The haiku has words, I mean it has syllables, FUCK OFF anyway! - Prostetnic Yanew Kasjonc, 1998 Hi Foulkes, Seeing as I don't know everyone on this mailing list personally, I thought it might be useful to introduce myself, say a little about what I do with computer music, and add my own thoughts about Woodstockhausen. Consider it a gentle ice breaker. I hope some of you will follow suit. From the beginning: I come from a place where there was _no_ exposure to interesting music other than the occasional classic rock tune on an FM radio station, unless you count Country Western y La Musica Campesino, con tubas. Throughout my childhood you might catch me absent-mindedly humming Henry Mancini tunes or catchy musak bridges that I heard in the orthodontist's waiting room, or just trying different goofy noises I could make with my mouth. Oh, "THE HORROR!", you must think...but sometimes ignorance is bliss. People throughout the Sierra Nevada foothills continue to be quite happy with their lot, reveling in endless songs of heartache and misery as they brood over cheap beer and fire their automatic weapons into the night. In fact, it occurred to me late in my high school years that I might have no musical inclination at all. I was more likely to enjoy the sound of rocks hitting a sheet metal shed, the plunk of pebbles dropped into a deep well with water at the bottom, the rattle of a stick dragged along a picket fence, the shriek of my car's rusty hinges, the strange echo inside an irrigation pipe, the sound of sharpening a knife, the eerie buzz of a high voltage electric fence, the reverberant _pong_ of slapping the propane tank, Mocking Bird songs, explosives, my sister's annoying breathless valleygirl accent, or the satisfied little gurgle you get at the end of a toilet flush (I still get a kick out of that one--every day is full of happy little sounds). So I left home and entered college as a musical blank slate, ready to be impressed with the first silly thing to come along. Out of idle curiosity and as something loosely associated with my major, I enrolled in Music 107a, the analog electronic music course taught by Pr. Wayne Slawson. More by accident than destiny, I found my passion. Whatever ramshackle hillbilly conceptions I had formed of music collapsed after a few months of late nights exploring sound for its own sake. I consider myself lucky to have discovered emusic at a time and place where classic analog and tape editing techniques were being taught as a necessary introduction to creating music with computers. I didn't value this so much from a historical perspective, which would have been the proper academic attitude, as I valued it for a chance to actually experience every zany Mad Scientist fantasy I had ever had watching late night television. If I had exercised all of this late night Mad Scientist energy at the engineering labs I would be making more money now, or I would have been thrown out of school. Analog electronic music technique as taught by Wayne Slawson was a satisfyingly _physical_ activity full of pulsing lights, big science fiction knobs and dials, rat nests of patch cords bursting from the Buchla modular synthesizer, frankenstenian tape splicing jobs, deep piles of discarded analog tape stock, the occasional outrageous costume, delivered pizza, coca cola, and endless fat, wet, juicy analog sounds. I recall countless moments moving slowly away from the studio through the upstairs hall of the music department, my odor and appearance disheveled from a sleepless night and a thrift store shopping budget, the quarter inch tape whispering through the handle of the coffee cup held before me as I kept tension on a very long tape delay, thinking "how the hell am I going to get back in there to reverse the tape speed?", when an attractive, talented young female performance major would emerge from a practice room looking as fresh and sophisticated as dew drops on a rose petal, and I would suddenly try to act...normal. "Yes, I do this all the time. It is actually very important work." My earliest cohorts in emusic were among the most interesting people I have ever met, and I still treasure the long hours I spent with them. There was Elaine Frigon, the earnest French Canadian and very talented musician with a bicycle fetish. As a work of performance art, Elaine once rode her bicycle from corner to corner around a busy urban intersection in Montreal while a friend stood inconspicuously off to one side and videotaped the performance...which lasted approximately eight hours. She stopped at every corner and waited patiently for the light to change. The reactions of onlookers ranged from amused indifference to violent incredulity at Elaine's obvious disregard for conventional reality. Elaine cherished this latter reaction. There was Adam