Were you an electronics hobbyist as a child? Did you build crystal radio sets and fuzz boxes and hang out at Radio Shack?
Not really. For an academic art historian, my father was quite the handyman — good carpenter, plumber, car mechanic, basic household electrical — and these were the skills he tried to pass on to his kids. He was never happier than when something broke down or got clogged up. I got a toolbox for my sixth birthday, and on Sundays we repaired appliances, built shelves, and went to the dump instead of church. I think my having learned to solder and patch together a component stereo were, for my father, the most impressive achievements of my very expensive college education. In high school I briefly tried playing electric guitar (I was terrible, even for a 13-year old), which got me interested in electronic sound. I bought an old used Tandberg reel-to-reel tape recorder and discovered a hidden switch, accessed by a screwdriver through the back panel, that when thrown set up some kind of undocumented feedback loop from output to input — adjusting the volume controls while recording manipulated weird, totally un-Scandinavian shrieking oscillation, further modulated by head echo (3 speeds!) and tape saturation limiting — very cool. I was hooked. I have a theory about the rise of American homemade electronic music: it involves the Signetics NE/SE566, a chip I became aware of in 1972 in my last year of high school.
When did you make the jump from simple analog circuits to the world of digital electronics?
Almost from the start. For a long time one of the biggest problems for non-engineers making audio circuits was power supplies — they were difficult to build, and always seemed to contribute excessive hum and other noise. Early integrated circuits [ICs] consumed a fair amount of power, only functioned within a narrow range of supply voltages, and required two "symmetrical" supplies. "CMOS" [Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor] was the first family of digital ICs designed for low power operation over a wide range of voltages — they run for days on a 9-volt battery. CMOS chips became available on the hobbyist market in the mid-1970s. A number of us sound guys figured out how to make noises with these chips, which was surprisingly easy, if never intended by the designers. In fact, when it came time to develop a course in "electronics for dummies" at my art school almost 30 years later, I went back to these mid-'70s circuit designs — they run the first time, every time — and they now form the core of my book on hardware hacking. Because they were digital chips, they suggested "digital ideas". My own circuitry started to go in the direction of "proto-computer instruments". I built circuits that combined sound generation with logical operations of various sorts. I was inspired by the "coordination" scores of Christian Wolff from the early 1960s — I saw his pieces like "For 1, 2, or 3 People" [1964] as presaging computer music: all those notations that instructed the players not to play notes by following a metronomic time base, but by linking their actions to those of other players as if by logic circuits. So I built instruments that could only be played by multiple players — sounds were generated when two players did the same thing at the same time — for example, pressing the same key on two separate keypads ["ANDS", 1978]. I took a course in computer programming in college in 1974 or so. I figured this would be the future of electronic music, so I should learn it, but sitting in front of a mainframe seemed miles away from the concert stage. A few years later Paul DeMarinis said I should get a KIM-1, one of the first generation of affordable, single-board microcomputers. I demurred, saying I didn't like computers. Paul replied, "Don't think of it as a computer, think of it as a big, expensive digital chip." That did it. I bought a VIM — a slightly turbocharged KIM: 1 MHz 8-bit CPU, 1 k RAM (expandable to 4 k!), 6-digit numeric LED display, a small calculator-style keypad for writing programs, audio jacks for connecting a cassette recorder for saving and retrieving data files using finicky fax-like tones. It really was not so different from designing circuits — programming machine code makes you think about waveforms, about voltages going on and off one at a time, hopefully in the right sequence — very different from Max, SuperCollider or Pro Tools. I couldn't figure out how to make a D/A converter, so my "computer music" consisted of direct digital output from the computer — just 1s and 0s, square waves at different frequencies. To vary the timbre I'd make trains of different patterns of ons and offs. My first computer music was as much about the hardware of the machine as it was about the software I wrote. It was pretty raw. I listen now to pieces I did then and think, "Wow, that is so much more extreme than anything I've done since" [like "Little Spiders", 1980]. Most of the composers of my generation who started soldering their own circuit instruments in the 1970s went over to programming by the end of the decade; they rode the wave from KIM to AIM to Commodore 64 to Apple II to Atari to Macintosh and never looked back at hardware. I always kept one foot in hardware and one in software. One thing I learned from David Tudor was that music seems to get more interesting when you add more connections: duos generally are more engaged than solos; a guitar sounds better though a distortion pedal and amp than it does unplugged; and lots of cheap circuits patched together with some feedback loops sound way more interesting than any MIDI keyboard. Unfortunately, computers tend to be permutationally impoverished in the connection department. Yeah, I know someone's going to say, "what about plug-ins?" But it's not the same without real patch cords. So after a few initial forays into pure, computer-generated sound I settled into an impractical, but richer strategy of combining programs I wrote with hardware I built or hacked. Around 1980 I got interested in early hip-hop DJs like Grandmaster Flash, and I wondered what it would sound like to have a dozen turntables cross fading on beat, instead of just two. So I built a crude automated mixer that could detect the beat in 16 channels of audio material and cut between any two channels when they came into sync on a downbeat. The performance consisted of constantly "feeding" the mixer with different audio material — tape loops, drum machines, electronic toys, radios, etc. — and letting the computer work out a perfectly seamless, if illogical, mix of these otherwise unrelated sounds — a sort of schizophrenic form of dub ["Is She/He Really Going Out With Him/Her/Them", 1982]. Later I used the system to tighten up the punch-ins on a more overtly rhythmic record of mine [Devil's Music, 1986] and a few tracks on an LP I produced for your band, Western Eyes [Western Eyes, 1984].
In the 1980s, after a number of years working in "pure" electronic music and acoustics and feedback-based music, you started tinkering with electric guitars. How did that come about, and what exactly is a "backwards electric guitar"?
Moving back to NYC in 1980 after college I was slowly drawn into a music scene that was more about playing than soldering or programming. I realized that guitar bands had a serious theatrical edge over knob- twiddlers, so I decided quite pointedly to make instruments and pieces that could compete for attention on the noisy New York stage. My first strategy was the "backwards electric guitar": I connected amplifier outputs to the pickups of some pawnshop guitars via some cheap matching transformers so that sounds plugged into the amp would resonate the guitar strings and turn the instrument into a mechanical filter — like a spring reverb, only one you could "play" by fretting chords and muffling strings — as if an EBow had an input jack. I asked some musicians to stand on stage and work their left hands while I sent a whole bunch of different sounds into the strings. It looked just enough like any other band of the time that we managed to open for Rhys Chatham at CBGBs in 1982, but it didn't really sound like one ["A Letter From My Uncle", 1984].
