(ill)-Literate Mixes:

A discussion of speculative literary audio with Trace "The
Pharmanaut" Reddell by Jeremy Turner.

JEREMY: Like myself, you currently are in the role of an educator and
critic as well as an artist. Does being an academic help or hinder one's
work as a composer and by extension, does theory help or hinder
practice?

TRACE: I'm intrigued by the manner in which theory and creative
practice interact with and inform one another. More than that, I'm
interested in works that blend the theoretical and the creative in
extreme ways. I would say that artistic products move in this direction
more readily than critical and theoretical works. At least I tend to
encounter more artists, particularly in the area of multimedia design,
who at some level of content address their works' nature as media.

But I'm not just talking about artists who incorporate a few
statements about how the medium is the message, or even how the tool is
the message, as Kim Cascone spins that phrase. Rather, I have in mind a
hybrid form of work, a creative piece in which the artist/critic openly
grapples with the theoretical aspects of its construction, as well as a
theoretical object that acknowledges its creative strategies along with
the technologies that participate in and shape the compositional
process.

In any case, we end up needing a new term to characterize what we're
experiencing in these situations. The Surfiction writer Ronald Sukenick
blazed this trail with his discussions of "formal thinking" that
came together in 1985's In Form: Digressions on the Act of Fiction.
Here, Sukenick makes a distinction between theories of reading and
interpretation and theories of composition.

To some extent, Sukenick discusses the strategic nature of composition,
but more importantly he emphasizes the experiential aspects of
composition. That is, he seeks ways to compose that are in accord with
his life. Here I'm thinking, for instance, of his "fictional"
works (The Death of the Novel and Other Stories, The Endless Short
Story) that incorporated long verbatim transcripts of tape-recorded
conversations, sometimes of a very personal and intense nature, at other
times absolutely mundane.

In either case, the taped autobiographical dialogues have the effect of
calling into question what is fiction, how the fiction writer uses real
experience in fiction, and how the imagination aligns itself with media
in order to inform, produce, and transmit experience.

I studied under Sukenick while attending the graduate creative writing
workshops at the University of Colorado at Boulder. What I took with me
from that experience is an insight into the nature of imagination and
the way in which the imagination informs the production of our
experiences, artistic or otherwise. I have come to conclude that the
imagination is more closely aligned with media and technologies of
mediation than it is with the human subject or agent, but that's
probably another question!

In formal thinking, theoretical analysis is wrapped up in the
construction of new modes of artistic practice. That is, works that
exhibit the characteristics of formal thinking embrace their own
critical dialogue, but they do so more from the perspective of how the
compositional practice of the work engages imagination rather than the
interpretive gestures that might attend reading or viewing or listening.

To ground this in some quick examples, I'd say that in literature no
one has yet surpassed Sterne's Tristram Shandy in terms of creating a
text that more thoroughly (and humorously) gets into the intricacies of
its own composition with an eye toward revealing how the imaginative
processes of fiction inform the construction of the autobiographical
self. In media theory, Kittler's work is outstanding; the theoretical
objects of his work consistently interact with the various technologies
of meaning-making and communication that build, house, and transmit
them.

In recent films, I'm particularly impressed by Richard Linklater's
Waking Life. More than the structural organization of lucid dreaming
punctuated by episodes of false awakening, the visual elements of the
animation works psychoactively to achieve a mild hypnosis and so situate
the viewer in a state very much like that of the lucid dream. In the
case of audio production, Kim Cascone is doing some very engaging work
that explores conceptually and practically the notion of digital
detritus, while much of the audio and scripts found at Fallt.com also
work at the level of deeply formal inquiries that are at once creative
and theoretical. One of my older favorites in this context is DJ
Spooky's Riddim Warfare, an album that sets up the parameters for, and
then participates in, its own theoretical critique.

JEREMY: Is programmatic content (say derived from literary sources)
the best way to rescue composition from the austere excesses of self-
referential minimalism?

TRACE: I'm currently interested in exploring the intersection of
literary practice and musical production at a couple of different
levels: glitch and microsound, at one level, and DJ sampling and mixing
at another. At the moment, all of this has come together in the form of
my LITMIXER project, which is currently featured at Electronic Book
Review (http://www.altx.com/ebr).

This project is a multimedia piece that applies the strategies and tools
of the DJ to the task of literary interpretation and critical
speculation. It was really fortuitous that EBR put out a call for
content for this special issue on music, sound, and noise just as I was
finishing up the LITMIXER. EBR's focus has always been on theory,
particularly theories concerning the new modes of writing and critical
practice cultivated on the Internet, but this was their first attempt to
integrate sound as a component of online critical writing.

