by Craig Reynolds
with Wayne Feldman & Michael Kramer of Therefore
"The point at which Mike duck-taped/fishing-lined an electric guitar on one leg and a bass on the other was the show’s highlight, because on one hand the noise it made was amazing, but also because the sound of Mike walking around revealed no 'musical' incentive whatsoever. It was quite simply the music of what people do, amplified in reverse."
"En route to Buffalo, airline officials refused to treat Wayne’s guitar as a carry-on item, so he unscrewed the guitar’s neck and stuffed it in his backpack. 6 hours later, Wayne replicated the act mid-performance, employing non-musical experience as a figure for the de-generation of musical convention."
Describing the music of Therefore––who performed a continuous 8-hour show of improvised noise and sound fragments at the invitation of Big Orbit Gallery in July of 2000––is a linguistic impossibility, in part because it neither clings to nor aspires toward any recognized style or genre. The sounds made by the groups members––Wayne Feldman & Mike Kramer––are quite simply what they are, although the fact that the group generates these sounds over long durations—8, 24, even 32 hours—and do so with ambitions toward creating an "environment"––as opposed to simply indulging in traditional long-form jamming--suggests conceptual ground worth exploring, especially as it relates to the boring, muddled or just plain "bad" moments inevitably generated during these long periods. What’s more, the group’s performance apparatus answers many of my concerns about creating new forms of music in addition to simply exploring new sounds on the surface of established modes. Therefore interests me because their method suggests one new model by which to transcend traditional performance dynamics.
With this in mind, I asked them to participate in this "inter-review," which consists of 16 initial meditations on the band’s performance, as well as 2 rounds of corrections, digressions and explanations relating to all 3 party's contributions. The source material is in plain text, the first round of Therefore answers are capitalized, the first round of my answers are italicized, the second round of Therefore answers is capitalized and underlined and my final responses are underlined and italicized. The inter-review is as much about my own obsessions with altering audience/performer dynamics as it is about them, unwinding theoretical debates that to be sure, the members of Therefore were somewhat reluctant to pursue any further in words rather than music. "I think that we all have contributed many thought-provoking ideas throughout, nevertheless I worry that we’re overdoing it," Wayne wrote about going any further. Added Mike: "We should make it clear to everyone that the majority of the ideas behind Therefore come after the fact. When we play, we just play, and we play because we enjoy it. I think Wayne and I would both agree that there are a lot of interesting things touched upon by Therefore, but Therefore can stand alone." That being said, I give you the inter-review, a document concerned with generating strategies for the creation of new music as much as or more so than representing Therefore, whose loud, cacophonous and conceptually thought-provoking music nevertheless serves as a basis for the discussion.
1.
In preparation for your Big Orbit show, I struggled to find the language to describe both your music and the method by which you create it, which are 2 aspects of Therefore that I couldn’t really separate from one another. Eventually I came up with "sonic abstraction as an action process," which implied artful noise but also qualified the word "performance." Your music isn't performed, it's "lived," through process, and at a pace that I think of as being consistent with regular human activity as opposed to the hyped-up pace conjured by musicians "performing" on stage for a brief period of unusually increased intensity. (M): I HAVE DIFFICULTIES WITH THE WORD ABSTRACTION. ABSTRACT IS DEFINED IN THE DICTIONARY AS CONSIDERED APART FROM A PARTICULAR INSTANCE, OR EXPRESSING A QUALITY APART FROM AN OBJECT, AMONG OTHER DEFINITIONS. ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM IS DEFINED AS ART THAT EXPRESSES THE ARTIST'S ATTITUDES AND EMOTIONS THROUGH ABSTRACT FORMS. I DO NOT BELIEVE THAT THEREFORE IS ABOUT ABSTRACTION. IN ART, ABSTRACTION WAS THE NEXT LOGICAL STEP IN MANY WAYS, BUT NOW WE CAN MOVE BEYOND THAT. JACKSON POLLACK IS PROBABLY A GOOD REFERENCE HERE. MAYBE I READ SOMEWHERE THAT HE DID NOT LIKE THE TERM ABSTRACT IN RELATIONSHIP TO HIS PAINTING. HIS PAINTINGS WERE THE RESIDUE OF ACTION PROCESSES, BUT NOT ABSTRACTIONS. THEY WERE THINGS THEMSELVES, NOT REPRESENTATIONS, WHICH DESPITE ANY AMOUNT OF DISTANCE ATTEMPTED, REMAINS THE PITFALL OF ABSTRACTION. THEY WERE RECORDS OF WORK—your music is the work itself, I think, not simply a document of it. In the end, the process is inseparable from the musical record. I GUESS THE ONE DEFINITION OF ABSTRACT THAT I WOULD AGREE DESCRIBES THEREFORE IS SUMMARY—to be sure, I did not intend "abstraction" to summon "abstract," the verb, at all. I wanted to suggest that your music might best be approached as live sound art, and that your performances are built on the medium of sound itself as opposed to conventional musical principles .M: I think that our free one-of-a-kind tapes are like the residue of this long working process.
