In the fifth installment of "The Out Door" we discuss the infamous vuvuzela in the context of noise and minimalism, interview unclassifiable percussionist Z'EV, go over the finer points of just intonation with composer Duane Pitre, and speak to versatile musician and publisher George Chen about the Bay Area underground.
I: Four (or 40,000) Vuvuzelas (2010)
That's what "minimalism" was at first conjured up to do: to substitute repose, or wily humor, for all the claptrap and institutional appearances of art. --Tony Conrad, 1996, from the liner notes of Four Violins (1964)
You know more about most things than I know about soccer. I grew up in a household where American football, basketball, and baseball were the sacred trinity, dictating the sort of sports cards you collected and, after class, to which practice field you headed. But I'm a sucker for a fever, and this year's World Cup bore all the trappings of an essential one.
America's team, after all, looked to be an interesting squad, anchored by a New Jersey keeper whose entire life seemed to have been lived and won against the odds. And it didn't take a soccer historian to understand the excitement of an opening American match against the English, the premier soccer architects (and perennial underachievers) who remain our chief cultural ally and rival. So, on a Saturday afternoon, I escaped the summer heat and found a local bar broadcasting the game. According to TV ratings, more than 30 million people watched the match in either the United States or United Kingdom that day. I'd found my seasonal fever.
Little did I know that I'd also found one of the world's biggest conversations about our expectations of music and environment. Throughout my bar of choice, a serene, mildly sinister hum presided-- persistent but unstable, like a sound engineer searching for the proper mix while recording a massive modern drone ensemble. To me, it suggested Yoshi Wada's 1974 piece Earth Horns With Electronic Drone, in which long tones from several massive metallic horns drive a series of circuits that alter the sound. The music was transfixing. Somehow bright and low, it added an eerie, electric calm to the attentive pub atmosphere.
Well, at least for me: Other people hated the hum, so much so that, for the last few years, the culprit-- the vuvuzela, a long, thin, plastic trumpet made and sold on the cheap in South Africa-- has been the discussion of a potential ban. Fleets of players and fans abhor their sound and, after last year's Confederation Cup in South Africa, demanded that FIFA ban the tubes from this year's World Cup. FIFA declined. "It will be a World Cup with African sound," communications director Hans Klaus told ABC.
For some, though, perhaps that conjured memories of The Lion King or a recent Putumayo compilation. But the vuvuzela most common in South African soccer stadiums produces only one wobbly note, an approximate B-flat just below middle C. And it's extremely loud: A vuvuzela pressed against the ear peaks at around 127 decibels. "This is louder than a drum at 122 decibels, a chainsaw at 100 decibels and a referee's whistle at 121.8 decibels," writes the BBC. Imagine a stadium full of such horns, improvising for a match's 90-plus minutes, and you can guess the rest. The sound's been called Satanic by spectators and, by one Associated Press scribe, an "unrelenting water-torture beehive hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm." A writer for the technology news monitor Mashable called the vuvuzela "the most annoying sound in the world." YouTube's full of vuvuzela joke videos, too, many more abrasive than any noise any instrument could ever render, and web sites and television networks have devised a dozen ad hoc strategies for canceling or reducing the B-flat buzz that comes through your speakers.
The arguments against South Africa's smothering sound seem rooted in our desire to watch sports how we're used to watching them. With the horn bellows in place, many say, it's been impossible for the defeated English to deliver their drunken, boisterous taunts. "We absolutely could not hear the rich African voices of Ghana fans who sang lustily Sunday at the Loftus Versfeld in Pretoria, vibrantly clothed in their national colors of green and red," wrote The Associated Press' John Leicester, acerbically sending one African tradition under the bus in favor of another. "What a shame."
And the players have complained that vuvuzelas have hindered their ability to communicate on field or to concentrate, as if they were negotiating the Postage Stamp at Troon. Indeed, some of the most sacred venues for sports-- Duke basketball's Cameron Indoor Stadium, the Green Bay Packers' Lambeau Field, Mexico City's massive Estadio Azteca-- are chaotic, problematic places to play. Their environs force the best athletes in the world to adjust their strategies, to test their mettle. Survive and advance. Don't, and become Brazil. The indigenous horns certainly didn't give the South Africans much of a home-field advantage. Though South Africa eked out a win against a disastrous French squad, Uruguay destroyed the team 3-0, and they tied Mexico 1-1 on the tournament's first day. South Africa didn't make it to the Round of 16.
Others still have claimed that the vuvuzela shouldn't be defended as a South African tradition because they've only been in use in South Africa for about 15 years. They've only been commercially popular since the announcement of this year's World Cup in 2004. That's as good an impetus as any to stop and reflect for a moment on the state of South Africa just two decades ago. Tradition doesn't have a deadline.
So when did we get so defensive with what we're hearing? I don't think we have. Any major city's din eventually becomes a swollen, pervasive hum, and most people don't live their life complaining about that or turning it into scathing blog rants. Rather, it's the vuvuzela itself-- and our own general, collective listening past-- that gets peoples' ears in a twist. We demand songs, development and narrative-- really, the same excitement we hope to see on the field-- not a scoreless tie or a drone that trades melody for one note. And that such a note doesn't really respect our own tuning conventions doesn't help.
The vuvuzela's history remains a bit of a mystery: Though some say the plastic horn is a crude derivative of the African kudu used to call villagers together, others insist it was used as a cheering device in Chinese basketball before being introduced in South Africa as toy. There's talk that the Church of the Nazarene claims the instrument as its own and threatened a lawsuit to keep them out of the World Cup this year. No one knows what the word means, either, with interpretations ranging from "making noise" to "to sprinkle you, to shower you with noise."
