WKDTS60

- World-Class Technology, Frog Hollow (San Jose, CA 1983).

- The Fundamentals of Direct Mail, Frog Hollow (San Jose, CA 1985).

- The Remembrance of a Technological Past, Frog Hollow (San Jose, CA 1987).

- Guided Missile Favorites, Frog Hollow (San Jose, CA 1988).

- In Recognition of the Relevance, unreleased (San Jose, CA)

Artwork by Lieven Fieremans


NOTES:

World-Class Technology, Frog Hollow (San Jose, CA 1983).
San Jose Holiday 9' 45"
Broken Crystals 11' 51"
You Can Change It All You Want 6' 46"
Painted Rocks 12' 3"
Reaganomics 4' 34"
Zolmack the Zygon. 4' 5"


San Jose Holiday
This is the story of how Garden City was transformed into Silicon Valley.
San Jose, in Santa Clara County, during the early 1980s was still suffering from an identity crisis. Up until the 1960s or so, Santa Clara County in general, was more or less known as The Valley of Heart's Delight, because of its vast fruit orchards. However, with the development of various electronic technologies influenced by Stanford University in Palo Alto which spun off into the various semiconductor industries which greatly invigorate the nascent microprocessor/software explosion as well, the valley's agricultural areas began to be gobbled up by the geometric expansion of industrial parks to house what was becoming to be known as The Silicon Valley. San Jose, as the county seat of Santa Clara County, was somewhat reticent to exchange its old appellation at first with the somewhat dubious technology ("Is it really that significant?"), and it took some time before it declared itself The Heart of Silicon Valley. During the period of this transition, the city's powers-that-be were still promoting the fruit-growing aspects of the area. During a rare visit to California in the 1980s, the mayor of San Jose invited the Queen of England to visit the local sewage treatment plant in order for her to see a prime example of what makes San Jose a leader in World-Class Technology. Why would an industrial park devoted to creating a new technology that would change the world be of interest to anyone? Needless to say, she had a busy schedule in California and could not visit the treatment plant.
Around the same period of time, however, San Jose was blessed by another visitor, Ceratitis capitata, known by its common name locally as the Mediterranean Fruit Fly. The county leaders were still not sure that this new computer thing would really catch on or that there would be any money in it, so they had to take whatever measures necessary to save the fruit crops against this visiting pest. They literally went to war with the flies -- got out their big guns, and enlisted the aid of a large number of helicopters from somewhere to visit everyone in San Jose and several other areas in the county late at night. They would line them up at one end of the valley and proceed to sweep the whole place while dumping truckloads of bug spray on every neighborhood near an orchard.
The sprayed insecticide was strong enough to take the paint off of a car. There were several lawsuits filed against the city as a result. It also caused a number of health problems. Then a helicopter pilot was killed when he crashed and burned on someone's front lawn just barely missing a family home. The whole episode was a public relations nightmare and the Mediterranean Fruit Fly, though substantially reduced, continued to be a much-monitored nuisance. Ultimately, the powers that be got rid of this pesky visitor by tearing up the rest of the fruit orchards in the valley and replacing them with tastefully modern industrial parks, multiple-story condominiums, and lots of concrete and asphalt.
The texts for San Jose Holiday were extracted and recomposed from some informational brochures about the fruit fly infestation. They were read by Andrea Muller, Ellen Zweig, and Alice Prussian. Instrumentation included a Buchla series 200 synthesizer, Boda vocoder, and a homemade digital sampler with digitally controlled filters and amplifiers which I had constructed, and of course extensive use of tape manipulation. The processed and unprocessed environmental tapes in this piece included recordings made of tourists waiting at a bus stop, the sounds inside the Victoria Train Station in London, and the roar of about twenty helicopters passing over my apartment down on First Street near the center of San Jose one morning at around 3 am. When you can not sleep, record!