2.
By situating a Therefore show in the continuum of 8 or more hours, you embed it in lived time rather than performed time. Instead of talking about your show as a normal "I’m going to perform for you now" experience, I began to think of it more as a conceptual action . . . as performance art, but an ironic form of performance art in so far as you replace "performance"––as defined by traditional performative dynamics (which involve the transmission of info. from point A, the performer at the pulpit, to point B, the passive, needy audience)––with "process," which radically reconfigures the traditional performer/audience dynamic. (W): I THINK I NEED TO TAKE ISSUE WITH THE WORD "IRONIC", STRICTLY BASED ON THE NEGATIVE CONNOTATIONS THAT I ASSOCIATE WITH IT. I DON'T WANT TO NITPICK ABOUT WORDS AGAIN, BUT THEY ARE IMPORTANT, ESPECIALLY SINCE THIS IS THE FIRST IMPRESSION MANY OF YOUR READERS WILL HAVE OF OUR MUSIC, AND US, WHICH IS DISTURBING. WE'RE NOT GOING TO ACURATELY REPRESENT ANYTHING THIS WAY. THAT SAID, I'LL AGREE WITH YOU ON THE POINT ABOUT REPLACING "PERFORMANCE" WITH "PROCESS". (M): WAYNE DOESN'T LIKE WORDS BECAUSE HE IS A SPY—that’s okay, I don’t like them either, although I am a pirate. BUT I AGREE THAT IRONIC TO ME IMPLIES A SNOBBERY OR PESSIMISM THAT I DO NOT AGREE WITH. TO CLARIFY, IF I MAY WAYNE, IT IS DISTURBING THAT THIS IS MANY READERS’ FIRST IMPRESSION OF THEREFORE, BECAUSE IT IS SECONDHAND. KIND OF LIKE AN ART HISTORY CLASS WHERE THE WHOLE HISTORY OF ART IS REDUCED TO A SLIDE SHOW. OR A GREATEST HITS ALBUM. OR A HICKORY FARMS MEAT AND CHEESE SAMPLER. Nevertheless, it’s the best we can do at this point. What I meant by the word "ironic" was not that your performances are ironic—they’re anything but. No, I meant that your shows are both performances and non-performances at the same time—that, as "performances," they are the opposite of what they purport to be––although perhaps what I actually should say is that they’re the opposite of what an audience might expect, based on their own pre-conceived notions of what band performances are supposed to be . . . M: Perhaps the better word here is paradox. Although that is probably equally loaded for others, but for me it is at that critical crux, that liminal phase of betwixt and between. It is having a vague memory or inexact approximation of the past, an intangible present, and a myth of future, and the "absurdity" of these all occurring simultaneously. Rather than appear on stage with pre-drawn answers which you then impart to your audience, you created both the questions and the answers on the spot, and you did so in a fashion that seemed much more natural to me than stuffily "artistic," or even performative—and certainly not ironic. In configuring your art as a human process, you achieve a kind of subtlety that is almost impossible to argue with, because it’s not artificial or even artistic.
3.
