I contacted Russell Frehling for a sidebar to my interview with composer Pauline Oliveros. To accompany the Oliveros article, I wanted to include a profile of Deep Listening Space's house engineer. Frehling's diverse experiences and his love of the technology of recording contained far too much breadth for the space of a sidebar.
While Tape Op has covered countless recordists with low-budget, grass-roots backgrounds in rock recording, we've talked to few grass-roots engineers in the avant-garde music world. Russell Frehling, who now runs the house studio at Pauline Oliveros's Deep Listening Space, is one of the most experienced. He's done everything from recording punk bands (and the Jim Carroll Band) to developing underwater sound fences for dolphins with Greenpeace in Japan, and his own creative pursuits involve large-scale sound installations. He's best known for his avant-garde recordings, and it's this experience that's led to his role in Oliveros's not-for-profit foundation and its studio.
"I was in a rock n roll band that got a record deal when we were 12-right when the Beatles came out. They called us the Echoes of Carnaby Street. They just changed our name to try to fit the mood of the time. That experience was outrageous for me. People didn't really have much hi-fi in their homes at the time. You pretty much listened on your parents' car radio, or you had a little box at home that held a bunch of 45s and had a little speaker in the front. It was 4 track then, at Criteria in Miami, which is a big, famous studio. You cut your instrumental tracks live in stereo, and then you had a lead vocal track and a sweetening track. That was a huge experience. I went and did some, 'Hey man, can I hang around?-just go and watch. I don't know what I learned at that age, other than to see it happening and want to do it more. I started tinkering by myself, got a little Sony tape recorder with sound on sound as a Christmas present when I was probably 13 or 14, and did a lot of work from there. All through college, [he did] a lot of classical and new music recording."
"I graduated as an undergraduate from Brandeis, and then I did [a] summer in Buffalo program. In those days, Morton Feldman ran this summer thing. They'd take a handful of young composers from around the country. They had a really top-notch music ensemble there. They'd have Morton and then a couple of guest composers. Pauline was one, and Joel Chadabe was the other. We lived in the dorm together and just became really close over the summer. She encouraged me to go to Mills, and we'd see each other on the road over the years."
Frehling "began a public access, low price, subsidized studio, and spent about 3 years there working hard, and then built my first public recording studio, probably around '74 or 5. [He] ran that til about 1980, and then did freelance stuff. I lived in Miami at the time. I was in Japan for a few years doing stuff with Greenpeace for dolphins, developing an under water sound fence that worked with dolphins."
"When I lived in the Bay Area and had a commercial studio, I did a lot of freelance work. They have a big independent film [community], they did back in the 70s in San Francisco. It was great, because I got to use automation. Everything was on sprocketed tape. You have all these transports that are set up for SMPTE time code, you have 10 tracks and 10 actual transports, 10 reels of tape. Hit a button and all 10 machines whirr up at the same time. It's expensive, so it was all very business-like-it was very different from rock n roll in the '70s. You showed up on time, you were sober. You monitored very quietly because you were there for 12 hours. You wanted to be as good at the end of the day as you were at the beginning of the day. I learned a lot from those guys."
"There was no studio after that. I would pick up and go wherever the project was going."
"People don't call me up to do a whole lot of rock n roll, especially as an independent, because there are a lot of people that are really good at it. I might be OK at it, but I wouldn't be the first guy you'd think of. If you were doing a new music project, or a classical music or jazz, anything acoustic-I got my rep in the West Coast doing jazz."
"Jim Carroll was kind of a poet kind of rocker. I did his first big hit, 'People Who Died'. He used a band that was from around Marin County. They came to us, and they didn't have a deal at the time. They came on the cheap and did these tracks, and they ended up using them."
"I worked with David Tudor during the years. I did Rainforest with him. I wasn't in it as long as some people, but I don't do good in groups. He's one of those people I just hit it off with, I had a lasting friendship with. He'd always do a long stretch at Berkeley with Merce Cunningham. They had a really small, tight-knit group that was usually Tudor, maybe David Behrman, [Takehisa] Kosugi, and occasionally somebody else."
