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Is It Art?
What is this stuff, Doc? Why do you do it this way? Why didn’t you do it this other way? …. Are you out of your ever-lovin’ mind?
I tried to avoid those questions as long as I could. It may seem incongruous for me to say this about electronic instruments, but I very consciously strive to avoid overthinking these things. (“You can say THAT again!” – snorks any MSEE engineer reading this!) (I wrote you folks a special letter of apology)
I think of myself as a musician and I often play with my eyes closed…even when playing these contraptions(!). I liken my motivation for making music to the motivation a goose has for honking as it flies. No goose has ever discussed its motivations directly with me, but I frankly think that strengthens my assumption!
I make these devices first and foremost to make music. That is their purpose. They are instruments; the tools of music. I have done many live performances with all of them. I am confident saying I am a musician.
But you will find very little of that music on this site. Here’s why. My music does not fit in web-friendly sound bites. Like me, it tends to be long-winded and improvised. My favored medium is live improvised performance and not recording. Furthermore these instruments do not reveal much about their myriad characters in the form of a 15-second ‘demo’. Most of what is interesting about them is how their voices evolve over time – lots of time. And that is not easy to reproduce. If all you know of Beethoven is: G G G, Eb … then respectfully I submit that you might recognize Beethoven, but you don’t know no Beethoven. The video page is my best attempt to present recordings of the instruments. But what this website does present well is a good LOOK at these instruments. And that’s why I neglected this site for too long. I did not consider that the visual aspect of these instruments was of any importance or interest.
I am blessed to number some monumentally gifted visual artists among my friends. Kevin Harris , Van McElwee , Perry Emge, Anna Minx & Bryan DeMatteis, to name just a few. Over the years, all of the talented and deeply respected aforementioned parties have referred to my instruments as ‘art’, sculpture, etc. My reaction was: Phooey! I’m scavenging cheap tin candy boxes and cast-off electronics, for no-cost enclosures to put eccentric circuits in. Then one night at Guido’s restaurant, after a gig, my sensei, Rich O’Donnell pointed out the number of discarded whiskey bottles in the peerless creations of one of my heroes, Harry Partch and it dawned on me that my habitual dismissal of the visual aspects of my work was:
– perilously narrow-minded
-a bit arrogant, considering the assessments voiced by visual artists I deeply respect
-outright disingenuous; just look at the second electronium I built, the Viaggio. Sheesh! the prosecution rests.
I can be a pretty tiresome ideologue and I have a burr under my saddle about ‘synth-porn’ on the internet; especially pictures of commercial products with no substantive explanatory material. So I needed some persuasion to stalk the borders of that vapid morass. But if the sustained encouragement of the great visual artists named above was not persuasisve then the folly is my own.
A bit about my approach to design. I’m going to try to do this in three terms:
Brutally Utilitarian Sci-Fi.
The Sci-Fi is obvious. My childhood was the 1960’s. NASA was downright romantic! And movie sets were dripping with clear acrylic and blinking lights. Barbarella!
The brutal utilitarianism merits a bit more explanation. I’m not selling anything. Some of my favorite anecdotes are about the attempts of some people to become customers(!) that ranged from inexplicably aggressive to downright side-splitting hilarious. My instruments are not supportable and it is unethical to sell them. They are also not the tiniest bit conventionally comprehensible. Here’s the best analogy I can think of:
As a boy growing up in the 1960’s I was immersed in car culture. In the 5th grade, like most of the boys I put an STP sticker on my schoolbook-satchel. I even knew what STP was…. back then(!). The neighborhood Robin-Hoods, glamorous outlaws, were teenage boys, drag-racing and dodging cops in the wee hours of summer nights. I was thrilled when one of these adolescent desperados invited me to sit in the driver seat of his custom hot-rodded Olds 4-4-2, but when I actually sat down, I was disappointed.
My dad drove a Delta-88 and the front seat was nearly the same. It was so stolidly FAMILIAR! I was expecting the hot rod to have a cockpit like a Phantom Jet. (I was a polite youth and faked my drooling gratitude nonetheless)
But my next-door neighbor was a no-nonsense 60’s gearhead. You could eat off the floor of his 1-1/2 story garage and his tool racks looked like they were tended by surgical nurses. He built and raced a top-fuel dragster on the regional circuit.
“Surely” I thought, “the inside of that thing HAS to look like the cockpit of the X-15”. Then one Friday after school he was adjusting some cable and saw me watching him through the fence.
“Hey Mike”, he yelled, “can you come over here and hold this stick all the way back for me?”
I’m sure he got a kick out of how I ignored the gate and scaled that fence in 2 seconds flat. He gave me a boost and plopped me inside the cockpit.
What I saw DID impress me but not for the reasons I expected. This is what it looked like:
There was no floor. I could see the asphalt of his driveway under my feet, like a Flintstones car for gosh-sake! But that was a crucial epiphany for me . This neighbor was a grown man, not some posing high-schooler and I knew that this machine I was sitting-in had clocked at 300 mph at a local track. This was real-deal racing and there was NOTHING in that seat that looked anything like the front seat of my dad’s Delta-88. THAT made an impression. Every single object in reach was home-made and not one of those objects was there unless it was absolutely necessary, including a FLOOR. It was the first time I saw genuine DIY up-close and something clicked. I got it. This machine would be 1/4 mile down the road by the time our neighborhood Andretti could push the gas pedal all the way down in an Olds 4-4-2. The message I got was: If you’re serious, THIS is what it looks like.
That design ethic permeates my instruments. They are not user friendly. They are not street-legal. They are designed to put only what I need to perform my art right where I need it, when it’s needed.
You don’t BUY a dragster, you BUILD it.
Harangues, Disclaimers, and The Real Scoop