like it says:

Toshio Kajiwara, David Last, Bubbyfish & Glomag, Criterion & Doily, and QPE have all done remixes of the 1982 track "Excerpt #1" to be released by The Social Registry as a 12" vinyl EP alongside a separate 12" of two original INTERFERENCE tracks from 1982. Target date: late summer/early fall?

This playlist reflects the actual sequence and final mastering of the vinyl: 3 tracks per side...

The Electro-Acoustic Soundscore for the Dance-Theater work of the same name...
Performed Live with Musicians:

Maximilian Ehrhardt - Harp
Lieke Jetten - Hurdy Gurdy and Voice
& David Linton - Guitar, Percussion, Electronics, Processing, & Mix


Recorded in performance at De Brakke Grond Vlaams Cultuurhuis in Amsterdam Sat March 3, 2007

(note)* This is not exactly a "HI FI" recording... grabbed from camcorder mics at the back of house... even so it portrays a decent image of the sonic territory traversed...

Thanks to Steim Studios & the Liminal Institute



we each did solo sets then this together to cap the evening...
z'ev is the acoustic percussion... me the other stuff....

By late 83-84 i had pretty much burned off whatever desire I might have had to play drums in bands - either my own collaborative projects or other people's units... thou it may have seemed extreme to some (who let me know at the time) for a drummer to just up and "go solo"... but to me it just seemed like the next step in a natural progression. I had already begun to experiment with electronics (such as they were at the time) in the course of making tape scores for choreographic friends... and YES at the time i was thinking it might be preferable to deal with machines rather than humanoids as my primary collaborators in matters so intimately intertwined as paying the rent (such as IT was at the time).
So out i went with: 1) my 4 channel noise gate which employed drum hits to open short temporal windows on prerecorded background cassette tapes containing all manner of self generated sound... and 2) a proto-sampler loop box from Electro-Harmonix which could hold a single 17 second sample in volatile memory to be 'triggered' via piezzo elements affixed to the head of a given drum... let's not forget 3) a full acoustic drumkit and 4) a voice primed to 'deliver' if not exactly 'sing' topical/surrealist lyrics of my own devising...
All this adds up to quite a sonic mashup for a solo drummer on the threshold of
godknowswaht in the early spring of 1984. I would go on to do more of this sort of thing over the next few years although i would soon leave the vocal aspect behind (for which the world can be grateful i know)... In listening back to this now i console myself with the notion that i was perhaps a better lyricist than vocalist...

"mod_doktor" is a performing alias/concept that popped up for a brief and rather strange interlude around 2003-4 that i now suspect represented my last gasp and exodus from the 'digital' period which had begun for me at some point in the early mid 90's. i had pretty much given up hope in using the computer as a live performance instrument and was not personally performing much although i continued to organize unitygain events and was very involved in trying to hold the UGTV project together... (after BCB had bailed)
So one winter day i was groping around the (freezing) old Dumbo loft (where i camped out for some years with my feline companion Djimbeau) looking for something/anything portable to use as a sound source for live processing when at last i dusted off the old mono 8bit B&W Powerbook 160 which had been languishing in a milk crate and was by now at least 10 years old. i was looking at the mono miniplug sound output port and musing - "there must be something i can run on this thing..."
A little websearch answered my query promptly: MODS*(someday i'll finish this story)

Here are 3 of the more listenable tracks from this 1987 Martin Bisi recorded session that resulted in the the release of the mini Lp "Good As Gold" on Homestead Records (long out of print by now). This was, I believe, Gerard Cosloy's parting shot to Homestead Records just before exiting to co-launch the Matador Label. Last time I checked, Zeena had omitted any mention of the existence of this record in her discography... to each their own... but even I have to admit that there are tracks on this record that give ME a headache... these 3 here are among the one's i can actually listen to... & even quite "like"...
Overall this session marks the later 'midi-fied' period of my acoustic drumkit triggered electronics employed to suggest an ensemble of virtual players approach - etc... At the time this didn't seem like such a grantedly silly, allbeit ahead of it's time, idea...

