INTERVIEW: Carl Stone

Carl Stone. Photo by Samantha Gore. Courtesy of Carl Stone.

INTERVIEW
Carl Stone

Carl Stone is an acclaimed computer music composer known for pioneering the usage of sampling in an experimental music context. He recently released a new compilation of archival material titled Electronic Music from 1972-2022 on the Unseen Worlds label. Stone is currently on a tour of the US and will be performing at the Empty Bottle on Oct. 17th, and will be giving a talk at SAIC on Oct. 18th.

By Levi Dayan

So I wanted to start by talking about your newest release, Electronic Music from 1972-2022. This is the third in a series of archival releases. Was there anything in particular that made you want to revisit your archive?

Well, this is the year that I turned 70. And so, keeping that in mind and reflecting back on my own musical history, which goes back for nearly 50 years, I thought it might be nice to sort of put my work in an overall context by presenting some of my earliest works with some my most recent and fill in some of the gaps in between.

How much of this album consists of previously unreleased material?

I guess it’s about 50/50 new material, and then some material which was released on smaller labels and is now out of print or out of distribution. So that’s part of the reasoning.

As a composer, you’re obviously known for working with samples. And so I think, in a sense, you’ve always been kind of working with an archive in your work. Has that colored your approach to revisiting your own archive on these releases?

I mean, you’re absolutely correct. I have been working with sampled musical material, and there is a little bit of a kaleidoscopic looking glass-type feel when I start to examine my own work. I haven’t really sampled my own sampling [laughs] so to speak. But I sort of keep an eye on musical context.

Most of your new releases have been on the Unseen Worlds label. How did that relationship come about?

I think I was approached by the label around 2007, maybe. At the time they were just getting started and their whole approach was to re-release things that had come out in years past on digital formats and help them reach different audiences. So they were interested in my first album, an LP that came out on the Wizard label back in 1983 titled Woo Lae Oak. It was great for me because Woo Lae Oak is a one hour piece that was created originally for the radio, and putting it out on an album really meant kind of compromising it because there’s no way to fit one hour of music on an LP record. So they proposed putting it on CD, it seemed like a great idea to me and I was very happy to have their interest. That was the initial point of contact. They’re wonderful people to work with, and as time went on we began to think about releasing some of my other music. We thought about maybe re-releasing my first CD, which is something I put out myself called Four Pieces. We discussed other ideas, and it was a process that took two, maybe even three years to kind of hone what that release would be. And it finally settled into the Electronic Music from the Seventies and Eighties release, which was all pre-existing material, some of which had been previously released but most of which had not. That got good critical attention, it was the number one archival release in The Wire’s yearly roundup, and so we’ve continued on after that.

I know Phill Niblock did the liner notes for the Woo Lae Oak album. How did you two know each other?

I’ve known Phill Niblock since 1975 or 1976. You know, Phil is a stalwart of the New York experimental music scene, both as a composer and also as a kind of impresario with his own series, which he hosted at his loft for many years. And so when I got out of CalArts, everybody said “you know, if you go to New York, you gotta meet Phil,” so that’s really how things got started there. I’m a big fan of his music, and I was really very honored that he agreed to write the liner notes for my release.

I don’t think I’d say this about any of your other pieces, but that specific piece has kind of a similar feel to his work, albeit with completely different material than what Phill was using.

There’s definitely a kind of commonality of aesthetic there. In that piece, the fact that it deals with the slow modulations and developments over time, that the timescale itself is expanded, that the materials are very minimal, but exploited in similar ways, use of microtones, etc … there’s a lot of things in common with his work.

You’ve said previously that there was sort of something in the air in the 80s and 90s in regards to sampling. It was definitely a revolutionary period in terms of sampling being understood as a musical form in and of itself, and obviously hip hop emerged as a cultural juggernaut during this period. That was also around the same time as people like Christian Marclay and John Oswald, who were also doing sampling in an experimental New Music context. Did you consider any of those musicians your contemporaries or did you feel you were more off in your own world musically?

Well, I knew both Christian’s work and Oswald’s as well. I proceed Oswald by a couple of years, in terms of age and so on and so forth. When I first met John, he wasn’t really working with samples.

He was originally a saxophone player, right?

Yes! That’s right, that’s how I knew him at first. His big breakthrough album Plunderphonics was the first time that I really became aware that he had been working with tape recorders and loops and pop music / pop culture and so on. So at that point, I felt a tremendous affinity but I didn’t know much about his work before then.

That Plunderphonics album is also pretty infamous because Oswald was ordered to destroy copies of it after representatives of artists like Michael Jackson complained to the Canadian Recording Industry Association. Have you ever had to deal with similar legal threats from artists you sampled?

You know, I think it’s interesting because both Plunderphonics and Negativland’s infamous U2 album came to the attention of the authorities not because of the music but because of the artwork on the covers. Plunderphonics had the kind of pre-Photoshop collage imagery of Michael Jackson’s head on a Playboy playmates body, which I thought was pure genius, and also reminds me a little bit of Marclay’s visual collage work. That and the U2 album cover (which had the U2 title in much, much bigger lettering than the actual name of the group) caused as much of the brouhaha as anything else.

I guess the moral there is that if you want to get away with doing that kind of plunderphonics, you have to stick to the music and not reference it in the cover art.

Well, I think it’s probably wiser [laughs].

Something I think about a lot, particularly in relation to discussions of intellectual property in music, is the ways in which sampling has, in a sense, always been around. In folk traditions, songs are always permuting from performer to performer, subtly evolving along the way.

I think that’s absolutely correct. I think older music has been used and repurposed by composers at least since the Baroque period, if not earlier. Bach used pre-existing folk music, and Brahms used Bach. The impulse to reevaluate a preexisting source of music in order to view it in a new way, and to create your own way of appreciating someone else’s music has enlisted for a very long time. And this is a history that I consider myself to be a part of.

