Sunday night at Open Air
It’s Sunday night at Open Air, a small, sleek lounge in downtown Manhattan. A couple dozen musicians, DJs, and bedroom hackers huddle around the bar or relax on couches. Many are toting computers. The atmosphere is trendy but soothing: Exposed wood conjures a California vibe that counterbalances the space-station chill; sunsets and moonscapes float across a wall of flat-panel displays. Everyone’s paying more attention to their laptop screens than to the art on the walls – making the scene more home-brew computer club than East Village bohemia.
Everybody’s here for Share, a weekly gathering that began last summer as a swap meet focused on the applications, macros, and plug-ins available to musicians working with PCs. Most of the goods were soon traded, and the party evolved into a combination jam session and mutual support line. Share co-honcho Rich Panciera, a scruffy Brooklynite who records under the handle lloop, explains: “The music people play here is a prototype for the music of the future.”
The music, as you might guess, is electronica. And though the stuff at Share sounds rather avant-garde, with its edgy textures and squirrelly beats, it’s also strangely familiar. After all, electronic music is ubiquitous these days, the sonic backdrop in restaurants, retail shops, and TV commercials. Its signature moves are used by everyone from Timbaland to Radiohead, Björk to Moby.
In a larger sense, nearly all of the music you hear today, both recorded and live, is electronic. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s digital – many studio engineers and artists remain fervently attached to analog hardware, with its arguably greater warmth and richness. But the computer is inextricably woven into all stages of the modern recording process: Even acoustic music such as string quartets and bluegrass is spliced and diced with all-purpose mixing software like Pro Tools and Logic. The wandering tones of mediocre (but marketable) singers are routinely treated with pitch-correcting programs like Antares Auto-Tune. And no one balks at drum machines anymore.
Most mainstream music production relegates the computer to a behind-the-scenes player. The digital processes that help create the sense of presence and authenticity are smoothed out and kept in check. The Share crowd wants to let those techniques loose. For them, the PC is no longer simply a playback device or an inexpensive home studio. It has become an instrument in its own right.
An explosion of scattershot beats emerges from the next room. The sounds belong to Geoff Matters, a slight 24-year-old who sports a wispy Fu Manchu, earrings, and long blond hair stuffed inside a beige stocking cap. Besides helping to organize Share, Matters is one of the lead programmers for GDAM, which stands for Geoff and Dave’s Audio Mixer. An open source digital DJ rig that’s “perpetually in beta,” GDAM cuts and mixes MP3s like a vinyl DJ gone cyborg.
Matters unfolds a 4-foot-square mat that looks like a tic-tac-toe gameboard and has the phrase STAY COOL! emblazoned in the center. Officially, the device belongs to Dance Dance Revolution, the PlayStation version of an insanely popular Japanese arcade game that leads players through hyperactive dance routines. Instead of dictating moves, Matters’ rejiggered pad lets him drive the music. Stepping on different squares controls an array of beats and effects, allowing him to scratch virtual records with his feet. “It’s not about re-creating vinyl,” Matters explains. “It’s about performance.”
As Matters hops around in his fat, floppy socks, the evening’s featured performer settles down on a nearby couch and pops open her PowerBook. Keiko Uenishi, aka O.blaat, is a Japanese artist best known for wiring up Ping-Pong games with mikes and modulating the resulting audio. Without fanfare, she begins unleashing an enchanted sea of sound: Fuzzed-out birdcalls flit through submarine drones, and scratchy beats crackle like a thousand records skipping as one.
Uenishi’s set is great; however, like most laptop musicians, she’s boring to watch. Calling up audio files and filters with a QWERTY keyboard lacks the visual punch of a guitar solo or a drumroll, and often there isn’t even a visible link between a keypunch and a specific change in sound. Is it live or is it Memorex? No one at Share seems to care, and for all I know, Uenishi might have spent her time playing The Sims.
The question about the “liveness” of the show conceals another, more difficult one: Who exactly is responsible for the music? Both at the club and beforehand, Uenishi made any number of decisions about audio files and sequences. But the PowerBook and its software brought it all together and unleashed the flow in real time. Who’s in control? The machine or the musician?
We should be used to this sort of ambiguity by now. Remix records regularly outsell the originals, rap music rules the charts with repurposed samples, and Black Sabbath uses TelePrompTers onstage. These days, Milli Vanilli seem like prophets, not cheats. As the musicians adapt the computer, the distinction between the instrument and the music the instrument makes begins to break down. Uenishi wasn’t joking when she suggested to me that, in the future, the pop chart would become a software chart.
