David First: Microtones and Notekillers

I initially encountered David First performing a composition of his microtonal drones called "My Veil Evades Detection; My Veil Defies Exhaustion; My Veil and I Divorce" at an old rec room called Cuando on New York's Lower East Side. The piece's dense, slowly evolving microtonal drones are typical of the work that has earned him respect in New York's avant-garde music community. While First is best-known today for these drone based compositions, in the past, he has played guitar — in one of Cecil Taylor's large ensembles at a legendary Carnegie Hall concert and with former Television guitarist Richard Lloyd [ Tape Op #56 ]. Ecstatic Peace will soon release a CD compiling the work of the Notekillers, his late-'70s punk-era band. "It's always been a weird pendulum swing with me, from totally noncommercial extended sound-oriented things to song- oriented things." He brought his experience recording and playing so many styles of music to his new pop album, Universary, most of which he recorded himself at home.

First originally encountered recording and audio-related technology through his family during his childhood in Philadelphia. "My grandmother was an opera singer, so she always had tape recorders in her home, which I think was kind of exotic back in the early '60s when I was a little kid." His father was "an electrical engineer, he's retired now. He always had interesting devices around, like audio oscillators and electronic test equipment. He used to show me little tricks like how to record things and play them backwards, or how to speed things up, the whole Chipmunks thing, or slow them down, the Darth Vader thing. That was pretty mind- blowing at the time. He told me what a Theremin was, and we built one for an 8th grade science project. My dad was also the first to explain certain acoustical phenomena to me. I remember once I was playing around with recording an oscillator and then sweeping another oscillator against it, and it was like, 'What is going on here?' I would hear this third tone that was occurring when I would get these oscillators' tones near each other, and he told me it was called heterodyning — two tones subtracting from each other to create a third."

Having played guitar much of his life, First's early influences were guitar players, such as Sandy Bull and John Fahey, and guitar-oriented rock bands such as the Grateful Dead and the Yardbirds. "There's a couple of tapes around of my high school band. Somebody always had some sort of reel-to-reel tape recorder. At some point in the early '70s I acquired an Akai M-9 sound on sound 2-track. I traded an old guitar amp for it. I used it for a lot of my first experiments with sound, as opposed to whatever you want to call writing songs, and also to develop the Notekillers material later on. I still have the carcass around here, though it ceased to work years ago. It slid off of a car- hood one sad, drunken Winter evening many years ago."

Gradually, First's interest in rock music diminished, as he felt the music had grown less vital, and he grew interested in experimental jazz and avant-garde composers. "In the mid-'70s, I took some courses at Princeton University in analog electronic music techniques and also in digital computer music. At that time, computer music meant the IBM 360, which took up a whole floor of a building. Once you punched out all your cards and fed them into the computer, you had to go to another building, half a mile down the road, and hang out for a half-hour or so for your D/A conversion to finish, and that was if nobody else was using the computer. Sometimes you had to come back the next day — it was crazy. And that whole computer wasn't nearly as powerful as today's laptop. The teacher I had at the time, a graduate student named Michael Dellaira, told me, 'Someday you're going to have a computer on your desk,' and I just looked at him like, 'Yeah, right'. We became friends, and he arranged it so I could use the analog studio. The graduate students there were all deeply into the IBM 360, the whole digital thing. At that point analog was like the dark ages. 'We don't want to deal with tape and cutting and splicing and patch cords.'"

"I was fascinated by analog because it was really hands-on. They had a Buchla [synthesizer] there with metal touch-sensitive plates. I found it more liberating than the piano-keyboard style synthesizers, which everybody in the pop music world was using to do Emerson Lake & Palmer licks. The Buchla wasn't oriented towards that. I just took every patch cord you could plug into it and did these free improvisations. I have A LOT of tapes of that. You HAD to record everything, because you were never gonna be able to repeat anything later. They had two Ampex reel to reels there — a 4-track and a 2- track. I would go there at night when nobody was around. I brought my guitar sometimes and plugged it into the patch-bay and used that to trigger voltages. I was always a little paranoid that Milton Babbitt, who I used to run into in the hallway, was going to walk in and see me jamming. It was still a pretty uptight place at that time, but I guess I got away with it."

