gobs is a new collaboration between myself and ivan cheng
vocal only. improvisation. raw production. impulse filesharing.
an excercise in purity
we have a release out already
Tag Archives: music
protofuse interview
Julien Bayle aka protofuse and I exchanged an e-mail interview
this is a follow up to a remix collaboration we did last month
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here are my questions to him:
How did you get involved in creating electronic music?
With a long past inside music as a guitarist, I crossed jazz fusion, electronic acid jazz and finally jungle & drum’n’bass. With my first CD of jungle beats (LTJ Bukem “Mixmag 21”) I travelled…
I was moved by those ambiant and continuous synth soundscapes crowed by disrupting rythms. I loved it very much and it was too late: I began to use samples & fasttracker 2. After that, I used Cubase with some hardware machines and naturally I falled inside big DAWs when processors & RAM became more available & cheaper.
How long have you been working with electronic sound?
The LTJ Bukem’s CD has been released in 1996., so around 14 years.
What music did you listen to growing up? Of that music, what influenced you most?
I listened jungle & drum’n’bass a lot. I had a VERY long travel inside House Music. Minimal and micro sounds were things I loved the most. I derived to Techno, Dub Techno very naturally. Damon Wild, Surgeon were my preffered composers. And I listened Carl Craig a lot. I guess my most inspiring artist today is Robert Henke. We have a lot of common point, but he’s talentuous.
What music do you find yourself listening to now?
I’m listening a lot of ambient and drone music.
I like Pete Namlook & Biosphere (Geir Jenssen) but also a lot of stuff we can found on the Drone Zone channel on SomaFM internet radio.
Initially, ambient was made to cover only parasites noises in the air, to make a smooth layer between us and horrible and annoying noise in airports and elsewhere. I really listen this music in that way. While I’m programming, coding, designing stuff, I’m listening ambient because it makes me focus deeper than every other kinf od music, and even than silence. Ambient is my own silence.
How do you go about creating a track? What is most important to you in the process – what is your focal point?
I have no focal point excepted the final result.
At the beginning, there is nothing. I layer some sounds together. When there are rythms, sometimes they comes first in the process, sometimes at the end.
I listen continously. I grab some sounds, I visualize things in my head like “this sounds is round, I need a more squary one”
I’m using very rarely solo and mute when I’m composing. I need to listen the whole thing everytime.
Is process (Patches, Max/msp etc.) important in your work or can the piece come to be simply focusing on the sound?
Sometimes the process is important because I need to alter sounds itself and/or its timing characteristics. I can use a virtual synth like Operator in Live. I tweak the sounds. I sample it directly inside live and I can reuse the sample in a virtual sampler (Sampler in Live) in order to have a kind of meta-control over the first materials I created before.
Sometimes, I’m using some reaktor patches as they come, without altering anything! When I decided to use a fixed number of tracks in Live, with always the same framework, curiously, it freed my mind! In that framework, I understood that all the possibilities could be tested. So I’m very comfortable to test, tweak, use a max msp patch in order to make a loop, because it fits with my framework. This infinity of possible is so powerful and I think I won’t change anything for a very long time, but who knows ?!
What do you think you have learned so far in your work?
I learn that simplicity and minimalism are the ultimate state of sophistication. I learned it in this knowledge field too, I wanted to add. Because in a lot of part of my life, I already felt that.
What do you hope to learn further?
I’d like to learn more technical stuff because in my field, I cannot forget about technique completely. I can learn a lot by myself.
But I love to learn from the others and I feel comfortable sharing ideas, patches, liveset idea. The main point remains the final result, so all these techniques are here only in order to reach the desired render.
What do you want to accomplish with your art – what creative/communicative goals do you harbor?
For me, music is a very intimate feeling.
