Statement
Distortion: you ask me why some of my work is so dirty, sometimes, and I think of “dirty pictures” (moral aesthetics) and how the association we have for uncleanliness suggests aversion to dirty corporal conditions, body taboo, fear of stink…the sign system in which sound has certain prefered stock is also in my work the product of a sterilization/digitization of the overflowing body-presence, it’s muted opacity and its shrunken aurality both, this paralogical complexity and all its distortion of the media in which it is carried are points of forced commitment for me…forced upon me, I agree, because of an almost instinctive form of resistance to an over-bridled passional culture…it evinces my “conditioning” by certain subterranean ideologies of modernity (surrealism, abstraction, op-art, serialism and the post-serialist challenges—including indeterminacy…and I am a bit stubborn, maintain a continuity between the supra-rational poetries trade-marked as “dark” by decadents and moralists (two-sides of the same coin) , the so-called irrational, and the interruptive strategies of indeterminacy and improvisation, such as Cage’s or Stockhausen’s or Rowe’s or Cocteau’s or Spicer’s counter-punching radios, for example. Distortion represents conflicts in ideologies. Distortion and the clarity viz honesty=lack of corrective cosmetics, remains an attempt to be basic or even pure. So even things called glitch or this very dubious phraseology employed by microsounders, “aesthetics of failure”, are not simply failures so much as situations I can identify in, and as an expression of, the history of distotrtions.
Spectral Methodology: the easiest comparison is the classically over-coded text of Joyce’s Finnegan, life as viewed through 5th dimensional spectactles. The idea that visual, aural and verbal puns create a straining to carry the fullness of meaning rather than any “emptying of the signifier” or random throwness into the “open work”. Its not even like the “death of the author and all authority”, the trick one taught one-self to perform in art school, without getting kicked out! Because under the unfolding universe we know and see there is always another river running. If there is a river running above us, like Nietzsche sd, there is one below us, like Mickiewicz suggests in his poem about the ice…we are in some karmic mixture of these rivers, meeting face to face daily with things especially designed for us by our own conditions of desire, buried in organs, flying out from organs around us…do you ever wake up at night with a word being spoken to you? Dream is the perfect, more enigmatic cinema and the unnatural extension of the natural mind. The house that is built is no longer buildable. Everything is waiting to happen.
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Classical guitar study at 13 preceded by beating guitar strings with pencils for 3 years after I destroyed my first toy drum-set, which disappeared mysteriously one day when I was 5. Disturbed deeply by Robert Johnson, Jimmy Page and even (a much to even) Robert Fripp but then Arto Lindsay cleft my brain into pieces. Leap from teen bands to Tapeworm Collective Buffalo years. Find the tapes, it will be worth it. Autodidact forever after I think. Fascinations with Arabic and Indian Musics (lesson on oud taqsim, research on rag and tal in Southern Indian Music) . I record here the name of Jeff Mattson and his 10 foot guitar. Recordings, gigs with Poltroon” and “Orphan Sound System”. I studied Javanese and Balinese gamelan music, and some kind of shamanic dance-magic with Min Tanaka and Kazuo Ohno, then played a self-styled percussion set-up, oud and rebab with Ephia in the dance theatre company Djalma Primordial Science ,working in NYC with a lower east side pool of musicians and dancers, among them Neel Murgai, Rich Gross, Chris Forsyth, Drew Gardner, Muriel Vergnaud and one outrageous experience on Williamsburg radio with Daniel Carter that I cannot forget.
Transplanted to Berlin in 2000, reduced again to the guitar, prepared and on the table, foraging thrift shops to find what I could crack into hacked electronic gear, looping the mixing desk and layered phonography, I felt “concrete” enough. I continued performance and pedagogical work with dancer Ephia and began collaborations with various Berlin-based musicians; at first Konrad Bauer, Joe Williamson, Michael Vorfeld, Michael Walz, and then eventually others. By the time of leaving New Mexico in 2005, I had introduced the laptop and developed new electronic processing systems which gave me further flexibility for orchestrating sounds. Yet I was determined to be more undetermined and phonographies layered into hard drives pounded out into late night performances in Berlin and then in New Mexico forgotten entirely as I learned to listen to everything without caring about recording anything. And I wrote poetry again in that period.
Although I am still playing traditional acoustic guitar, rebab ….(under construction) I am primarily concerned with sounds and boundary-line perceptions, how they are brought together and where this becomes music in our minds and why. Maybe there is music outside our minds? But how do we know it? I find myself a question mark between forms seemingly implicit and autonomous in nature and the inadequacy of rational reductionism. I was aided in finding this an inspiration by studying the works and theories of Iannis Xennakis (and being allowed to baby-sit a cello helped a bit too.)
I was assisted in my re-evaluation of how I use sound by a short collaboration with Keith Rowe, whom I felt had already a long-standing intuition about these matters. After Keith, I recognized three other contributors to my tendency to deconstruct from the center called “the guitar”, namely Kevin Drumm, Annette Krebs and Pascal Battus. Studying with Helmut Lachenmann, trying to clarify for myself the relationship between indeterminate music, improvisation and an at least personally coherent system of notations, I was impressed (again) by the idea that there is a historical and ideological struggle (a graphic struggle, also) implicit in musical practice. Serialism, only as a way of organizing periodicities, is a theatre of patterns, must order to the point of chaos or growing disorder. It is recurrence of events, like Jani Christou’s score for the lunar cycle, that generates our sense of stabilities. We are always getting tossed about nevertheless.