Broken Crystals
This narrative text-sound piece is something of a variation upon the theme of the last piece and is narrated by this typical Silicon Valley worker who works for an integrated circuit foundry that grows garnet crystals for the manufacturing of bubble memory. Bubble memory was a form of non-volatile memory that became commercially viable in the 1970s as a possible replacement for magnetic hard disk drives, which were mechanical (with moving parts that would break down), sensitive to excessive vibration, expensive, and took up a lot of space. Bubble memory was "slower" than static semiconductor memory (which lost its contents when the power was turned off), but was useful in niche applications where portability as well as excessive vibration were an issue. However, as hard drives became smaller, less expensive, and sturdier as well as the development of much faster and denser, non-volatile "Flash" drives, bubble memory became as extinct as the fruit orchards of San Jose.
However, I have a contrary story in confusion to all of that. This is one of my earliest extended narration pieces to take the form of a personal recollection. It is more of a text-sound composition rather than purely a sound poem in my understanding of the terms. Much of my previous work with spoken texts, involved their syntax being fragmented or manually processed (various "cut-up" techniques) with random juxtapositions providing springboards from which more texts would be created in an attempt to fill the contextual gaps. I soon came to realize that in an actual narrative structure, one could say almost any non-contextual, illogical, or absurd thing, and as long as the speaking rhythms remained true, it would be perceived as having some kind of validity. In a personal recollection, one flits back and forth between private and public memories, which can liquify the understanding of the text, and often the truth in such a narration lies only in the sincerity of the delivery. Rather than just have a single narrative voice "recite" a text, I also conceived of providing a "noise floor" as if the spoken text had to be "excavated" to be perceived as if it were a story being told in a noisy room. This became the model of many of my performance pieces in which I would do a "live reading" of the narrative using a background tape of manipulated sounds more or less relevant to the texture of the piece, as well as process my speaking voice simultaneously with a more or less portable, home-brew, microprocessor-controlled, vocal processing device. This allowed me immediacy in a live, real-time performance which would be lacking if I just played studio-constructed tape pieces through a set of speakers.

You Can Change It All You Want
My first home computer was a Radio Shack TRS-80, which was lovingly called a Trash-80 back then because of its "cheap" construction and capabilities. I however "hacked" it and added an analog-to-digital converter as well as a couple of digital-to-analog converters to get sound into and out of the thing. I also wrote programs that would fragment a spoken voice (or other sounds) and mix the order of the fragments much like I was doing mechanical with written texts and analog tape splicing. The fragments could also be filtered and placed in specific places within a stereo field. This "instrument" had a sound quality that reminded one of the sounds made by attempting to saw through a barrel of ball bearing with a hack saw. The device was portable enough that it could be taken to performances in the Bay Area and overseas with some effort. The realization of the instrument went through various iterations and "improvements" but largely still sounded very "low tech" and "raw." I ended up calling it the Audio Meat Grinder.
With my TRS-80, there was an instruction tape on how to use the early word processing application, Scripsit (which was also on an audio cassette in a digital format which one had to load via a cassette deck — which was very slow and not that reliable). This sound poem used the Scripsit instruction tape as the source material and I made use of laying down a few tracks on a tape recorder to allow for a denser-sounding piece.

Painted Rocks
On a long ride on a Greyhound Bus home from Yosemite National Park, I had the good fortune to sit by someone who had worked as a sort of "grip" and set crew worker on the classic, 1974 Jack Web TV series, Sierra, which followed the adventures of a group of crime-fighting forest rangers in a fictional US National Park. The exterior scenes were actually filmed in Yosemite. The series lasted for eleven episodes. This previous employee of Jack Web Productions told me a long and convoluted story about how he used to have to paint the rocks in the area that they were filming in to match (in terms of color, shading, texture, etc.) the rocks which they had previously filmed in. I wish I had recorded him speaking at that time to capture his monologue. I tried to write it down later but I could not remember all the details of the narrative thread. However, I used the text which I wrote as a template to extract random phonemes that I then manually collected and made a recording of me speaking from the list. I also did a reading of a completed text and processes it through a simple audio gate using a loop of tape with various lengths of blank leader spliced into sections of magnetic tape. I ran my reading several times through this loop and recorded the results on multiple tracks that were mixed down to a stereo field. In this way, I built up a fragmented narrative of bits of words and phrases that never reveal a perceived storyline. I also included a recording (which was also processed) of a group and teenagers walking near the trailer I was staying at when I was in Yosemite. It had snowed earlier and melted and the sounds of their voices and the sounds of their galoshes scraping in the slush echoed off the granite rock walls of the valley. The various layers of sounds were then mixed to form a synthetic acoustical landscape with coincidental similarities to some natural soundscape.

Reaganomics
The source material for this digital cut-up piece was a speech given by the then Governor of the State of California. The topic was the implementation of 19th-century economic theory about free market capitalism which then became known as neoliberalism in the 20th century. It is a political and economic philosophy that has had a lasting effect on conservative scholars, politicians, and various policymakers. Chile under Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in 1980 was one the first countries to implement this economic philosophy though it soon became popular throughout the world.