So, my musician part is very personal and I just hope some others could share my feelings through my music. I’d like to inspire people and tell them that they can make music or art by themselves. With Design the Media (http://designthemedia.com/), I’m trying to free people’s mind in order to make them becoming creator, artist, musicians by giving them a lot of tools, a lot of techniques. With all these new skills, they’ll walk their own way & I hope they will reach their goal safely and quietly. So my two parts create echoes each one of them for the other part: technique and creation/art became unsplittable.
Do you see your workshops and lectures as useful to yourself, does everybody learn during them (you included) or just the students?
It is very complicated to have a very homogeneous public.
The best workshop would be a workshop where I could learn a lot too.
I often met public who wanted to learn a lot and where there weren’t a lot of specialist. It is very interesting and I guess they liked it. I planned to make more interactive workshops (http://designthemedia.com/services/workshops/) I guess 2 different formats could be done: basic lectures + a new one. The new one would be real workshops where public would make things with their hands. I planned several events here and there. I hope I could make them.
Where do you go from here?
About the technical side, I began to design a new hardware controller. It will be released in 2011 but I cannot answer more about that at the moment. I can add it will be VERY beautiful and efficient. Another news, I’ll use it myself in order to prove it can really be used, customized in real life performance event. Some courses are planned too. Ableton Live, Max MSP Jitter & Max for Live will be teached for non profit association or directly final customers. I’ll make a lot of tutorials around these topics too. Workshops will be done too. A lot of work, as you can see. About the musical side, I planned 2 things: a 3 or 4 tracks ambient piece and another more dub tech bunch of tracks. I will propose my music live performance to a lot of festival for next years.
I just hope I could play live as soon as possible because all these techniques are only here for this : making music and video to have good and warm feelings.
Paul Lansky interview
When I compose, my main area of interest and exploration is the human voice. Likewise, I am drawn to other composers who focus on this element (AGF, Meredith Monk, etc.), so I was incredibly fortunate to obtain a brief interview with Paul Lansky. Lansky is one of the first electroacoustic composers who worked directly with the voice.
Paul Lansky (born 1944) is widely considered one of the original electronic music or computer music composers, and has been producing works from the 1970s up to the present day. He is currently a professor of music composition at Princeton University. He was a pioneer in the development of computer music languages for algorithmic composition, and is a former student of Milton Babbitt and Edward Cone.
the interview:
Derek Piotr: My first question concerns your first involvement with sound. How did that begin? Do you come from a musical background?
Paul Lansky: I do come from a musical background. My first interest in “sound” as opposed to “music” came in the mid 1970′s when I first worked with speech synthesis.
DP: My next question is directed at your concern with the human voice. It’s a unique sound to work with, being literally the most personal sound on the planet, the most emotional. Words and language are also an important element in human vocalizations, colloquialisms of speech etc. Which aspect is more relevant to you – the language aspect or the emotional impact/directness the voice can convey?
PL: I became interested in the voice because of its expressive qualities within an electronic context. It added something nothing else could.
DP: Now I’d like to ask you for some history on Idle Chatter – it seems very much rooted in aspects of colloquial speech. Am I correct in this? How did the piece come about?
PL: Idle Chatter was directly influenced by my first experiences with rap music in the early 1980′s.
DP: On UbuWeb’s archive there is another vocal piece of yours called Artifice (on Ferdinand’s Reflection). It reminded me very much of the speech experiments of Charles Dodge – was this something you were both using at the time, this speech synthesis?
PL: The piece on the ubu website is my first speech piece and it uses Linear Predictive Coding, as do my Campion Fantasies and the first three of the idle chatter set. I abandoned this technique in pieces like Smalltalk, Now and Then, Things She Carried etc, since it works best at low sampling rates and basically sounds crummy.
DP: Who has had the greatest influence on your work?
PL: Mozart.
DP: Lastly, what works have you yet to complete/accomplish that you hope to in the future? Where do your compositions move from here?
PL: I’ve been working on orchestral music recently. I haven’t done any electronic music since 2005 and probably won’t come back to it any time soon.
