Artist description I've been involved in creating experimental music and sound art since 1988, and have worked as sound designer, composer, artist, and technician. Sound is an intriguing, challenging medium. The expectation of an audience is to be informed of another's viewpoint and perhaps be entertained. The expectations an artist has of an audience are for the audience's attention and willingness to perceive structure, form, and change over an extended duration, to listen for both content and abstraction. The listener uses an entirely different set of skills, a different type of attention, than the audience of a plastic artist. I aspire to having audiences appreciate the difference between sound/music and plastic arts or entertainment. Plastic arts are comprehendible in a single viewing. Entertainment is ever-present in our culture and the general public does not discern between the differing intents of entertainment and art. Sound art can be seen as information that must be digested as a boa does a pig: very slowly, paralyzed by the burden of savoring the experience, until complete assimilation occurs. Popular music offers diminishing returns with repeated listening; music with complex structures offers growing returns on repeated listening. Such are the issues that a sound artist/composer tackles and I do so gleefully. It is very difficult to live in our culture without participating in sound art. Our culture is drowning in the necessary materials: computers are readily available and powerful enough to create complete CDs on, every thrift store in America is drowning in tape decks and amplifiers and speakers and microphones as well as records and books on tape and answering machines and CDs and 8-tracks. We use consumer electronics as they were intended to create installations and life-art. Car stereos push enough bass around to make everyone on the street physically ill. Our answering machine messages are our sonic self-portraits, an in-joke to friends and an intimate thrill to strangers. We use walkman tape and CD players to create an artificial music video sound environment; surround-sound home theatre systems are designed to exaggerate and stylize our natural sound environment. Alternatively, nature sound recordings serve to mask or hide our acoustic environments, replacing artifice with artifice. My influences are: Iannis Xenakis' ability to transfer concepts such as particle behavior and architecture into music Alvin Lucier's replication and recursion of ideas Hildegard Westenkamp's perspective on sound in our real world the reality of hip-hop and rap John Cage and William S. Burroughs' use of unorthodox techniques to obtain meaning. Zen Buddhism's belief that meaning is ever-present and has only to be recognized Miles Davis' creation of structures in time that are at once familiar and alien The passion of Diamanda Galas The playfulness of the Boredoms and Negativland and the Residents The work that I do touches different ideas and comes in a variety of media. Taped electro-acoustic pieces use manipulated real sounds to create compositions in the traditional sense. Radio pieces take that idea one step further: they are composed in real time for an unseen, unknown audience and deal with differing modes of communication. Improvisations with homemade and modified electronics attempt to liberate and recontextualize the devices that are so pervasive in our daily lives, and reveal the information hidden within. Installations incorporate ideas from their surroundings and use sound to speak to us about our relationship to architecture and urban planning. This is my passion for sound. I use the non-literal to create impressions on the listener, to initiate an understanding. Literal sounds are manipulated so as to reveal subtext and ignore context. Non-literal sounds are manipulated to disguise their origin, focusing the listener not on the once-was but on the here-and-now. My work is formalist in the exploration of composition; political in the discussion of architecture and gentrification; sociological in the analysis of idea communication; egalitarian in the use of readily available materials; and entertainment in that it is meant to be listened to and enjoyed. Babbitt's oft-maligned “Who Cares If You Listen?” article challenged the notion that new music is about the concept exclusively. He said that the concept is nothing without realization. I use sound as a medium for putting information out into the public dialogue, manipulated in such a way so that the point is made by the composition instead of the sounds themselves. The ideas are nothing without the realization. This is what's currently on my plate: the CD release of the Four Hundred Boys, an electroacoustic work sound design for commuter rail station art installations in Tukwila and Sumner an installation using found answering machine tapes live performances using homemade electronics with Seattle composer Christopher DeLaurenti

Music Style subversive, surprising, soothing, savage

Musical Influences noise, experimental, avant-garde, bubblegum

Similar Artists Test tones, Halloween records, Shortwave radio, Attilla, Stockhausen's Telemusik

Artist History Born in 1971, I started making recordings and music in high school in Houston, Texas. In 1989 I began performing and recording with the band Earth Army, and studied photography and music at the University of Houston. I also began working with home recording and experimental production techniques, and released work under my own name and as Tri-State. In 1991, Earth Army broke up and I attended the Recording Workshop in Chillicothe, Ohio to study traditional music production techniques, acoustics, and electronics. In 1992, I began performing with the bands Shrug and Border Patrol. In 1993, I attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to make work in the Sound, Art and Technology and Time Arts departments. There I studied with Bob Snyder, Lou Mallozzi, Peter Gena, Shawn Decker, and Lauren Weinger, interned at the Experimental Sound Studio and began doing sound design and soundtrack work for film and theater. I graduated in 1995 and, in April of 1997, moved from Chicago to Seattle. Recent projects include the Four Hundred Boys, an electroacoustic work; sound design for commuter rail station art installations in Tukwilla and Sumner; an installation using found answering machine tapes; and live performances using homemade electronics with Seattle composer Christopher DeLaurenti.

Group Members Alex Keller and occasional collaborators

Instruments Speak & Spells, walkmen, DAT machines, computers, microphones, speakers, and anything that can be documented on tape

Press Reviews One  review said

Location Seattle, Washington - USA

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