"I play a lot of things but that's never been my strong suit, unless enthusiasm counts for something. I hold my own on stage, but I don't think of it that way. All through the '80s and even into the '90s, until there just stopped being that sort of thing in America, a lot of my commissions came from the art world. I did mostly installations, large-scale pieces that sounded all the time. I did a couple of large ones with visual artists, but for the most part the visual field was kept as neutral as possible. Sound is very tactile if you use it in the right way. It did a lot of the things that sculpture would do, except it doesn't have any mass. That was the delicate game. It became increasingly difficult to do those kinds of pieces," both in the US and abroad. Frehling's installations have run "sometimes in public buildings, the percent for the arts kind of programs that people have, [and] sometimes in museums and galleries. They were up and running in public buildings for years. There's nothing up and running now. I have a lot of interests, and it turned out that now I'm back doing a lot of engineering and I'm really busy, and it's been fun."
As a composer, "I work mostly these days, with very small [sounds], what people have come to call grains. They're just taking normal ambient noise, getting down into the waveform level, taking a few thousandths of a second of it, and looping it back on itself, so it becomes a repetitive waveform, like an oscillator with a much more complex waveform. I go through and I take all of these little parts and then rebuild the sound field with the broken down parts. These little photographs where you stop something in motion, it's much like that concept. That's my sound material, and then I perform with it live. There are several pieces I do with those kinds of materials. These days I'm exploring delicate upper harmonic series with these sounds. They'll tend to be very quiet, you'll almost feel it as much as hear it. It'll use a lot of complex panning, but very delicate sounds that are the high frequency portions of the waveforms. I'll use a MIDI keyboard sampler. I'll load a waveform per key, so it has nothing to do with pitch. The keyboard ends up just being a bunch of buttons. The playing is building much bigger complex things. Some of these things will be a whole keyboard, but it'll only be within a half step or a whole step tuning. As you develop really complex phasing and little shifts and beating, those pieces get hugely massive. [In contrast,] my installations are almost imperceptible, they're very quiet, not much happens in 'em, and they last for a long time. Sometimes I get the feeling that my performance pieces are like everything compressed down, just like 'Eeeah.' It's pretty intense. I think this new piece that I'm cooking up will be much more like the installations in the sense that they're these very delicate sounds that are moving in a space."
Oliveros "came to me several years ago and [the studio] was something we had talked about doing. I think the model was the studio at Mills College, at the Center for Contemporary Music."
Frehling's first task at Deep Listening was completing the design and construction of the space. "There were two shells that we started with. David Gamper, who is in the Deep Listening Band with Pauline, did the first part-took this old building and framed out a couple of the rooms. From there, I made a few modifications for dimensional things and non-parallellism, and treated 'em basically by ear, with diffusion and damping where required."
"It's one of my pet things to try and find ways to build good sounding rooms and get good absorption and diffusion with the world's cheapest materials. I got a bunch of surplus ceiling tiles. They're that compressed junk. Instead of using 'em as absorbers, I make little 2x2 blocks that have been cut off at angles. I will put them on some kind of a backing board and glue those little squares on. You get these patterns of oddly matched shapes. They work great, and they cost next to nothing. Then building out walls where you build boxes literally on the wall, so you have variable depth cavities. You can put a mixture of straight absorption or panel type absorption, bass traps. Pegboard becomes really handy there as a sort of resonator. There's a formula that will figure out depth."
"If you just think random, you'll do pretty well in general contouring of the room. If you can afford it, you can build a room that sounds good everywhere in the room. If you can't afford it, then the best you can do is work to have it sound good at the critical position. Since we were a non-profit and had to beg for every dollar we spent, you can guess which approach we used. It works fine. It's important what's the music you're doing. If you're doing acoustic music, it's silly to monitor loud, because the music isn't loud. It's important to match your listening levels to the music you're recording. Consequently, you're not loading the room as much by not listening really loud and having really artificially deep bass. The standing waves don't have much amplitude. You can do a lot in simple conditions in this sort of music. You just don't want things that are bizarre."
"The trouble we have, the biggest constant fight I have, and I think everybody would have this battle, is low ceilings. It's very difficult to get separation with low ceilings. A few feet makes a lot of difference, between 8 and 10 feet is huge. It's not enough energy loss by the time it hits the ceiling surface. Gobos and things like that become ineffective because the sound just bounces over the top."
"For equipment, we use hard disk. It's on a Mac, dual-processor, G4. One of the first pieces of equipment that was donated was the old, original MOTU Mark none, just a 24/08. I was using ProTools at home, a Digi001. My feeling was that it had no place in a studio where you never knew what was going to come in. There was just no flexibility to it whatsoever. It does a fine job where you control the environment. There's not enough I/O of various kinds, and you can't build on that system unless you go to full-blown ProTools, which we couldn't afford. MOTU is really great with having boxes of all shapes and sizes. We had a 308 in there that allowed us to interface with whatever came in. I think all [of these units] do about the same thing. It's just getting used to the logic, or lack thereof, of the systems. Our main converters are Metric Halo Mobile IO. We recently got the Focusrite 428, which is 4 Focusrite ISA preamps, and they have an 8-channel converter card, which is damn good, especially for the price. Over the years we moved up. I got the MOTU Mark III, which is just better all around than the other ones, but I basically don't use the converters in it. I use it as kind of the traffic cop of the system."