Just because it engages literary sources, I don't consider something
like the LITMIXER to function in a programmatic fashion. In fact, I
would suggest that the source content is not really that important as an
object transferred from a literary media into an audio-based media.
Rather, I'm interested in shifting practices and strategies from one
area into another, as well as looking at certain parallels that can
exist between a theoretical deconstruction, like Derrida's discussion
of the pharmakon, and the mixing work of the DJ or other sample-based
artist.

I'm trying to get at the formal thinking that underlies both practices
(writing theory, DJ-ing) and our experience of reading or listening to
those works. Further, I want to pursue the practice of how we work from
those prior works, either as a critical reader or one who listens with
the discerning ear of the DJ.

Most specifically, I transplant into the realm of literary criticism
what may be the defining feature shared among all brands and subgenres
of contemporary electronic music: the producer's remix. I want to
plunge into the China-box of samples of samples of samples that
characterizes some kid's ACID remix of a DJ Spooky track (itself a mix
of a hip-hop record that samples some R&B groove) as much as it does the
linguistic alchemy that Derrida exercises on Plato's reading of the
word "pharmakon". In both of these instances, listening and reading
function as performative acts of audio (re)generation and critical
writing.

To get at these points I had to frame them in such away that would also
embrace formal thinking. So everything from the LITMIXER sound engine to
the texts included in the User's Manual functions as formal
expressions of sample-based mixing: the LITMIXER lets you actually mix
up soundfiles, clips of my own reading from Derrida's text along with
different glitchy or ambient sounds; a long section of the User's
Manual includes a schematic of the LITMIXER appended with cut-ups from
the major textual sources (Derrida, UlfPoschardt, Kittler, Trevor
Wishart, and some others); and even the most straightforward section of
the manual (a theoretical article on the topic of literary remediation
and mixing) draws attention to itself as an experience of mixed
samples, remixed ideas, and remastered theories.

Hopefully this response clarifies a certain skepticism concerning self-
referentiality, minimalist or otherwise. I prefer to track the tangled
weaves of sources and samples, to see how materials crossover from one
media to another, and so generate lively simulacra. If it could even be
created, a self-referencing work would be the product of the worst kind
of inbreeding: a simulacrum from a very depleted gene, or meme, pool.


JEREMY: According to your personal opinion and taste, what do you think
best constitutes a sound object: a tiny piece or a drone? If you pick
the latter, at what point does the drone cross the object threshold into
ambience?

TRACE: I really like Kim Cascone's discussion of "sound grids" and
"sound ornaments", of spaces made in which often very minute sonic
entities can form relationships. He goes on to explain that the density
of this space gives the listener the latitude to find different
positions and so participate in the generation of meaning. In this
model, I would suggest that ambience might stand for the sum of
relationships of all the various parts, tiny slivers or longer drones.
Ambience is one's awareness of the space between.

The contrast between a sonic space and the various smaller ornaments or
entities that occupy that space makes a lot of sense if you're
interested, as I am, in both generating and experiencing what Marcus
Novak long ago labelled "navigable music." This spatial definition
of music does two interesting things.

First, it suggests that the compositional process centers on
constructing the boundaries of a space and then finding some interesting
and engaging objects to put in that space.

Second, it suggests that the listening process has to do with occupying
the sonic space and then moving about within it in order to establish
and explore your relationship to the objects or entities that you find
there. Again, these objects may be tiny pieces or drones. Performance
occurs when the sound artist actively listens to the interplay of the
objects within the space that he or she has created. Recording of such a
performance defines the particular ambience of a given episode of
navigating through music.

JEREMY: Sometimes you work under the name "The Pharmanaut". Does the
name intentionally derive from the word "pharmaceutical"? If so, do
you see music as a kind of opiate for the masses or perhaps instead as a
panacea for boredom and/or suffering?

TRACE: The first half of the name derives from the word "pharmakon",
by which I mean to invoke Derrida's playful remixing of that term in
his 1968 article, "Plato's Pharmacy." Like any pharmakon, music
embraces and generates contradiction; one man's opiate is another
man's suppository, as the saying goes, and each has its function. The
second half of the name connotes the navigator, and so taken together
we're looking at the navigator of drug music!

I only adopt The Pharmanaut moniker when DJ-ing, and most of my sets are
unabashedly focused on space rock, Kosmische Musik and psychedelia
(Hawkwind, Gong, Pink Floyd, Tomorrow, Tangerine Dream, Harmonia) mixed
up with vintage sci-fi soundtracks and oddities like Fiorella
Terenzi's sound work from UGC 6697 data.The older psychedelic and
space music, though, is a perfect example of early navigable music, a
connection illuminated the first time that John Lennon told us to "lay
down all thought, surrender to the void" and then went on to construct
through sonic experimentation and tape manipulation the imaginative
experience of the space of the Bardo.

