Aesthetic Cartography

I’m getting all the boring singer/songwriter patter out of the way here, where it’s easy to ignore, so I won’t bore everyone at this Sunday’s gig. If you want, just skip to the end of this post for a peek at Sunday’s set list. Don’t forget the details: this March 22, 2009, Yu Yin Tang, 1731 Yan’an Xi Lu (near Kaixuan Lu), 8pm, 30 RMB, opening for 10!

I’ve been writing pop songs since about 6th grade. That would be around 1986, when I was about 11. My first song was called “Blue Eyes,” co-written with fellow missionary kid Andy Laesch. We had a band we called Center of the Earth, which we, as pious MK’s, eventually decided had infernal undertones, so we renamed our duo Outer Space. We wrote a bunch of songs of which I could still hum a few bars, with titles like “Electricity” and “Midnight Spooks,” and we recorded them into a little boom box, doubling up on vocal duties, with me accompanying on the little Casiotone keyboard I got for my 9th birthday, shortly after my family moved to Liberia.

I saw it one day—blue eyes
I knew it right away—blue eyes
So clear from the start—blue eyes
It brought love to my heart—blue eyes

Oh, oh, blue eyes
Oh, oh, blue eyes
Blue eyes

Even before that, I remember putting together an instrumental, auto-chord extravaganza, featuring such titles as, “Just Noise???” now lost to the ages.

I kept writing songs in junior high and high school, while attending the International Christian Academy in Bouaké, Côte d’Ivoire, switching to Christian themes, along the lines of the Petra, Michael W. Smith, Steve Taylor, Benny Hester, Steve Camp, White Heart, and Randy Stonehill cassettes I was listening to at the time. By far the standout hit of those boarding school years was “Rainbow,” co-written with “Guitar Man” Dan Pinkston (who now has a DMA in music and teaches at Simpson College). We performed this snappy tune with our band The Utensils (which at times also included staff members Kurt Werner and Brad Trosen on bass) around our school campus, in chapel, or just for pals.

My songwriting hit a new apex with “Epilogue,” mostly composed on the plane trip from Africa back to the US in the summer of 1990, following my 10th grade year. I spent my last two years of high school in Seward, NE, and I would often play my little songs on my friend Kathryn’s piano (much more often, in fact, than I actually had a willing audience). “Epilogue” was generally the most warmly received (unless I tossed in some Richard Marx).

I got my first synthesizer in the summer of 1990, the mighty Roland D-20 workstation (with a built-in 8 track sequencer + drum machine), and I set about sequencing synth-pop arrangements of my tunes, producing the better part of two “albums” in these two years. You will never hear them. The first, Nine Generic Love Songs, included “Epilogue” and was written during my junior year for the girl for whom I yet pined back at boarding school. The second was pulled together during my sophomore year of college and was eventually entitled Titled Untitled, comprising 17 songs mostly written during my senior year of high school, although two songs dated from my boarding school years (including a synth-pop version of “Rainbow”), and a few newer tunes also slipped in. While working on the first master in January 1994, I felt embarrassed that I was spending so much time on such ancient material, and that my college girlfriend was unrepresented, so I added the track “I Tell Her Everything,” by far the best thing on the album.

I did some really wacky stuff in high school, digging deep into the synthesis potential of my Roland D-20 and experimenting with odd meters, sudden harmonic shifts to distantly related key areas, microtonality, polytonality, even random procedures, a sign of things to come, I guess, as in the instrumental track “Genevieve” (the middle name of a girl I smooched at show choir camp), which dates from late 1991. The percussion tracks were recorded as a series of overdubs with the volume turned off, so I didn’t know where I was playing in relation to the beat or previous takes, an idea I think I got from a Keyboard magazine article.

At first I recorded my sequences and overdubs on a little cassette 4-track I borrowed from my high school band teacher. Later in college I bought a second-hand Tascam 238 Syncaset 8-track tape recorder and made new recordings; I continued to remix and rerecord these songs for quite a while, eventually bolstering Nine Generic Love Songs with four thematically related “outtakes,” and finally producing a digital master after moving to Seattle in 1996. Good practice, I guess.

I continued to write songs after commencing studies at St. Olaf College, but as a composition major, I was also starting to branch out into other kinds of writing. I would often try to slip some of the new ideas I was learning in music theory class into my songs, such as a German augmented sixth chord in “One-sided” (written as a homework assignment) and common tone modulation by way of an augmented chord in “The Verge of a Girlfriend.” The instrumental track “Jim/James” was the result of a homework assignment to write a minuet and trio (co-written by classmate JP Moninger, my partner on the assignment), and also snuck onto Titled Untitled. Most of my new songs were for my college sweetheart, with a few exceptions. I once wrote a grunge song for the cover band in which I played, Dirty Bath, entitled “Kill Fred,” a hateful diatribe against an incompetent sound engineer we had at one gig.

