[-empyre-] intro from Trace Reddell

["Trace Reddell" <treddell@du.edu>]

Greetings, everyone. Thanks for inviting me to join the list this month; I
look forward to discussing some things with new folks, as well as catching
up with my other guest cohorts.

I thought I'd start by characterizing my relationship with "microsound",
which I treat as a form of cosmic music. Certainly my own microsound
productions -- and by this I mean literally works created for projects
hosted at microsound.org -- bear the imprint of cosmic music in sound and
contextual framing. I'd been listening to and spinning the works of
Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Temple, Kluster/Cluster, and Hawkwind -- to name a
very few -- long before I knew of Stockhausen and Xenakis, much less Oval,
Pole, SETI, Taylor Deupree. My first expansion back into the works of the
pioneering micronauts as well as ahead into the practitioners of
clicks'n'cuts, bip-hop and such, came out of a need for new material to mix
in a series of eclectic but consistently spacey shows that I was producing
for radiovalve.com in the late-90s. Discovery of labels like Michael
Bentley's The Foundry made the most validating connections, in my mind,
between space music and what I learned was called microsound.

The most vital paradox of microsound is that working at a granular level
suggests disproportionately vast expanses of space -- new universes in
grains of sand, I guess -- and I like the techniques of microsound which
produce both ambient textures and minimal rhythms and pulses. But honestly,
I probably listen LESS to microsound works as such than anything else in my
collection. Perhaps to the dismay of my cohorts here (?), I also listen to
very little microsound in a "pure" context -- that is, not layered with
other microsound works or, more often, mixed up with minimal techno or even
deep house beats (as in the works of Gas).

I view microsound as a set of strategies to be adopted and mixed with other
strategies, so I'm glad to hear Glenn mention a desire to mix micro-detritus
recycling in the same breath as field recordings. I believe that microsound
functions at a level of occult materiality as the unseen but manifesting
layer of programming enacts (rather than represents) matter in order to hint
at weird and subtle layers of organization and activity. I first came up
with this phrase, actually, describing one of John Hudak's pieces "j.html",
which was submitted to the Perspective House site that I direct via U of
Denver's Digital Media Studies program; that paragraph and a link to launch
John's work may be found near the bottom of this page:
http://perspectivehouse.du.edu/features_reddell_salvage.html. I find myself
increasingly interested in how this concept of occult organization and weird
sound might open up micro-practice to other areas of data and practice. At
the same time, I find myself bored with what I see as solidifying tropes of
the microsound producer: grain travelling; glitch; working with broken
code/warez; and so on.

Finally, where I'm at with my work now. I'm struggling a bit with having
time enough for both curatorial/editorial roles I play (Perspective House;
A:D:A:P:T, a Denver-based media label and event production co.; editor of
the music/sound/noise thread of Electronic Book Review; new curator of Alt-X
Audio) and doing my own work. I'm trying to find ways to minimize the former
and get into some focused production modes. Like Glenn, I'm very interested
in the interplay of sound, text, and image, though the image element is the
newest for me. Starting later this month, and hitting full-stride in
September, I'm going to produce a bi-monthly webcast, Pharmakopolis
Broadcasting, as part of Randall Packer's Tel-SPAN network
(http://usdat.us/tel-span/). I'll mostly perform audio dubs for Packer's
ongoing Media Deconstruction Kit video, but also gradually work in some of
my own video content -- namely, a series of animated political cartoons
incorporating remixed visual imagery from my stack of 1980s Marvel/DC comics
and some of my own characters as well; situationist detournement meets
1967-style Marvel cartoons. I'm looking into some VJ ware so that I can
perform these visual mixes.

I'm also about half-way through a full CD of material called
"drugtextsound", all works along the lines of the "Machinery for Dreaming"
track I did for the stasisfield palimpsest project. I'm working on a variety
of strategies for converting text files to sound; for instance, converting a
primary text (for instance, DeQuincey's "Opium Eater" or Baudelaire's "On
Hashish") into MIDI note information, while using secondary texts (say,
Sadie Plant's chapters on DeQ or Baudelaire) to generate control channel
info such as velocity or modulation. This would then model in the creation
of the soundwork a certain way of thinking about the relationship between
"original" text and "critical" gloss. I'm also collaborating on a CD of
microsound-ish interpretations -- what I call "sound paisleys" -- of
psychedelic and punkadelic tracks by The Thirteenth Floor Elevators,
Chocolate Watchband, Strawberry Alarm Clock, etc.

Here are links:

http://www.microsound.org (parasites; mcdonna; bufferfuct; city of the
future; under the names Galactus Zeit and The pHarmanaut); higher bitrates
for some of these, plus other Galactus Zeit material, at http://commtom.com

http://www.stasisfield.com ("the palimpsest project, v.1"; upcoming, "the
audible still-life") -- the first one is the DeQuincey piece; the upcoming
project worked with text-to-MIDI as well, more DeQuincey and some Byron.

http://www.djrabbi.com (pharmakon.t, webspinna) -- a series of DJ mixes that
performs the internet as the sole source for layering content

http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr12/litmix/index.htm (litmixer) -- the first foray
into critical theory mixing.

I look forward to the discussion!

Cheers,
-=Trace