I am 28 years old. Although I often feel like I am 12. I’m ambitious, a bit of a dreamer, I’m not always realistic with my expectations. I find it difficult when I don”t get my way.

I live in California. I was born in California. I’ve left it twice. Once to live in Seattle, for a year. Once to England, for a year. California is a special and beautiful place. I have a restless spirit, but I will always have deep roots in California, in Northern California specifically. The ocean, the tiny San Francisco skyline, foggy Berkeley mornings, runs on the Skyline.

I am obsessed with music. All sorts of music. All kinds of genres and styles. It’’s a happy day when I can flip through hundreds of used CDs and records searching for gems. I am also obsessed with horror movies, zombies, John Cage, Brian Eno, and most bits of musical equipment. Especially those ones with flashing lights and knobs.

I <3 music. I make no illusions to be a talented musician, I consider myself a dabbler. At best. My first memories of making music are leaning my dad’’s electric guitar against his amplifier and twisting knobs on the delay box producing a glorious racket. A four track followed a few years later, and most of my after school hours were spent multi-tracking my noises into full-on cacophonies. I identified with the experimentalists. The Aphex Twin and Skinny Puppy were mindblowing realizations. Yeah I wore black. I was in a band for a little while, they”re still called Carta. I still dabble occasionally.

I enjoy school. I studied recording arts at USC until I couldnt take it any more. I moved to Berkeley and made up my own major, I made more noises, and wrote a thesis relating to the effect of digital technology on the musical aesthetic.. A few years later I decided to leave the country and moved moved to Northern England, where I studied music technology at the University of York. I sampled many exceptional beers, and even tried driving a car there. I returned unscathed, masters degree in hand.

I am an entrepreneur. I more or less stumbled into this one, but in a way it was bound to happen. I’ve never much enjoyed working for other people. My parents own their own business. When my brother proposed a business idea, I came up with a name, and now we are nine months into our first year as a corporation named Panoctagon. We have a little office in Berkeley and things are going nicely.

ALSO: I enjoy taking pictures in carwashes and red candy.’

“..everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist’s life: in understanding as in creating. There is no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confidence in the storms of spring without fear that after them may come no summer. ” Rilke

I know, but somehow I forget. What I need to forget is the idea of completion, of making something for any end other than growth. I need to just make experiments and let them remain seeds. Stop thinking about perfection and mastery, these things will come with time and a love for creating.

But at this moment, I can hate very easily. It happens often, I’ll let myself get distracted by other tasks so as to avoid actually starting the work. Because its messy business, a truly difficult thing, scratching out an ideal and with an aim to create something beautiful or meaningful. That is all I really want, to create beautiful things. It’s a good goal, but a challenging idea.

I am always trying to jump past the germination into the blossoming. I am always five steps ahead of where I am at, thinking about making a piece or a work, and then comparing it to things I admire. How could it compare in such an embryonic stage and not have flaws? And how could I be anywhere near anything I admire when I know full well the dedication the creators put into developing themselves and their art? They probably haven’t avoided everything I have.

Expectation develops so easily and I find it easier still to criticize myself and my abilities. To decide absolutely, I should stop, give in, give up. And it’s times like these that my brain becomes an utter mess, devastated by questions of what can you do well, what do you love, what will you do? I can’t face it, and I distract myself from pushing through this wall, I focus on ways to sidestep it, divert it. But no, I need to find a way through.

I interviewed Alex Graham / Lexaunculpt for my thesis. I was retyping it and thought I would post it here so it might see the (sort of) light of day.

Q: What is the role of technology in your process? Is it a mere tool?
A: It would be narrow minded to think of the computer as merely a tool, which it clearly is, but it is an instrument at times, as well as an improvisational player that makes its own decisions and provides me with ideas, so that it becomes an artists and I am the producer. The nature of this form of technology is that it can be modified to perform the task of thinking for itself. Creating outside the users’s specifications. In this way, I think it can become larger than merely a tool for the execution of creative ideas.