Those unspecified origins are telling because they point to the lack of any real regulatory control over the vuvuzela. Former soccer player and current entrepreneur Neil Van Schalkwyk runs the vuvuzela manufacturer, Masincedane Sport, that first made the horns legion, but his company is now just one of many selling the horns in South African host cities. It's a malleable industry, then, one where standards of quality control and consistency fall mostly to the consumer. In response to recent criticisms that the horns damage hearing, for instance, the BBC reported that Masincedane Sport designed a vuvuzela that delivered 20 less decibels at the bell. So, though the common soccer vuvuzela plays something like a B-flat, there's no timbre police approving the sound of each instrument.
And so, the note bobs and weaves like a midfielder dribbling through traffic. The blog MiltCentral put one vuvuzela to the test, and found that, sure, it hovered around the correct frequency of 233 Hz. But it was unstable at best, producing ornery microtones and, on occasion, moving one full step in pitch. As British composer Stuart MacRae noted via Twitter, "#Vuvuzela is teaching the world the beauty of the microtone!" His use of beauty, it should be said, comes sans irony.
What's more, the overtones of the vuvuzela are more complex than they might appear. All instruments produce overtones when they're played, but these extra sounds are mostly familiar and predictable. When the vuvuzela produces its primary pitch, though, you also hear higher frequencies that don't relate to that main sound in the traditional way. It adds noise to the note. "It has a simple and regular pattern of overtones but they don't match harmonic overtones. So it masquerades as a 'musical' instrument but is actually noisy," MiltCentral writes. "What you get is the impression of musicality but the effect of irritation."
Now, again, imagine a full stadium of people blowing such an instrument with very little experience or stamina, stopping or starting as their lung capacity dictated and sputtering wrong notes. The sound never stops-- it just shifts, subsides, and swells.
The effect is one that recalls both the sacred African-American process of lined-out hymnody and musical minimalism. In hymnody, the leader of a congregation quickly and emphatically reads the upcoming words of a hymn. The congregation follows, singing those lines slowly and diligently, trying their best to find the right pitch and feeling while largely disregarding an absolute rhythm. The result is often a spectral, radiant sound, where a mass of people simultaneously offers imperfect versions of text they consider very important. On a take of "Father, I Stretch My Arm to Thee", included on last year's excellent Fire in My Bones Box Set, you can make out individual voices of the Mt. Calvary Congregation giving the words everything they have. Step back, though, and it's a giant, serene sonic smear. In his excellent book Lining Out the Word, William T. Dargan says the process creates "complex heterophony, subtle rhythms and unhurried intricacy."
"Unhurried intricacy"-- that feels much like the working definition of minimalism that composer Tony Conrad offered in 1996. "Musical minimalism reduced and underlined its formal boundaries in part so as to make modes of attentiveness malleable-- to defuse the hearer's sense of expectation. Further, minimalism stood for a contentedness with the ideal and preoccupational aspects of the specific sound itself," he wrote in 1996. That is, minimalism set up a system to explore "the specific sound" for everything it contained and to draw the listener away from a traditional narrative arch-- to create a sonic scoreless tie, and to be content with it.
So perhaps this World Cup, or its soundtrack, has been the world's biggest display of musical minimalism ever, with a score like so: Fill a soccer stadium of strangers with rudimentary noisemakers they barely know how to play. They can blow at their own pace and volume for the duration of the match, or they can choose not to blow at all. The piece ends when the match, or matches, end.
We'll call it in B-Flat (For Terry, 2010). Listen for the coda Sunday, July 11.
--Grayson Currin
Next:> An interview with performance artist Z'EV
II: Z'EV: Framing movement with sound.
Calling Z'EV a drummer is both technically accurate and massively insufficient. Percussion is his medium, but he takes it into realms beyond music, including performance art, theater, science, and philosophy. Banging, rubbing, and bowing both traditional instruments and ones he creates out of stainless steel, titanium, and PVC plastics, he veers from simple rhythms to complex cacophony to what sounds more like edited electronics than real-time acoustics. And his performances are more like rituals than shows, as his motion and concentration become as mesmerizing as his sounds.
Z'EV was born Stefan Joel Weisser in Los Angeles in 1951, and started playing music not long after. In 1978, he took on the moniker Z'EV, part of the Jewish name his parents gave him. Soon after, he developed a movement-based performance approach that he dubbed "wild-style," a sort of marionette show using drums instead of puppets. In 1980, he opened Bauhaus' first European tour, and his metal-based percussion influenced industrial groups like Einsturzende Neubaten and Test Dept. Abandoning "wild-style" in the mid-80s, he moved to a more traditional mallet-percussion method, which he's continually taken in new directions. He has also collaborated with an international array of artists, including Japanese guitarist K.K. Null, minimalist composer Charlemagne Palestine, Sunn0)))'s Stephen O'Malley, and NON's Boyd Rice.
Currently residing in London, Z'EV still performs around the world and maintains a busy release schedule. His latest record, As/If/When, includes a 1978 recording on L.A. station KPFK and a 1982 performance from San Francisco. We recently talked to him via phone about that release, how an audience can be a musician, and why "experimental" is a dirty word.
Z'EV: "As (Excerpt)"
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Pitchfork:__ What was it like listening to the pieces on As/If/When 30 years later?