By 1977, First's renewed interest in rock led him to assemble a new trio, the Notekillers, in which he played guitar. While the Notekillers clearly reflected his long- standing love of psychedelic music and his awareness of "the whole CBGB's scene," they also assimilated First's influences from free jazz and minimalist composition. Their music loosely resembles the New York no wave bands that existed at the same time, but with a more direct and less fragmented rhythmic sensibility.

"We rehearsed six nights a week in the basement of a beauty parlor that was owned by the bass player's father. Every time I smell hairspray, I still think of that space. We didn't do anything to make it particularly recording-friendly. The one thing we did do, and we were paying for it every month, was we had a sound system made for us by Community Light and Sound. It had 2 pairs of horns and these monstrous bass cabinets. We had a full-time sound guy who was at every rehearsal — he was like our fourth member. Our feeling was that if we were going to be all instrumental, which was fairly unusual, we didn't want to be at the mercy of sound people that didn't know what we were doing. Most sound systems at the time were still built around vocals. Other bands would ask if they could use our set-up, and it wasn't really designed for vocals, it was designed for what we wanted to do. It sounded beautiful for us, but they would end up thinking we were sabotaging them, because it didn't sound like a typical system."

"We all lived together in a big house, and one of the guys who lived with us talked his brother, who was a lawyer, into buying us a Teac 3340 4-track. That was what the Notekillers single was recorded on. Our sound guy became our recording engineer. There were some subtle overdubs on the A side, 'The Zipper', but the song was basically done [live], with one track for each instrument. There was a solo in the middle and an extra guitar part at the end. There are also some maracas and some clusterous saw-tooth waves I mixed down separately that sneak out of the mix near the end. The B side, 'Clockwise', was a totally live recording with no overdubs."

"The Notekillers made an aborted attempt at a second single, where we tried to do something a little bit more ambitious, not sticking to our usual way of working. We thought we should get more elaborate and sophisticated for our second release, so we tried to do some things with overdubbing and processing. We thought it was a step up. We didn't use our regular engineer who knew our sound. We still did it in the basement, but we brought in somebody who had an 8-track Tascam 80-8, which was too much for us. The guy was a friend, and it wasn't really anything that was his fault. We just jumped all over the idea that, 'Oh my God, you don't have to do everything at once.' It was kind of a disaster. It didn't have our energy, and it wasn't the greatest performance." The Notekillers broke up, and First moved on to northern New Jersey and then New York, where he has lived since 1984.

A recent article in Mojo Collections magazine brought First in touch with long-time Notekillers fan Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, whose Ecstatic Peace label will soon release a CD compilation of their material. "We're going to include the two singles, but the best thing I've found for the rest of it is a live concert that was recorded on an 8-track cartridge recorder that our sound guy owned. I found it at the bottom of a box of cassettes that I've been lugging around New York for almost twenty years now."

After moving to New York, First played briefly in Richard Lloyd's band, then wrote a set of new wave pop songs. He recorded them "on a 1" Fostex 16-track at Moogy Klingman's studio. I chose it because Moogy was involved with Todd Rundgren, and I've always loved Todd Rundgren's songs. It was a typical one or two day thing. I went in there with a band of musicians I had been rehearsing on the Lower East Side. We did a 4 song demo. Nothing much came of it. It was another in a series of frustrating experiences. As I was finishing the demo, the band I had put together, which was a crack band, was breaking up. I had pretty much had it with that round of the singer-songwriter thing anyway."