There are loads of digital instruments available, but most don’t create new sounds – they emulate old ones. Techno kids who once drooled over rare or expensive hardware like Prophet-5 or DX7 can now download “soft synths” from the Net (legally or not). A popular Swedish product called Reason serves up a bevy of virtual machines in an old-school package: Boot the program and you see a rack-mounted stack of rectangular boxes equipped with the old knobs and sliders. If you want to reconnect the devices, you can just spin the simulated machines around onscreen and switch the patch cords.
The hardcore, however, use more flexible applications that let them design their own instruments directly. The most legendary of these modular programming environments is Max/MSP, which got its start 20 years ago at Ircam, a highbrow music research lab in France. Max allows users to design data-flow networks that, among other things, can generate music. MSP is an extension to Max. It synthesizes and processes the sounds sluicing through those networks. Max/MSP creates these networks, called patches, mostly by drawing links between graphical objects that represent different processes. “It’s like a musical Erector set,” says Joshua Clayton, a Max programmer who records under the name Kit. “From simple building blocks, you can build individualized musical machines.”
Max/MSP’s lean packaging and steep learning curve restrict users to a rather elite group of coder-musicians: Some – Aphex Twin and Autechre, for example – are electronic pop stars, but most are buried in academia. The company that sells the program, Cycling ’74, keeps a low profile, with only a handful of employees, little advertising, and no outside investors. As Cycling executives see it, high-end software like Max/MSP will never become more than a cottage industry that caters to serious electronic musicians, who are often demanding, idiosyncratic, and poor (and hence are sometimes willing to swap cracked software).
A more populist philosophy reigns at Native Instruments, a Berlin company founded in 1996 by a couple of German synth-heads. Devoted to bringing slick and cool music software to the masses, NI has already released 10 or so products to great acclaim and is flush with investment capital and programmers. The company has released classic synth emulators and a dynamite DJ mixing program called Traktor, but its flagship product remains Reaktor, a modular synthesizer and sampler that provides Max-style powers in a more accessible package. Mate Galic, Native Instruments’ audio evangelist, compares snapping together Reaktor’s audio modules to playing with Legos.
NI also acts a bit like a record label, putting together CD compilations and sponsoring live events in Europe, where electronic music is both more mainstream and more integrated into the art world than it is in the US. Even the company’s software releases radiate a cool, edgy vibe. As Galic puts it, “We see software as an artistic creation, not just a tool.” Some NI software comes complete with its own aesthetic style: Spektral Delay, released last year, transforms practically anything you throw at it into a warm and spacey track reminiscent of the Berlin dub artist Pole. Conversely, one NI music compilation has its own software: Mewark-Stoderaft, created by the Russian hacker-composer Lazyfish, is a Reaktor-based interactive audio track designed to be manipulated directly by the listener. “Eventually, software instruments will become pieces of abstract electronic music,” says Galic. “You will just let them run, and they’ll never stop.”
***
The coming of autonomous, self-generated music has long been prophesied by the ambient graybeard Brian Eno. Today, that’s a sure thing; it’s also a problem. Software instruments never stop changing, never stop offering up more of those infinite possibilities we’re always hearing about. Compare the situation with, say, playing an acoustic guitar. Years of practice are necessary before you really begin to discover the hidden potential inside that rounded box with six metal strings and a hole. But right off the bat, software instruments – especially modular ones like Max/MSP and Reaktor – provide a dizzying number of powerful effects. This makes it easy to endlessly tweak your material rather than to accept the constraints that partly define the act of composition. And this is particularly true when you can tinker not only with the sound but with the virtual machine that makes the sound.
For Robert Henke, a 33-year-old member of the Berlin-based ambient dub group Monolake, it boils down to this: “Do I go to the studio and make a song? Or do I make a new tool to make another song tomorrow?”
Henke decided to do both, and the strategy paid off. In 1999, he and then fellow Monolaker Gerhard Behles helped found Ableton, a software company that recently released Live, a much-praised audio sequencer. Live brings to real-time performances the kinds of sculptural control over loops and samples that one has in a studio environment. “There are two approaches you can take with your music software,” says Behles, who quit Monolake in order to run Ableton full-time. “One is to consider your tools as fixed. The other is to control the tools themselves. That gives you a much bigger lever. But it can keep you from ever doing music again.”
A lot of what passes for experimentalism in popular electronic music represents an obsession with the big lever – whether it’s Reason, Max/MSP, Reaktor, Live, or something even newer. The desire to constantly reprocess material, and to release the results as finished products, is only amplified by the constant turnover of software. “There’s a new piece of software every day,” says Oakland, California’s Miguel Depedro, who runs the Tigerbeat6 label and records whacked-out sampladelic electronica under the name Kid606. “By the time you’ve learned how to use something, there’s already something else. I would love for everything to just pause right now – no new advances, no faster computers, no new Max. And then we’ll see what we do for the next two years.”