Z'EV: Well, with the piece from KPFK from 1978 ["As"], I remembered playing pretty well that night. That was probably the best recording of that period, which was right before I made the breakthrough to working with movement. So this was still hand-manipulated and mallet-percussion-based. And it's pretty definitive, I think, for that form of percussion, for me.
Pitchfork: What makes it definitive?
Z'EV: I think the range of sounds. This was after I had played for a couple of years with analog synth players, doing sine-wave-based stuff. So the ability to generate percussion sounds that were not sine-wave based, but emulated more triangle, saw-tooth, and square wave-based sounds, that's really clear on this.
Pitchfork: How much do you plan the range of sounds you'll use in a given piece?
Z'EV: That comes as I'm performing. When I was playing with synth players, I was still within a conceptual framework of playing music. When I started playing solo, I became much more aware of the acoustic phenomena that the instruments were producing. And from that point, which would've been about 1977, that became my focus, generating acoustic phenomena. It became about what the instruments do in the space. You go into a space and you hear what the instruments are doing and you follow that, you work with that. If you take them to another location, they sound different. So you can't really have a set piece in rehearsal. You can't replicate it. The piece is a result of how the sonic energy of the instruments develops in the acoustic space.
Z'EV EXPLAINS HIS SET-UP WHEN RECORDING "AS" IN 1978
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Pitchfork:__ I've read that you don't consider your work to be "solo," and that the space is part of your "group."
Z'EV: Not just the space-- it's the space, the time, the audience. The energy of the audience is something I listen to. You know how you listen to other musicians, and you don't just listen to what they're playing? And everyone gets this group mind happening, and changes come organically, like a tempo shift or a chord change. I do that same thing with the audience. I'm listening to them listening to me and reacting to me, and I'm getting this feedback loop. So we are playing together in that sense.
Pitchfork: Is there any difference between playing with other musicians and playing with the audience?
Z'EV: For me, there's no difference. A lot of the time my eyes are closed when I'm playing anyway, so I'm not getting a lot of visual feedback. A lot of the people that I play with are electronic-based, so there isn't a direct physical analogue between what they're doing and the sound you're hearing. You don't have those cues, like being able to watch fingerings of a guitar player. So it's more ephemeral. It's like I'm accompanying the space. The majority of my training was as a drummer, and drummers are basically accompanists. I really like accompanying. I like working with vocalists, I've worked with a lot of poets. Or playing music for movement artists, dancers. It's kind of the same thing. You're watching the person, but you're still dotting the i's and crossing the t's, but those i's and t's are physical movement. You're framing that physical movement with sound.
Pitchfork: Do you think of your playing as improvisation or spontaneous composition?
Z'EV: Well, it is a form of improvising because it isn't an electronic instrument. It is a physical set-up, meaning it has particular limitations. You can't just change the patch, like you can with a synth. Like the stainless steel rectangular box that I use, it always sounds the same. So there are certain techniques that I use to get particular sounds out of it, and those are the same night to night. Every once in a while I'll find a new way of playing something, it will suggest itself. But generally speaking, there's a set sonic potential, and that's in concert with a set instrumental technique. And then I improvise within that framework. You have to be loose enough so that when you listen to what's coming, you can follow it. In that sense I am improvising, but I don't think I'm experimenting. I have a problem with the whole term "experimental music."
Pitchfork: What problem do you have with that term?
Z'EV: I think people take it too consequentially. The way I put it is, I don't want to see an experiment. Experiment at home-- when you show up on stage, I want to see a result*.* I think a lot of improvisers, you'll see them some nights and they just stink, and they go, "Well, we're just improvising." Like that's a license to have a shitty night! I was in a group 40 years ago, and we jammed a lot, and we had particular times after a jam-- not in front of an audience, but rehearsing-- that we'd talk about afterwards. Like, remember this one part, remember this thing. So if we performed and it wasn't going anywhere, we could shift to something that we knew worked. If I had that together when I was 17, I expect 30 and 40 year olds to be able to figure that one out. But some of them don't.
Z'EV: "If (Excerpt)"
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Pitchfork__: You recently presented a "master class" at New York's Issue Project Room-- what did that entail?
Z'EV: Well, it wasn't really a class. We talked. People asked questions and I answered. It was easier that way than just pontificating or something.
Pitchfork: I ask because I'm curious how theory informs your playing.
Z'EV: Well, I've always been interested in finding out more about the properties of acoustics. The thing that I learned the most from happened one night in Amsterdam. In the place I was living, the window looked out on one of the canals. And there was wind and rain, and watching the patterns on the water-- it was like watching sound in a room, if you can imagine that. That's how I saw it. It was like, OK, I see, those waves come this way, then they go that way, then they build up and create another kind of wave. I watched that for a couple hours, and I learned more from seeing a visual demonstration of energy from the wind and rain being applied to the water than... well, I really learned a lot. All my work with acoustics after that was based on what I learned from watching these wave interactions, and how they affected one another.
Pitchfork: How has music from other cultures influenced you?
Z'EV: What I find most interesting is the way that they work with time. If it's Korean opera, or Chinese opera, or Noh theater, I get recordings of those things and play along with them to get other ways of thinking about time. When I do that, I listen to them as though I was playing with those musicians. So I got an interior sense of the logic of what they were doing. To the point where I could get a new piece that I hadn't heard, and I could fall into it, meld into it.
Pitchfork: You've said you deal more with duration than time. What do you mean by that?
Z'EV: When I perform, it's definitely about duration. I don't play any kind of time signature known to man. My stuff is completely its own thing. If somebody asks me what time was that in, I say, it was 20 minutes. That's not being facetious-- that's really how I deal with it. I deal with the overall time frame, the length of time.