Zolmack the Zygon
This extended narrative text was a sound piece inspired by my experience of living in an old apartment building in downtown San Jose for about ten years. The rents kept getting higher and the upkeep of the building kept deteriorating. The ownership of the property kept changing hands and the subsequent owners would hire an increasingly unskilled variety of surly property managers to take care of the place. The tenants of the apartment building would often have to call the police to report the disturbances caused by noisy and unruly landlords/managers rather than the other way around. The whole experience drove me to purchase a house in an outlying neighborhood away from the downtown area. This was back when people who worked in San Jose could make enough money to live a few miles outside of the city, rather than having to commute many more miles as housing prices skyrocketed in a few years.

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The Fundamentals of Direct Mail, Frog Hollow (San Jose, CA 1985).
A Description of France 14' 42"
Starting With Maya 5' 20"
Uh? 6' 3"
Arroba 11' 44"
The Murkier News 9' 30"
Modem 7' 36"


The Fundamentals of Direct Mail:
This definitive work covers a wide range of key text sound mailing topics, including how to design a more functional "grocery" list, the correct way to lick a word but not swallow the vowel, coming up with yet another definition of text sound for people who still do not understand what sound poetry is, how to talk about the propagation of verbal and non-verbal sounds in twenty-five words or less, how to adjust for seasonal responses of variations, seeking out that hinge between recognition and no sense at all, looking forward to customer analysis and satisfaction while ignoring it, seeking compulsive distractions, explaining meta-language vocables hidden within spoken words, how to defy inertia, building primitive home-brew feral electro-acoustic devices, partaking in the excavation of words buried within noise, working on more formal in-house researches, understanding the implicate order of everything or not, watching how one technology can replace another (with the painful exchange of one set of problems with another), how to pronounce K'uk'ulkan with authenticity, finding where a thing has a name which no one remembers, rejecting the ideal of wholeness for the practicality of incompleteness, celebrating the chatter and clutter inside of your own head, the rewriting of a narrative as a kind of translation into pure sound, cramming as much sound into a space as possible, what is this verse without words business actually, describing words as a sound, composing notes as significant as the thing it points to, paying attention to industrial standards, finding when a sound cannot be described as either music or language, getting lost in a world of words but moving towards a haze of random meanings, how to speak for fifteen minutes without saying a thing, determine the quality of strawberries, finding the lie in the "truth", getting to know sentient robots with a few loose screws, how not to leave humor only up to the professionals, the difference between speaking from a written text and speaking from memory, how to name your cat, constructing a soundscape in the backyard as a weekend project for the kids, the lost art of how to address an envelope properly, the difference between a rook and a crow, but nothing about mailing live frogs or toads.


A Description of France
This is a personal recollection of a Paris which I never knew. It is an anecdotal remembrance of Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier with more than a nod to Raymond Roussel as filtered through the radio of Jean Cocteau's taxi. This is of course, the Fourier of the mathematical memoir, On the Propagation of Heat in Solid Bodies, a somewhat controversial view at that time in which the author described the diffusion of heat by a partial differential equation which could be solved using an infinite series of trigonometric functions. The equations for Fourier Analysis as it has since become known, also turned out to be very useful in the analysis and re-synthesis of sound (which is very much like slow heat), and as such could be described as an infinite series of sine waves of different amplitudes, frequency and phase.
Joseph Fourier was also the scientific advisor for Napoleon during the French invasion of Egypt in 1798. Besides his papers on mathematics, Fourier spent several years writing Description of Egypt in 25 volumes and which Napoleon then extensively rewrote, essentially changing history before it was allowed to be published. With its second edition, however, Napoleon himself had become written out of the history of this period, and the story was retold minus his appearance. The Rosetta Stone was found by Napoleon's troops during their invasion. The black granite slab inscribed with identical texts in demotic, Greek, and hieroglyphics provided Jean François Champollion, a French linguist, and proto-Egyptologist, with the key to the decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. This he finally solved in 1821.
This somewhat confessional narration here describes a small, insignificant, and imaginary dinner party celebrating the return of the French scientific delegation from Egypt in 1801. Fourier was the guest of honor, and all his science buddies were there as well as the chief archaeologist for the expedition, Jean Jacques Champollion-Figeac, who was the elder brother of Jean François. The younger Champollion was only 11 at the time but quite precocious and considered by many of his fellow Frenchmen, even at such a young age, to be a genuine genius.

Starting With Maya
I had constructed a simple text-to-speech device that allowed me to type in texts which the synthesis program tried to say in English. The text for this piece is an excerpt from a transliterated Mayan document. The text-to-speech synthesizer would then pronounce nonsense words using English phonemes. I then rewrote what was being heard several times and gradually replaced the nonsense sounds with what they reminded me of with real words and phrases and then ran each sonic transliteration through another reading by the synthesizer. I made two variations of the texts and the two resulting synthesized voices were superimposed upon one another in a sort of question-and-answer dialogue of nonsense.

