Matt Novak recently published an article titled Musicians Wage War Against Robots on Smithsonian’s website that revisits a $500,000 advertising campaign undertaken by the then newly-formed Music Defense League in the early 1930s. The League was reacting to a growing tendency of movie theaters using recorded sound rather than live musicians. The campaign enlisted the help of a threatening, ominous robot (see above pictures) to argue that using “canned music” marked the dehumanization of art and the degradation of culture.

This isn’t the first (or last…not even close) instance of musicians waging war on technology, though it has accelerated significantly in the electronic age. Take this guy, for instance:

The paranoia of soulless robots remains, apparently.

Yet if we reach back into the not-so-distant past, we can easily observe other wars as a result of technological innovation (and here I am invoking Marshall McLuhan’s 1968 work War and Peace in the Global Village). In a recent presentation (click here for my Prezi), I outlined three such wars. Here are some hints:

• 1965, Newport Music Festival: Dylan goes “electric.”

• Late 1960′s, USA: Robert Moog and Herb Deutsch develop, manufacture, and market analog synthesizers.

• 2010, Worldwide: Apple releases the iPad, a device now used among amateur and professional musicians alike.

All three of these events have something in common: they involved technological innovations used in the production of sound, of music, and all three received significant backlash from traditionalists, which invariably involved a critique of the instrument/artist as somehow less authentic. One might say these events were analogous to the robotic “canned theater music” of the 1930′s, threatening the musical landscape and indeed the entire culture. We might look back on the Music Defense League’s advertising campaign and snicker at their shortsightedness–I mean c’mon, what’s wrong with recorded music??–yet we’re engaged in the same wars today over sonic authenticity. What are today’s wars? The iPad. Digital Djs. Autotune. Quantization. Sampling. Lip-synching. And the list will go on and change as our technologies change. As McLuhan wisely noted, “Every new technology necessitates a new war.”

I recently published a page documenting some tools and techniques I’ve explored in the world of prepared guitar music (my Jazzmaster pictured in upper left), and I recently distributed a syllabus with a photograph of Kim Gordon playing a Jazzmaster with a large file (upper right picture). As I was preparing this particular course I had this photograph in my mind as a way of teaching composition that makes sense to design students (majoring mostly in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Interior Design).

Prepared guitar techniques, put simply, are methods of physically manipulating the guitar (usually by introducing foreign and unusual objects) to produce radically different sound textures. You can see above that I’ve introduced alligator clips, wood skewers, and a spring. As I strike the strings, say, with a drumstick, I can achieve some incredible soundscapes. Likewise, Kim Gordon and the rest of Sonic Youth explored the guitar in very nontraditional ways, utilizing strange tunings, excessive feedback, files, and so on. They were drawing largely from Keith Rowe, Fred Frith, Glenn Branca, who drew from John Cage, and so on. This repositioning, refashioning, and repurposing of the electric guitar had some very interesting sonic and philosophic consequences. Here, have a listen:

Beautiful. Using familiar tools in unfamiliar ways. Understanding genre, undercutting it in innovative ways. And it is this that I want my design writers to do: understand conventions of writing, tools and methods, processes and skills, understand them all and be able to call on them when appropriate contexts demand. But I also want them to undercut and extend conventions, stretch genres and methods of communication, break tradition in ways, sometimes subtle and sometimes radical. I think good writing, good composition does this. Perhaps they’d do best not to stick a spring in their resume and strike it with an electric fan when applying to internships, but I suspect they’ll soon find a space to stretch boundaries in very interesting and pleasantly disruptive ways.

I could extend this a few ways, namely that these techniques introduce objects/actors into the sonic toolscape, undercutting the role of the human composer in often unpredictable and uncontrollable ways. Knowledge of a pentatonic scale, for instance, is useless when wood skewers are introduced to the network. But that is another conversation, I suppose. Next entry…

Creative Destruction: War and Peace in the Global Village, Remixed

I’ve just published a remix of McLuhan’s 1968 work, War and Peace in the Global Village in a special issue of Enculturation edited by Kevin Brooks and David Beard. You can check it out here: http://enculturation.net/creative-destruction

Many thanks to editors and reviewers.

