I enjoy working with firearms, especially rifles. Inserting the magazine, the weighty click of the chamber being loaded, positioning your body, taking aim, breathing in, out, then halfway in, and BANG. A consuming shock explodes through your body, flame, smoke, the sharp smell of burning powder, the casing arcs out of the chamber and chimes on the ground beside you, and you still have more rounds to go. The experience of shooting a gun is truly exhilarating. The lines blur between life and death, pleasure and violence. Like the moment before you kiss a new lover, your guts are in a knot, your head on fire, and it’s delightful. The experience of being overwhelmed by something beyond, some massive and undeniable force, is what I seek in life and art alike. As with target practice, if you overcompensate, if you hesitate, if you overanalyze, you will miss your mark. For me making art is about experience, process, and having the right spirit. To achieve this in sound, I work primarily in the analog realm, as I prefer direct contact with my instruments, and I enjoy all the accidents, challenges, and delightfully simple processes the medium embodies. I build everything myself, working from several very basic schematics. This allows me to experiment freely, trading out components of different values, adding switches and pots, playing with photocells and light sources, outputting to either small portable speakers or directly into a mixer. I have had opportunities to learn more complicated designs, and I have worked with software interfaces and digital media, however I chose to stay focused on exploring the physical properties of sound and the experience of listening. Improvisation is key to my process, in both the studio and live performance settings, solo and in collaboration. Along with versatility, patience, and focused listening, an ability to spontaneously create compelling structures is required, navigating the push – pull between allowing sounds to exist and breathe, and striking out with force and decisiveness to change the direction of things. It is all about communication, between the sound and your own internal structures, with the aesthetics and energy of the other players, and also with the intensities that manifest. Ideally a dynamic tension exists between power and humility in all players, and the most soulful and engaging music springs forth. To describe my own improv style, I use raw sounds with no effects, moving between minute, precise tonal interplay and brute, visceral drone, embracing the revealing, the awkward, the violent, the human. My performance is very tactile and dynamic, striking surfaces to modify feedback, pinching capacitors to squelch signal from a tone down to a percussive click, moving wires to tune frequencies, manipulating materials and objects to create texture and resonance. Simple, analog electronics allow for a truly direct performer – audience engagement, with the minimum interface separating source from sound, silence from onslaught, thought from experience. The tones generated by my oscillators are persistent and endlessly variable as I modify and layer them, the waves interacting, sounding overtones, creating phase, beating, and much unexpected interference. With amplified objects, the smallest click or scrape can fill the room, simple surfaces are transformed into sonic landscapes through movement. Feedback is also just a volume adjustment away, and can be harsh or incredibly resonant and beautiful. Radio and other electromagnetic frequencies exist all around us, and are made audible with a simple receiver, by touch. This practice requires extreme attentiveness and continuous adjustment to bring about a truly singular listening experience, and the process is felt very strongly by performer and audience alike. Through my engagement with sound, I have found infinite possibility within the simplest things, explored vulnerability to actualize strength, moved through violence into pleasure, and at the moment where silence and sound meet, we realize there is still an unknown, an indescribable, a beyond. It exists everywhere, right in front of us, and all it takes is a shift in perspective to experience it.