You’ve contrasted your approach to composition, where the process is often made pretty clear to the listener, with the work of the serialist composers, who were intentionally trying to obscure their musical point of departure and come up with something tense and complicated. Did you have any intention of making a form of experimental music that’s perhaps easier to follow or understand for someone who isn’t schooled in that kind of modernist compositional theory?

Well, I was interested in making a kind of systematic music wherein the system itself could be easily comprehended, and my models were the minimalist composers of the 50s and 60s. A very important work for me would be a piece like Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting In A Room.” There’s a perfect example of a piece that explains itself over the course of the piece very concretely, and then the piece itself unfolds and the listener can follow it step by step. My piece “Shing Kee” is another piece like that, where the process unfolds gradually, and an attentive listener can follow along, and we take the journey together along the way without obscuring the path. But even in music where the content of the music might not overtly explain itself, such as the music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass and so on, there is a way to follow the process. You might anticipate the results and you might be surprised by what actually happens. All these things were really interesting for me. It wasn’t the sole motivation for me, but I was very interested in the idea. That’s not to say that I don’t respect music whose complications sort of obscure itself from the listener, but it just wasn’t my preference then, and I suppose it wouldn’t be today.

You attributed your discovery of sampling to a period in which you were working in a library dubbing vinyl records onto cassettes and hearing all of these disparate sounds playing at the same time. You’ve also said that you discovered a lot of formative music through listening to the radio growing up. Do you think that kind of musical discovery is possible in the age of the internet?

I think in a way, it’s more possible now. We have so much exposure and attention being given to the music of the world, and retrospective attention being given to these recordings that I discovered back when I was working in a dungeon-like setting in that library. The recordings I found from the Deutsche Grammaphone Archiv series, or the Ocora label, or the UNESCO recordings, and so and and so forth, are much easier to find online now. In a way, of course, there’s a normative factor that kind of flattens everything out, and there’s so much musical information out there now that things might get sort of lost in the glut. But it’s all available for sure.

You said in an interview that as a result of this period of discovery, you basically tuned out pop culture for 30 years. Yet, on your album Stolen Car you’re working with samples of Mitski and Ariana Grande, and this new Electronic Music album includes a deconstruction of Aqua’s “Barbie Girl.” Did you start paying more attention to pop culture at a certain point?

No, I never did and still don’t. Those things have sort of popped into my head because of random encounters, like hearing something walking down the street or in a restaurant or cafe, and sort of sensing the musical potential for re-mixing and recontextualizing them. So it’s not like I’m tuning into top 40 radio or following what the artists of today are doing in a pop context. If I encounter something, I just take it from there.

That’s interesting, because I know you name your albums and pieces after various restaurants you’ve visited, and that you do that as kind of a way to not impose meaning on your pieces by naming them. But maybe there is some meaning to that considering these restaurants seem to expose you to music that has an impact on your work.

Yeah, I guess so, I’d never thought of it that way, but you could say that. Certainly spending time in Thai restaurants in Los Angeles in the 80s, I probably heard some Thai music in the background on their sound system that might have had an influence on me. I remember my first encounter with “Barbie Girl” was walking around Berlin in about 1997 in the Alexanderplatz and just hearing it blasting out of some store and wondering “what’s this all about?”

I read that you were in a jazz-rock band with Z’EV in the 60s. Do any recordings of that band exist?

I wouldn’t call it a jazz rock band. We were sort of a progressive Western improvisational ensemble that took most of its influence from groups like the Soft Machine, in their early iterations. Me and Z’EV, and James Stewart, we all attended concerts together in Los Angeles in the 60s and 70s. We saw Hendrix perform live and the Soft Machine opened. It was sort of convenient; their instrumentation of keyboard, bass and drums match our particular lineup. I played keyboards, Z’EV played drums, Stewart played bass. We also listened to Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, Harry Partch, John Coltrane and so on, and the music that we listened to at the time sort of got integrated into it. But to answer your question, there somewhere might be a recording of this band that was made under the crudest of possible circumstances, by hanging a mic in the garage with a reel-to-reel tape recorded, and if I ever were to put my hands on it, I’d have to seriously think about the wisdom of letting anybody else hear it [laughs].

We’ve talked a lot about your process for putting together compositions, but do you have a similar process for putting together albums? Do you view your albums as just collections of your work or as a piece in and of itself?

I think it’s very important to structure an album like a musical composition, because I think that, in music, form is very important. And so I give attention to form when I compose, and I give attention to form when I curate an album and structure it. So the answer is very definitely yes.

Do you have that same kind of attention to form when you’re performing live and improvising with musicians?

The improvising is a little bit different because it’s a matter of shared control over both the form and the content. And usually, when I improvise with other players, we don’t make a lot of pre- performance decisions about form, but we might have sort of a general idea of how we want to start, or how we want to end or how long we want to play. When I’m performing solo, I’m definitely keeping form and structure in mind, but the smaller note-by-note details might be different every time.

You did a series of interviews for KPFK called Imaginary Landscapes, featuring very prominent musicians like Brian Eno, Frank Zappa and Terry Riley, which has recently been rereleased by Dublab. Did the experience of talking with all of these legendary musicians have any impact on your own work?

Of course! I mean, when you’re engaged in a conversation with someone like a Frank Zappa or a Terry Riley or a Morton Subotnik, how could it not. I was honored to do them, and they were very educational to me. I learned a lot from them, just through those conversations, sharing and contrasting points of view.

BRIDGE AUDIO’S CARL STONE DISCOVERY PLAYLIST:

ON SOUNDCLOUD

ON SPOTIFY

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