At the start of this excerpt, my electronics mostly provide a dense, harmonic drone, created through the granular synthesis engine. Although there is some dynamic movement in the intensity of the drone, in terms of the harmonic content, it provides a sense of stability. Kjetil's playing uses this stability to his advantage, layering a variety of phrases and multiphonics that play with this stable grounding. Some confirming the tonality while others providing friction. The situation establishes a normative, but at the same time, it produces a form of stasis that prevents the sonic behaviors from exploring new directions. As Kjetil mentions in one of our conversations, as an improviser, he is well aware of these moments of stasis and always negotiates a balance between lingering within that sonic space, and looking for alternative trajectories. For the improvisation to move ahead and evolve into new domains, a disruption is needed. Right at the end, just before the silence, the drone appears to stutter somewhat: a minor indentation in an otherwise mostly smooth stretch of sound. Noticing the instability, my immediate reaction is to impose a radical shift, one that leads to a gap of silence where there is supposed to be sound. Kjetil responds nearly instantly and stops playing a fraction of a second after. Within a dense wall of sound, a tiny crack catches our attention, just a miniscule stutter, and the wall evaporates in an instant.
And then there is silence.
This silence could have been the end of the piece, and for several seconds it nearly seemed to go that way. But then a gentle, soft, grainy noise breaks the silence and offers a new and different path forwards. Ending an improvised performance is a difficult task, and there are times when performers must decide to either stop or continue. In this particular case, the improvisation up until the abrupt silence felt like it contained an untapped potential. The decision to continue opened up the possibility to explore previously untapped avenues within the sonic universe. The silence became a clear marker within the performance, delineating a before and after, structuring the performance as a call and response. Where the first coalesced into a wall of sound, the second half explored open spaces, leaving plenty of room for each instrument to contribute.
The sessions with Kjetil are all marked by our shared sensibilities to balance moments of stasis with sudden change, stabilizing and destabilizing sonic structures. Our playing attracts and repels, injecting a sense of tension building and impending collapse. The music invokes the feeling that even when things seem stable, it could all come crashing down, replaced with something entirely unforeseen.
“States, especially psychical states and processes, cannot be understood as distinct, self-contained things. They flow into each other continuously, imperceptibly, more as fugitive emanations, as processes, than as atoms or units. States merge one into the other, with no clear-cut separation between one and the other; their transition is indiscernible. If we artificially arrest this indiscernible transition, we can understand states as separate entities, linked by succession, but we lose whatever it is that flows in change, we lose duration itself.”
E. Grosz (2004, 195)
Prior STATES
STATES is a guitar pedal, developed in collaboration with Pladask Elektrisk, combining ring modulation, phasing, and a filter, inside a feedback loop. On its own, it is able to self-oscillate and produce almost flute-like tones that roughly arpeggiate along parts of the harmonic spectrum. When placed in a network, these tones interfere with one another, resulting in much more complex sonic behaviors. The guitar pedal is the basis for a live electronics setup that combines several STATES pedals with other hardware and software manipulations. Before going deeper into the specifics, some context may be necessary. There is a backstory to the States instrument that is tied to the trajectory of my explorations into chaotic music over the past decade. The beginning can be traced back to a short residency at STEIM in January 2013. During this residency, my focus was mainly to experiment with no-input mixing, and to work toward a setup that could be used in live performances. The project blog has the following entry on the second day of the residency:
“Instead of coding I decided to first bring along some more hardware gear to see how it affects the feedback loops. Plugging in an Alesis Bitrman seems to turn the setup into a funky beat machine.”
Some of the sounds recorded that day were eventually used as the outro on the track, "Six of Eight," as part of my album, Eight, released on Adnoiseam Records, in 2014. There was something about this sound that grabbed my attention, although perhaps that is too much of an understatement. The sound was more like a window into a possible answer to a question that has haunted my mind for years. Long before my ventures into chaos, I was intrigued by the idea of designing processes that were able to display all sorts of sonic behaviors while originating from a single, simple source. For many years, my approach was mostly focused on the manipulation of existing sound material. Given a long enough chain of audio effects, the source material could be transformed into nearly anything else. But these chains of complex processes always seemed like a contrived, inefficient, brute-force approach. However, through feedback and only a handful of simple audio manipulations, a captivating and vibrant sound-world emerged.Even though these sounds are clearly the product of a fully electronic instrument, the specific manner in which they evolve and behave feels organic, almost like a strange kind of acoustic flute.