Pitchfork: Do you do that on smaller levels, like bits of time inside those times?
Z'EV: No, I lose all track of time on that level. I used to have a really good sense of time. I didn't need a clock to play, and I had a sense of when five, ten, twenty minutes had passed. Now I can only play with a clock. Without one, I would probably end up going through the whole set in 15 minutes. It wouldn't work as a performance. I might have to do the set three or four times, and I think that would be pretty boring for the audience.
Z'EV EXPLAINS HIS CURRENT SET-UP
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Pitchfork:__ When did you start making your own instruments?
Z'EV: When I was five I made a drum set. The local Baskin Robbins used to throw out their cardboard cartons, and I one time got up my nerve and asked about them, and they gave me three. So I hammered them onto three sides of an orange crate, and then on top I nailed in some coffee can lids to be cymbals. I didn't have a high hat or a kick drum, but I would put my foot inside the crate and tap it, and there was a bit of resonance. And I played that for about three years, and then started getting lessons at age eight. They gave me a crappy little practice pad, a piece of rubber, and it was kind of a big bring-down. I'd been used to playing a set and here I was reduced to playing a piece of rubber!
I stopped drumming for a long time, then I got back into playing with some musicians I knew in a garage band. I'd been collecting different ethnic instruments here and there, and then I started making little bell type stuff, looking for weird little sound toys. Then in 1974, I started working with synthesizer players, and I had to find new instruments. I needed a more complex sound, so I went to a surplus place and got a bunch of hard plastic stuff and stainless steel stuff, and that stuff worked. So from that point on, from the 70s on, I've made instruments.
Pitchfork: You still make instruments today?
Z'EV: Yes-- some of the stainless steel discs that I play, I cut myself from pieces of stainless steel that I found. I don't make as many as I used to, because you can't get into surplus and scrap yards as easily anymore. In L.A., I called every scrap yard and surplus place that was listed, about 50 or 60 places, and only at one of them did the owner get intrigued and let me go around the yard to find stuff. Because the insurance regulations are such that you can't go into the places anymore. So it's really hard to find materials. Also, prices of metal have gone completely through the roof, insanely expensive. And if you go to a dictionary and look up starving artist, you'll see my picture. But I don't really need new stuff anyway. I like to make big stuff, and it's too expensive to travel with. So I have my refined set that works well, and I'm pretty much set with that.
--Marc Masters
Next:> We talk to New Orleans-based composer Duane Pitre
III. Duane Pitre: A Space for Sound
Duane Pitre by Lauren Cecil
Lately, it seems, some of my favorite records remind me to turn it up. Last year's Monoliths & Dimensions by exploratory metal pair Sunn O))) once again proclaimed "Maximum volume yields maximum results." Meanwhile, Jim O'Rourke's The Visitor insisted, politely, that you "Please listen on speakers, loud."
This year, add Duane Pitre's Origin to the list: The latest release from the New Orleans-based Pitre, Origin was written and recorded during the young composer's crucial years in New York, using guitars meticulously strung and tuned using just intonation and, here, bowed by an ensemble of six. To be as reductive as possible, just intonation is any tuning system where the musical intervals might be represented by ratios of whole numbers. Equal temperament, the basis of the music familiar to most Western ears, divides an interval into a number of equal steps, most frequently 12. Consider the neck of a common electric guitar, for reference.
When used in loud, immersive drones, such as those of La Monte Young, Tony Conrad, and James Tenney, just intonation can produce overwhelming musical phosphorescence, with tones reflecting around and radiating through whatever room they fill. It's a sound of curious depth, sort of always inviting the listener to come closer, to listen a little bit more. "Origin was composed for live performance, to be performed at loud volumes in a resonant space," the liner notes methodically explain. "To recreate this experience via this recording, the listener should try playing it at relatively loud volumes in a space large enough to convey the piece's resonant qualities." Follow through, and you'll be rewarded by a record that embraces with sound. Each movement of each bow feels like an invitation. By the time Origin peaks, in its final and fifth movement, the sound has become its own, massive world.
Origin is Pitre's most compelling work to date, but it might not be his most enduring. Pitre has become a casual but essential advocate for just intonation. That is, while he insists that just intonation is more of a tuning system and a way to get a certain sound than some way of life or cult of idiosyncrasy, he's helped make it accessible. Last year, Pitre curated the terrific eight-track set called The Harmonic Series: A Compilation of Musical Works in Just Intonation for Important Records. Uniting three generations of just intonation composers and a half-dozen approaches and instruments, it's a statement of the vitality and variety possible with one alternate approach to tuning. As first impressions go, it's perfect.
Duane Pitre: "Mvmt II: Carpenter"
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Pitchfork:__ You left New York last fall and returned to New Orleans. Origin was your last major New York piece, and it's quite different from your first major New Orleans work, Feel Free. Do you think your composition is affected by your location?
Duane Pitre: I'm very much affected by my environment. It comes through in my work. I was interested in seeing how that would come about from moving here and what results would come out of it. There's already been one major piece, Feel Free, that I've written here that I feel is definitely a direct result of living here.
The result of being here and how this piece came about would have to be that there's more silence. I mean silence in a relative way, obviously. My section of my neighborhood in New Orleans is quite quiet. You can hear some things that I couldn't hear in New York on a day-to-day basis, or, if I heard them, it just became part of the mass noise. I've lived in several different places when composing in this realm of music, and one of those places was San Diego. That was before New York. That's another quiet place. When I live in these places, the music I create has more space. I don't mean necessarily silence within the music, just more room to breathe in the piece. It's more about the decaying of notes and listening to them fade away and the new ones coming in instead of it just being a mass.