This foregrounding of process also makes yours a truly "experimental" music in ways that most "experimental" music actually is not. Although that word––"experimental"––is generally used to describe anything non-mainstream, it doesn’t usually refer to actual experimentation. (M): THE SAME GOES FOR ALTERNATIVE, PUNK, JAZZ, M: And I would now add to this list Blues, Soul, etc. There are essences of these words that I still believe can be executed, but as genres? Thin ground. THESE ARE ALL STYLES AND WORDS THAT HAVE BEEN ASSIMILATED INTO THE MAINSTREAM VERNACULAR––which marks a continuous theme of this article: we’re trying to negotiate the massive disjunction between sound and words that claim to describe it. I don’t believe that words are transparent emblems of reality—meaning’s only in the specifics of the transaction taking place. M: It is fun to try, however. To be sure, you weren’t trying to test a hypothesis, although your method was certainly to fiddle around for the purpose of discovery––to build, to attempt, to experiment, and not necessarily to present or represent. (W): AGREED, THIS IS AN IDEA THAT RUNS THROUGH OUR PERFORMANCES, FROM THE ORIGINAL 8 HOUR, 16 RADIO PERFORMANCE; THROUGH OUR PROJECT 'GEOAURAL' WHERE WE PLACED LOOP TAPES IN BATTERY POWERED CASSETTE PLAYERS IN PUBLIC PLACES; TO OUR PERFORMANCE AT THE 6TH ANNUAL OLYMPIA EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC FESTIVAL WHERE I GENERATED SQUARE WAVES TO AN AMPLIFIER THAT MIKE BUILT A 4' X 4' X 4' WOODEN BOX AROUND. WE ARE VERY INTERESTED IN TRYING OUT IDEAS THAT WE CAN'T PREDICT THE RESULTS OF, AND ALSO IN THE DETERIORATION OF SOUND OVER TIME BY VARIOUS MEANS. (M): WE RARELY KNOW IF THE THING WE ARE ATTEMPTING IS EVEN GOING TO WORK—like when Wayne disassembled his guitar mid-show. Your performances are like sound workshops and the audience is invited to watch, or to generate their own sounds, or to participate, but they shouldn’t expect to be performed to––it’s like when surgeons used to do work in hospital auditorium rooms. (W): I THINK IT IS A MISTAKE TO THINK THAT WE'RE TRYING TO ALIENATE THE AUDIENCE, WHICH IS NOT WHAT YOU SAID—definitely not, I think that your method liberates the audience (whether they realize it or not)––BUT IT IS SOMETIMES THOUGHT ABOUT OUR PERFORMANCES. WE ARE CERTAINLY PERFORMING IN FRONT OF AN AUDIENCE, AND I THINK WE'RE BOTH AWARE OF IT, BUT IN TERMS OF PERFORMING TO THAT AUDIENCE, THAT'S NOT SOMETHING THAT I FEEL ADDS ANYTHING TO THE SOUND THAT WE'RE CREATING...AND THAT'S WHAT I'M MORE INTERESTED IN. You clear a space for your music in life, as opposed to art, and that’s why your "art" is radical, I think. In Buffalo, your creativity seemed to spring from an innate impulse toward interesting activity rather than any kind of learned or traditional apparatus of artistic creation.
4.
From the perspective of a listener, the music really began to work its magic when we realized the futility of trying to function as an audience (since you had already dumped being performers). (W): I JUST WANT TO CLARIFY WHAT I WAS SAYING A MINUTE AGO - WE ARE PERFORMERS. WE ARE PLAYING MUSIC TO AND FOR THE AUDIENCE (AND, OF COURSE, OURSELVES) BUT OUR PERFORMANCES AREN'T FRAMED IN SUCH A WAY THAT THERE'S ANY PLACE FOR GRAND GESTURES OF SHOWMANSHIP...THERE IS VERY LITTLE THAT IS PRE-DETERMINED IN OUR PERFORMANCES, AND I THINK THAT'S ONE OF THE MAIN REASONS FOR THE APPEARANCE THAT WE ARE NOT PERFORMING TO AN AUDIENCE. I’m not being negative when I say that you had dumped being performers, and I certainly don’t think you were trying to alienate anybody. I must say, however, it raises some interesting questions if that’s what other people have said about you. Not necessarily questions about your music but about audiences and conventions. In my case, the freedom to not-watch and yet experience the music in some other fashion was really welcome. We started playing Chinese checkers, drinking beer, joking around, reading books, whatever. It was as if the performance was just something going on in the room, although it effected us profoundly without providing us with some transcendent focal point (as in a typical concert situation). I pushed Chinese checkers, Wayne banged nails into wood, a girl read a romance novel, Mike wrapped himself in duck tape (M): SOME THINGS YOU CAN NEVER LIVE DOWN, another guy read the newspaper. What you were doing was totally absurd in one sense (stringing wire between 2 metal poles, attaching a pickup and running a violin bow across the newly invented "instrument") but in other ways it was totally natural. From an audience standpoint, your performance was just something going on, which was amazing because it helped manifest an ideal, creativized community––even if a very contained one defined by that small storefront in which the show took place––where music and life interface.