Uh?
This sound poem is composed of a single sound sample of a short utterance that was manipulated in a variety of ways by the homemade sound sampler which I had been constructing in various forms. My attempt here was to fragment the sample and reconnect the fragments in such a way that they could be recognized as a human voice (even though it could not be understood as recognizable phonemes or words) and gradually move such resemblance more towards non-human kinds of sounds — not quite like music but not like spoken vocables either.

Arroba
Having to leave my apartment of ten years which was off of First Street in downtown old San Jose, and then out into one of the many gerrymandered, outlying suburban neighborhoods which the construct that is now what present-day City of San Jose is known for, was a somewhat jarring experience for me. After the difficult experience of working with a realtor examining several different areas in the immediate San Jose area, our realtor, George, found us this place in the Cambrian area of San Jose on Arroba Way in which I have lived since. This piece is dedicated to George who tragically killed himself on the night before we signed to buy this house. With this shock and the additional shock of being a "city dweller" for so long but yet, escaping the ever-spiraling rent and then being able to live in a "real home" with the possibility of "owning" it someday (instead of endlessly throwing my hard-earned cash down a "rat hole" to nowhere), was both a joyful yet very sad experience for me. All of a sudden I had the responsibilities as well as the confusion of being a first-time homeowner. I had a two-bedroom, one-bathroom, house built in 1953 in a somewhat quiet yet bland suburban neighborhood (which looked like everywhere else) complete with a front yard with a lawn (which the long California drought eventually killed), a postage stamp-sized backyard in which often floods when it rarely does rain, an abandoned, very vocal and angry, feral Siamese-mix, beat-up, old tom cat (that lovingly became known as "Meathook" after he slashed me several times with his lethal claws) who believed he owned the place, and a serious debt up to my neck to pay off for 35 years or so. The text to this piece was a list of fragments of the various documents and impressions I had gone through during this process of giving up my previous life of being a "professional student" after I left my parents' home several years before, and becoming an "adult" with adult bills and worries trying to survive in late free market capitalism and a heated technological environment which became known all over the world as Silicon Valley (rather than just another urban textbook example of how not to plan a city).

The Murkier News
As a text sound word problem, I began to experiment with more extended narrative forms which could exist only as an acoustical expression off the page. I came upon the notion that the construction of third-person news articles as well as various first-person opinions, essays, product endorsements, etcetera one finds in an ordinary, daily, mass-media newspaper of our times could provide some very interesting structural models to attach two contradictory points of view upon. Both internal and external points of view could be held in static tension to one another. Vocalizing such a reading of stories from a newspaper (from an up-and-coming high technology area for this piece for instance) could be expanded sonically to include the shadow of distortion that follows one's speech as it is entered into the various memory agents within the speaker's mind, along with his own internal chatter near the threshold of perception plus the external ambient sounds that are also being internalized simultaneously within the mind as he is speaking aloud. Such a narration with its built-in internal acoustical substrate of contradictions could then be turned inside out and the speaker (along with what is going on in his mind at that instance) could be projected to fit within the confines of a three-dimensional acoustical stereo space. With the equipment which I had been building, the so-called Audio Meat Grinder, I could do something just like that. Basically, I could cut up any sound from the smallest fragment or up to some seconds worth and stick the pieces back together by chance in more or less real-time as well as filter, propagate, and layer the results by tape manipulations. By the use of both first-person and third-person sounds within one's mind, the need to focus on the narrative to understand what is being said would have to be accentuated. In an act of heighten perception, one would have to pay attention to the news better. Could digital technology improve the quality of newspapers in the future as a result?

Modem
Back in the day when the Internet just went AWOL from its boot camp beginnings as the ARPANET project for the US Department of Defense in the 1970s, Home Computing was pretty much a Wild West Show with the rapid spread of interconnectivity, and before the later development in 1993 of the World Wide Web along higher connection speeds (along with more powerful electronics) made commercialization a whole lot easier (along with computer viruses, Trojans, assorted malware, and scams) which also made the Internet more universal, pedestrian, but no longer all that special. In this earlier era, "home brew" clubs and specialized hobbyists stores popped up in areas where the technology was being developed, and which supported the off-duty professional engineers, and amateur high-school and college student enthusiasts who were "hot-rodding" what primitive, affordable systems that were available at the time to them, or else constructing their systems from "scratch", basic components, and writing software and applications which went way beyond email, games, address books, financial spreadsheets, word processors, recipe databases, and so forth, to explore the often idealized possibilities that the new technology suggested to have opened up to the world as a whole. It was a heady time full of imagination, hope, and wild enthusiasm. Much was the promise, myth, and hype that eventually however, slowly extinguished the need for Direct Mail and relegated its popularity to the slow backwaters of technology's past.