Moving to New Orleans, I had the desire to make more music like that. That's what Feel Free is based on. It's self-organized guitar harmonics-- and when I say self-organized, it's randomized via computer. They're pre-recorded guitar harmonics I've recorded on a bunch of different guitars, which are the guitars I used in Origin. I collected all of those guitars for Origin specifically-- cheap, beater guitars on Craigslist. I wanted to get more use out of them, so I recorded these guitar harmonics. They're all in just intonation. I use these to turn patterns into randomized melodies, in a sense of how wind chimes are erratic yet orderly. That's something I can definitely hear around my neighborhood-- and church bells.
I can play the piece solo with a simple synth that I've also connected to my computer so it sounds like a Rhodes organ, or it can be played with an ensemble. I did a sextet version of it in New York recently-- harp, contrabass, cello, violin, hammered dulcimer and myself on that synth. We basically improvised, but I say improvised loosely. It's rule-based, with strict parameters with the harmonics that are being randomized, weaving in and out with them. The title points to the fact that this is probably the freest I've allowed musicians playing a piece of mine to be. It's still playing within parameters, but they're a little more free. This piece is a freedom from what I was doing before. It's also the first piece that's kind of a break from these long-tone drone pieces.
Duane Pitre by Lauren Cecil
Pitchfork: In Origin, you're a performing composer, so that you're playing with the ensemble. And that work seems very carefully composed and rehearsed. Everyone seems very much in control. Do you think Feel Free is also a reaction to the feeling of being in absolute control, or of wanting to put some of the music back in the hands of the musicians?
DP: Possibly. A lot of the work with my pieces goes in before the ensemble even touches it. You could say that about a ton of composers, that it's all in the score-- it's note for note, it's dynamic for dynamic, every marking, every score. My pieces aren't like that, so I guess I can only come at it from my angle.
With Origin, a majority of the work went into how I would go about stringing the guitars-- what gauge strings were going to be used, how many of that string. On one guitar, for instance, the top four strings will be one gauge, all the same note, and the bottom two will be a different gauge of a different note, both of those being the same. A lot of the arrangement of the piece was literally in the guitars, how it all stacked on top of each other.
It definitely took a lot of concentration, and I had to find guitarists that had some experience in bowing. In certain performances of it, there were people who had very little experience, but I gave them specific guitars which had certain gauge strings at certain intervals that didn't require as much control. The lower, deeper notes-- the ones that have to be more steady-- needed to be in the hands of someone who had more experience. There's definitely more rehearsal that goes into Origin, but I wouldn't say it was out of hand. But Feel Free does allow me some freedom as well. That's how the piece was prepared. It's a little more open and looser, whereas Origin is definitely more concise and precise. There's not much leeway for the performers-- a little bit in movement four, but not very much. You could say it was a reaction in a sense, but I think it's a reaction to something bigger, not just necessarily Origin.
Duane Pitre: "Mvmt V: Sun PM"
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Pitchfork:__ Especially in the last two movements, Origin becomes very dense and busy, and all of these different strands are moving through and around each other. It reflects, to me, the sound of a city.
DP: Very much so. Feel Free has this openness, which is a reaction to the environment here. There is a lot of space so you can actually hear the wind. In New York, there's this constant hum of the city. I feel like Origin, and especially that last movement, is drowning out the city. It's really simple in my mind: You're sitting, trying to work on a piece that has a lot of space in it, space that allows the external sounds of your surroundings to come through. Those sounds are going to be influential on the actual piece. I think I got to the point where I did not want to hear those sounds in New York. A lot of people do-- they want to hear those sounds, and it drives their music. At some point, I didn't want to hear those sounds, so I wrote music. It wasn't a conscious thing. This is a reflection that I made upon moving here. I saw that I was writing music to drown out the city.
Pitchfork: It seems like that situation-- being blanketed by sound, or any sort of information-- transgresses geographical borders now. Anywhere, given an iPhone and Twitter or a laptop, you're just swimming in information.
DP: Absolutely. I think about that on a regular basis, especially from living in New Orleans because it's more apparent now. Living in New York, it's part of the big machine. You have everything in the palm of your hand-- your e-mail, everything you need. You kind of need that because it's part of life, whether you get caught in it and you don't enjoy it or whether you do enjoy it. And I have to think that if you live in New York, there's a part of you that has to enjoy it because, if not, it's probably not a very good place to be.
By moving here, I get to see it from a different angle. Things are just slower. The place we have here has a porch. When we first got here, we would just sit on the porch and listen to the extreme quiet around. You're less bombarded with this layer of information and sound and advertising and this video of some monkey doing some bullshit that may be funny, but do we really need 18 videos of 18 different monkeys? And then there's a giraffe...
Three days ago, I had an epiphany of some sort-- you might call it a freak-out. I work at home on a freelance basis, and I sit in front of my computer too much. I have this iPhone with e-mail on it, and I was just like, "You know, I don't need to be connected that much." It's draining, and I think it's bad for-- for lack of a better term-- the soul and your being and a calmer state of mind. I took e-mail off of my phone. I shut it down.