If you were in fact performing for us, were we an unappreciative audience for not paying attention? M: No, not at all. In some ways you were even more appreciating because you were able to arrive at a mindset where us performing was but one of several accepted activities with which you were going to be simultaneously engaged. And paying attention can exist on so many levels. You can subconsciously pay attention. W: I think you have proved throughout that you were paying attention. I don’t think you are required to watch the way in which sound is created in order to pay attention to it.
5.
I once wrote a performance that consisted of one instruction: "do a dance that is indistinguishable from that which is not a dance." You achieved in music what I was hoping for in "dance," cramped in your case only by the fact that a definite performance space existed as distinct from the audience’s space. With hindsight, knowing how many people showed up, we should have scattered your stuff around the room, making no distinction between your performance and the environment in which it took place. If a huge crowd had showed up, however, it would have been impossible for you to work, and there might have been a problem with certain audience members trying to take the whole process into their own hands. Because that did not happen, we missed an opportunity to create a living sound environment. (M): I DISAGREE HERE, YOU ARE SHOWING HIERARCHICAL FAVORTISM TO DIRECTIONAL SPECIFICS. WE USUALLY SET SPEAKERS ALL AROUND THE ROOM TO CREATE THE DROOLING SURROUND SOUND DYNAMICS, BUT IT SEEMS TO ME THAT EVEN WITH A STEREOPHONIC PUBLIC ADDRESS SYSTEM WE WERE ONE MORE ADDITIONAL ELEMENT IN AN ALREADY EXISTING 360DEGREE MUSIC/SOUND ENVIRONMENT. BUT THERE IS SOME TRUTH TO THE BENEFITS OF HAVING ATTENDEES ENTERING FULLY INTO OUR WORKING SPACE. IT ALSO SEEMS THAT YOU CONTRADICT YOURSELF ON THIS POINT. You’re absolutely correct. I was inadvertently privileging an all-over artistic environment without realizing that an all-over environment already exists (with or without the artistic element) and that you were just a part of it. I’m glad you called me on it.
6.
Even without completely breaking down the distinction between artist activity and life activity, it was remarkable to what extent your performance answered the death of the author, reconfiguring the apparatus of music transmission as a whole around a new audience-performer dynamic. Even at some punk shows, where the audience is on stage, sitting on amps, jumping up and down, singing into the vocalist’s mic, there’s a dionysian quality, a kind of furious activity out of which everybody is supposed to emerge changed––that is, there is a distinction between the privileged space of the performance and the real life we’re trying to escape, change, or reinvigorate by attending the punk show. Your performance was like the Zen-opposite of that. You opened new horizons not through crisis, through catharsis, but by embracing the immediate, the non-theatrical (and yet the difficult and interesting), which is really liberating. (M): THANKYOU.
7.
One really interesting angle by which to approach a Therefore performance is through the prism of fatigue and boredom, both yours and the audience’s. Because your shows are about process, not performance, they almost invite boredom, especially the really long shows (24 hours, 32 hours). This was a concern of mine because I didn’t want new audience members coming in to the show halfway through and thinking, "they’re just tuning up or bullshitting around" . . . without getting the full picture, which is to say a sense of the process that was at the heart of things. (W): WE HAVE PLAYED ENTIRE SHOWS THAT ALMOST NOBODY PAYED ATTENTION TO BECAUSE OF PRECISELY THAT REASON. Then I realized the importance of boring moments, moments of non-intensity, of non-performance––as boring moments––in opening up a true sound continuum. To achieve integrity with your method, or any method that involves a breakdown between art and life, you have to accept boredom, non-action, but also not try to "perform" through too much conceptualizing of the non-exciting, non-performerly moments. John Cage was able to do that, although he was in a way able to be more extreme in so far as he removed himself entirely from his compositions through chance operations whereas you do improvise, which involves intention. (W): NEITHER OF US ARE CAGE SCHOLARS, BUT CHANCE IS IMPORTANT TO WHAT WE DO. AT THE BUFFALO SHOW THAT WE'RE TALKING ABOUT, I DIDN'T KNOW IF MY ELECTRIC GUITAR WAS GOING TO WORK WHEN I DISASSEMBLED IT. THERE IS A TRACK ON 'KHROM' THAT RELIES COMPLETELY ON OUR 'CHANCE OPERATION' METHOD OF CHOOSING WHICH TRACKS TO ADD AND SUBTRACT AND WHEN. CHANCE IS A USEFUL ARTISTIC DEVICE, BUT NOT SOMETHING THAT I WOULD WANT TO COMPLETELY DICTATE WHAT WE DO SOUND-WISE. M: Yes, because then its not chance anymore, is it? Or is it? Hmmmm. I am more interested in Christian Wolff’s use of chance than Cage’s. What I think is interesting about Cage’s use of