In the world of Dance there are more works clocking in at around 20 minutes than of any other durational increment...
Mine is not to reason why.... but i did 'compose' quite a string of these during the dark years of the late 80's into the mid 90's.... These were largely midi sequenced, sample based, tekno influenced, 'in' rhythm, tonal, etc... quite 'pop' in many aspects while not at all in others...

Here are a few:

#1) was a 'Meet the Composer' music for dance grant for a piece by Charlie Moulton put on the 'Albany Berkshire Ballet'. There was some talk of a 'narrative' which the music should represent - and as a result this does have an almost anecdotal quality to it... although i have no idea what the 'story' turned out to be as I never saw the finished work - etc...

#2) is a singular hybrid in my output. It was sequenced - actually started on the old Atari 1040 then ported over to my first Mac - a black & white mono Powerbook 160 - with a mixed quartet of string and brass parts printed out to be played live by orchestra musicians from the Opera Ballet of Lyon as accompaniment to Stephen Petronio's choreography. This is potentially a longer story than i will indulge in here. I worked quite long and hard on this piece... the recording of the live parts was botched by the Radio France crew who showed up with a two track machine and no baffles -etc

#3) was something i started and obsessively continued to work on for months with no particular goal in mind. Some sections were 'performed live' - dub style on an over sized midi rack during the SoundLab days... but for some reason the parts kept insisting that they be strung together into this impossibly long and meandering sequence.
My old friend choreographer Sondra Lorring came to the rescue by inviting me to apply some of this music to a concert of her work at St Marks Church thus delivering me to a place where i could finally stop sequencing. This arrangement - I believe - is close to what was played for her show.

Charles Cohen might just be the best living realtime electronic musician on the planet... There are those who can hear this - mostly other electronic musicians - and then everyone else. I've known Charles since 1996 when he came to play - in various collaborative configurations - at the old hausofouch loft on Canal Street where I 'served' as 'host' for the early SoundLab events. It was the height of the 90's vintage synth boom and Charles modestly set up his Buchla Music Easle (one of app. 25 in the world) next to the virtual cr@p everyone else at the time was using... None of us were prepared for the sound that would follow. We heard him then and most of us have been hooked ever since. His sets became the inspirational mainstay of the UnityGain events I began organizing in the later 90's - if Charles was there we knew that any given evening could only be lackluster for so long. Even so - it took me a few years to get around to asking him to join me in a one to one collaboration & this didn't get underway till the early summer of 2001:
Under an invitation from Stuart Argabright (another legend in his own right) Charles and I went one steamy early summer weekend into Harvestwork's studio PASS to lay down some kindof track for an eclectic 'electronic' compilation Stuart believed he would eventually find someone to release... (this would unfortunately never happen). Since the Harvestwork's engineer was unable to provide us with even the most basic form of sync or midi clock that would have enabled us to track time locked overdubs we just filled the 16 track tape slots 'vertically' with free-form impro's: 4 stereo passes from each of us. I then took this motley collection of AIF's home on a CD and proceeded to try to make something out them for most of the rest of the summer of '2001. The first track on this play list is the version eventually submitted to Stuart for his compilation... & the others are more or less self explanatory. If you ask me... what started out as the side effect of a single technical scofflaw turned into an entire album worth of quite peculiar music and if you listen closely you may hear that we were anticipating something immanently more peculiar approaching our psychic event horizon in the summer of 2001.