I spend a lot of time on my computer and being bombarded like that with Facebook and dealing with people's updates-- not to be negative-- but it's just too much. We don't always need to know everything that's going on. There's value in it, but there's inherent badness in it, too. I feel sometimes that my music is a way for me to-- I don't want to say escape because it's not about escapism-- but to take time to have a calmer state of mind. It's not meant as a meditative tool. That's not why I'm creating it. But if that's something that someone can get out of it to take them out of the information loop and all the layers of data, and if I can help them retreat, then I feel I'm doing some kind of good.
Pitchfork: When do you first recall hearing just intonation, or, at least, music you realized later was operating through a different tuning system?
DP: There was a period of time when, with some artists, I found their music was curiously different. It was interesting in a way that I didn't necessarily realize. There was Terry Riley, and then there's also the traditional world music of India, Japan, Persia. I now know with tuning systems why these things sounded different and interesting. A lot of people use the term "exotic-sounding." Basically, the way I look at it, "exotic-sounding" means different tuning systems.
I would say the first time that I learned on the spot was the first time hearing The Well-Tuned Piano by La Monte Young. That, for me, was very obvious. We've all heard the piano hundreds of times in front of our faces and on recordings, and it's the piano. It's become the centerpiece of Western music. But hearing that sound, it was, "What the fuck is going on? What is this?" A friend played it for me, and I said, "Why does it sound this way? What kind of processing does he put on this to make it sound this way?"
It's not processing: The piano normally has three strings. Two of those are taken off, so each hammer is only hitting one string, and they're all tuned to this system called just intonation. The curiosity came. The questions came. That's when I started my studies. It was something that grabbed me. It was one of those things in life that when the day comes, I fixate on them, and they become my life-- which can be good or bad.
Pitchfork: Where did you go next? There's a lot of information about just intonation, but so much of it seems either overly academic or simply not very rigorous.
DP: There's the good and bad qualities of this Web, the Internet, the huge layer of data. But I was able to go straight to the Internet and look up what it was. Every time you read a description of it, by no means did it clarify what it was. It told you what it was, but that didn't make it so clear. I found The just intonation Network (http://www.justintonation.net/), which I think started in the early '80s, and they had the just intonation Primer. This Primer was basically this handbook to start you off and to teach you what just intonation was. I met certain people-- whether it be professors or people who had been studying this for a long time-- who were more than willing to talk about it. A lot of people in this community were quite responsive and excited that someone new and relatively young was interested in such a thing. There was correspondence through e-mail and getting books on the physics of sound, going to the root of it before even learning just intonation. The basis behind the tuning system is not the tuning system. It's physics and mathematics.
Duane Pitre by Larry Blossom
Pitchfork: How long did it take you to move from investing yourself in the study of just intonation until you actually turned that into music?
DP: The hard part for a lot of people with just intonation is that it's all theory and study. And they want to hear sound. I completely sympathize with that. In the end, it's about the sound for me. It's not about how the piece looks on paper. But with a lot of people, it's what stops them: You have to study for a decent amount of time before you can actually implement it. If you don't know what you're implementing, you're going to implement it wrong. You're going to hear wrong results, which could deter you from studying any further or give you the wrong idea.
After a year, I started messing around with small sine tone pieces, just taking sine tones that I could very easily use with the computer. I'd never been a very big computer music person, and I was just starting to get into using that as a tool. I was able to generate specific tones very easily and very steadily, so I'd make these little compositions. I hesitate to even call them compositions. They were more so just tests to hear how certain Just intervals interact with one another. But from the start of studying to an actual piece of music, it was at least two years. I had to check my list of works to actually know that. But I enjoy that, and it requires someone that enjoys studying and gets reward out of studying and not just "what I can do once I study this." To me, the studying, I enjoyed that almost equally.
Pitchfork: You've definitely become the rare young proponent of this system, especially with last year's compilation The Harmonic Series, which you curated on Important Records. I loved listening to it and reading each composer's ideas, but what was your goal for it-- to educate, to entertain or both?
DP: You'd be amazed at how many people are very defensive and how many people get pissed off. I'm not really sure where it comes from when people that work in Just feel that they are too good for equal temperament. For me, that's not it at all. It's just something else to work with that sounds good. It's just a tuning system. It's not a musical style. And that's something that, in your studies, you need to realize early on. That's all it is-- tuning. I wanted to make a compilation that used that tuning system and that, stylistically, had a common thread all the way through and could be listened to as a whole. That's something I was very adamant about-- the sequence, the tracks, how it flowed. I really wanted to make a nice sequence and for it flow as one album, not a compilation of pieces. Of course people have their favorites, but the goal was to make one record, not a bunch of pieces put together. I looked at it as if I was sequencing a record that was my own.
The compilations that I heard that were in just intonation, the only common bond was that the pieces were in just intonation. There really was no other common thread. No, it wasn't wildly different music, but it's not going to be when you're dealing with something as specific as just intonation. When I was learning about just intonation, there was nothing like this. It was older literature. It was still relevant, but I wanted something more contemporary where I could identify with the music being played and with the systems and hear what those composers had to say with their approach. I wanted to create this tool for curious minds out there-- one that had more focus and was a little more relevant to now.
John Brien at Important came to me with the idea to do this, so he had this interest in it initially. Putting this out on a label that had a lot of strong contemporary acts that people were digging, it gets some focus. It wouldn't be shoved under the rug of: "Here's a compilation that came out of academia." To have this comp come out on a label such as Important, where it could reach people that it wouldn't have been reached by it if it was published by a university, it was creating a tool to reach a crowd that necessarily wouldn't learn about this tuning system based on whole-number ratios. Will this person even care? Well, maybe now they'll care because they like the sound that's being created with it. Hopefully this will be another resource that goes into the library of resources that people go to when they learn about just intonation. That would be a huge honor.
