Last week, I performed on a panel with my friends and colleagues Kyle Stedman, Harley Ferris, and Jon Stone. Our panel was titled, “Ways of (Sonic) Being: Composing and Performing Sonic Rhetorics,” and was an experimental approach not only to the ways in which research is composed and performed, but also in the sense of co-performing with each other and the spaces and objects around us. Jon began by introducing and including us in his “folkways,” Harley explored the guitar as a case of cultural meaning, and Kyle toyed with our affective expectations of sounds.

My talk, titled “Self-Oscillating Texts: An Experiment in Chance and Feedback,” was truly an experiment to illustrate the ways that, especially in sonic composition environments, the often romanticized human composer loses control. We know this, of course. We don’t have complete control of our objects, technologies, and environments. Files get corrupted, computers crash, planes are delayed, storms happen, we forget what we were going to say. I enacted this lack of control by using a circuit bent keyboard, live web radio, and self-oscillating feedback loops. What resulted was, at least as I remember, a strange and at times uncomfortable soundscape. And in this way, I suppose, I succeeded; the loss of control is uncomfortable. Glitch is something we have been taught to avoid. To cringe at.

Yet as Alex Reid later talked about in his fantastic keynote, glitches are a key ontological condition; they are features, not failures. And to shamelessly link my work to Reid’s (and also Byron Hawk’s brilliant Stompbox Logic, a must read), I am echoing the argument that composing without an acknowledgment of glitch, chance, indeterminacy, and cooperation is simply not accounting for the complex digital ecologies in which we live, think, and compose.

There is so much more to report, of course, from the Graduate Research Network to the outings with friends. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t at least mention the amazing (and amazingly underattended) performance/gift from Thomas Stanley and Tesia Kosmalski. Here are some other reports of #cwcon from my friends Dan Anderson and Kyle Stedman.

Computers and Writing continues to be the most supportive, open-minded, and thoughtful community of scholars I’ve encountered. Next year cannot come quickly enough.

some live sounds from black boxes.
april 6 @ stoker’s at the Hotel Donaldson, Fargo.
untitled.

i’ve completed a short film version of my recent audio work titled ouroboros.

reptiles. humans.
nightdriving.
devolution.

i hope you enjoy it.

we’ve now confirmed our fantastic lineup of artists for the chimera cooperative mixed arts cabaret IV, Friday, Apr 6 at Stoker’s (Hotel Donaldson) on Broadway in Fargo, ND. Performances begin at 8:30.

this free event will feature local artists, creating and co-creating in the same space. collaboration and improvisation.

join us.

artists and info:

Sounds
Black Boxes feat. Rod Mooridian
experimental electronic/analog music
Mark Reitan, formerly of the Johnson Family Band
acoustic singer/songwriter
Jake Severson
soloist/acoustic guitar
XidZeta (of Tryptic Groove)
live electronics

Sights
Colby Nelson
illustrator
Nate Booth
video art
Will Buchanan
abstract painting/drawing

Words
John Powers
Poetry
Paloma Segal
Comedy

Here is ouroboros.
It is best when listened to in stereo (headphones, especially) due to liberal use of panning.
It is a cohesive album, a narrative. But naturally, make of it what you will.
I hope you enjoy it.

Heather and I have confirmed a date for the next Chimera Cooperative mixed arts cabaret event. As usual, the event showcases local artists, encourages participation from attendees, and is free and open. Artists/performers TBA. Save the date!

apr. 6
8:30 pm-
Stoker’s at the Hotel Donaldson, Fargo

why de-fret?

De-fretting a guitar is a fairly simple, inexpensive way to create an instrument capable of microtones, distinct in feel and sound, and particularly conducive to prepared guitar techniques. Bassists like Jaco Pastorious and Les Claypool have used fretless instruments, but surprisingly few guitarists have employed such techniques/tools. There are drawbacks, of course. The guitar becomes a new instrument in many ways, challenging the expertise you may have gained on the fretted instrument; chords, while certainly possible, become more difficult to play consistently; many fretless players note a drop in sustain, and so on. Many converts, however, find that with a bit of time with the new instrument yields a certain fascination and novelty, and learning to cope with a new instrument is indeed inspiring. I found that undertaking this hardware modification adventure closely resembles circuit bending, both in terms of process and product. Both value the reuse and modification of an existing object to create new sonic devices, both embrace DIY philosophy and aesthetic, both seem to inherently value notions of sound that violate Western constructions of music and sound in some way.

diy!

The good news is that you don’t need to spend a lot of money to try this instrument. Sure you could go out and spend several hundred or thousand dollars on a fretless guitar or bass. But you could also do it yourself for relatively little cash. Here’s how I did mine:

Materials:
a fretted guitar (any will do, but using maple will be more complicated and I don’t talk about that here)
soldering iron
nail clippers
wood filler (i used elmer’s)
plastic putty knife
sandpaper (medium fine to fine grit)

Process:

1. remove strings from guitar
2. place soldering iron on frets, heating glue, for 1-3 minutes. do not overheat so smoking occurs.
3. when loose, use fingernail clippers to gently pry frets from slot. be patient, don’t get greedy, or you’ll take pieces of the fretboard with you. this is bad.
4. when you’ve removed all the frets, lightly sand the fretboard to achieve a smooth surface.
5. use a plastic putty knife (or similar tool–whatever works) to apply wood filler to fret slots.
6. let wood filler dry (see manufacturer’s recommendations. I waited 30-45 minutes.)
7. sand fretboard to achieve smooth, uniform surface.
8. repeat steps 5-7
9. you’re done. string it up and enjoy your new instrument.

Here are some photos of my fretless, an old and cheap Peavey Raptor. Yet make no mistake: this guitar is easily my favorite instrument, especially when combined with a pencil (to create an additional and moveable bridge) and various prepared guitar tools/techniques. It creates some beautiful noises.

There are plenty of fantastic resources and other tutorials for de-fretting guitars online, so do some additional reading.

Here’s mix one of our new album (two mixes are planned) for your listening pleasure. Our approach to this album, which is one continuous track, was to cloud collaborate, each producing twenty tracks lasting exactly 60 seconds each. We will then each create one cohesive mix from those forty tracks. It’s been an interesting approach, collaborating through a medium that is asynchronous and somewhat distant (at least to musicians used to the immediacy of a rehearsal/jam). We’ll write more about this when we’re finished with both mixes, but I wanted to throw this track out into space after finishing.

Here is mix one, titled Mas! Mas!

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…