From: CTHEORY EDITORS [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2001 6:21 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Article 101- The Microsound Scene
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CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 24, NO 3
*** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
Article 101 12/04/01 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
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THE MICROSOUND SCENE
An Interview with Kim Cascone
=============================
~Jeremy Turner~
Kim Cascone received his formal training in electronic music at the
Berklee College of Music in the early 1970's, and in 1976 continued
his studies with Dana McCurdy at the New School in New York City. In
the 1980's, after moving to San Francisco and gaining experience as
an audio technician, Cascone worked with David Lynch as Assistant
Music Editor on both ~Twin Peaks~ and ~Wild at Heart~.
He has worked for Thomas Dolby's company Headspace and as Director of
Content for Staccato Systems. Since 1980, Kim has released more than
15 albums of electronic music and has worked/performed with Keith
Rehberg, Oval, Scanner, Carsten Nicolai, Doug Aitken, and David Toop
among others. Cascone was one of the co-founders of the microsound
list (http://www.microsound.org) and writes for ~Computer Music
Journal~ and ~Artbyte Magazine~.
For a look at Cascone's talk and performance at the Tate Modern go
to: http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/programmes/webcasting/deleuze.htm
For more articles and interviews on electronic music, visit:
www.ctheory.net
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CTHEORY: You have mentioned before that the problem with some
realtime performances of laptops is that the result(s) can be easily
dismissed by the listening public as "spacebar music". Do you feel
that performing your own compositions from your laptop is a
sufficient way to engage a concert audience?
KIM CASCONE: I am currently writing an article for Mille Plateaux
about how the laptop computer has become a focal point for some of
the issues surrounding "performance" in electronic music today. There
are several historical forces at work here that need to be considered
while addressing the problem of "laptop music":
1) The role of the individual in the performance of
electronic music.
2) The migration of electronic music to pop culture.
3) Acousmatic music presentation in academic music culture
and...
4) The expectations of an audience in various cultural
settings.
All of these forces are currently intersecting at one point and most
people are unable to view these various forces with equal clarity.
The resulting difficulty most people have with laptop performance is
exacerbated by the fact that most people today arrive at electronic
music through the cultural framework (and hence expectations) of pop
culture...and even within the cultural framework of 20th century
music there are people who still cling to the notion that music
performance needs to carry a visual counterpart (I call this
"gestural theater") to the actual music being produced...as if the
music is made more rich or meaningful through the gestures of a
performer...people can't let go of needing to verify causality in a
musical setting.
I find it odd that people don't demand the same proof of causality
from a piece of visual art but some of this has to do with the
difference between temporal and spatial arts. We demand to see proof
of causality when a piece is being performed realtime. We need proof
that the work is not just a temporal displacement; i.e. playback of a
stored "performance". I find this distrust and suspicion tied
directly to the distrust of technology in general.
My view is that the laptop acts as a direct connection to the mind of
a composer and bypasses most of the apparatus that has been put into
place by pop culture over the past 100 years. Hence, many ideas can
now be expressed which previously couldn't be because of the highly
developed motor skills required to play a musical instrument...
Besides, the fact is that there is very little difference between the
construction of a synthesizer/sampler and a laptop computer...they
both share I/O, CPU, some sort of storage, and a display for UI. It
just happens that one is packaged like a computer and the other like
a keyboard (usually)...
CTHEORY: In past interviews, I discussed the possible aesthetic
homogenization of software driven music composition due to the
proliferation, saturation and possible dependence of plug-in
templates. Upon hearing your recent work (on your square CDs), I was
able to detect exactly which kinds of plug-ins you were using and
that started to take precedence over your compositional processes.
Admittedly, I am also a composer who has trained himself to pay close
attention to the diverse array of available compositional processes
and techniques and so my ear would be tuned to these sorts of
textures and forms but even those who are not actively composing
music or listening to sounds deeply have still been able to notice
the similarities in the bulk of electronic music being produced
today. What do you think is the best way to compose new works where
the processes are more concealed? Or, do you feel that it is best
when these processes are transparent? Would you agree that your forms
are meant to mirror Clement Greenberg's idea that all media should be
discrete and transparent? Is your recent work aspiring to be true to
its sonic materials?
KIM CASCONE: I came up with the following quote for an article I
wrote for Computer Music Journal:
"The medium is no longer the message, the tool has become the
message".
I think that this is an unavoidable situation given the reliance on
digital audio tools for creating electronic music but it is no
different than musicians being able to hear a Yamaha DX-7, Korg M-1
or an Arp 2600 on a recording except now they can hear plug-ins.
Being aware of the tools used in a work of art is nothing new. I used
to hang out with fine arts and film students who could trainspot a
particular type of brush, medium or camera lens used in a work. The
pressure to create sounds that have never been heard before and/or
whose origins are undetectable reeks of a modernist notion of
"originality". Originality is no longer a relevant aesthetic
problem...we abandoned that idea a long time ago. I like the fact
that tools have become part of the message...it can create very
complex surfaces upon which to work.