The audio files here document one of the first live manifestations of the Bicameral Research Sound & Projection System given as part of Roulette Intertmedium's annual 'Mixology' multi-media festival.
This system routes analog audio oscillators through processing and feedback loops to drive RGB video patterns which are rescanned and projected in realtime. So the sound heard here is actually simultaneously the audio 'control signal' which generates the visual component. In this way vibrational 'harmonies' result between audio and visual elements where the audio frequency of tones corresponds directly to the Flicker Rate of the video image - etc... Thus the title 'Stroboscopy'...
The second piece here labeled 'ulbip' refers to the realtime performance entity "Untitled Low Bit Improvisation Project" which is a collaborative AV duet with video artist Chiaki Watanabe. Here the primary audio source is a pair of cheap customized/'circuit bent' Yamaha DD7 preset drum boxes.

I drummed with Rhys Chatham from the Summer of 1980 till the Spring of 1982??? ...something like that....
Anyway this interesting swath of 'acoustic terror' was recorded on cassette at the PA desk during the 1981 European tour of the Karole Armitage punk ballet Drastic Classicism...
Rhys's score was played live on stage by the band briefly known as The DIN which was comprised of Rhys and Joe Dizney on Guitars, Michael Brown doubling on Bass and Guitar, and myself on Drums.
Most of the gigs on this tour were for 'sit down' dance/theater audiences in 'proper' theaters. However on this one particular occasion we had a gap in the theater schedule while in Nancy France as part of this massive annual multimedia festival held there... so someone had the clever idea to book us a music only show at a kind of 'youth' cultural venue typical of France during this period of Jack Lang's precedence over such things... And so there we went into a space suitable for use as an airplane hanger armed with only the "Drastic Classicism" repertoire, a massive PA system, and an audience of not more than a hundred inebriated French 'Youth'. Rhys - never one to miss such an opportunity - was rather inebriated himself - but not so much so to fail to realise that we had only about 40 mins worth of material prepared (as this was all that was needed for the "Ballet" version given staging and temporal spacing -etc) and so decided to dramatically employ some of his favorite time filling techniques. Predominant among these was shouting incoherently at the audience and retuning on stage at full volume... & so on this occasion - whether under instruction or spontaneous gesture - I don't really remember which - I decided to play through the re-tunings to keep the energy of our restless young crowd engaged. What ensued - I'll venture to say - is the hardest rocking rendition of Rhys's music you will likely ever hear anywhere...
The fidelity of the recording isn't great but the size of the sound is what it should be... ( it's too bad more of the world never got to hear much of this version of the band - given the weakness of the guitar and drum production on most of Rhys's published studio recordings to date...) For this reason alone I will leave this messy little gem up here until someone sues me.... and if Rhys himself should happen across this page at some point (Hi Rhys!) i'll trade him my autograph for the privilege...

the actual order of the live set would have been:

1- D-duo or Drastic Duet was the opening music of the 'ballet suite' played by Rhys on guitar Et Moi on drums... Rhys & I played this piece a lot in those days... i imagined it to be a collaborative effort - but of course Rhys being RHYS never HEARD it this way... HIs title for this piece was 'Acoustic Terror' but it is telling to note that it was never recorded (with another drummer) after I left the group...

2- Drastic Classical Music - the main body of the 'ballet suite' played by the full quartet. Here with Michael Brown's freaky hammer bass line somewhat more audible than on the published recording of the same name and basic arrangement... note* with michael on bass here this means all that guitar noise is coming from just 2 guitars - Rhys and Joe Dizney. (really who needs 100 guitars??? pulleeeesseee....) After a pause there is a 'Cadenza' which sounds rather like Guitar Trio perhaps tuned to a tonic other than E... Far as i know this thing was never recorded or published either...

3 - Rhys Solo: this is the closest thing to improvisation i ever heard from Rhys during the time i played with him... To this day I still find it to be pretty entertaining - knuckle head theatrics aside - it's now clear that he really was working out resultant waves from his tuning experiments...

4 - 'Cadenza'/Guitar Trio - Not sure what to say here... this is re-tuned for 'Guitar Trio' but there are only 2 guitars with michael on bass and the 'score' is kind of dispensed with altogether at certain points.... suffice it to say: it really does rock!