Quantazelle

Written by Brien Rullman Sunday, 07 September 2003 06:26

Brien Rullman: Describe your music and process for creating it. Quantazelle: My process is dependent on the software as much as one's thoughts depend on their native language... I think that the software influences the end product; its interface puts certain limitations on what kind of things you can do to a piece. My work is sample-based as opposed to being a virtual analog or virtual traditional instrument-based, meaning it involves the manipulation of sound recordings or the manipulation of the sound file itself.

So for the first part of the process, I forage sounds. Mainly I go around with a laptop and a microphone and knock things over, slam doors, and get my dog to chew on things and record it right to the hard-drive. I've also recorded traffic noises with the laptop open on the passenger seat and a mic hanging out the window, stood in the alley on recycling day and got some nice breaking-glass noises, and defragmented my hard-drive.

The second part is editing the sounds, where I use a wave file editor and cut down the larger files into smaller, more interesting ones. Some times they stay fairly recognizable, other times they get pretty obscure when I zoom in to smaller parts of the wave and pitch shift or timestretch them. At that level sometimes I end up just drawing the waveform instead and creating nice glitchy noises. Then I file all the sounds away on a server under a proprietary organization scheme and then use a tracker program on the laptop to sequence them.

For the sequencing I use Buzz, which is a modular-synth program that runs on a windows platform. Even though it's pretty robust with allthe "machines" (generator and filter modules), I use it only for its multiple stereo-tracker ability. I start out with one tracker and go through the sample directories and listen to samples and start imagining which ones would work well together. It tends to start out as a pretty arbitrary collection, but as I keep building the track I start looking for specific sounds, like a sound within a certain frequency range that will stand out or mesh well with the other samples. I add more trackers and start grouping the samples. Then as I'm working I can mute certain groupsto hear how everything is relating, which is The reason I switched to Buzz from Impulse Tracker. But I also wish there was more of an actual programming language where I could write out conditional statements and call functions and such to automate the process a bit more. I get to control in great detail which sounds happen and where, which is nice for composing, but makes it a difficult interface for improvisation in a live or performance situation. In a live situation, I play the tracks from within buzz so that I can have control over all the sounds and their arrangement, by marking in and out loop points and by adjusting the levels of individual samples to fit the physical space that I'm performing in. I'm still experimenting with the live setup I use.

BR: What are your Ultimate goals of your music and presentation?

Esthetically, I want to make music that I'd like to listen to, I guess that's most people's motivation... Well, to me, interesting music has a lot of different layers and relations and interesting sounds, while at the same time being groovable; I think the rhythmic quality of this kind of music is what makes it accessible, which can be a good thing since it allows you to experiment in different aspects of the internal relations of the music.

As for what I focus on in my compositions and the theory behind it,I create tracks out of sounds collected from different "environments" and arranged as a kind of sonic-Cubist audio-painting. Picasso and Braque's Cubist explorations involved painting objects in a way where the sides that exist on a different plane are viewable from a single perspective.

All objects exist in four dimensions; the scope of three-dimensional objects is only viewable by experiencing the object within time. You have to take the time to move your self and eyes through physical space in order to view another side of an object. In this way, time and space are conceptually related.

Interestingly enough, around the same time as the Cubist paitings, physicists were discussing a new set of theories formulated by people including Heisenberg and Einstein that would form the basis for quantum physics. Among these is a notion that what would later be called the "spacetime continuum". So then Cubist paintings can be seen as a visual representation or diagram of what things would look like as one were to approch the speed of light, since space (and its perception) is a function of time and vice versa. They represent a "compression" of space and, by that implication, time.

So my compositions are the audio equivalents of Cubist paintings. I collect the audio imprints of different "environments" that are in different "planes" in normal existance. The furthest being those that are removed from the environment where the sounds are later sequenced (which tends to be at my computer in my house), such as traffic. Moving inward would be the sounds produced by interaction with the physical projection of the computer itself (banging on the keyboard, harddrive noises). The next levels would be sounds created by malfunctioning software-hardware interaction (such as audio glitches), to sounds that exist only as binary represetatons in the memory of the computer. All these different environments (perspectives) are layered into the singular space of the composition and require time to experience it.

BR: Favorite performance / show and why? how can you improve it? changes?

The Select-Release party was the most fun so far, though I was experiencing a draft from the open door to the patio durning the first half until I got a nice crowd behind me to keep me warm. Also, a guy from Ann Arbor, Michican heard some of the tracks on my website and drove down to Chicago for the show. He said he hadn't really been into music for the past year or so until he heard my work on my website and was totally insprired by it. I thought that was sweet.

I need to find a differnt sort of environment where I can acutally program instead of hard coding the sequencing like I do now. It makes for interesting tracks but it's harder to really experiement with live. At the same time I want to avoid the virual analog environmnt, which i know I keep repeating....

BR: Favorite software?

I still really like Impulse Tracker becuase it feels like I'm working closer to the nature of the computer. Ir runs in DOS, is written in assembly, and NEVER crashes. It resembles nothing in the physical world and has a steep learning curve. It's great. I 'm dissapointed with software like Logic or Reason mainly because of the kind of process I use. I generally improvise as I go along and because of that, the mode of interaction with the computer influences the outcome. If I worked with Reason, I would have to think in terms of "patchbays" and "inputs" instead of "iterations" and "conditionals". And then the kinds of sounds you would find yourself producing would be totally different as well. There are certain limitations on the creative process when you're dealing with virtual analog setups, and working with a computer should not have those. The nature of a computer is also different than what tends to exist in real life. Computers are good at square waves (binaries) and real life is good at sine waves.

I think more revolutionary things will be done with computers when you're working close to the language of the computer. I think it's sadly ironic that these emulation programs call themselves "Logic" when they seem so far removed from that actual level of the computer. It's a crying shame. Almost as bad as Apple's marketing campaign where they sold themselves as "harware for hip hackers" when really they build metaphor-laden boxes and keep the inner workings hidden from anyone who goes looking for them. I am aware that the new OSX has a Unix kernel, but they're still hocking designer cases dreamed up by marketing people, and they still have proprietary hardware that they can charge whatever they want for.

Anyway, when there are layers of metaphors between you and the computing part, your're exposing yourself to the limitations of the physical world and you're limited by the language you've chosen and you're not really going to get anywhere interesting. It comes down to the tenets of linguistics. Computers should be a revolutionary tool, not one of the linguistic status quo.

BR: How do you feel about the IDM genre?

I prefer the term "samplebasedputermusic" represented in its ascii notation (hex) : 73616D706C65626173656470757465726D75736963 . I think that's right, but mistakes caused by a decreased computing ability may be attributed to

function shutdown_mathcoprocessor($BRAIN.SELF, $thoughts)

if (awake_time >= ("24 hours")

kill_processes($thoughts); return true;

BR: Whats next for Quantazelle?

if (shutdown_mathcoprocessor($BRAIN.SELF, $thoughts))

sleep();

Quantazelle's website can be found at www.wombatcombat.com/quantazelle

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