"I was living on Canal Street at the time, right near the Holland Tunnel, my first place when I finally moved to New York. Every day, especially at rush hour in the morning and at night, there was this incredible sustained symphony of car horns outside my window. It didn't just make writing these semi-delicate pop songs difficult, it totally blew them out of my head. It just really was impossible to compete with it, and at the same time, it was a really beautiful sound influence. You'd hear these people, dozens of them, and you could almost swear they were playing with each other, although it was probably more like 'Fuck You' to each other. It wasn't really trading off melodies — it was trading off insults and cursing, although I suppose that's a type of musical communication."

He had discovered microtonal pioneer Harry Partch "when one of his albums got re-released on Columbia in the late- '60s." Influenced by everything from Partch to the car horns in his daily life, First incorporated microtones more prominently into his compositional approach. "The pitches of the overtone series diverge wildly from the scale that you'll hear on any tempered instrument such as a guitar or a piano, but these are some amazingly powerful, beautiful tones. As a guitarist, [there is] a lot of that you do intuitively, like harmonics and string bending in blues. When you're tuning the guitar, you learn to hear beating tones you're supposed to get rid of. I was already using these ideas, like purposely creating beating tones, as far back as the Notekillers. Systematically exploring them didn't come until the mid-'80s when I started using synthesizers again." "Once digital synthesizers became prevalent, I was able to isolate precise microtones and make compositions for them. My first systematic composition for synthesizers was for the Casio CZ1000. It was programmable, and it was affordable. When the whole CZ series came out, all of the sudden you could buy a digital synthesizer for two hundred fifty dollars. You didn't buy them at music stores — you bought them at camera and watch shops in midtown. They weren't even considered musical instruments — they were kind of toys. I had a group for awhile called the World Casio Quartet. We got a lot of mileage out of that [name]. We used to brag about how we had over a thousand dollars of equipment on stage!"

"According to Casio, the only microtuning possible on their instruments was to have the equal-tempered tone plus a second pitch that was slightly off by a globally programmable amount. I figured out a way to trick the synthesizer into bypassing the equal-tempered tone so you would only get the detuned pitch. I programmed all these different patches at different microtonal deviations. We would play one note on each keyboard and just keep changing programs. The piece would be about how virtuosic you could be about changing programs. We did some recording with that band at Gramavision, which was a nice studio in lower Manhattan. They had a deal where you could do an 8 hour session for four hundred dollars. We treated it as a live performance, direct to tape. Alex Noyes acted as my interface with [the technical parts of recording]. In those days, whenever I needed somebody to tell me whether something was possible technically or how to do something, Alex was the guy I would turn to. He arranged this session. He wasn't the actual engineer at this session, a guy named Tim Casey engineered the session, Alex was the translator."

"Live, I was really into exploiting flaws. If I discovered a loose heating duct or window that would resonate at a certain frequency, the people who set up the gig would be apologizing for it and I would make it the centerpiece of that evening's performance. If I could make something rattle, I would definitely go for it. We were really into beating tones and creating these sonic masses — trying to make a room explode. That was hard to capture in the studio. The one piece that was up to snuff out of the Gramavision session was the one that ended up on my first CD, Resolver. The rest of it was a little bit too pristine. You hear this from a lot of bands, I'm sure. They do this really great live thing, and then they go into the studio, and they're a little careful or they're a little ill at ease or the room doesn't give them what they're used to. I've had that experience a few times, where I didn't have enough recording experience or time to create the magic in the studio, which is a whole art in itself."

"Even before I was doing things with the Casios, I [used] an old Heathkit tone generator, the same one I used on 'The Zipper'. I bought a [Tascam] 244 PortaStudio when they first came out, and I used that for awhile. When I was doing the Casios. I didn't have a computer or anything that would trigger [MIDI], so I would record directly [to the Tascam]. I would record one pitch, and then I'd find another one that was cool, and I'd record that pitch. And then I'd record a third one, and then go back and record something for the fourth one that would supercede the first one, and build it up. That's how the Casio quartet pieces were built, just overdubbing on a PortaStudio."