Put a gun to his head
Kill Fred
Make him bleed; it’s so red
Kill Fred

It was actually kind of a funny song (in Phrygian mode, which we had recently been studying).

After college, I moved to Seattle, and I kept writing songs, almost exclusively, and perhaps somewhat neurotically, about the college girlfriend who broke my heart in the end. Eventually I started to write about other people, but almost invariably the subjects would revolve around my striking out with girls, though I tried to maintain a modicum of wit about it. One happy exception was “First Dance,” composed for the wedding of Cheryl (my former French teacher from boarding school) and James Cloyd.

At any point since high school, if you had asked me what my next album was going to be called, I would have been able to tell you. After Titled Untitled, I had planned a sprawling quadruple album entitled Our Unique Culture, which would bring me totally up to date with everything worthwhile I’d ever written, or even started to write. In college, I was working on an album called Whatever, which later became Stark Originality. I’m sure there were others album titles I’ve forgotten. At one point I planned a rock album. Then in the early Seattle years, it was a 12-song concept album about the aforementioned college sweetheart entitled, I’ll Never Make the Same Mistake Twice Again (hmmm, bitter much?). Then I thought I’d better just sweep everything I had into one collection and move on to something new; at first I was going to polish and rerecord everything and call the compilation Jot Down a Quick Note, later shortened to Jot Quicky. But in the end, I just burned CD-R’s of whatever half-baked demos I had laying around for friends, christening the 15-song compilation Dumb Songs and Demos.

After a while, somewhere around 2000, I just stopped writing songs. I’d gotten busy composing the string quartet soundtrack to the computer game Arcanum (2001), which took me most of 2000 to complete. I was also writing a lot of choral music for the church choir I was in. I’d continue to have ideas for songs, but I’d never flesh them out or record them. At the time I felt demoralized by indifference, but in retrospect, I was doing almost nothing to get my songs heard by anyone outside the circle of my immediate acquaintances. The last song I wrote in Seattle was “Kiss Locally,” sparked by the way my pal Mike was able to breathe new life into some of my older tunes with killer rock arrangements. (And these arrangements are finally seeing the light of day as 3 Heart-Shaped Cookies, available now!)

In retrospect, my last year or two in Seattle was ripe for a pop renaissance. I had finally assembled a perfect little computer-based home studio, my longstanding goal since moving to Seattle, rounded out by the acquisition of the Roland JP-8000 and JV-2080 that I was able to retain from my studio at Sierra when they finally shuttered their Bellevue office. And I was starting to perform regularly in a new band, Subpoenaed Lemur, at the instigation of my dear pal Korby; I don’t know if I can truthfully say we were garnering a following, but we were playing around town quite a bit and having a blast. But at the same time I was in the throes of my master’s degree in composition at UW, while continuing to work full time in the games biz, leaving little time for pop dalliances. It’s an irony of history that just as the last pieces of my home studio fell into place, I had shifted focus almost entirely to doing computer music in Max/MSP. And to this day I feel shame that I never pulled my weight in the band; continued respect to Korby for doing all the booking, preparing all our backing tracks, and running all the rehearsals.

When I decided to move to China in 2004, I had to figure out what to do with my studio gear, and each option seemed like a losing proposition. I could sell it all and lose money and regret it later; I could pay to store it as its value steadily declined; or I could pay to ship everything over to China. In the end I brought it all with me to Shanghai, where it languished in unopened boxes for about 3 years, as I continued to focus on computer music.

I guess what got me writing songs again was a trip to Vietnam with Jutta in October 2007. It sounds silly and cliché, but it was a time of intense emotion, and I didn’t know how else to express what I was feeling than in a song. By the time we returned to Shanghai, “My Heart is a River in Flood” was pretty much sketched out, though it took a few more months to work out some harmonic details and record it. In the meantime I had started writing “EndWar,” which despite its commercial provenance was genuinely the result of good, old fashioned passion and inspiration (working on one game for 3.5 years will do that to you). And “Jessica’s Scissors” ensued shortly from a brazen bar boast; our friend Jessica, an instructor at the Vidal Sassoon academy, was celebrating her birthday at Logo, and I offered to write her a song in exchange for a free haircut, perhaps not the best bargain I’ve ever struck. All of this was enough to finally pull my studio gear out of mothballs and wire everything up.

And so pop songwriting has once again finally come to the fore. I’ve had this idea of doing an album about my experience living in Shanghai ever since I got here, but it’s languished on the back burner for years. But now I’m committed to finishing it in 2009; once I’m back from setting up this installation in Beijing next month, I will be all about Shanghai Travelogue. All the new songs I’ve been writing recently (two are already lined up and ready to record) are going towards that release.