--Grayson Currin
Duane Pitre: "Feel Free (Excerpt)" [Live at Zebulon; May 30, 2010]
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Duane Pitre: composition, simple-timbre synth, computer
Jesse Sparhawk: harp
Jim Altieri: violin
James Ilgenfritz: double bass
Jessie Marino: cello
Shannon Fields: hammered dulcimer
Next:> An interview with Bay-area musician and label head George Chen
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IV: George Chen: Getting Stuff Done
George Chen [far right] playing guitar in KIT
If you've seen or played an underground show in the Bay Area in the last 15 years, chances are you've run into George Chen. Since the late 1990s, this California native has been an Oakland fixture, first publishing Zum magazine, then starting the Zum label, all while participating in numerous bands and collaborative projects. He also helps book shows as part of the collective Club Sandwich, and works at Jello Biafra's legendary Alternative Tentacles.
Though Chen's pursuits run outside the mainstream, they show an eclectic interest in all kinds of music. Recent releases on Zum bear this out-- there's the tribal post-punk of High Castle, the piano-led bombast of Silentist, and the Dan Deacon-esque noise-beats of Mincemeat or Tenspeed. Chen's own musical activities are similarly diverse. He's a founding member of KIT, whose new album Invocation is due on Upset the Rhythm in late July; half of the abstract-sound duo Chen Santa Maria; and a guitarist in Common Eider, King Eider, the band led by ex-Deerhoof guitarist Rob Fisk, whose album Worn was recently released by Root Strata.
While working toward a pair of 12th Anniversary Zum shows in August, Chen took time to speak with us about how he got started in music, how running a label has changed since the late 90s, and why, in the Bay Area, ambition is not exactly contagious.
Pitchfork: How did you first get into music?
GC: I started doing Zum magazine with my sister when I was about 15 years old. My music tastes weren't that developed at the time; I grew up in San Jose where there wasn't a lot for underage kids to go to. In maybe 1991 or 92, we started hearing about stuff like the International Pop Underground, K records, Nation of Ulysses, stuff like that. And it just seemed so exotic.
Pitchfork: The coverage in Zum seemed pretty diverse.
GC: I think it was a conscious effort to cover a variety of things. Even now I try to check out things that aren't within my comfort zone. But it was mostly finding friends who were willing to review things. We said, sure, if you'll do it for free, we'll take it. My sister has always been a lot better at organization end of things. I was more just trying to buddy up with bands.
Pitchfork: Did you play music at that point?
GC: No, I didn't really start playing until 1999. I started this band called Boxleitner, with Gabe [Mindel Saloman] who went on to be in Yellow Swans.
Pitchfork: Of the bands you're in now, what goes back the farthest?
GC: KIT, which started in the summer of 2002. The Touchton bros from XBXRX were in the Bay Area, and their plans were to only be in town for the summer. So we had this idea of starting this band with no long-term goals, and now it's still a band in 2010, which is bizarre. [Steve Touchton remains in KIT alongside Chen, Vice Cooler of Hawnay Troof, and singer Kristy Geschwandtner]. We were really inspired by Friends Forever, even though we didn't play out of a van. We were all at a show they played in San Francisco, and we just looked at each other and said, "We've got to start a band."
KIT: "Merticane" from Invocation [Upset the Rhythm]:
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Pitchfork:__ Do you think KIT has a defined sound?
GC: The short answer I give when people ask what KIT is, is it's my punk band. Hardcore punks may not agree with that, but it has that energy. The live shows tend to be chaotic and sloppy, and I think people used to think we were just a spazz-out, energy/freak-out band, but we actually take the composition part of it really seriously.
Pitchfork: When was Invocation recorded?
GC: Last summer. We went up to Anacortes, Washington and recorded with Phil Elverum [of Microphones and Mount Eerie]. It took about four or five days. It's the most efficient recording I've ever done. We took like two years mixing our first album [Broken Voyage, 2007]. I'm really proud of that record, but it sounds like every idea got thrown into there, and I wanted to do something that wouldn't take as long. Having to get everything done in a week really focused us. In the summertime there, the sun doesn't go down until like 10:30, so we'd work that late every night.
Pitchfork: Some members of KIT live in L.A.?
GC: Actually, everyone in the band lives in L.A. except for me. I'm the holdout.
Pitchfork: There seems to be a close connection between underground bands in the Bay Area and L.A.
GC: I think so. I feel like there's a lot of people who split time between the two. Carla Bozulich is up here a few months out of the year. John Wiese comes through town pretty frequently. So it can work. With KIT, for years the Smell was the only place we would play in L.A. And then we'd play shows here with Wives, Mika Miko, Silver Daggers, Abe Vigoda. The two Zum anniversary shows in August will be at 21 Grand in Oakland and at the Smell.
KIT by Steve Andrew Garcia
Pitchfork: Zum has a pretty diverse roster-- do you think of the label as having a specific sound?
GC: I guess we have an aesthetic-- it's pretty broad just because it's based on my own tastes. If there's a band that could potentially be super-popular, I wouldn't want to have the burden of them breaking up because the record I did didn't do very well [laughs]. There's a limitation of money-- I wish I could be cranking out as much stuff as Not Not Fun, and I did start a tape label [Two Thousand Tapes] so I could do stuff more efficiently in smaller batches. But I do have a track record of being able to get stuff done, and that's the main thing I can offer. I can't really offer fame and fortune. Not that I think the stuff I do is not worthy of a larger audience, I just don't want something that will outgrow dealing with me too quickly. But genre-wise, I'm open to everything.