Q: What is the role of the computer in your music?
A: The computer’s role in my music is very large. Quite simply because when I begin to think about who I want to make a piece of music, although it often starts at a piano level, or an acoustic level, I am not limited by space. As I know that all things can be restructured. This freedom has always existed, but it was much more tedious, now I can quickly move anything together and alter any piece to work. This knowledge is sort of like a Heidegger dependence when you think of how it provides such a clear head. Unlimited.

Q: Using computers and electronic technology for creating music requires that you work through an interface. Have you found the interface to play a role in constructing your music?
A: The interface to me is something very important. As well, all see music very differently. An interface is the color and tone of what I toll I will be using to talk through. I feel those color and textures coming out both intentionally and unintentionally. The very nature of the grid is very oppressive even with its microscopic divisions of time, however, being award of spatial relations can allow a greater degree of alteration. Non-linear software patches such as those created in Max can be great for giving a very unpredictable, and endlessly envelope of change.

Q: What is the comparison of playing music with a physical instrument and using computer technology to create music?
A: My experience with music is six years of drums, five on piano, five on guitar. Recently been using the violin. I tend to look at all instruments as the simple carbon that makes up sound to be manipulated later, I don’t care if I have a Bb on a piano or a violin, it is the fodder for remodeling and reworking. It merely takes the substance as a starting point to evolve to an imaginable place. This mentality of looking at all noises as potential strengths is something that works well in a computer environment, which is quick to allow that sort of alteration. There is a life to hitting a key and returning a vibration immediately that differs from the inherent latency and intangibility of computer user, but I prefer not to compare them, as the both provide and fail to provide. I can’t possibly play all the things I can imagine on the piano, but the computer provides this possibility.

Q: Software tools like Max/MSP, Reaktor and Supercollider make it possible to create very specific and specialized tools for composition and sound manipulation. How does this sort of open-system affect your music?
A: Infinitely. Anything that I can imagine I can create. I haven’t found anything as beautiful as Max in real life. The strains of this relationship is that Max makes me work harder to come up with the ideas, because all the parts are there, all the necessary items to make any structure, all that is lacking is my idea. The open nature of the environment makes artificial intelligent decisions begin to take hold. With random integers moving into parameters, the system is always providing new choices that I can sift through and extract my favorite moment of computer improvisation from, just like a band member.

Q: Is it important for your human input to show through your music or do you prefer it stand as a piece that is not necessarily associated with a person or even a human player?
A: I fluctuate between the desire to express myself through my music and to create a surreal and severe technological environment that removes the ability of the listener to think that a human created it.

Q: What is your perspective on the performance of computer-generated or produced music? Would you say that its important that the human element is involved? Do you for see any sort of reconfiguration of the performer/audience? Is the experience o music changed with technology?
A: I don’t know about the role of performers,it’s a difficult thing to answer, of course I know it will be a little different than seeing the Rolling Stones and people want to want to apply the Chuck Berry aesthetic of performance to all music, which is troubling. The nature of the music I make is very much about precision and detail in craft, and it cannot happen spontaneously right now with the limits of speed. Until they get fast enough, things have to be dumbed down for the live approach, which is still very weak. I think that motion sensing and analysis can be conceptually interesting, but they are hardly accurate enough to achieve the precision I want in my music, and as a result are most often used to suggest the idea that the performer is doing a lot of work, when the reality is quite the opposite.

I would like to see a music system that anyone can plug into, make a series of choices between alternate forms of music that they prefer, those choices narrow themselves down smaller and smaller, a person needs not know the reason one is better than the other 7, but just pick, and then keep narrowing down. This information could then be stored and used to generate very specific music tuned JUST to our individual liking. This is why I make my own music right now as no such system exists.

In his book The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination Jacob Bronowski has written:

“I believe that we need to review the whole of our natural philosophy in the light of scientific knowledge that has arisen in the last fifty years. It really is pointless to go on talking about what the world is like (as much as philosophy does) when the modes of perception of the world which are accessbile to us have so changed in character. And we become more and more aware that what we think about the world is not what the world is but what the human animal see of the world.”

