a uniquely open-minded town.)

Anyway. After an initial get together around Thanksgiving, when we visited the Berkeley Museum and saw the strange orange blob-like landscape seating which we would be sharing the space with, we began to conceive a show. A usual Wet Gate show runs about 40 minutes and involves alternating sequences of pictoral and abstract film loop projections. We looked at some material we each proposed to bring into the show. Peter (Conheim) showed Steve (Dye) and me a great Margaret Mead film of Indonesian trance theater. We enjoyed our usual brown dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Alameda.

The Winter went by. Our rehearsal time turned out to be only the day prior to our Friday show, although we exchanged volumes of e-mail discussing the museum space and our use of it. This procrastinative approach is historical with Wet Gate; we have often created set lists at restaurants just prior to show. There is a fine line with Wet Gate work, wherein repeated rehearsals of a show contents can lead to exhaustion of interest in that material. The machines also slowly destroy the film material. While we have a written set, improvisational aspects add just enough room to give the performance a flexibility that makes it exciting. We took notes from several "jam sessions" that Thursday. I sat with notebook and tried to piece together a set from what we were looking at, with Steve and Peter's corrections and comments. We ran through some of the material and Steve and Peter made more suggestions. We shuffled the order and re-wrote the set.

We met Friday morning and again worked on some of the transitions and sections of the show, did some tweaks to the set, but really we had time now only to load out to the museum and see if we could work there for a few hours. We were blessed by wonderful weather, cloudy with a chance of meatballs, right? (It did rain that evening, but only after we were well set up inside the gallery.) I had major concerns that we would have trouble getting good vantage on the screen as it hung over the orange landscape blobs in the gallery, but as we turned on the projectors and started to toss some light around it appeared that we had a great spot. Set up went smoothly and easily with very good support from many hands on deck at the museum. Steve and Peter spent a lot of effort maximizing placement of the Mackie loudspeakers in the orange waves of grain. We had all afternoon to get comfortable in the space, and Anne and Jon showed up much later and seemed ready to go in minutes. We decamped to a Korean restaurant and chatted with Gibbs (Chapman) and Keith (Evans) while also considering any changes needed to be made to the set.

It seems that over 400 people came out in rainy weather to see the show, it seems a great thing that museums are opening their doors to the public at night and hosting performance events. Ever increasing disposability of culture must demand that museums seek some spontaneity in their hallways. Art is expensive; kids want cheap MP3's. Where is the meeting point? In experiences, perhaps.

Wobbly and Anne (Freddy) did a very fun set of twisted lounge singing, she curled into the orange turf under the screen which projected, Peter Campus style, herself in closed circuit video feedback. (The screen projects.) Jon selected from a series of arch pop music samples to create the vertebrae for her singing, and his rig sounded great considering the space. (The best vantage point was directly in front of what was the stage and then moving out from there sound became echous.) It was very funny at times, perhaps a little grandiose a venue for receiving the messages of some of her ruminations, but some great moments, including when viewed from high up in one of the museum balconies. The party atmosphere of the event had a lot of background chatter all through the night. In the middle of one song, Anne good-naturedly commented: "Go ahead and talk among yourselves. Get a drink at the bar." She had also threatened to strip at the show's start but didn't carry through with that, understandably.

We then came on and did our 40 minutes of chaos, which started a little stiffly but relaxed into a groove in which we listened and played well, if not absolutely inspiredly. Our show seemed to fit the room well. We somehow fell back into the conversation we had learned to have with this equipment and each other. At one point early in the show, Peter, fed up with the audience chatter and innattentiveness, suggested we ramp up the energy and fight back, which we did and it added a needed jolt of steam to the show. I tend to prefer the less formal performance, and this situation was something between a formal performance and a more relaxed workout, a nice balance in a pretty unique situation.

While it's uncertain what future remains for Wet Gate, this event was definitely a good one. I'm trying to fold my performance energy towards a solo sound and image show and continue to see Wet Gate as an incubator that could lead each of us to new things. It was nice to be back together again and we had many encouraging comments, as well as a nice anonymous timelapse youTube document you can see here (sound coming some day soon):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2toVwJV2MDc

(Images above both from this youTube clip.)

See also BAM/PFA site for L@TE schedule:

http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/about/late

(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.