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The Remembrance of a Technological Past, Frog Hollow (San Jose, CA 1987).
Where I Am From 7' 57"
The South Bay Homebrew Inventors Club 7' 55"
Muffie 6' 48"
Toad Farming for Profit 3' 47"
Silicon Valley Ghost Town 5' 26"
The Great Silicon Valley Toad Plague 5' 52"
Gene Cat Toad 7' 23"
Silicon Valley Horror Story 9' 38"
Silicon Valley Love Story 6' 17"
The End of San Jose 8' 33"


This set of pieces is an imaginary, electro-acoustic, oral history. It is a series that make up an obsessive, often contradictory, conceptual, unreal, and speculative history of living and working in San Jose, California, my hometown, as seen from some vague, alternate, twisted future. The narratives often share a common inventory of descriptive items and phrasings however, may also sketch completely different kinds of environments. The work is a poetic sense of a future in which history has gone off its rails. The future could be next week or it could be a thousand years from now. It is at whatever point that history can become mythic, reflected upon itself, alogical, or just plain stupid. It is the point where not only social conventions could change, but also climatological, biological, and geological transformations would occur.
This San Jose is a city that eats its past, and as such it is a "gold standard" by which other high-technology urban areas can measure themselves. You can go into a section of town that you once remember as an orchard a few years before, and it is now some kind of fast food restaurant, a month later you drive by and it is a duck and chicken feed store. Then it is a video cassette store, which is replaced by an electronics component store, and later a bowling supply store, a comic book store, and a hair and nail salon, which burns down and is replaced by a shopping mini-mall, which for whatever reason goes broke after the first month it is open, and they tear the whole thing down in a day and replace it with three condominiums and a jogging smart sneaker store… There is a constant sense of loss and dread with no apparent sense of redemption within the compulsive acts of distraction. "Where should we eat lunch?" could be the city's motto.
Everything is more or less already in the future in San Jose because it is a place where time and space collapse upon themselves. There is no identity or attachment to place or culture, only this constant wave after wave of people constantly immigrating into the valley and then slowly dispersing outside of it again. They come from cultures elsewhere or nearby, fruit growers, heavy tool makers, airplane and car builders, designers, chemists, lithographers, weapons researchers, computer hardware slingers, software hackers, kitchen sink bioengineers, and so on. They are all driven by the continuous replacement of one technology in the valley by another at an ever-increasing rapidity. Along with a transformation of each existence in which significant energy is expended and wasted in the creation of a new point of view yet nothing ever really changes.
The social class strata here varies from the ultra nouveau riche to the "left-behinds": those with few skills that did not "make the cut" after decades of technological advancements — the downtrodden homeless living in what is left of their vehicles which they bought in their "glory years" of a go-no-where job which is now extinct. Or else they are out on the streets, under bridges and overpasses, scurrying about their tiny lives as if they were cockroaches and criminalized and disdained as such by the "normal people" who have "made it" and have a home for the moment. Living from hand to mouth on whatever non-living wage, un-skilled job that they would be very lucky to find or on the spare change they can beg off of strangers, as well as steal, as they go dumpster diving for that occasional half-eaten, Happy Toad Burger meal that they can scrounge on a "good day".
This then is ten text-sound compositions about this place. By taking certain aspects of either the universal or specific qualities of San Jose and changing their influence and dimensions through parody, small, cartoon-like, logically defective, electro-acoustic miniatures of what San Jose is about are represented here. Our peculiar personalities and perceptions of ourselves living here are constructed internally as well in a similar fashion. There are a lot of known and unknowns involved, and we each fool ourselves into what we perceive somewhat differently, but we all end up following the same general narratives and processes.
Within these short, self-contained parodies of San Jose, one can cross-cross in an essentially hyperbolic fashion, a whole array of meanings erasing non-meanings; the semantic use of ambient sounds versus purely expressive sounds; the use of pedestrian, common referential language versus private and specialized ones; a dynamic sense of logic, time and space versus a static, alogical space with absurd spatial or temporal distortions; references to well-known "found" sources such as literary works, pop songs, commercials, and so on in contrast to lesser-known references such as obscure newspaper narratives, the stories that people tell us, or the things which have happened to ourselves or our acquaintances.
By sharing certain acoustical images and phrases between the different miniatures, all the narratives can be linked together like beads on a necklace, however still retaining a certain autonomy as well as just as often being the opposites of one another. There is also a specific protagonist for each of these narratives who presents their situation in the narrative in a self-confessionary style. The bearer of the narrative voice is often only vaguely aware of the debilitating and alienating environment of which they are a part. The transformation or exchange of situations that occurred during the development of the narrative tends to be a less promising situation: it is often just the exchange of one bad situation with another bad situation with the protagonist not understanding how bad it actually is. He is just another hapless fool who manages to navigate through the noise and travails of contemporary inter-urban, technological life without falling into a self-serving, cynical rant or the black hole of despair and pathological depression. "How to make it real compared to what!"
The electronics which I used for these pieces were of a self-designed and self-constructed nature for the most part with the occasional use of commercially available at the time, "common" audio equipment as well. The electronics provide an electro-acoustic dimension to the voice, much like some theatrical techniques can extend the rhetorical qualities and varieties of speech. Distorting speech electro-acoustically can accentuate the gestural aspects of speech and place them in contrast by running counter to what is being said. Similarly, in manipulating recordings of ambient sounds, one can reduce the referential aspects of the origins of these sounds to the point where one becomes more aware of the acoustical concrete nature of a sound, as well as its intrinsic complexity. The loss of reference in a sound is echoed by the loss of reference in the contexts of the spoken words within the narrative. The electronics also provide a means to both blend and underscore the voice layered on top of the ancillary sonic "ground floor" of the sonic substrate. These are works of perception: the difficulty to understand the spoken words or recognizing the ambient sounds blended by the similar morphological underpinnings focuses the perception upon what is being communicated.