“Neither art or science is dull: No imaginative activity is dull to those who are willing to reimagine it for themselves.”

“No creative work, in art or science, truly exists for us unless we ourselves help to recreate it.”

“Reasoning is constructed with movable images just as certainly as poetry is.”

“Imagination is the manipulation inside the mind of absent things, by using in their place images or words or other symbols.”

“No work of art has been created with such finality that you need contribute nothing to it. The internal relations that make a work beautiful have to be discovered and in a way come from you.”

Sentences on Conceptual Art

by Sol Lewitt

1. Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.
2. Rational judgements repeat rational judgements.
3. Irrational judgements lead to new experience.
4. Formal art is essentially rational.
5. Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.
6. If the artist changes his mind midway through the execution of the piece he compromises the result and repeats past results.
7. The artist’s will is secondary to the process he initiates from idea to completion. His wilfulness may only be ego.
8. When words such as painting and sculpture are used, they connote a whole tradition and imply a consequent acceptance of this tradition, thus placing limitations on the artist who would be reluctant to make art that goes beyond the limitations.
9. The concept and idea are different. The former implies a general direction while the latter is the component. Ideas implement the concept.
10. Ideas can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.
11. Ideas do not necessarily proceed in logical order. They may set one off in unexpected directions, but an idea must necessarily be completed in the mind before the next one is formed.
12. For each work of art that becomes physical there are many variations that do not.
13. A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist’s mind to the viewer’s. But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artist’s mind.
14. The words of one artist to another may induce an idea chain, if they share the same concept.
15. Since no form is intrinsically superior to another, the artist may use any form, from an expression of words (written or spoken) to physical reality, equally.
16. If words are used, and they proceed from ideas about art, then they are art and not literature; numbers are not mathematics.
17. All ideas are art if they are concerned with art and fall within the conventions of art.
18. One usually understands the art of the past by applying the convention of the present, thus misunderstanding the art of the past.
19. The conventions of art are altered by works of art.
20. Successful art changes our understanding of the conventions by altering our perceptions.
21. Perception of ideas leads to new ideas.
22. The artist cannot imagine his art, and cannot perceive it until it is complete.
23. The artist may misperceive (understand it differently from the artist) a work of art but still be set off in his own chain of thought by that misconstrual.
24. Perception is subjective.
25. The artist may not necessarily understand his own art. His perception is neither better nor worse than that of others.
26. An artist may perceive the art of others better than his own.
27. The concept of a work of art may involve the matter of the piece or the process in which it is made.
28. Once the idea of the piece is established in the artist’s mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly. There are many side effects that the artist cannot imagine. These may be used as ideas for new works.
29. The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course.
30. There are many elements involved in a work of art. The most important are the most obvious.
31. If an artist uses the same form in a group of works, and changes the material, one would assume the artist’s concept involved the material.
32. Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution.
33. It is difficult to bungle a good idea.
34. When an artist learns his craft too well he makes slick art.
35. These sentences comment on art, but are not art.

The idea of simplicity can be much more complex than you might initial expect. On contemplating the nature of simplicity, specifically simplicity in the arts, I have begun to realize that it can be a very rich and fertile ground for exploration. - Computer art, digital art seems more than a little overwhelming to me. But this is coming from the perspective of someone who is still on the cusp of it all. Someone struggling to understand how one translates a technical process into the something, a work, a piece, complete and realized. I am intimidated by the vastness of it all. My goal is focus, to strip back the extraneous layers and concentrate on a single element. Forget what the technology is capable of, and concentrate on its potential to produce a creative end.

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove. ”

–Antoine de Saint-Exupery

An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth

“Music as a Gradual Process,” by Steve Reich

I do not mean the process of composition, but rather pieces of music that are, literally, processes.

The distinctive thing about musical processes is that they determine all the note-to-note (sound-to-sound) details and the over all form simultaneously. (Think of a round or infinite canon.)