Depedro’s reaction to the infinity of options is to largely ignore them. Instead of geeking out over new software, he goes punk rock, injecting bratty-ass fun into a music dominated by tech talk of fast Fourier transforms. His live shows unleash dense hip hop and R&B from the twin-barreled plunderphonic bazooka fashioned from two PowerBooks and a multichannel DJ mixer. And a recent Kid606 bootleg EP, freakbitchlickfly, features Depedro mangling unauthorized snippets of Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On” into a Ritalin stomp. The turn away from process-heavy hermeticism represents a rejection of the technological futurism of the ’90s, which mindlessly embraced the latest upgrade as the avenue toward fulfillment and success. As Depedro points out, “You don’t even need a computer to play live electronic music.”
Even a few programmer-musicians echo some of Depedro’s concerns. Joshua Clayton programs for Cycling ’74 and remains captivated by the nitty-gritty processing available in environments like Max/MSP. Clayton also has concerns about the aesthetic attitude that such programs can produce. “I find that people who use Max and similar programs often aspire to be the god behind the universe, to come up with a formal system that’s completely under their control. Some people can’t wait to get everything inside the computer so they can generate some kind of utopian music that’s all contained within the machine.” For Clayton, who still loves to sample the analog world with a hand microphone, music that just plays itself is anathema. “We are at a confusing point in time,” he says. “These mechanical processes are the only things the culture can latch onto, but at the same time there’s something unpleasant about them, something a little weird.”
***
The party is Joypad, the place is San Francisco, and local laptop wizard Twerk is playing one of the most engaging live ambient sets I’ve ever heard. Oddly processed sounds build up shimmering textures as feedback loops envelop one another and beats slowly unfold like a flower bud in a time-lapse film. Along with working his PowerBook, Twerk twirls a set of knobs on a small controller. Next to me, a punkish brunette explains to her friend that the knobs are controlling various parameter values for the algorithms that make up Twerk’s live patch.
This is clearly not rock ‘n’ roll.
Neither is Twerk’s home studio, which takes up the living room of his apartment in San Francisco’s Western Addition. The space is frighteningly neat, the dust-free computer desk bare except for a handful of CDs stacked in a crisp brick.
Twerk, aka Shawn Hatfield, is recognized as one of the leading programmer-musicians on California’s laptop-techno scene, but the 28-year-old native didn’t even own a computer a few years ago. Originally a hip hop DJ – “spray cans were our technology” – Hatfield began making straight-ahead techno records in the late ’90s. On a whim, he bought a copy of Cool Edit Pro and started playing with it on his girlfriend’s Sony Vaio. He was hooked. He plunged into Reaktor and then upgraded to Max/MSP, and his techno records began to mutate. “My music started to get more experimental because the tools themselves are experimental.” Eventually he sold all his analog gear. “I’m not even trying to emulate analog. I’m trying to make new sounds, computer sounds.”
All musicians who use computers must come to terms with the peculiar situations created by software. Some, like Depedro, turn toward showmanship, while others, like Clayton, balance digital control with analog sounds and sensibilities. Hatfield, however, represents another way: into the machine. His latest record is called Now I’m Rendered Useless, which runs techno conventions through a giddy but decidedly alien beat percolator. The title refers, in part, to Hatfield’s feelings after being dumped by his girlfriend, who got sick of his geekish ways. It also refers to his increasing reliance on virtual music machines that, in a sense, do his work for him. “Building these sequences in Max, I could tell the machine to do everything that I do. It was like building human replicators to copy the way I would make music.”
To keep his sounds from growing predictable, Hatfield introduces randomly fluctuating values into his patches. “I’m never able to get the sounds that I hear in my head,” he explains. “So I just play with randomness and let these things happen naturally. The networks of sound generation I set up are just spewing out all of this chaos, and from that I pull out the pieces that are worthy. It’s like a garden that you’re constantly trimming and manicuring.”
Like many electronic musicians, Hatfield divides his time between building patches and making tunes with those patches. After amassing a library of them, he decided to release one – which he dubbed drool_string-ukulele – to the online community of music phreaks. “At first I was afraid of giving away my style,” he says, noting that, unlike Reaktor fans, a lot of Max-heads are rather cagey about their work. “But when I started to get back all these crazy random tracks, I was very inspired. They were so different than I expected. Now I get off stoking people out with cool shit.”
For Hatfield, building virtual machines is at least as engaging as making tunes. He’s learning C++ and contemplating a potential career as a music software developer. His girlfriend has come back, yet he continues to embrace technology. “Computers have given me an amazing amount of fulfillment and joy,” he says. “If I don’t have a computer, I almost feel like I’m only half of who I am. I think at some point, when technology is ready, I will become the machine that I’m using.”
