An Evening With Carl Stone

      
From SPLENDID MAGAZINE

        

          

            


            
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(interview by Elliott Smith.)

It was labeled "An Evening With Carl Stone." As I had never been to
Audible Visions (Ellen Band's loft in Boston) before, I wasn't sure from
the title whether Carl would be talking about his music or giving a
performance. As the room filled up with people (leaving no space for
equipment, save for the video monitors which were already in place) I
kept wondering what the evening would be like. Eventually the lights
dimmed and the music started. . . but where was Carl Stone? Over the
next hour music poured from the loudspeaker as images from a Korean
karaoke tape were displayed on the video monitors. The short concert was
mesmerizing; the music swelled and sound patterns collided, but during
the whole process the composer was nowhere to be seen (a perplexing
matter which I asked him about in the interview).

Over the years Carl Stone has established himself as an independent
composer, releasing music on a variety of labels and performing all over
the world. He is well known as being one of the most influential
composers to embrace the sampler as a means for composing, and has
received numerous grants and awards for his contributions to the arts.
On the night of the concert I was only able to chat briefly with Carl
but he agreed to do the following interview via e-mail.

For more information about Carl Stone look at his web pages and be sure
to check out the Carl Stone track that has been added to the boombox.

INTERVIEW with CARL STONE

Splendid: So how are things going? 

Carl: Things are going great. I've just come off of about three months
on the road, for concerts and residencies in Europe and in the US. Now
that I'm back behind my own desk and computer I've begun working on a
commission that is due - quite soon! It's for Disklavier, the
computer-controlled acoustic grand piano built by Yamaha, commissioned
for the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Henry Cowell. 

Splendid: Do you consider composing for that medium somewhat of a
departure from your sample-based pieces? 

Carl: Yes and no. I have a separate "mode" of composition that is based
on pitch and rhythmn (as opposed to my sample based works which
manipulate digital recordings) but in both cases usually the starting
point is found or approrpiated musical material. For example, in my
piece "Ruen Pair," which was written for the Paul Dresher Ensemble, I
used a fragment of Mozart as a starting point, using my computer to
manipulate the score in a variety of ways. The computer output was then
converted into a score, further edited and manipulated by me, and then
used for performance. This is basically the approach I am taking in the
new piece I am writing. 

Splendid: What software are you using to do that? 

Carl: Well, MAX 3.0 to do the music manipulations, Vision to do the
editing and the final score is prepared with Mosiac. MAX and Vision are
from Opcode and Mosaic is from Mark of the Unicorn. 

Splendid: Do you know of other composers who are "sampling" notated
music and manipulating it in a similar fashion? 

Carl: Well, of course the historical precedents go back long before the
technical development of what we call "sampling." Bach, Handel, Brahms,
all used prexisting music as starting points for their own. The Brahms
"Variations on a Theme by Handel/Hadyn" would be the most obvious
example. Of course Brahms didn't use MAX 3.0 though perhaps he might
have if Opcode had given him an "accomodation deal." 

Splendid: Speaking of those composers, do you really feel much of a
connection with them, or are you more inspired by more recent composers? 

Carl: Well, I certainly feel a connection to Bach, he's one of my
favorite composers, because for me he was able to combine magic and
logic so well. In this era, I think Conlon Nancarrow does the same. 

Splendid: When you compose, how do you deal with issues of form and
structure? Some of your pieces seem to have a lot more of a balanced
structure than others.

Carl: Well, I sometimes make essentially "pre-compositional" choices
about shape and form, then fill them in with actual materials, but
usually it is after I have played with materials or processes that forms
suggest themselves. At times balance and formal symmetry are goals, but
also there are times when I prefer things to seem a bit out of whack. So
your observation seems to hit the mark. 

Splendid: Your most recent disc on em:t is much more ambient than
preceding projects. Do you find those types of textures easier to
balance out than some of your more aggressive works (such as your
collaboration with Otomo Yoshihide)?