Pitchfork: Is it hard to run a label with a less-definable sound, especially in the underground where micro-genres tend to stand out?
GC: I don't know that I have any reputation in the noise scene with what I do, because a lot of it is really song-based, especially the older stuff. We put out stuff like P:ano, which is more in the vein of Stephen Merritt. And the Mincemeat or Tenspeed record, even hardcore noise people might not be inclined to include that, because it's fun and has a beat to it. I don't know if people talk about Zum enough for it to have a coherent reputation. It would be nice to be part of a dialogue, but in a way I'm relieved I'm not in the midst of that.
Pitchfork: What's different about promoting music now then when you started a decade ago?
GC: Well, a lot of labels that were really active... I'm surprised I'm still around and they're not. GSL is gone, Touch and Go is gone, and I'm still cranking out these small things. But then my label's more in a boutique vein, because I'm not making a living off of it-- thank God! It's all shrinking, and that's going to have to winnow out people who are just hobbyists versus that people whose life purpose is music. In the early days of punk no one looked at it as a career, you just had to do it because you were a freak. It might get more back to that. The underground aspect might get stronger, and winnow out people who are not lifers.
Chen Santa Maria by Rebecca Radovsky
Chen Santa Maria: "Milan Excerpt 4.25.2010" from split cassette with Orbless [Accidie]:
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Pitchfork:__ Chen Santa Maria grew out of a tour you did with Steve Santa Maria?
GC: Yes-- people said, "Your music sounds like Steve's music, you should play together." When we started I would play drums and he would do electronics. Now, every six or seven months we change the format, but it's basically guitars and synth. Not really any programming or drum machine stuff, no computers.
Pitchfork: Is your music primarily improvised?
GC: Well, it's never very song-writing based. There are arcs that we discuss, how we want something to flow instrumentally or emotionally. And we talk about it in terms of what gear are we using. I have a cycle of notes I like to work on, and he has a specific tuning he likes to use, so we know how those things go together, but it's never totally pre-planned.
Pitchfork: Do you think of your sound in terms of influences?
GC: We come at it from pretty different angles. Steve was way more into techno than I ever was. He's really into Kompakt Records, and he had more of an interest in industrial music. He's from Buffalo and grew up listening to East Coast, straight-edge hardcore, which I don't have a lot of background in. The only band we are both really into is Archers of Loaf, for some reason. We toured with Dan Friel and we were listening to Icky Mettle, the first Archers of Loaf album, and Dan said, "What are you guys on about? This is so 90s and has nothing to do with what you do." But it was like our comfort food.
In terms of our sound, I've gotten a little bit pickier if I hear something in someone else's music and I can totally tell what gear they're using. We like it when we can't tell if the sound is coming from me or him. I like to be confused by it, and I like to hear something that doesn't sound like it's just the gear being played. Just before our recent European tour, a lot of my gear was stolen, so I was trying to re-learn how to play everything with borrowed gear. And now I have to re-do the set with new gear. It's kind of mind-boggling, but I like that it forces me to re-boot, and I can't get too complacent about it.
Common Eider, King Eider
Common Eider, King Eider: "The Rabbits Will Come Again" from Worn [Root Strata]:
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Pitchfork:__ How did you come to join Common Eider, King Eider?
GC: After the first record in 2008, Rob Fisk was asked to go on tour with Xiu Xiu, and he wanted to fill out the sound, so he asked me to play guitar. For most of that tour I was just imitating his guitar playing [laughs]. But the new record we just did is the first time it's been collaborative in terms of writing, and we're writing some new stuff now, reworking riffs to make them tougher and scarier. The record I feel is very pretty.
Pitchfork: It definitely has a distinct mood.
GC: That's what I like about that band. There's already a vibe set, a tone that we're used to. I like when brutal-ness seeps into the prettiness, and I think live I try to turn the brutal up to 11. When you have four people playing, there's a lot of holding back that we need to do, to keep it from sounding like a mess. I think people have no expectations when we play, no context to put it into, and I get a lot of surprised comments about how well it's put together. I don't want to get pigeonholed into one kind of scene.
Pitchfork: How do you think the underground in the Bay Area is affected by the economics there?
GC: It's an expensive area so people have to work different kinds of jobs to scrape by. You're not really making bank doing this stuff, it's just to do it. But it's always active and there's always new people coming here. There was a time in 2000-2002, with Erase Errata, Total Shutdown, Flying Luttenbachers, Burmese, the Lowdown, Pink and Brown... there was kind of a Bay Area renaissance, and a lot of those people had moved here maybe 3 or 4 years earlier. So it goes in these waves.
Pitchfork: There's a lot of punk history there, but there's also a tradition of improv music and performance art.
GC: There's definitely a lot of history on that side, going back to the Residents, the Cockettes, and performance art stuff in general. People that stay here and do a lot of music or art tend to be... well, there's still a sense of being competitive, but it's not competitive about making it in your career as much as seeing what someone else is doing and trying to push it further. It's more about stretching boundaries. Ambition is sort of frowned upon [laughs]. Anyone who shows ambition, it's like, why don't you take that shit to L.A. or New York? It's kind of keeping it real to a fault, but it's also liberating. I think of, for example, Caroliner-- anything they do is totally on their own terms. It can seem insular or elitist, like you're just doing stuff for a cluster of friends, but I don't think it comes from that. It comes more from modesty, and accepting there's a ceiling to things. That seems very Bay Area to me.
--Marc Masters