CTHEORY: Your work although densely textured, still seems to present
multiples of the same family of timbres as if we are listening to
many mutations on the same theme simultaneously or hearing different
angles of the same shard. In a rather baroque way, your work seems to
evoke the fugue-machines of Iannis Xenakis. I am also reminded of
Hugh Le Caine's "Dripsody" where he does endless variations on one
drip or John Oswald's manipulations of bell tones. You recently
mentioned that you were hoping that future directions would
eventually abandon minimalism. Do you see your recent approach as
abandoning minimalism with regards to source timbre as well as
structural variation? I am not suggesting the serialization of
timbres but such ideas would lead to an increasingly maximal approach
towards composition.
KIM CASCONE: I have always felt that the term minimalism when applied
to music has been misused. It is difficult to create a work which is
emptied of content and refers to itself. All artwork references
external reality in some way but that might be a different discussion
altogether but yes, I find minimalism to be an aesthetic dead end. It
carries less and less information with repetition and I am much more
interested in density of information i.e. multiple channels of
information all turned on at once while listeners position themselves
within this field.
The patch I constructed in Max enables me to control the amount of
density via external MIDI controllers so I can create multiple spaces
and port info back and forth between them by introducing new sounds
and changing the overall context/mix. The minimalist sinewave/clicks
and cuts/glitch movements are folding in on themselves because the
work is too self-referential (in terms of genre) and it can't evolve
in an entropic cultural environment...
CTHEORY: What is your view on localizing and isolating sound objects?
Or more importantly, what is your definition of a 'sound object'?
Does it differ much from Pierre Schaeffer's "Objet Sonore"?
KIM CASCONE: I am currently reading "Information Theory and Esthetic
Perception" by Abraham Moles in which he discusses the concept of
"sonic objects". I tend to think in terms of "sound grids" and "sound
ornaments" and this informs much of the way I tend to work but all
sound objects have a defined lifespan and I tend to submerge the idea
of sound objects below the abstraction of layers, surfaces, and
spaces. The objects I create are born and die within these spaces but
all my objects are pre-defined.
My compositional process has more to do with creating the space in
which sound objects can co-exist and form relationships. Again, these
spaces are very dense and this enables the listeners to position
themselves within this space so they can participate in the
production of meaning...
CTHEORY: You have made a close connection between the aesthetic
choices in your work and the philosophies of Deleuze. Are there any
contemporary scientists, engineers or architects that are directly
influencing the choices you make in your work?
KIM CASCONE: Contemporary? I am not sure all my influences are living
but here are some of them: Georg Cantor, NOX, Marcus Novack, Henri
Bergson, Iannis Xenakis, Manfred Schroeder, Greg Egan, Marcel
Duchamp...
CTHEORY: Are you content with the technology you are currently using
or do you have compositional ideas that would require some hardware
or software that has not been invented yet? What kind of device or
program do you envision?
KIM CASCONE: I am very content with Max/MSP <www.cycling74.com> but
would like to spend time learning SuperCollider in the future.
CTHEORY: I have been reading the essay "Loving The Ghost In the
Machine" by the Finnish scholar, Janne Vanhanen published in CTHEORY
(Article 99, www.ctheory.net). As mentioned in this essay, he
continues to ask the question first put forth by the German
philosopher Wolfgang Welsch, about the dependence on the visual in
our culture to communicate the other arts such as sound production.
Like Welsch before him, Vanhanen wonders:
"How to think of sound itself when the epistemological focus of our
thinking and our concepts is located in a seeing subject?"
In your particular context, you prefer to project visuals as a
backdrop to your compositions when performing live. How integral are
these projected images to your compositional output? When I saw
Markus Popp from Oval perform at the Western Front Society in
Vancouver last year, he gave a local artist permission to provide
visuals for his concert without ever seeing the content of the
imagery in advance^J It was as if he was not too concerned about the
visual side to his audio presentation. Do you make your own visuals?
KIM CASCONE: This is a very deep subject that touches on many
contingent concepts: Acousmatic music and pop audiences, the lack of
"gestural theater" in microsound, manipulating the expectations of an
audience, etc.. But in my own work, I try to manage the stress of
providing music created and performed on a laptop where the gestures
are micro and read as "clerical" by most viewers.
The expectation of gestural theater by pop audiences is great so I
provide a visual world that complements the sound in the way it was
produced (software failure, corruption, broken media, etc)... This
gives people a place to focus since my job isn't to wean them off of
pop gestures...the video doesn't supply gestural theater but does
provide a portal where people can access other parts of the
sound...the video was created by my wife who is a multimedia
designer.
___________________________________________________________
Jeremy Turner is instructing a new course on the "History of Digital
Audio" at the Vancouver Community College in Vancouver, Canada.
Turner is also a composer and inter-disciplinary artist. He is the
co-founder of an international artist collective, 536
(www.fivethreesix.com). He is currently composing site-specific
lieder to be performed by Avatars in 3D OnLive environments.
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