Taking a closer look at the hardware used, multiple processes seem to be working in tandem. The Alesis Bitrman, mentioned in the project blog above, is a hardware multi-effect processor. The "funky beat machine" probably emerged through an experimentation of a bit-reducer in a feedback loop. The residency afforded me plenty of time to try out all sorts of configurations. Specifically, the combination of the dual phasor and the ring modulator yields fascinating sonic behaviors. The combination of both effects prompts the instrument to spontaneously produce arpeggiated harmonics, lending a musical quality to the otherwise more abrasive sonic vocabulary of no-input mixing. It is not merely the tonal quality that draws me in, but rather the lively and organic manner in which one pitch collapses while the next erupts to take its place. These transitions are full of detail, suggesting underlying tensions and frictions. The sounds are vulnerable and fragile, yet at the same time rich and vibrant: almost like the call of some unknown animal instead of a collection of subverted technologies.
States Pedal
In the fall of 2019, about a year into my Ph.D. in Artistic Research, the guitar pedal designer Knut Olai Mjøs Helle took the initiative to start up "Loddeklubb," an ongoing series of social soldering evenings at his studio in Bergen. These events only fueled my already existing interest in further developing my skills in designing and building analog hardware. During one of these sessions, the idea for a collaboration was proposed: to encapsulate the combination of ring-modulation, phasing, and feedback in the form of a guitar pedal. My prior experiences of translating these ingredients onto different media had taught me that the result of such an endeavor would most assuredly obtain its own sonic identity, rather than becoming a seamless emulation of any of the prior versions. Before long, the first prototypes confirmed this expectation and a new instrument with its own unique voice started to take shape.
This development unfortunately slowed down during the restrictions imposed due to Corona. Especially during the first months of the pandemic, due to lockdowns, priority went out toward the development of a software, written in Supercollider, that would eventually be used to process the sounds of the STATES pedal. The software consists of a granular synthesis engine in combination with music information retrieval. The analysis of the output of the granular synthesis is mapped onto the parameter space of itself, forming a control rate feedback loop. Due to this process, the playback of the grains is neither predictable nor random, but rather settles into quasi-repetitive gestures. During the first weeks of the development of the software, the prototype pedal was unavailable, so instead, recordings of a demolished piano were used as the source material for the granular synthesis.
From the start of the collaboration with Pladask Elektrisk, it was clear what the ingredients of the pedal would consist of. The real challenge was geared more towards an investigation of the artistic impact of relatively minor adjustments of the range and operation of these constituent parts. In the midst of this investigation, an opportunity arose to write an essay that was eventually published as part of the Blue Rinse Papers. Blue Rinse is a concert series for live-electronic music, organized by Craig Wells and myself in collaboration with Lydgalleriet. Because of restrictions related to the global pandemic, it was impossible to organize events. It was then decided to reallocate a part of the funding to commission a collection of essays from artists that were in some way connected with the concert series. My own contribution, "The Unfinished Instrument," discusses the process of designing an instrument that is centered around chaotic processes, where each change, however small, unlocks new and unforeseen sonic behaviors. This, in turn, would steer the design process into unexpected territories. Early in the essay, there is an important citation by the theoretical physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli, discussing the concept of permanence in his book, The Order of Time.
“The entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of permanence. Not of being, but of becoming.”
This ontological statement has proved to be important in guiding my thinking throughout the research. Within chaotic processes, things never settle down into predictable patterns. Nothing is permanent. Even those behaviors, that seem stable when viewed from a distance, crumble down under closer inspection. There have been quite a few occasions when my instruments have seemingly settled into a drone, only to suddenly collapse into a different behavior thirty minutes later. This means that the instruments that are made as part of the research are behaving like events, rather than things. Although their outer appearances change only slowly from day to day, the circuitry inside acts more like an electric fluid, quite opposite to the notion of solidity that the conductive metal would imply. Changing the parameters slightly, causes the circuit to settle into new configurations, where new chaotic processes emerge.
“The tuning pegs of the guitar address the detuning effects of the expansion and contraction of the wood on the strings. In turn, these very same measures can be utilized to make decisively musical alterations to the instrument’s character, opting for alternative tunings, exploring microtonality, or changing the strings altogether for a change in timbre. That which increases permanence simultaneously increases its potential for change.”