So, while I see music as possessing the qualities of the opiate and the
panacea, I'm most interested in exploring its psychedelic qualities.
Though it's never stated in "Plato's Pharmacy," I think that
this is precisely the underlying thrust of Derrida's work with the
pharmakon, which is nothing if not a psychedelic agency that expands
human consciousness by following unanticipated threads of association or
even bringing to light frequently denied patterns of thought and
behavior. Just look at the trippy coda that concludes the article and
tell me that Derrida hasn't taken some delight in imaginatively dosing
Plato's water beaker with something other than Socrates's hemlock!

JEREMY: In your Digital Media course(s), do you ever mention your own
place in the historical continuum of digital audio? If so, in what
context do you situate yourself and what analogies do you (or would you)
use to aid the student in understanding exactly what it is you do? Do
you (would you) provide specific historical precedents or affiliate your
work with a known movement for the convenience of learning?

TRACE: I don't situate myself in a historical continuum of digital
audio. Musical production isn't my primary field, and to date I don't
have a significant collection of audio works with which to stake out my
own place. I work mostly in digital multimedia with a strong emphasis on
an audio component, and I hope that I can continue to cross the
boundaries of different disciplines, both inside and out of the academic
environment, in order to develop engaging works.

I do want my students to be aware of some contextual background for
computer-based audio production, though, and so my classes begin with a
very quick survey of important artists and we listen to some different
works. I introduce pioneers of computer and electronic music like Morton
Subotnick and Raymond Scott, but I situate this kind of work (which
strikes my students as somewhat esoteric) against the DIY tape
manipulation experiments of William Burroughs (which strikes them as
just plain weird). I also talk about the incorporation of avant garde
techniques in the pop psychedelic works of the Jefferson Airplane and
the Beatles, and I'll mention George Martin and Brian Wilson to consider
the significance of viewing the studio processes of mixing and mastering
as musical decisions. Then I move quickly through dub to talk about the
strategy of the remix, and turntablism to talk about sampling. Next, I
rocket through Tangerine Dream (sequencing) and Kraftwerk (all-synth
dancemusic). We end up with Eno to talk about the beginnings of ambient
music. Throughout the remainder of the quarter, I'll play samples of
recent electronic work, mostly of an experimental nature.

In any case, I bring in other works, old and new, in order to stress
strategies and tools rather than some kind of evolutionary development.
Most of all, I want my students to be aware of the fact that what they
hear and create in my classroom is the product of an imaginative
interaction of strategies,accidents, and technologies. I try to foster
my students' ability to address the creative, technical and critical
aspects of the processes in which they"re engaged and the products that
they create.

While students come out of my digital audio classes with a portfolio of
self-contained audio works, some of them quite good, I think it's safe
to say that most of my students are looking for ways to apply and
incorporate audio into other multimedia projects or Websites.

So, we end the class by looking at a number of Web sites that utilize
audio to support multimedia projects or, more importantly, use Web-based
interfaces or database programming as ways to deliver new forms of
digital audio experiences: electrica (http://electrica.leonid.de/cgi-
bin/index.cgi);PHON:E:ME (http://phoneme.walkerart.org/);sonicflux
(http://sonicflux.walkerart.org/index.html);amorphoscapes
(http://www.amorphoscapes.com/);and Soundtoys
(http://www.soundtoys.net).

+ + +

Trace Reddell is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media Studies at the
University of Denver, and the graduate director of the M.A. in Digital
Media Studies. Trace teaches a mixture of critical theory and multimedia
production classes, and he specializes in the area of digital audio
production. His current projects conduct collaborative experiments with
sound generation and manipulation in computer-networked environments.
Trace's literary sampling engine, the LITMIXER, is featured in
Electronic Book Review's special series,
music/sound/noise(http://www.altx.com/ebr). New audio works from his
Galactus Zeit project have been released on the Communications of
Tomorrow label (http://www.commtom.com).

Jeremy Turner is a music composer and inter-disciplinary artist. He is
currently exploring the creative possibilities within the pre-existing
software architecture(s) of OnLive Traveler and ActiveWorlds. He is the
co-founder of an international artist collective, 536
(www.fivethreesix.com) in Vancouver, Canada. Turner used to be a regular
Arts/Entertainment critic for AOL Canada and website
reviewer/interviewer for Intelligentagent.com in New York. Turner has
some recent interviews published on www.ctheory.net.