"I avoided formalizing percussion in my music for a long time, because I couldn't figure out what to do with it. Coming from a rock/pop background, I didn't just want to do the microtonal thing on top of a pounding 4/4 beat. I felt like I was either going to do something analogous to what I was doing with pitch, or I wasn't going to deal with it at all. A lot of my early microtonal pieces were soundscapes, drifting sounds. Some of the Casio quartet pieces had rhythmic things going on, but not percussion instruments or sounds. My approach by the time of The Good Book's (Accurate) Jail of Escape Dust [First's second CD] was to use [percussion] in the free jazz kind of way, where I guided somebody to create some rhythmic heat underneath. It was more intuitive [and] still avoided the 4/4 thing." With Good Book, First incorporated his rock and avant-garde jazz influences into a more academic compositional structure. The piece starts quietly with subtle drones and the resulting interference patterns. These drones never disappear as the piece evolves, but they interact with less rigidly structured and often more aggressive playing. Good Book builds through an hour to a prominent climax.

"As I got more involved with tuning, I became less satisfied with what was possible on my instruments. About five years ago, I discovered the computer software Csound, which allowed me to do things that I was never able to do on any commercially available product. You can program such fine degrees of anything — I've used it mostly to create pitches for drone pieces. It really changed my life. The piece at Cuando was all done with Csound. I know how to use maybe 2% of its potential, but I really know how to use that 2%."

"I'm interested in what I call gestural improvisation, where the actual pitched material will be simple, and the improvisation is built around filtering, detuning, and getting inside the rhythms. Often, It's a virtuosic test of how SLOW you can play. I've used the Peavey PC1600 [MIDI fader board] for a lot of live [performances]. I just got a new toy, this MidiMan Oxygen 8. It's a small keyboard, I think it's got 25 keys on it. It's designed specifically to work with your computer to drive soft synths, and it has 8 programmable continuous controller knobs. I just got it a week or two ago, and I think it's going to be cool."

First's new album, Universary, marks his attempt to incorporate his microtonal explorations with his pop background. He spent several years recording it, mostly in the small studio in the loft space where he lives. "The first truly satisfying studio experience I've ever had is the one that I've had the past few years. I was finally able to make a studio in my home, and not [have] to do everything in a day, or a week, on unfamiliar equipment, with somebody else who didn't know what was in my head. Also, for about 10 years I would compose a piece for about half a year, rehearse it twice, and perform it once in front of 50 people. I just said, 'The next CD I want to put out is not going to be a studio rehashing of something that was created for live performance.' I wanted to create a controlled object. I wanted to create something that was made for the studio, in the studio, by the studio. I started acquiring the kind of equipment I needed to do that."

"The first question people would ask me after hearing what I was working on is, 'What are you going to do with this stuff? How are you going to do it live?' I would say, 'I don't know, I don't care. I'm not even thinking about it.' If the Beatles can do it, I can do it. Which is, I guess, a certain kind of arrogance, but I suppose they created the model. It's just the idea that you can do something in the studio and you didn't think about the practicalities of live performance."

"By this point, I had a significant amount of experience with MIDI and sequencing. I was using an Atari 1040 from 1987 until about 1995. The Ataris were amazing — I still have one. When I finally got my first Macintosh, I was able to explore actual digital audio on my own. Up to that point I was always at the mercy of somebody else's expertise. I had done some digital editing on some pieces earlier on at Harvestworks studio with Alex, and it just seemed like such magic to me, to be able to fix things and move things around and make copies of things."