Through writing the essay, it became apparent that notions of change apply just as well to acoustic instruments as it does to electronic ones. Most instruments can tip into chaotic behaviors as long they are put in the right conditions. The real focus of the research is found in the question of the centrality of the chaotic process. How much effort is needed to push the instrument towards instability? How sensitive is the instrument as it responds to performative gestures? Whereas most instruments are designed to yield reliable responses, chaotic instruments are perhaps designed to produce differences. Most instruments can be pushed closer and closer to, and eventually, over the edge. This edge is a threshold, defining the boundaries of reliable responses. Tension builds up as such a threshold or edge is approached. When instruments are centered around chaos, these edges are not just located on the boundaries, but rather spread throughout. Through play, a growing amount of edges are found as they emerge, warp, and dissipate.
“With the evolution of mechanical, electronic, and digital instruments, new possibilities have begun to surface, enabling further negotiations between reliability and possibilities for sonic surprises by implementing nonlinear, recursive, or stochastic principles. In effect, these negotiations reveal the intricate connections between the design of instruments, and the experiences of the instrumentalist, and how each informs the other. ”
The essay then discusses the concept of instruments as "pliable entities." This reflection moves away from the question of what an instrument is, and instead, examines their capacity to reconfigure themselves. Following Rovelli, instruments are seen as events in various states of becoming, rather than unyielding permanent objects: instruments that are in flux, rather than fixed. Playing with instruments that are exceedingly pliable works best when it is approached as an exploration, fueled by curiosity and wonder. It can not be taken for granted that a similar performative action will lead to a similar sonic outcome.
“Once the instruments we perform with are no longer defined by their reliable responses, we eventually reach a point where it is no longer useful to think about performance as an act of control over an instrument. Instead of playing on the instrument, we start to play with the instrument alongside it.”
This distinction between playing on and playing with is important. It renegotiates the hierarchy between performer and instrument. Learning how to become better at performing with instruments involves an increased focus on active listening and responding to the emergent sonic behaviors: becoming acquainted with its temperament, and picking up on idiosyncrasies or tendencies along the way. While the attempt to master or control a chaotic instrument only leads to frustration, engaging with the instrument on its own terms will uncover a wide array of sonic expressions. Composer and performer David Dunn shares this sense of a lack of control as he poetically describes his experience of performing with his chaotic instruments:
“While I can influence the complex behaviors, I cannot control them beyond a certain level of mere perturbation, the amount of which is constantly changing. The experience is often tantamount to surfing the edge of a tide of sound that has its own intrinsic momentum.”
Pliability turns into viscosity as the notion of control melts away. Dunn’s use of a tide of sound is a powerful metaphor, as waves are always on the move, always reshaping their environments as they pass along. Playing with chaotic instruments takes the form of edge-finding, and once an edge is found, to follow along, surfing upon the tension of a tide that could break at any moment. My influence on the evolution of this movement is only partial, as the momentum of the tide itself is not easily diverted or redirected. It is possible to go against the tide, causing the wave to break. There is no telling how the tide will reform and continue after such a disruption, but when it does, all that is left to do is to follow along once again.
“Some minutes ago, my hands were still on the dials and knobs, influencing patterns and intensities, but for some time now, I’ve just been listening. A focused, concentrated form of listening. An evocative act of curiosity, taking in the tidal rhythms and melodies and contemplating what exactly it is that I experience. What are these sonic behaviors expressing? Who or what is speaking? And conversely, where do I find myself within this conversation?”
Although this moment of silence caught both of us off guard, it quickly became clear that this was not the end of the improvisation. After about five or six seconds, a layer of filtered noise crept back in, forming a new platform for the improvisation to carry on. The session then continued for a whole new section until it concluded. Two questions arise: Why did we both stop playing so abruptly, and why did we continue afterwards?
In October 2020, Kjetil and I spent a week in a studio at the University, spending the days recording improvisation sessions and conversations about our practices. We started on Monday, spending a good portion of the day setting up our gear, finding a balance between Kjetil's amplified saxophone and both of our electronic setups. Soundchecks like these can be quite labor intensive, as it is unclear how loud and how quiet the sound might turn out to become. We ended up recording two sessions, mostly testing the levels in preparation for the days to come. The next day we arrived early, everything was ready to go, and we decided to record our sessions straight away.
“On the second day we had some really good jams. [...] Sometimes there is this extraordinary feeling, maybe one in ten concerts is like that, and those jams, the first one especially [...] I felt there was something really special about it.”
As we push up the volume on our instruments, a densely dissonant wall of sound greets us. The tension in the sound is immediately tangible. Although the sound is clearly pitched, a low rumble is present, destabilizing the notion of a tonality, and placing the main focus on the texture of the sound. The instruments do not so much complementing one another, as they press against each other, creating a situation that is as of yet unresolved.