Many electronic artists and Djs have embraced influence to the fullest extent, acknowledging the derivative nature of art and playing with that realization. Girl Talk is the most obvious example of this approach to authorship and originality. We also know the flipside to that coin: artists who, either by explicitly stating or by using the legal system, completely fail to understand that remix is by no means limited to the Dj, and that indeed all creative work builds on other creative works. They subscribe to an Author-God (I’m referring to Barthes’ The Death of the Author) authorship paradigm in which a “strong poet” (Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence) can singlehandedly and intentionally construct a text and its meaning while avoiding the ever-problematic factor of influence. While these artists are typically highly successful commercially and largely operate as puppets for record labels  and the RIAA (the hands that feed), there are a few somehow surprising adherents to the “strong poet” paradigm.

In the 2004 film Kill Your Idols, director Scott Crary seeks to explore the No Wave scene of the late 70s and early 80s and later artists such as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Strokes who in his estimation, “followed.” Lydia Lunch, a pioneering No Wave artist of the band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, makes frequent rhetorical appearances in the film, most notably making two arguments that Crary elevates and nurtures as the film unfolds: first, that No Wavers were extraordinarily original and influence-free (she comments that she set out to not sound like the bands that inspired her, such as Television), and second, that late 90s and early 2000s bands were “unoriginal” and poorly replicating No Wave sensibilities. Lunch and Crary make no effort to trace the roots of No Wave, however; they instead black box No Wave and mourn the “good old days.” To anyone familiar with experimental sonic art, however, the implication that No Wave had no influence is absurdly false.

Marcel Duchamp? Dada? Kurt Schwitters? Albert Savinio, Erwin Schulhoff, Hans Heusser, John Cage? No Wave was, one could argue, a resurgence of 1920s Dada. Anti-art, noise, experimental sound production, performance art… The similarities are so obvious, and the lineage is clear both philosophically and artistically. We could also talk about the Fluxus movement. And so on, and so on. I don’t mean to broadhandedly crucify No Wave; it is incredibly influential in my own work and I think it to be one of the most important sonic movements in recent history. Further, most No Wavers acknowledge influence readily and are able to intelligently position their work in a “conversation.” Yet this particular film, as is true with so many other nostalgic explorations of artistic movements, reinforces the problematic notion in art, composition, and expression, that original and non-derivative discourse creation is not only possible, but required if one is to produce anything of consequence.

Bent my Boss DS-1 tonight. It’s unfortunately too late at night to do a demo video, but stay tuned. This thing is violent in a really fun way.

Today, the U.S. Committee on the Judiciary is holding a hearing regarding the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a bill that would effectively introduce censorship to the internet. Read a bit more here. This is an obvious issue to many of us who work with digital media, teach remix/mashup, produce art and scholarship, consume various media, engage in various intellectual conversations… and on and on. I won’t go on, especially because this is not much of a controversial issue; I’m preaching to the choir, unless of course some of the kind folks from the RIAA/MPAA are reading this. I suppose I just wanted to put another oar in, and echo the voices of other SOPA opponents while discussing an interesting little illustration:

My partner is an avid reader. She loves novels, and goes through them pretty quickly. Facing the problem of a massive collection of books she’ll likely never read again and reading “on a budget,” she came upon paperbackswap.com. Here’s the rundown: you have a book you’re finished with and post it on the site. Someone sees that book, selects it, and you send it to that person and receive a “credit.” With that credit, you may then select a book from someone else’s list… It’s a great little service. Upon closer investigation of paperbackswap.com, I found two other versions: swap-a-cd and swap-a-dvd. Same system, different media.

Wait…isn’t this a peer-to-peer sharing service? People are sharing copyrighted materials, distributing and receiving media they haven’t paid the publishers for. It’s simply a different medium of exchange. So I wonder why these criminals aren’t being pursued, why they’re not being called out as the moral equivalents of purse-snatchers? What are the differences between sharing a torrent and participating in a paperback swap? The primary difference, at least at first glance: the medium of delivery/access. The medium in this case is the message. The message that legally distinguishes thrift from crime. Or maybe the difference is rooted here:

Is this it? Duplication? So we can share any media we like, as long as there’s no duplication? I wonder which is worse, according to MPAA/RIAA: sharing physical media, or duplicating digital media.