"When I was using the Atari 1040, I was using Notator, which is sort of the granddaddy of what became Logic Audio. I kind of went around the block using 4 or 5 different sequencers, checking them out, before I finally ended up with Logic Audio. At first I was using the Audiowerk card, which was a very nice card, especially for using with Logic — it was pretty seamless. When I wanted to go to 24 bit, I got the Korg Oasys, which is a pretty interesting card. It never caught on, and if there's a reason why, maybe somebody can tell me. It was highly overpriced when it first came out, which didn't help. I bought it after the first price drop, but then it dropped unbelievably. When it first came out, it was like 2 grand and now I hear it's like $350. It's got a built-in synthesizer that's very nice. Plus it has a software mixer and some great effects that came in handy because they don't tax the host CPU. I don't have a lot of outboard gear. I have one hardware synth. The next step after the Casio was a Yamaha TG-77 synthesizer, and then I got a Kurzweil K2000R, which I used a lot until fairly recently."

First gradually assembled his home studio around his Macintosh. "The first things I bought, besides an old 7200/90 PowerMac, were the Mackie 1202 VLZ and the Event 20/20 powered monitors. I was using an old Fisher hi-fi amplifier that I had hanging around for years. I didn't get this Samson Servo-170 until maybe a year or so ago, when I definitely wanted to make sure whatever I was doing was going to be somewhat state of the art, at least for a home studio. I've also upgraded my computer every couple of years, most recently to a G4 450 dual processor."

"Another one of my first purchases was a SansAmp [GT2]. I've never really had a great guitar amp — I still don't. Living in a building with neighbors and not really being that [technical] about recording guitar, I just would just as soon plug it into a SansAmp and plug it into the board and get a cool sound right away. Not too long after that I got a [Line 6] Pod when they came out, and that made things even better. I'll tweak something to death if it's an audio sequence, but when it comes to recording my guitar, I just want to plug it in, get something I can live with, and just do a track. I'll go for it and try my damnedest to get it on the first take, because that's where the energy and the inspiration is. If you have to pick the two bars out of a 10 minute improvisation that actually fits what you're looking for, cool, but don't try to perfect it. I'll very rarely even do a second stab at it because, almost always, the second shot is a weak attempt at recreating the first one."

"I was doing mixes [on the Events] that sounded good here, and I would take them to friends' places, and they just didn't sound the same. I had always noticed that a lot of people had [Yamaha] NS10s. Whenever I could get through an article in a recording magazine, they would always mention the NS10s. The big line was 'We hate 'em but everybody's got 'em, so we use 'em.' I don't even 'hate 'em' — maybe something's wrong with me — I like the way they sound. It allowed me to feel more confident that whatever I was doing would translate. When it got to a serious point in the project, [co-producer Joshua Fried and I] still took it around to different places and listened to it on different types of [systems]. We went back and forth [between the Events and the NS10s], and if [mixes] sounded good on both, then we really knew we had something. It was a little tricky because, doing recording in a square, small room like mine is the worst of worlds. If you'd listen [in one place], and you'd listen 5 feet away, it sounds completely different. We were just as close as possible to having the speakers right in our face, so we wouldn't have weird reflections."

"I'm still astounded by the idea that you have to create a commercial recording that's gonna sound good on every type of ridiculous speaker combination in the world, from somebody's crappy home Radio Shack thing to somebody's state of the art multi-thousand dollar sound system. It's such a daunting idea to me that it has to sound good on every one of those systems, let alone boom boxes and headphones and Walkmans. It's the craziest thing in the world to me."

While Universary began as a completely solo project, First eventually sought help from friends with both technical issues and musical performances. "Joshua Fried is a really great new music composer, but he's also had more commercial experience than I have, as far as doing remixes and doing some pop producing. I brought him in to take care of things that I was not that savvy at. Sometimes he would cringe at the sound of some of the guitar recording, but most of the time he was able to work with it." Guest musicians included trumpeter Roy Campbell Jr., vocalist Shelley Hirsch, harpist Zeena Parkins, and cellist Jane Scarpantoni.