Carl: Not necessarily easier, just different and more in keeping with my
early compositional roots, such as in the mid-seventies when I was
experimenting with slowly evolving drones. 

Splendid: Was this return to more ambient textures influenced by the
fact that the music was going to be released on em:t, which is known for
that type of music? 

Carl: It was more that I had several pieces either recorded or in
process and "Nyala" was the one I felt was best suited for the label.
Even then Iwasn't sure but I passed an early demo along to Chris and
David at t:me and they seemed to like it. 

Splendid: Whose decision was it to divide the piece up into four
sections? 

Carl: It was mutual. And I decided where the section breaks would be,
although that was not always easy; the transitions were often quite
murky. 

Splendid: Do you feel that having a release on a label like em:t is
helping you reach a different audience? 

Carl: Yes, I think so. Definitely. 

Splendid: Is it a bigger audience, or just different? Do you notice any
significant difference between how many discs em:t might sell as opposed
to New Tone or New Albion? 

Carl: I don't have the answer, because I am not really sure how many
copies of my CD are being sold at the moment. And there are other
factors at play, like which company has its distribution more together,
so CD sales alone don't tell you the whole story. 

Splendid: You don't seem to do more than one release per label. Is that
going to be the case with em:t or have you signed to do more projects? 

Carl: I'm not committed to another project with em:t at the moment, but
the possiblity is there, at least in my mind. One thing is that I want
to do more than just a straight-ahead audio CD this year, but rather a
CD-ROM mixing my music and my computer graphics. 

Splendid: Were those your own graphics at the concert? 

Carl: No, that was a Korean karaoke tape that I just rolled, random
collisions of appropriated image and sound. The graphics that I do,
while they start from appropriated images as well, are highly processed
and developed, mostly using QuickTime technology. 

Splendid: I remember the karaoke part, but prior to that you had these
slowly evolving images on the screens. They seemed to be more in line
with the music. 

Carl: They were from the same tape, though. Just freeze frames which I
stepped through very slowly. 

Splendid: In your live performance, I was somewhat disappointed since it
just didn't seem like a performance at all. I mean, you had your music
playing, but I couldn't see you or what you were doing. There really
wasn't anything tactile for me to view in order to connect a performer
to the music. 

Carl: It's true, with live computer music there is often a disconnect
between an action the performer might take (such as moving a fader,
clicking a mouse etc) and the sound that might result. In my music,
sometimes the push of a button sets a process in motion that doesn't
manifest itself as sound for a few seconds or even longer. The concert
you attended in Boston was even more abstracted, because I removed
myself from the performance area and set up on the balcony because space
was extremely limited. I try to use this disconnect sometimes -- I like
it when my small physical gestures can be converted into big musical
ones. One person at that concert commented that for her the music could
have been pre-recorded. From the standpoint of "action" that may be true,
but each performance is different, the timing is different, the
materials can be different, the music is under my control, there is no
sequencing...so it has to be live. 

Splendid: So how are you controlling the  music? Are you just mixing
things as a DJ might, or are you actually changing the sounds beyond
what you could do on a simple mixer? 

Carl: Well, each piece is different, I usually write a new computer
program with a specific set of capabilities for each piece that I do.
The piece you heard at Audible Visions used a set of repeating samples
that I turned off and on, faded in and out, located spatially etc. This
is done with a set of on-screen faders that I control with a mouse (or
trackpad). Other pieces, for example, have small pre-composed rhythmic
cells (or "grooves", one could say), which I trigger from a computer
keyboard. That's pretty standard in itself, but the twist is that I am
constantly stacking, expanding, compressing and just plain changing the
materials that are being "grooved", to hopefully interesting effect.
This is done using some realtime techniques squeezed out of my sampler. 

Splendid: What type of sampler are you using? 