Despite this long history of pop songcraft, I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve performed a set of my pop songs in public (excluding the songs we did with Subpoenaed Lemur: “Love on TV,” “Kiss Locally,” “Late Life,” and “Our Newfound Skill”). I did a short ½ hour set on some festival line-up in college, a few tunes at another open mic night in college, 3 more at an open mic night shortly after moving to Seattle at the Art Bar on 2nd…maybe that’s it? (After the Art Bar performance, the host, who I think may have been Ted Narcotic, afterwards commented, “Hmm, you’ve got kind of a Tiny Tim/John Tesh thing going on there, don’t you?”)

So perhaps this Sunday will be my first full gig of original pop songs ever. Took me long enough!

Here’s the set list, with approximate dates of composition. If a song title is highlighted, click on it to listen!

Love on TV* (1997)
Our Newfound Skill (1998)
Late Life* (~1999)
I Tell Her Everything (1994)
Like Vaseline (~1999)
Kiss Locally* (2003)
Cold (2009)
I and My Neurosis (~1999)
First Dance (~1998)
My Heart is a River in Flood (2007)
I’m Not Drinking Alone (When I’m Thinking of You) (~1997)
Jessica’s Scissors (2008)
EndWar (2008)

* included in the brand new rock’n’roll EP 3 Heart-Shaped Cookies

This show will be “quasi-acoustic,” meaning that I’ll be singing and accompanying myself on a keyboard with no computer trickery. It would have been fully acoustic if Yu Yin Tang had a piano. Later this year I’m planning to make the leap to full-fledged synth-pop performances. I always felt ashamed to be performing alone with only sequenced accompaniment (despite the fact that Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails have made quite profitable careers based on this approach). Now that I’ve witnessed the “electronica” revolution of 1999, followed by my discovery of China’s karaoke culture, I think it’s time for me to overcome those old reservations.

Wow, what a long, boring post. Thank you very much for listening. Good night. Enjoy your steak.

Here’s a quick preview of what I’m going to be presenting at this Sunday’s “Silence or Silence or Brainwave Communication” show, which you should totally attend (details here).

I’m currently working on a collaborative project with my pal Chen Hangfeng 陈航峰, an installation for the Today Art Museum in Beijing, going up next month; he’s doing the visual part, and I’m doing the audio part. The point of departure was the notion of a kaleidoscope, which fragments and transforms the world around you into something unexpected, strange, and beautiful. To achieve the same kind of effect in sound, I’m writing a program in Max/MSP that will take a live audio signal coming from a microphone positioned around the gallery and manipulate it in funky ways. In the end it will have four different behaviors (what I’m calling “scenes”) that can be deployed independently on the two speakers in the little room we’re building. I’m planning to preview two of these at my performance this Sunday.

The basic sound production method is to use resonant filters to emphasize certain very specific frequencies present in the original signal. When the incoming signal includes one of the frequencies I’m looking for (and in the kind of noisy, ambient sound I’m pumping into the computer, this is quite likely), the filter will be excited, and you’ll hear a tone at that frequency that also retains the amplitude contour of the signal going into it. It’s not a particularly new or difficult idea—I think Jean-Claude Risset was one of the first do put this idea to musical use in the 60’s—but it’s still effective.

Setting up the filters (six of them, referencing the hexagon forms seen in kaleidoscopes) is pretty straightforward; the guts of the piece are in how and when I set those frequencies.

I’ve got an overarching harmonic plan based on just intonation that’s a bit complicated, but it basically involves picking a new scale for each “scene change.” I’ve got 5 scales to choose from. Different scales imbue the changing scenes with different moods or feelings. A fundamental pitch is selected from the chosen scale. Then each of the filters picks a multiple of that fundamental pitch (based on the scale) as its base pitch. Then it does these shorter volleys of some behavior (the specifics of which vary from scene to scene), which involve choosing another multiple (still based on the same scale) from that pitch. So you’ve got a scale degree multiplied by a scale degree multiplied by a scale degree, which is kind of analogous to the way images are reflected back and forth in the mirrors of a kaleidoscope.

I’ll be previewing two of these scene behaviors this Sunday. One is a kind of swooping, sustained thing, where each of the filters are behaving independently, coming in and out at different times, hovering around different octave offsets, very mellow and ambient. The number of swoops per volley, time of the sustain, time of the sweep, time between volleys are all controlled algorithmically, slowly changing over time. The other behavior is a more rhythmic thing, different patterns pulsing on the different filters, playing off each other, with gradually changing patterns, density, tempo multipliers, pauses also controlled algorithmically. Still mellow and ambient, but with a beat!