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Guided Missile Favorites, Frog Hollow (San Jose, CA 1988).
Teaching the Cat to Play the Guitar 7' 44"
San Jose Sunrise 3' 12"
San Jose Hot Spell 10' 46"
Let's Go Down To The New Mall 3' 11"
Ants 5' 8"
Land of a Thousand Dentists 6' 37"
Rude Awakenings 8' 40"
Desperate 7' 18"
Someone's At The Goddamned Door Again 3' 49"


The Story of the Guided Missile Project:
The sounds here were all generated with the assistance of a small, hand-built, digital signal processing system that came to be known to us as the Guided Missile Project. The name comes from a friend of ours and alludes to the speculation that the central "chip" in this project could be used in the guidance systems of missiles, though in reality, it is more likely to have been designed in the "active" suspension systems for automobiles, or in high-speed modems, blood analyzing instruments, and particle counters.
The GMP (as it is known among friends) was designed over a three or four-year period by Daniel Kelley, who would often hang out at my home, while I fed him a diet of moldy cheese quesadillas, stale blue corn chips, soggy sushi, and flat apple and black current soda. The device used for these pieces represented the third iteration of something which we have been kicking for about eight years previously in preparation: a system that we could afford on our meager budgets which would allow one to implement a variety of digital signal processing algorithms. The device used here is based around the Texas Instruments TMS32010: a first-generation 16-bit signal processing integrated circuit and as such had several severe limitations when put to this particular use, however, the part was relatively inexpensive and easy to obtain, and we ended up pleasantly surprised by its performance. Later versions of the GMP made use of the Motorola DSP56000 24-bit digital processor.
Dan was responsible for the complete hardware and software design for the project as well as building the first working prototype. My main input was limited to acquiring a few of the hard-to-find parts, as well as providing a sounding board and being a "cheerleader" and a "beta" tester for a lot of Dan's ideas. I built a second device for myself from Dan's schematics (as well as to prove that it could easily be duplicated) as well as cleaning up some of the documentation in the process. Not being as involved in the time-consuming design work, also allowed me the freedom to play and explore the possibilities and limits of the instrument. I could make use of Dan's software-designed "instruments" and explore their potential for various pieces. This present collection of works is, as the result of such experimentation: a set of examples making use of the various synthesis techniques which Dan was able to implement on the device at that time.
For those who are interested, the hardware for the GMP that was used for the pieces here consisted of three circuit boards on an STD bus: the TMS32010 signal processor IC and program memory board, a 64K word delay memory board, and two 16-bit DACs on the third board. The STD bus was interfaced to the host computer via an STD to SCSI interface board made by Ampro Computers in Mountain View. The host computer which included floppy disk and hard drive interfaces was a compact, single-board, Z-80 CP/M computer also made by Ampro. All the software was written in Z-80 assembly code or in an implementation of Perry's and Laxan's public domain F83, FORTH language. This model of our GMP was quite portable (though being wire-wrapped this version was somewhat fragile and accident-prone) and could be used in performance with just a floppy disk drive.
The synthesis techniques used to produce the pieces here are more or less identified in the listing of the pieces. Such basic computer music implementations as AM, FM, wave shaping, Karplus-Strong, and digital filtering are demonstrated. The "sampler" pieces were made by transferring via MIDI, samples made on a rudimentary AKAI S612 digital sampler, formatted (converted to Q15 format) for transfer to the GMP, and placed into its wavetables. This allowed for a variety of manipulatory and processing explorations as well as using the GMPs 16-bit DACs for audio output (later versions of the GMP also included an ADC which allowed for real-time sampling and manipulations of audio inputs). There has been some "cheating" in creating these pieces with the use of an 8-track tape recorder to lay down layers of the output from a single GMP. A Yamaha SPX-90, "Digital Effects Processor," was also occasionally used to add reverberation as well.