"I did my first round of vocals here at home. People started telling me, 'Everything sounds really cool but you've got to do something about the sound of the vocals, they're not up to snuff.' I had this ElectroVoice RE1000 mic that was a decent mic, but I was trying to make it do everything, and my studio was not set up to do vocals properly. Luckily, I had met Yianni Papadoupolis through the Logic E-mail list that I belonged to for awhile. Yianni has a much more well-equipped commercial dance, hip-hop studio, Track Factory in Astoria, Queens. He's got a lot of outboard gear, great mics, and an actual vocal room. I just spent the next year and a half going up there, recording vocals, burning audio files, and bringing them back here. It's kind of the best of both worlds. I could bring my tracks there and record what I needed to record and bring it back here. I would do a bunch of takes of the song and generally I got what I wanted after some comping. If I didn't, I went back and did it again. I did some other recording there for the Universary CD, including some live strings. There was one case where I tried re-recording an acoustic guitar track out there, but I just couldn't get the vibe, so I ended up using the one I did here."

"One of my main indulgences was I had [Universary] mastered at Sony by one of their senior mastering engineers, Joe Palmaccio. I've had my share of disappointing recording experiences. I spent so much time and energy to make sure I had everything exactly the way I wanted it, or as best as I could imagine it. I definitely did not want to go to somebody's place who says 'Yeah I'm a mastering engineer' and [have them] bring out their Waves plug-ins. I really wanted to have it done by a guy who had done some commercial pop music. Whether it turns out in the real world that the CD is pop music or not, I wanted to at least have passed through that filter and come out the other end. It was important to me, [even if] it's voodoo or superstition. The sound engineer himself was downplaying the importance of what they do, saying, 'People think that they can come here, and I'm gonna make it into something, but you already have to have done the work. I'm just applying a certain kind of polish to it.' He definitely cleaned up a lot of whatever problems there were that we hadn't gotten to, low-end [and] midrange issues, and [he] just put a little sparkle on the top end. We felt like we were 98% there before we went in. His job was to just add that extra little magic."

Because Universary's songs rely on vocal melodies to provide their organization, they lean toward a pop idiom, even when they follow untraditional verse/chorus structures or exceed 10 minutes in length. They combine pop elements, which sometimes resemble mid-'80s commercial hits, with slowly evolving drones and extended technique solos. In some sections, the pop elements drop out completely and the drones move to the foreground.

"A lot of the things on Universary are built around just- intonation tunings. Most of the tunes have pedal-tone drones going through [them]. Sometimes it's the root tone or sometimes it's the fifth, but in every case they go through cycles where one tone stays constant and the other slides up by about 20 cents and back. Pythagoras developed this system where you go through the cycle of pure fifths, 3 to 2 ratios, in order to create a scale. It's called the Comma of Didymus. I use it as an interesting way of creating a second tone that's about as wide as you can get from a tone and still be called that tone. The ratio is actually 81 to 80. It's a nice theoretical idea, but at the same time it seems to have an hypnotic effect on the listener"

"Just intonation is all based on the overtone series, a set of ratios derived from the measurements of a vibrating string. What's generally considered a perfect fifth in traditional music theory is a 3 to 2 ratio in just intonation. What's called a major third is a 5 to 4 ratio, although already by the major third it's diverging by a significant amount, like 14 cents lower from standard tuning. If you're talking about 100 cents being a half step, that's already a significant amount. What I started to do somewhere in the early '90s, was apply those same ratios to rhythms. I'd have the pitches that were being played rhythmically executed by the same ratio. A lot of the music in my opera The Manhattan Book of the Dead was based around this idea of creating rhythms that were 5 to 4 rhythms and 4 to 3 rhythms and 3 to 2 rhythms — they're really great polyrhythms. The grooves on Universary were built around these same combinations."

After finishing his opera, First came to an important realization that has driven his work with Universary and beyond. "I was no longer interested only in creating these mesmerizing sensations that would have an immediate visceral impact, but I also wanted to hit people on an emotional level. I want to have it all" — and record it at home too.