"We've got a big Mackie 32 input 8 bus. Pauline had gotten that when she was doing this big opera years ago. I don't like it. In 3 years, I don't think I've put anything through it. I use it like this giant monitor mixer."
"I feel that the weakest part of a digital system is the mix part. I lustily eye those boxes like the Dangerous Music that are just a mix bus. But frankly, I'm a big fan of digital. There are shortcomings to it, but I think a lot of the people that wax nostalgic about the good old days didn't go through [them]. It was an hour before every session just to clean and align and bias machines. If you were serious about it then you did that before every session. It's fun to splice tape, once, but by the 50th tape it's not fun anymore. The ability for a session to move quickly, to just quickly say 'Let's run another take,'" is a big plus of digital. "Everybody's in a rush. Come the end of the session, people say 'Can I have something to take home,' and I can at least get them something. The downside is obviously that you have to sample and bit-depth convert before you can give 'em something on a CD. The process is pretty quick, and it's getting the music. People say I have really good ears, and I don't know, I just have the ears I have. I'm a good listener. The differences I hear [between analog and digital] are very subjective. There's a certain smoothness to analog which is really nice, but would I trade it for the ability to work quickly and work smoothly and be able to afford it? Analog costs a lot of money and it costs a lot of time. Since this is a volunteer effort, we couldn't possibly do tape. People come in and you're trying to charge a low rate. One roll of tape [costs $200]. Sessions don't generally fit on one roll of tape. The tape becomes more expensive than the studio time, which is kind of silly. A lot of people come from different states and different parts of the country. They come in there for a couple of days and record, and I can get stuff back and forth to them in a hurry without incurring all kinds of charges."
"Digital as a working medium is really wonderful, and I probably wouldn't have been so keen to come out of retirement if the technology hadn't changed radically in the interim. It does make life very easy, and the sound quality is good enough, as far as I'm concerned. I don't want to be controversial about that. You still have to work to get it sounding right before it hits any recording medium, [but] then I've never felt disappointed by the recorded sound. If you AB things all day and you spend a lot of time worrying about that stuff, there's probably a difference, but in good hands, digital sounds good. In bad hands, digital sounds shit. If you push digital, it's like the chalk on the blackboard thing, it just really grates. You learn your tools, and you learn where you can push it and where you can't, and what you can be careful about. I've dug some stuff out of Pauline's archives, and some other people of her generation, and I've seen some beautifully recorded analog tapes, where the hiss is almost inaudible, and then other ones where, 'Do you really want to work on this thing?' We're going to spend a lot of time trying to de-hiss this, it wasn't that good to start with. I'm shocked at the range of stuff. Now, hiss isn't an issue, it's all kinds of other stuff. I think part of what people hear as the brittleness of digital is the lack of noise and distortion. It's a different kind of distortion. There's certainly distortion in digital. Obviously, the higher the sample rate, and 24 bit has never been a problem, but the [lower] sample rate does lose those delicate little corners in the upper frequencies. [88.2 or 96 KHz] is certainly more open sounding, I'm the first to admit that. But often, for quickness and ease, if the session calls for it, I just record in 44.1/24, especially if it's a lot of amplified instruments. I definitely don't hear a lot of difference at that point. For acoustic ensembles where it's delicate, I will run it at 88.2 [KHz]. In my mind the math [to convert to 44.1] is easier. If it's easier for me, it must be easier for the computer-just cut it in half, it's gotta be better than rounding off all those numbers. The difference is a small percentage at that point, and there's already a noticeable improvement, and that's been fine. The more rounding off the computer has to do, I think the more errors creep in. That's what I hear when I read the stuff that other people who spend a lot of time worrying about it tell me."
"I think the first good preamp we got was the old CLM, which is from Scotland, a really nice class A, very simple but very functional. We use the dbx 586, which I think is one of the most under-rated preamps in history. It's very clean, very nice, good headroom. The EQ on it is pretty vanilla. It's not a very tube-y tube amp, but it's a real tube amp, 250 Volts across the plate. It's definitely not a character amp. The music that we do, day in and day out, is acoustic, what you hear is what you get."