Zaretsky, who at first came across as a charismatic member of the Goth crowd but soon proved to be something much more fantastic and terrible. Where Elaine enjoyed tickling the tenuous membrane of reality, Zaretsky plied the open waters of weirdness with reckless abandon in ways that actually threatened the Liberal Arts establishment at UCDavis. There was his week-long art show in the stuffy basement of the Art Building, featuring massive sculptures of raw hamburger and artfully arranged animal body parts. Attendance was notably down by day seven. I still treasure one of his later works in advanced computer music, which started with a triple video screen montage of Adam saying: "Hello. My name is Adam, and this is my garden," followed by a pan out to Adam standing naked and urinating into a dead potted plant, all to the accompaniment of wild zither music. Within every Zaretskyesque assault, there were profound compositional moments which the more faint of heart never got to experience. Last I heard, Adam does PR and web design for a dominatrix in L.A., and still holds lights for the occasional porno movie. And then, of course, there was Pukish. Ahhh, Pukish. After my innocent upbringing on the farm, I started out with the suspicion that Mike Pukish was dangerously insane. I actually feared being alone with him in the music studio at night. I was not accustomed to individuals who could be holding a normal pleasant conversation one moment and be singing rapturous castrati music from Neptune while standing one-legged on a chair and flapping his arms the next. I had the jumpy feeling that Mike might get naked at any moment, or jump out a window, or ride his bike into the lake, or fill his underwear with jello, or walk on the ceiling, or rise up into the sky and disappear with a purple puff of smoke. The first piece I ever heard by Pukish probably didn't earn him such a terrific mark with Slawson, but it put him right at the top of my personal charts: Slowed down dreadful crying of a baby (60sec), gun shot, applause. No bullshit. I have never forgotten it. I have had my happiest late night Mad Scientist moments with Pukish, and during the early period of our friendship I came to the understanding that he was not really insane, but so burstingly creative that his life is a constant compositional process, whether he realizes it or not. By now, you are hoping I will come to the point, mail this fucking letter, and get back to work on my music. Soon, soon... Those of us that actually enjoyed Music 107a moved on to take Music 107b the next semester, Wayne Slawson's computer music course. The experience of creating computer music was somewhat different at that time than it is now. Where now we each stretch out in front of our own hotrod 450MHz 64MB 16GBHD 32xCD Pentium out on our sunny verandahs with Pina Coladas and hors d'oeuvres, imagine 8-10 sweaty undergrads with no typing skills as they painstakingly enter rows and rows of CSound score data or wait for Csound to spit out a few more milliseconds of audio at rinkydink little terminals, all of which were served from a single Sun 3/160 workstation that might crash catastrophically at any moment. OK, excuse for another coffee break. That's six cups tonight. The entire process was tedious and not often rewarding, but every now and then would come a sound or sequence not of this earth that would send the author dashing off to bring back witnesses before Roger (the 3/160) went south on another unixian whim of its own. My first introduction to Csound came in the form of Wayne Slawson's sound color macros. A gross oversimplification of Slawson's work with sound color (he has written an entire book on the subject, wherein he describes at one point a musical epiphany experienced while tapping on sheet rock walls to find the studs) is the use of vowel sound formants for musical expression. This was also my general introduction to the eccentricity of computer musicians. Many of our 107b lectures would segue into surrealism as our professor stood before us and rapturously recited one sustained vowel sound after another, sometimes requesting that we repeat after him: "Now this one is really very nice, AAAAAEEEEEERRRR- RRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO..." It was clearly a medium in which anything could happen or anything could be done, and no one would ship you away in a padded carton for doing it. I remained a devotee of Csound for a few years after I first discovered it, and wrote a number of C language tools and macros to alleviate the tedium of data entry and assist me in my growing exploration of algorithmic composition. For a limited time I was very productive with these tools, and with friends hosted some small concerts in the back yard and living room of my dive college house, the "Back