chance is that it was a way to create using a process that was already inherent in the environment being engaged. What you do is nevertheless a very interesting post-Cage variation in so far as you create music that harmoniously co-exists with the environment in which it takes place. Morton Feldman felt this was the central problem with Cage, that he removed human beings—or at least the creative and/or emotional and/or intellectual function that is, by contrast, definitely involved in your performances––from the equation. Feldman felt that the point was to be able to maintain one’s humanity, one’s creative abilities, without impeding nature or the environment. (M): ANY RELATION WAYNE? (W): NO, NO RELATION. BUT I CAN 'RELATE' TO HIS APPREHENSION AT THE REMOVAL OF SELF FROM THE FINISHED ARTISTIC PIECE. WE WOULD NOT BE DOING THE WORK THAT WE ARE IF I THOUGHT THAT EITHER OF US FELT THAT WAY. It seems to me that the subtle dualities of accident and intention, sound and soundlessness, excitement and boredom that mark your music meet Feldman’s critique of Cage, whose musical endgame seems less and less appropriate as time goes by and we, as creative people, still find ourselves willed toward creativity. Specifically, how do you relate yourselves as artists to the environments in which you create music? You clearly see your music and the environmental sounds as existing in harmony, as one larger process, but how exactly do you reconcile the artistic contradiction between creating an environment musically and occupying a perfectly good pre-existing one? M: This is an excellent question. Perhaps to point out that a perfectly good one does exist. W: Furthermore, I don’t know that our ‘music and the environmental sounds’ exist in harmony. Surely, they both exist, and there are points at which they work well with each other, but there must be times when they don’t- just as the sounds that both Mike and I are creating sometimes do exist in harmony, and sometimes sound like hell together. Literally, hell.
8.
You don’t seem to have a problem with embracing the lag moments (the role that time plays in your music may be the reason why). (M): IF ART IS REALLY SUPPOSED TO REFLECT LIFE OR COMMENT ON IT OR BE IT OR A PART OF IT SOMEHOW, THEN HOW CAN IT NOT DEAL WITH BOREDOM AND LAG? Unfortunately, most art defines itself as art precisely because it cuts out the mundane, non-intense moments—that’s craftsmanship, or at least the exalted perspective that justifies to most artists what they are doing. I think your music is fairly unique in so far as it avoids that trap. M: Or overemphasizes this to the point of fetishizing. There are some artists and musicians who use lag well––Lag artists, they are called, there is a whole school of them. W: Really, they’re called ‘lag artists?’ That’s great! I’m not that interested in ‘Art’. I like things that are popular, Liking them makes me feel like I am part of the larger whole. The artlessness of your shows is what’s so great, and weirdly hard to come to grips with, paradoxically generating all this talk, I’m sorry. Time fragments your performance, opening it up to the audience’s life-activities and to the sound byproducts of these activities; but being 2 (non-)artists, your music spreads out over a linear playing field, over time rather than orchestral space. I began to do other things during the performance––to live with it––so the fact that the performance wasn’t at peak-level (in a traditional performative sense) for all 8 hours didn’t bother me––it allowed me to focus on my next Chinese Checkers move, or to get a beer. How else would you say that time, the dominant conceptual motif in your performances, effects the music, the process, and the performance? (W): I OBJECT TO THE IDEA THAT TIME IS THE DOMINANT CONCEPTUAL MOTIF. ‘TIME,’ AS A CONCEPT DOESN'T DESERVE THAT TYPE OF TOP BILLING. IT IS SUCH AN ARBITRARY CONSTRUCT. I GUESS WE ALL AT LEAST AGREE ON ITS PARAMETERS, BUT I WOULD REALLY HATE TO CALL IT THE "DOMINANT CONCEPTUAL MOTIF IN YOUR PERFORMANCES," OR OURS, AS THE CASE MAY BE. Yeah, I suppose that’s not really what it’s about, in the end, but you do choose these time-frames (literally, frames) that you sort of work in. And what really surprised me was how closely you stuck to them. I figured an 8-hour show would be, you know, 8-10 hrs., but it was actually 8 hours, so this time element is important in structuring the music, at least its beginning and end (it’s not like you were following sound onto its own horizon, you were using the 8-hour conceit in a far more important structural way). What’s more, you guys definitely paced yourselves, even taking time to stretch out before and during the performance in anticipation of time’s physical and emotional effects. Then, once it started, the show had ebbs and flows linked to this arbitrary duration you had committed yourselves to enduring, and I think the audience’s reactions were also colored by the awareness that you had been playing, or were about to have been playing, for 8 hours.