Teaching the Cat to Play the Guitar
Karplus-Strong plucked string synthesis.

San Jose Sunrise
Sampling instruments using toy sounds generated by John Hudak as a source.

San Jose Hot Spell
A two-voice wave-shaping instrument with AM (4 recorded tracks).

Let's Go Down To The New Mall
An eight-voice sampling instrument with AM and a Smith-Angell Resonator.

Ants
Karplus-Strong plucked string synthesis with digital panning.

Land of a Thousand Dentists
A four-voice FM-controlled sampling instrument.

Rude Awakenings
FM, wave shaping, and Karplus-Strong with "stretch" extensions.

Desperate
An eight-voice sampling instrument and FM.

Someone's At The Goddamned Door Again
FM, noise impulses through a digital comb filter, and Karplus-Strong.

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In Recognition of the Relevance, unreleased (San Jose, CA)
Edwin's School For Technicians 13' 37" 1989
Bakersfield 9' 13" 1989
Alternate Routes 25' 8" 1993
Meetings 15' 9" 1999
The Death of History 16' 6" 2002


Edwin's School For Technicians 13' 37" 1989
Back when I used to get off of work after a long day of being a technician, I would walk home, and often fall asleep in front of an old TV set. Then often enough I would also then wake up in the middle of the night, with the playing of some long and strange commercial for technical, mail-order correspondence courses promising to teach one to be a technician with a variety of skills: which would lead one to a better career and a much more financially rewarding life as they claimed. I would then fall asleep again and later I would wake up during another version of the same training school infomercial or at some other point in the repeated commercial. I would do this a few times before I would finally go to bed so that I could get up in the morning to go back to work being a technician. The experience was often confusing since I was generally "half asleep" and only partially conscious during the commercial presentation and it made little sense to me. I was already a technician and it made me wonder why I would want to be another kind of technician. But it also made me wonder the next day, when I was more awake, about how many people who hated their jobs would actually buy into these "fly-by-night" kinds of training programs in the so-called "high-tech" fields, and would actually believe that in a few short months they would be able to radically change their lives and go out and get a "real" job." A "job of their dreams!" — this was what these commercials were peddling. Certainly, I reasoned, there must be enough underpaid, overworked, and unhappy people in the area, who could not sleep at night because they could barely make ends meet, who would then see these ads and be attracted to try such a service. Such a need by a sizable segment of the population must be enough then to support such companies I further reasoned. These companies would also be able to afford to hire a significant staff to write, design, realize, direct, and act in these long infomercials as well as pay the local TV station for the use of their video production studio, gear, and technical assistance along with the late-night broadcast fees which were probably a significant charge to present such commercials. What a "sweet deal" I concluded and which also therefore, inspired this text sound piece which includes various signal processing, "shop" sounds, shortwave radio broadcasts, and our shop telephone answering machine message, as it was declaimed by my fellow technician, Eric Gatzert, plus my additional sales-pitches for my fantastic set, of home-study, mail-order courses that can turn anyone into a highly paid, and skilled technician.