For quite a long time, this pressure is maintained. One of the instruments may offer up a sense of stability, but the other counters the suggestion with friction and grit. At the same time, there are many playful interactions bouncing back and forth. Listening back to the recording, it almost seems like we are slowly working toward the main thematic chord structure that is introduced about five minutes into the session. Of course, this would be a complete misinterpretation of what was actually happening while we were playing. Our instruments do not allow us to plan ahead, and the music unfolds just one phrase at a time. Nevertheless, out of the dissonance, a series of chords emerge that provide a sense of openness after a long buildup of tension.
The third "chord" in the progression, colored yellow in the spectral analysis above, proves difficult to replicate. There is a prominent Eb note from the saxophone, mostly supported by a low and rumbling electronic timbre. It functions as a layer of suspense, eventually resolving back to the F# that ends the sequence.
Unfortunately, after several years of extensive use, my Bitrman unit broke down. As the product was discontinued, I decided to replicate the effects chain in SuperCollider code instead. Although it proved difficult to really approximate the earlier vocabulary of sounds, a similar but different sonic universe revealed itself instead. This second version, combining analog no-input mixing with the effects-chain in SuperCollider, led to a performance titled, "STATES." The title refers to the performance practice that is used when the instrument is played. The instrument is influenced until it reaches a state in which it produces intriguing sonic behaviors. Then, the instrument is left to play unimpeded for some time. These states have musical qualities that evoke an enchanting sense of wonder.This sense of wonder arises through the perplexing behaviors of the chaotic processes, capable of creating all manner of expressive sounds that move me. When the state runs its course, the performer may decide to intervene again, informed by this wonder, influencing the behaviors of the instrument into different states. This cycle of playing and listening continues until the end of the performance. The back and forth between actively playing and deep listening is a method of performance that is recurrent in my work. It creates a structure for performances, and at the same time, communicates to the audience that the instrument has the capacity to play by itself.
Some years later, in 2017, a fully digital version was developed, using the same forms of processing. Adjustments were made in such a way as to fit the context of an interactive art installation. Developing these new versions was not just a matter of reproduction. Each time, a whole new vocabulary of sound was unearthed. These new sounds caused a reconceptualization of the premises of the instrument. Where some of the first encounters sounded like a “funky beat machine,” the following iterations honed in on slow-moving, harmonic drones, and the digital version moved towards more abstract and harsher territories. In the summer of 2017, a series of recording sessions at STEIM with bass clarinet player Gareth Davis led to the vinyl album titled, STATES, released by Moving Furniture Records in 2018. On each side of the record a different setup is used, showcasing a versatility of sonic vocabularies.
After a few weeks of lockdown, the design process for the guitar pedal synthesizer continued. At the heart of the design is a FV-1 Spin Semiconductor chip. This chip enables the possibility to program and run low-level software to ring-modulate and phase-shift the incoming signals, while still using analog means to influence these processes. Within the pedal itself, analog and digital approaches to signal processing are blended within a feedback loop resulting in a sound world that can not be reduced to either idiom.
Excerpt of the schematic of the STATES pedal showing the FV-1 on the left, along with adjacent circuitry.
After a long period of incremental changes and refinements, the pedal started to take shape. The first few versions had clear issues, resulting in a limited range of sounds. These early steps in the process were relatively easy to work through. Often it was quite clear what needed to be done to be able to proceed. After this first phase the pedal was fully functional, and the development shifted gears to refine the design to fit within the context of a larger live electronics setup. The granular SuperCollider patch, described above, was extended to include live input, expanding the sonic vocabulary of the STATES pedal.
Now the challenges become much more ambiguous. It is no longer a question of getting the instrument to speak, but about discovering what it is capable of saying. Many days and weeks are spent exploring and listening to the sonic behaviors of the pedal. While it is really difficult to characterize what it is that is listened for: it is not any specific timbral quality, but rather the breadth in variation of the timbres that are encountered; whether the instrument opens up for new avenues of exploration each time the power is switched on.
When several of the prototype STATES pedals connect to one another through a matrix mixer, each output interferes with the input signals of the others. The inclusion of the matrix mixer truly makes the instrument come alive. The interferences between the different pedals create a soundworld that is full of tension, as they all try to balance the incoming sonic gestures in accordance with their own internal states. The resulting sound is reminiscent of the use of multiphonics on a wind instrument, where multiple frequencies rub against each other in a struggle for resonance. One of the channels of the matrix mixer is routed to the input of my soundcard, making the sounds available to be sampled and processed through the granular SuperCollider software. The output of the software becomes an input on the matrix mixer, establishing yet another feedback loop.