Carl: I sample directly into my Mac 7100. For sample playback in concert
I use a Peavey SP, it only comes in plain vanilla but it is small, cheap
and RAM expandable so it serves my needs nicely. 

Splendid: When you're manipulating your samples in a live setting, is
this a pretty casual thing, or are you sweating through each performance
hoping that you can pull off something really expressive? 

Carl: Usually I'm sweatin', although I do a lot of pre-concert
preparation to try to avoid the larger pitfalls. 

Splendid: Are most of your concerts geared towards the so-called art
crowd? Or do you ever do performances at clubs or events that are more
geared towards youth culture? 

Carl: They're not geared for any crowd, but in terms of how they are
presented, it varies. My "Acid Karaoke" project is usually presented in
clubs. My longer pieces like "Nyala" or "Guelaguetza" usually show up in
art spaces (well that's not entirely true... "Guelaguetza" was premiered
in a crematorium!) 

Splendid: What is "Acid Karaoke" like? 

Carl: It is deconstructed chinese karaoke done with sampling and the
live singing of MIN Xiao-Fen. Let me tell you how it came about.
Xiao-Fen (Incidentally, her family name is MIN, her given name is
Xiao-Fen) is a world-class performer on the Chinese lute ("pipa") who
was living in San Francisco back in 1994. She was introduced to me by
the composer CHEN Yi. Once she was a guest on a radio program that I
produced on KPFA in Berkeley. After the broadcast I gave her a ride to
her apartment and noticed that she had a huge trophy on display in her
living room and a photo of herself in accepting an award in full evening
regalia. Naturally I inquired about these. She opened up a closet
containing a huge stack of karaoke gear, whipped out a microphone and
began singing away. Lo and behold, in addition to being a great
performer of traditional Chinese music she is also an international
karaoke champion. And then I had a stupid idea, which is simply to
rewrite the background karaoke songs using my patented techniques and
have her sing along. That is how "Acid Karaoke" got started. 

Splendid: And it goes over well in clubs? 

Carl: Happily, people seem to enjoy it. Xiao-Fen is great. 

Splendid: In a lot of your music you sample popular sources and you also
use a significant amount of repetition which seems to have some sort of
relation to pop music. Are you consciously attempting to make some sort
of bridge between art and popular music? 

Carl: Although my earliest musical tastes as a young child leaned toward
European classical music and opera, I listened to a lot of rock music in
high school, and it has undoubtedly influenced my music today. I think
that any bridges between "art" music and "pop" music were built quite a
while ago, the classic minimalist pieces of Glass & Reich in the '70's
come to mind by virtue of their use of repetition, volume, and their
instrument sound world. I sometimes use pop music sources as much for
their iconographic value, and also for ironic purposes. 

Splendid: Speaking of the minimalists, how much of a connection do you
feel your work has with theirs? 

Carl: Well not all that much these days but then after all I think
almost all of the so-called minimalists (i.e. Reich, Riley, Glass) have
evolved beyond their classic styles. My piece "Shing Kee" is a
minimalist work in the tradition of Reich's "Its Gonna Rain" or Lucier's
"I am Sitting In A Room" because it uses a single formal procedure to
generate the entire piece. 

Splendid: Yeah, but even some of your more recent pieces seem to settle
into a fairly repetitive patterns that evolve slowly over time. So even
if they're not classic minimalism, wouldn't you say that the techniques
from that movement have been influential on your output as a composer? 

Carl: Oh absolutely, no question about it. As have things like gagaku,
which, while stylistically very different, also uses slowly evolving
repetition, 

Splendid: What is gagaku? 

Carl: Gagaku is the beautiful, unearthly music of the ancient imperial
court of Japan. 

Splendid: How much of an influence does gagaku have on your own music?
Does it influence the structure of what you do, or are there other ways
in which it might be an influence? 

Carl: It's a subliminal influence; perhaps the most overt manifestation
would be, thinking back, in my piece "Woo Lae Oak," composed in 1981.