Sunday, April 16, 2006
About The Painful Leg Injuries Podcast Series 10, Improvised Sensorlab
It was sometime in December and I was taking a lunch break. I wandered into the Radio Shack on 7th ave and 29th street. I had been thinking about adding more instruments to my growing collection, but I wanted something that would have a primitive electronic sound that I could manipulate into various different shapes. So I found this little home projects kit, for kids of nerds I imagine, or late twenties noise music geeks looking for the next weird little instrument to add to their collection. Oh, that brings me back to me. I bought it and brought it home. I read through the manual skipping all the magnet stuff and light bulbs and whatever until I found the section on oscillators.I built one that had a continous droning sound to it, but not the cavernous drones of most of my material, the sine wave type drones you'd hear the Improvised Music from Japan Players use. It sounds like test tone. This original oscillator is what used for the upcoming episodes 3, 4, and 5 of this series.
I reconfigured my sensorlab to make pulses, one dial would control the rate of the pulses and the other the pitch. These are episodes 1,2 and 6 and 7.
I have grown to love the music of the Improvised Music From Japan players. From reading the annual magazine/cd set of the same name, I have grown a pretty strong unerstanding of what they are after. Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M and Toshimaru Nakamura, the leaders of this scene, on their record Good Morning Good Night wanted to make electronic music that is pure abstraction, the simplest tones meeting, to find what is at the heart of music. They want us to appreciate the pureness of sound in it's most simple form. A form of music that's not dated by a production sound, a music that cannot be connected to a particular location by the instruments involved.
As much as I admire this view, I couldn't see using my Sensorlab to explore what they are already doing. I love the idea of taking the pure sine wave and sculpting into some primitive instrument. Like finding some weird old synthesizer.
I used some guitar pedals, and picked a sound for each piece, by reconfiguring it everytime. Then it was down to the two dials. I was limited in options plus, I didn't know what would happen when I turned the dials. With no compositional plan, I would just turn dials, when I found a sound I liked, I would try to repeat it, if I was successful, I kept going until I made a mistake, then the plan became to repeat the mistake. When I painted myslef into a corner, I would turn the dials the complete opposite direction and start again.
It seemed like only a few seconds would go by, but in some cases it was early a half hour. Oddly, it felt like I had become hypnotised in some way. I know, I'm starting to sound like some kind of new-age hippy. It was more like some kind of weird meditation, like I wasn't thinking about anything, just concentatrating on the sounds I heard and reacting. Maybe, I was simply relaxing, perhaps adding years to life. I fell out of any direct connection to any specific time or place. So breifly I lost my time and place, and I think experienced what the IMJ folks are chasing, losing myself and just imagining.
I guess this is abstract expressionism in the sound art realm, but the experience of making is better than experience of just observing. And who knows, maybe everyone will hate this noise except for me. There was just such an amazing feeling of transportation and other-worldliness, I felt extremely compelled to share.
But, the dogs will have to out. I have to write a lecture for tomorrow, that I've done before, numerous times, but never wrote down in a place where I could find it again. My life, my time and place inevitably returns.