Restate (Performance)
While the STATES pedal slowly but surely took shape, there were frequent conversations on its progress with my fellow artistic researchers, including the saxophone player Kjetil Møster. Kjetil's practice processes the sounds of his saxophone through a guitar pedal board, which also includes a matrix mixer along with a selection of other effects. Our conversations led us to start playing improvised sessions together. From the very first sessions, it became clear that the sounds from our setups could almost blend together to form a single sonic mass, but there were also moments in which our sounds were more distinct, forming tensions and dissonances. The nonlinear feedback sounds of the STATES pedal had an organic, almost acoustic quality, like an overblown flute of some kind. At other times, the sound veered more toward the more abstract sonic vocabulary of electronic music. Kjetil's playing with the saxophone and his pedalboard covered a similar terrain, in which the acoustic sound of this saxophone engaged with the electronics in rich but unforeseen ways.
In reflection, there is a strange realization that neither of us are in control of the situation, yet we are both able to influence our respective instruments in such a manner that compositional structures and movements emerge. Playing together mostly consists of paying close attention to these emergent processes, and creating space for them to evolve, mutate, and eventually ebb away again. Listening back to the recordings of these sessions almost paints a false picture of what actually happened while we played. The music comes across as decisive and meticulous, while in actuality, the improvisations were full of fragile tensions in which neither of us could tell how things would end up. A similar confusion could occur during concert situations, where quick and decisive performative gestures may be mistaken for control, whereas they are actually attentive responses to emergent sonic events. During a recorded discussion about the risk and vulnerability involved when performing with instruments that defy control, Kjetil remarked with the following:
“I want people to relate to what is happening [...]. If the things that are presented are very safe, [...] it doesn’t push the listener and they don’t relate to it in the same way. If it's more risky and either it fails or it becomes really good, you relate to it in a stronger way.”
As long as the audience is made aware of the risks involved in playing with a chaotic instrument, they are compelled to sit on the edge of their seats, paying full attention to the unfolding of the sonic expressions. This holds true for both the audience and the performers themselves. A strange moment occurred during one recording session with Kjetil Møster on the 17th of June, 2020. To give some context, all of these sessions happened on the basis of a quite radically open form of improvisation. There was no set time limit to the improvisation, and there were no other structural musical instructions to guide the playing. After playing for several minutes, the sonic intensity steadily increased. But then, seemingly out of nowhere, we both stopped playing, and a moment of silence was introduced. This moment is clearly visible in the waveform of the recording.
The sequence repeats roughly four times in total, although the timing of each round varies greatly. After analyzing the strongest partials in the spectrum of the recording, it is now possible to reconstruct this passage using additive sine tones in SuperCollider.
During this improvisation there are many examples where a tonal structure is hinted at, but immediately subverted either through glissandi, layers of texture, or microtonal developments, resulting in beating patterns among the frequencies. The piece allows structures to emerge, while simultaneously subverting and destabilizing those same structures, playing with the tensions between formation and destruction.
A sketch with rough indications of the sonic movements of the saxophone (above) and the electronics (below).
This passage, following the chord structures discussed earlier, showcases this balance between stability and instability within the sounds. The horizontal lines in the spectrogram indicate that there is a strong sustained harmonic content in the signal, eventually landing on a B Major chord. However, there are several blurred out sections, where the stability of the chord is placed under stress. Throughout most of this passage, one layer in the electronics slowly rises in frequency, creating a range of dissonances and consonances along the way. At certain points, the stability of this upward glissando is put into question as the signal briefly gives way to noise, only to re-emerge after a few seconds. All of these factors combine to place the listener in a position where they constantly need to pay attention to what is unfolding.
Excerpt of the outro of the track 'Six of Eight'. The full track is exactly eight minutes long and is 'trip-hop' oriented in sound.
A selection of recordings of the recursive granular synthesis patch written in SuperCollider, using recordings of a demolished piano as input.
In this recording, the sonic qualities are particularly fragile, dancing around the edge of collapsing from one harmonic to the next. Even though the sound is not loud or agressive, there is a lot of tension present in the way that the timbres build up and subside again.
This recording features intriguing transitions from one pitch to the other. Zooming in further on only a fragment of the recording, it becomes clear that the frequencies of the different pitches partially overlap.
The different frequencies are harmonically related and depending on the state of the instrument, some of these harmonics take the upper hand. The frictions that occur when one harmonic dissapates and another surfaces, gives these transitions their distinctive sonic quality.