I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music.

To facilitate closely detailed listening a musical process should happen extremely gradually.

Performing and listening to a gradual musical process resembles:

pulling back a swing, releasing it, and observing it gradually come to rest;
turning over an hour glass and watching the sand slowly run through the bottom;
placing your feet in the sand by the ocean’s edge and watching, feeling, and listening to the waves gradually bury them.

Though I may have the pleasure of discovering musical processes and composing the musical material to run through them, once the process is set up and loaded it runs by itself.

Material may suggest what sort of process it should be run through (content suggests form), and processes may suggest what sort of material should be run through them (form suggests content). If the shoe fits, wear it.

As to whether a musical process is realized through live human performance or through some electro-mechanical means is not finally the main issue. One of the most beautiful concerts I ever heard consisted of four composers playing their tapes in a dark hall. (A tape is interesting when it’s an interesting tape.)

It is quite natural to think about musical processes if one is frequently working with electro-mechanical sound equipment. All music turns out to be ethnic music.

Musical processes can give one a direct contact with the impersonal and also a kind of complete control, and one doesn’t always think of the impersonal and complete control as going together. By “a kind” of complete control I mean that by running this material through the process I completely control all that results, but also that I accept all that results without changes.

John Cage has used processes and has certainly accepted their results, but the processes he used were compositional ones that could not be heard when the piece was performed. The process of using the I Ching or imperfections in a sheet of paper to determine musical parameters can’t be heard when listening to music compsed that way. The compositional processes and the sounding music have no audible connection. Similarly in serial music, the series itself is seldom audible. (This is a basic difference between serial (basically European) music and serial (basically American) art, where the perceived series is usually the focal point of the work.)

What I’m interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one and the same thing.

James Tenney said in conversation, “then the composer isn’t privy to anything”. I don’t know any secrets of structure that you can’t hear. We all listen to the process together since it’s quite audible, and one of the reasons it’s quite audible is, because it’s happening extremely gradually.

The use of hidden structural devices in music never appealed to me. Even when all the cards are on the table and everyone hears what is gradually happening in a musical process, there are still enough mysteries to satisfy all. These mysteries are the impersonal, unattended, psycho-acoustic by-products of the intended process. These might include sub-melodies heard within repeated melodic patterns, stereophonic effects due to listener location, slight irregularities in performance, harmonics, difference tones, etc.

Listening to an extremely gradual musical process opens my ears to it, but it always extends farther than I can hear, and that makes it interesting to listen to the musical process again. That area of every gradual (completely controlled) musical process, where one hears the details of the sound moving out away from intentions, occuring for their own acoustic reasons, is it.

I begin to perceive these minute details when I can sustain close attention and a gradual process invites my sustained attention. By “gradual” I mean extremely gradual; a process happening so slowly and gradually that listening to it resembles watching a minute hand on a watch–you can perceive it moving after you stay with it a little while.

Several currently popular modal musics like Indian classical and drug oriented rock and roll may make us aware of minute sound details because in being modal (constant key center, hypnotically droning and repetitious) they naturally focus on these details rather than on key modulation, counterpoint and other peculiarly Western devices. Nevertheless, these modal musics remain more or less strict frameworks for improvisation. They are not processes.

The distinctive thing about musical processes is that they determine all the note-to-note details and the over all form simultaneously. One can’t improvise in a musical process–the concepts are mutually exclusive.

While performing and listening to gradual musical processes one can participate in a particular liberating and impersonal kind of ritual. Focusing in on the musical process makes possible that shift of attention away from he and she and you and me outwards towards it.

Remember simplicity. Don’t get bogged down in the technical end. These are merely the means to the end, being the composition or the piece. This should probably be thought out almost fully before delving into the technical aspects. Maybe not the entire idea, but at least well-formed thoughts on the aesthetic and goals. Rough ideas perhaps.

Remember, “The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.” -Cage.

Not to show complexity or prove anything. Think about sound as physical. Think about its weight and mass and depth. The space it occupies.