Andy Hong: WHFS — tell me about WHFS.
Brian Transeau: Oh my god! We're talking about formative musical events for me. WHFS has so much to do with my love for... — In England, everybody's like, "He's an anglophile," and so many people think I'm English because I have this encyclopedic knowledge of early English new wave music. WHFS had so much to do with that. It was the one radio station in our area that actually played fairly progressive music when I was a kid. Also, I had a friend named Lisa Watson, and she used to go with her family to England in the summers. She'd come back with mix cassettes. So between WHFS and my friend Lisa, that's how I found out about Cabaret Voltaire, Human League, and Yaz — and all those bands.
I also had a Lisa — Lisa Harrington — and she would bring back these mixtapes, and I was blown away. So listening to WHFS and then listening to these mixtapes, hanging out at Bethesda Surf Shop, and there was Yesterday and Today Records...
Wow, we're going back to some similar places, my friend. Crazy.
When I was in high school, you were eleven, I think, discovering all this. My discovery was, of course, through all of the music I was listening to, but also, I had an Apple II+, and I have this moment in my mind when I'm playing Castle Wolfenstein...
Great game!
* ...and I hear the little German guy say, "Achtung, Achtung!" And I say to myself, "How can that come out of the computer?" So I did a bunch of research, and I realized, that's 1-bit sampling. I didn't even know what "sampling" meant. But it's 1-bit sampling using Peeks and Pokes and 6502 Assembler — through the cassette port. That's what changed my life. I eventually became a programmer at Digidesign [now Avid], I worked at the MIT Media Lab... - What are some of those moments that you had?
I so love it! I love how you're talking about this, because I'm just rebuilding an Apple IIe, and I've got the Mockingboard "C" card that has speech-synthesis abilities. And finding some of those applications, I'm like, "Wow, I'm going to end up using these on a record now." It's so cool, so interesting. The glottal sounds at the end of it — there's no way [a contemporary instrument would sound like this], because it turns into these impulse trains with these huge spaces between. It's so musical sounding now. But you know, as a kid, my formative experiences with technology and it intersecting with music are really in some of the first synths I bought. One of my first memories I have with synthesis was, before I could even afford to buy my [Roland] Juno106, I spent an entire summer mowing lawns — and getting Roland's books on modular synthesis. I never owned a modular until I was an adult, for all intents and purposes, and sitting and reading them, and saying, "Oh my God, this is what Phil Oakey is doing when he's building a Human League song. These are the exact principles he's utilizing in making that music." And making the connection that some of my heroes were actually not just songsmiths, but were technicians. That was really the connection for me. Like, "Wow, not only do I want to write this music, I want to understand how to make it, and how to utilize these tools that are available for making it."
The first computer program I wrote that was music oriented — after playing with Castle Wolfenstein — was a 1-bit sampler, using the cassette port.
I love it!
And I could hit keys, and play those samples back. But then I realized, "There's got to be a better way. I can't play it well. Maybe I should build in a system that could play something that I type in as code." I didn't even know what a sequencer was. But that's what I wrote — a sequencer that plays back 1-bit samples. What was your first moment when you sat in front of a computer...
...and wrote something? I can tell you. So I had — and I just got another one, and I'm very excited — an IBM 5150 [the original "PC"] as my first computer, and I wrote a several-page script in BASIC just using tones — a sine wave like a beep, basically — like Control-G on the Apple II. So using beeps, and changing the frequency of those beeps, and making these intervallic relationships. But my interest at such a young age was all of this micro-rhythmic stuff — instead of doing something that was based on an arbitrary length of time as a subdivision, but doing something with rhythmic subdivisions that was, for all intents and purposes, micro-rhythmic. And I realized immediately, you can take a C major arpeggio, and if each one of those notes lasts for a fraction of a second — oh my god! That's the kind of sound we now call chiptunes. And also too, I cut the speaker off my 5150 and drilled a hole, and my father would still have a panic attack if he heard this story. I drilled a hole — true story — and soldered a 1/4'' port into it so I could plug it into my little boombox. My parents didn't know what to make of me. I'm a kid with a soldering iron writing stuff in BASIC and compiling it. That's some of my first memories — writing stuff in BASIC. These simple little tone generator things that were intervallic — musical intervals but really short durations — and realizing that's a lot of the way those early sounds were created.
Have you ever thought about taking that first program you wrote on the 5150 and turning that into a free plug-in or something that someone could play with?
I wish I had it! My 5150 is long gone. Like I said, I just got another one. I had a 386 — an IBM PS/2 Model 70. A lunchbox with an amber monitor that I still have and use, that has DOS 3.0 on it, and I wrote some things for that, as well. But I really love that idea; it would be really cool. You know, looking back at some of that stuff now, I realize the inherent musicality of it. There's this thing to be said for an imposed kind of workflow that outputs something really special you've created with your need. And so, I love looking back and not just looking forward. You've sparked a little idea for me. I like that.
When I think about your career, you've been breaking boundaries. As a kid, you were breaking boundaries when the opportunities were much smaller in terms of what you had available to you, but you're still breaking boundaries today when the opportunities are much, much bigger. That's a beautiful theme in your life. But that's why I want to go back to having a plug-in that's written on the 5150 — your first digital oscillator.
[Lots of laughter] Alright. It'd raise the game. You know what I mean? It'd be so much fun. I should do something like that. That would be a lot of fun.