Bakersfield 9' 13" 1989
This piece is the tape portion introduction of a much longer, real-time, electro-acoustic, outdoor performance which occurred in an athletic field. I happened to get invited to be an artist-in-residence at the California State University of Bakersfield for a week. Following the topic of post-industrialism, I worked with a group of students during my time there for the most part of the week on a scavenger hunt collecting material that we could pile up and use as a temporary "sound sculpture" in a performance at the end of the week. This material included an old TV, a broken microwave oven, some very moldy and stained upholstered sofas and chairs, broken bicycles, a row boat, the chassis of an old car, a kitchen range, a large trash dumper, a kitchen sink, and assorted other items that were ready to be discarded, which we then wrapped up in a haphazard way with a large spool of construction wire which we also "found", and to which a number of small amplified contact sensors which were then attached to the various items to allow the pickup of any kind of sound the item made when struck to then be mixed and digitally manipulated by my GMP digital processing gear. The class which I was working with along with members of the CSUB Water Polo Team were then invited to "play" the amplified rubbish and debris "sculpture" by whatever means necessary. "Bring Your Own Hammer!" was the motto. Several parents also came to the performance. The text to the piece was taken from an old family story about Bakersfield that I heard in my childhood which I had reworked for the occasion.

Alternate Routes 25' 8" 1993
Back in the early days of our history, before people had the ability to locate themselves by Geosynchronous Positioning Satellites orbiting our planet out in space, people had to be educated about how to get from Point "A" to Point "B" and beyond. One had to learn how to read this arcane, graphic mnemonic device called a "map" which existed in many different forms with notational styles which often required one to carry several different copies of these things which generally existed on pieces of cheap paper which often became folded-up "wrong", torn, stained with coffee and food, mutilated, outdated, or just plain worn out. If one was unfortunate enough to have to use the public and mass transit systems in America at that time, the problematic issue of how to get from Point "A" to Point "B" and beyond, became overlaid with a far more complicated complex route and timing schedule which varied from transportation system to transportation system that was also printed up on a variety of different sized, constantly changing, throw-away, crumpled up, paper lists in another multitude of arcane notational styles, whether it be bus systems, trains, or planes. If one wanted to go someplace outside of the local system, they had to carry with them a large bundle of these maps and schedules with which they would also have to pay close attention very carefully or else they could end up where mass transit does not exist or run anymore: stranded at a broiling-hot or freezing cold, un-enclosed bench in the middle of nowhere, having to wait for several hours until the first bus, train, plane, or human being would show up the next day to get you out of that hell-hole. Not that this still cannot occur in our now modern times with all of our technological conveniences where we do not have to think where we are at any particular moment. However, this text sound piece harks back to a simpler time when one had to learn this specialized language to be able to get around to places which is now a more or less extinct way of doing things. Instead of being able to just tear up out of frustration while screaming, at their maps and schedules when they miss a connection or get lost, one can now throw their battery-dead, "smart" cellphone (that cost an arm and a leg) onto the ground and stomp on it several times — while screaming of course. We have come to appreciate this "better living" through technological change as progress indeed.

Meetings 15' 9" 1999
On the downward slope of the late Anthropocene, the search for salvage will become the major way to make a living. The economics and means of production will be reduced more and more to the most rudimentary forms while the necessary skills and knowledge required for continued progress in technological areas will have finally collapsed upon themselves after many iterations while being slowly diluted and forgotten as a result. A sense of crisis will permeate everything in the world as humanity continues to sleepwalk through it half-consciously. That part of humanity who persevered and survived catastrophe after catastrophe of this slow yet eventual apocalypse will eventually be reduced to the level of hunters and gatherers. This time, however, the "hunter" seeks out the waste and rubbish which was left behind by the previous generations which failed before the present one. With things that they can find, they can barter as an organized group, with those who can still reprocess and repurpose it as well as distribute it. With this exchange for what they can gather, they can receive those items which they have come to believe are necessary to maintain their barely subsistent lives, as well as buoy the hope for the return of a quality of life which now only exists in memories and dreams which are slowly dissolving into myth. One joins a salvage crew both as a "challenging adventure," which will get them out of the dull depression of their day-to-day struggle for existence, as well as a gamble to "strike it rich": which they believe will return them to that quality of life that actually never really existed anyway, but rather was just the dull continuation of various reactions which led to the present situation which they now find themselves in.

The Death of History 16' 6" 2002
This piece is a eulogy for Nicholas Zurbrugg (1947-2001), publisher/editor beginning in the 1970s of the seminal visual and audio arts small press publication, Stereo Headphones. He was also a lecturer, interviewer, and organizer of conferences of this kind of material, as well as a published scholar of Proust, Beckett, Baudrillard, Postmodernism, Multi-Media, Concrete, and Sound Poetry, and most other things occurring in the contemporary art culture of the times. An insightful critical thinker with a keen and gentle sense of humor, as well as a sorely missed friend to those of us who had the fortunate experience of spending an all too brief moment of time with him.