Porch" concerts. Humble precursors to Woodstockhausen, the Back Porch concerts were performed on garage sale stereo equipment with candles and fluorescent lights for visual effect. My gradual falling out with Csound probably started when I finally met its creator. Those of us who actually liked using Csound were inclined to lionize Barry Vercoe as the father of computer music for the common person, and were extremely excited when Wayne Slawson arranged to have him speak at the Music Department. Mike Pukish and I queued up with a limited number of other local fans, and over the following hour were shocked and disappointed to discover that Vercoe was the sort of effete intellectual snob who treats his admirers with contempt. Whether by accident or subconscious design, I have continued to find fault with Csound ever since and have ceased to use it entirely. ...which left me in a difficult position, since at the time I knew of no equivalent tools. There followed a fallow period in my life that lasted four years, wherein I finally left my cushy university job and chili garden at the behest of Doug Cook to enter REAL LIFE as a computer professional. ReAL LiFe more than compensated for musical outlet for a while, bringing with it long work hours, a mortgage, marriage, Nainoa Marslander (my son), endless yardwork and other lower middle class chores. I think that Doug must have been feeling the same lack of zany Mad Scientist energy in his life that was missing from mine, because one day early last summer he shook his head and said to me "We need to have a concert". That's how Woodstockhausen came to be, and most of you have been living the story along with me since then. These days, I make most of my sounds with my own custom software applications, and then arrange them into compositions with Cakewalk Pro Audio. My primary computer music interest for the last year has been the creation of new sounds by applying the genetic algorithm to evolve new audio module networks. The richness and variety of sounds I have "discovered" with this technique is astonishing to me personally, and I predict that I will continue to explore the possibilities of making sounds this way for years to come (for those of you who are interested, I intend to have this polished up as a Windows shareware app by Christmas...participation in Woodstockhausen gets you an automatic free copy!) My idea of evolving new sounds was originally inspired years ago by Thomas Ray's program "tierra", which open-endedly evolves aggressive little assembly language programs in virtual computer memory, but it was eventually Kurt Thywissens's "Genotator" software and the more advanced programming skills I have picked up at E-mu Systems that pushed me out of LaLa Land and into production effort. Genotator is the amazing piece of software which allows the user to evolve an entire musical composition complete with orchestration which many of you were introduced to at last year's concert. Another relatively recent personal fascination has been granular synthesis. After an operation on my left knee in May I was bed-ridden and high on happy pills for about nine days. During some of the not so very lucid hours following my return from the hospital, I lay with my laptop perched on my belly and whacked out a granular synthesis mini-app that surprisingly works very well in every respect but memory management (a problem I will deal with AFTER Woodstockhausen). One of the two pieces I hope to submit for this year's concert will contain about 40,000,000 short sound clips of my son disassembling the kitchen and screaming with joy. And then, there is always the unquenchable need to do something goofy. Last year I invited a high-ranking Vogon to come and recite some of his poetry. Earlier that same year Mike Pukish, Todd Hodges, and myself went careening about the UCDavis Drama Department stage in wacky costumes shooting shaving cream and silly string at each other in a performance which assured that electronic music Alumni will never be invited back to participate in a student show so long as Wayne Slawson breathes air and walks the earth. In earlier years there were readings of computer generated poetry accompanied by cheesy DX7 patches and stoned fluorescent light operators who missed their cue and blinded the narrator, or the elaborately enacted assassination of a kimonoed Yanni. I have heard rumors that there is an ensemble piece in the works using water, PVC tubing, live hamsters, attractive young performance majors, tape delay, operatic castrati singing from Neptune, electric fencing, body paint, pot and pan gamelan, at least one chicken, a flame thrower, volunteer members of the audience, sampled body noises, bizarre costumes, nudity, a fog horn, a potato gun, stilts, chimes, cymbals, flute, campesino tubas,.....