I didn’t want to turn this into a post about piracy, free culture vs. “free beer,” and so on. For the record, I am pro-file sharing, I am anti-permission culture. I believe piracy is an invention of capitalist machinery too inept to rethink distribution, value, and consumption in the digital age. But I’m chiefly concerned with accessibility to information and the ability of humans to interact with media in open ways, ways that encourage further creativity, thought, and knowledge. Sure, “free beer” is problematic when widespread and abusive. But sacrificing free speech online to help the MPAA and RIAA recoup “losses” due to extraordinary laziness is outrageous. I hope the House Committee understands this, and considers the wishes of its constituents, not its financial contributors. We’ll learn soon enough.

Inspired (as usual) by CasperElectronics, I am working on a modular, circuit bent Casio Sk-1. Here’s a sneak peek of the prototype:

To include a 25-point patchbay, patchable adjustments, pitch knob, loop switch, video out, and some other goodies/necessities. Updates as progress continues… Stay noisy, my friends.

Hope to see you there.

I recently finished bending a Casio PT-100. I picked up the piece for $1.50 at a local thrift store (it was a very happy find) and brought it home. The only issue with the keyboard was that, like so many thrift finds, there were remnants of stickers. They weren’t the usual stickers denoting notes on keys, but rather some sort of stubborn adhesive residue on the main casing. I tried to peel it away with no success. Then I learned a lesson… I have a can of Goo-Gone at home and gave it a try. DO NOT use this stuff on these keyboards!! It removed the adhesive, and also started to break down the plastic. It went from bad to worse as I tried to fix it, and I was finally left with an ugly mess. And not even ugly in a cool way…

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I decided that I would try, for the first time, to paint a piece, alter its native state. I don’t usually do this. Why?

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Plenty of benders regularly rehouse, recase, embellish, and/or decorate their instruments. Ghazala does this to the extreme, experimenting with paints, designs, and techniques to make some crazy-looking instruments. I’ve always chosen to avoid radical modification for a few reasons:

• I’m relatively inexperienced working with paints and visual art,
• I find original casing to be, in most cases, aesthetically pleasing (sometimes only ironically), and
• I find that altering the case hides the bend, masks the process of modification, and blurs the beautiful way in which you just subverted technology to create a piece of art.

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The quality of a bent instrument depends on more than the selection of bends; the playability, longevity, and aesthetic appeal of the instrument demand the selection of high-quality parts. This isn’t to say that they need to be expensive or high-tech; in fact, some of the best components are quite inexpensive. Q. R. Ghazala echoes this sentiment, warning would-be benders against low quality SPSD switches found at Radio Shack. Forums at circuitbenders, a UK-based site, contain several complaints about other low-quality suppliers and products. This could turn into a very long article, so for the sake of brevity I want to discuss an often-overlooked but incredibly important selection: wire.

Ghazala and others recommend a small-gauge, solid-core wire for circuit bending:

Mostly, wire-wrap wire is good for our needs because it’s very thin. This means that it will
get into tight places (such as under resistor leads already soldered to the board). And because
little metal is involved in thin wire, it absorbs heat quickly and will therefore solder very fast.
Real wire-wrap wire is a “silver content” wire, actually containing silver. This does aid in soldering,
but regular (nonsilver) “wire-wrap” wire (same gauge, pre-tinned, probably won’t say “wire
wrap” on it) solders equally fast. Fast is important when you’re soldering to heat-sensitive items
such as transistors, IC pins, and diodes.
Beyond this, wire-wrap wire is very easy to strip, its insulation is usually high quality, the inner
wire is always solder friendly (not all bare wire is), and, c’mon, it comes in marvelous colors.(66)

He does discuss, briefly, the downside of this choice, which is its lack of flexibility and eventual breakage.

When I began bending in 2009, I took Ghazala’s advice and purchased this wire, and found myself using an increasing amount of profanity as I soldered and re-soldered broken wires. Granted, my first projects were not terribly neat in terms of wiring, but it was maddening. I’ve since tried a few types of wire and have settled on a seeming best-of-both-worlds solution. That is, an inexpensive, thin, flexible, multicolored wire that holds up over time.

The solution: telephone wire!

Why?

• Cheap, cheap, cheap. Go to the thrift store and find this clogging bins. I usually pay $0.50 for a 10′+ cord. Each of these yield four multicolored wires.
• Reusing a dying technology is not only inexpensive, it echoes the philosophy and practice of circuit bending. Nothing is more fun that finding use for old tech that people have thrown away.
• Flexible multi-strand wire that won’t break if they’re flexed repeatedly. I’ve never had a wire break or pop off a board.
• Thin enough to solder in tight spaces.