I’ve done a couple of pieces exploring this notion of algorithmically generated rhythmic patterns, and my first efforts were pretty unsatisfactory, notably in a piece called “Study for Eventual World Domination,” which I did at the 2Pi Festival in Hangzhou in 2006. Some of the patterns were interesting, but they kept coming out in a stream that became boring after a while, homogonous in its constant randomness, since it lacked any mid-level coherence. So I’ve come up with a system that will still generate algorithmic patterns, but store them in a list, so that they can recur and play off of other patterns, and so far this method is proving much more satisfactory. It’s actually a cross between the way I’m storing radio signals in buffers in Radiospace (randomly choosing one of the six buffers to rewrite every 20 seconds, allowing for this same kind of mid-level coherence) and how I was choosing cells to play and juxtapose in the EndWar music system.

To hear the other two scene behaviors, you’ll have to come to Beijing next month and check out the installation! The show opens April 17. I’ll post more about all the specific details later. In the meantime, see you Sunday, 8pm, Yu Yin Tang!

Three weekends ago, I checked out the Intrude: Art & Life 366 exhibit at the Zendai Museum in Pudong. I was always a little fuzzy about the exact parameters of this project, but it seems to have been a yearlong initiative in which different artists would do pieces to take art beyond the museum walls, and this show collects some of the highlights.

My pal Chen Hangfeng 陈航峰, with whom I’m currently collaborating on an installation for the Today Art Museum in Beijing for next April, was one of the participating artists. His piece involved chronicling the year by taking a picture of himself every day with a sign counting down the number of days remaining. Only about forty of the resultant photos were on display at the museum, though I thought there was room for a lot more, especially the one I’m in, an egregious curatorial oversight.

Most of the pieces were public performances of some kind, so they were represented in the museum by their documentary evidence, mostly videos and photographs. Lao Yang 老羊, proprietor of the Sugar Jar shop in Beijing’s 798 complex (the best place in the country to pick up experimental and underground Chinese music) had a piece on display, which involved riding around on a bike carrying one of those looping bullhorns; Lu Chen 陆晨 and Mei Er 梅二 of Shanghai punk band Top Floor Circus 顶楼的马戏团 could be seen in the background recording. Hangfeng’s friend Zeng Yu 曾郁, who we bumped into at the show, did a piece that involved walking around town wearing a blank white mask, handing out manifestos about the metaphorical masks we all wear in the public sphere. Yan Jun 颜峻 was represented by a piece that unfortunately looked suspiciously like an empty Windows XP desktop when we encountered it. One of the most entertaining pieces was by Australian Michael Yuen, who paid 40 people to follow him around People’s Square for a day without knowing why; it was fun to see how other people started to follow along and take pictures out of curiosity, goaded, I assume, by the prospect of a celebrity sighting.

Watching these videos, I couldn’t help thinking about how the act of documentation alters the performance itself. Without a documentary crew, I think some of these pieces could really shake people up and cause them to re-evaluate their surroundings, their habits, their assumptions, maybe even their safety. But when the videotape’s rolling, I expect people automatically prepare themselves for some kind of stunt or prank, if not an artwork, especially in a country where every Bi Feng Tang restaurant and intercity bus rolls those endless candid camera videos for cheap distraction. As I Twittered at the time, “A guy on a bus in a mask turns heads, but a guy on a bus in a mask being videotaped just rolls eyes.”

The only piece of these that I experienced live, other than Hangfeng’s, was a performance by German sound artist Daniel Wessolek on a rainy spring day last year up at Lu Xun park, way up in Hongkou district. He was doing a bit of circuit bending with cheap electronic toys and loudspeakers, controlled by a simple hardware sequencer he had built. Only about five people showed up for the show, but curious park-goers kept popping into our little pavilion to see what was going on. Eventually we were booted, so folks could play cards, and Daniel gave a brief encore on a boat in the lake under an umbrella. One reason I found the performance so beautiful was its ephemerality, the faint electronic sounds blending in with all the other Sunday morning noise, like drizzle on water.

But of course, if they hadn’t been videotaped, Hangfeng and I would have missed out on a fun afternoon of exploring and discussing these pieces. Documentation expands the audience for these works and gives the museum a greater roll in their promotion, analysis, and dissemination. Nonetheless, I had a strong sense that videotaping a performance does justice to neither medium. You don’t have the full sensory bandwidth, the intrusion into daily life, of a live performance, but neither, in the vast majority of cases, is the full communicative power of the video medium being exploited.

Guo Li Jun 郭立军’s “Ouch 岂不痛哉” was represented not by a video, but by an artifact. His piece involved setting up punching bags labeled “Trust me I can prove your existence 请相信我能证明你的存在” in public places, with a sign indicating that the bag may be used for hitting, kicking, hugging, kissing, or any other purpose. The same invitation held in the museum as well, so I went two rounds with one of his bags. To me it seemed the only piece in the show that even in its museum context still held the power to intrude.