9.
Musically, the sound of me rolling marbles across a metal board became part of the experience and for those of us who had been there all day, who were hypersensitive to sound as a result of being there, sounds began to matter in ways that they usually don’t. It goes back to this fact of blurring the distinction between music and real life, of living in harmony but with slightly more awakened senses. Since boredom is in life, it should be an anticipated, expected, and even required audience reaction. On one hand, having an audience member sit for 8 hours means boredom's going to set in at one point or another, but the nature of the show is that as soon as someone gets bored, they can leave, so it invites life back into the equation (negotiating boredom is living, not being a passive consumer of information in a traditional audience sense). I will sometimes sit in the park and listen to the music of people laughing or playing or talking or whatever but eventually I get up, although I don’t resent my boredom, my need to get up. This is why your method is radical but also why it’s problematic for the promoter of the show. Because it’s a music event, most audiences have an expectation that they will be performed to, so it’s hard to make the situation clear without sort of compromising it or scaring off the listener. W: I don’t think either of us had anything to say to this point because it’s a good one, and the compliment that you paid yourself is just. Audiences will get what they want from the show. If they really want to like us, they will, and if they don’t, then they won’t.
10.
One thing that personally intrigues me is securing audience interest, a goal that your method––in terms of the duration, the workshop-like quality of the performance––almost seems to reject—ah, perhaps this is what you meant by some audiences’ senses of alienation. You ask a lot of the audience’s ear (by this I’m referring to the complexity of the sounds you create), but you also ask the audience to create their own experience of the music, to comprehend it without convention (even avant-garde convention), and possibly, to experience boredom as a part of the process. There were times, for example, when you exploded all conception of harmony, rhythm, melody and pitch, and did so without falling back on some kind of stagy gimmick to allow the audience something to focus on. (M): THIS IS NOT AN EASY THING TO DO CONSIDERING A LONG CONDITIONING OF POP RESOLUTION AND THE FETISHIZING OF THE C MAJOR CHORD. Do you worry that audiences will come in during the lag moments and maybe misjudge the experience as I worried they would? And maybe more importantly, to what extent, if at all, does boredom and fatigue play a role in creating the music, especially after 24 or more hours? (M): WE NEVER EXPECT AN AUDIENCE MEMBER TO HAVE TO SIT THROUGH AN ENTIRE EIGHT HOURS OR 22 HOURS AND WE ARE SURPRISED WHEN SOMEONE DOES. I THINK AN ATTENDEE WILL EXPERIENCE THAT BOREDOM FACTOR IF THEY STICK AROUND ANY LONGER THAN 1/2 HOURS TO 2 HOURS, BECAUSE THAT IS YOUR AVERAGE BAND/SHOW TIME FRAME. AS SOON AS YOU PUSH SOMETHING FARTHER THAN YOU ARE USE TO, BOREDOM CAN QUICKLY ENTER THE PICTURE. It occurred to us afterwards that the show might have been better attended if we had scheduled it for say 6pm to 2am as opposed to noon to 8pm, although one condition relating to the use of that storefront was that the music wouldn’t go too late. What’s more, we had hoped there would be more street traffic as a result of the daytime schedule, but unfortunately the torrential downpour that began at noon and ended at 8pm pretty much dashed that logic.
Although it may not be the best forum for your work, you have done more traditional shows . . . in bars and what-not. How does the response differ in places where audiences can assimilate your music into their usual way of experiencing a band? M: This is a tough question. I don’t think I have enough bar shows under my belt. I will say this much: playing the Knitting Factory and other "experimental" venues has taught me a lot. When people come to an "experimental show" at such type "experimental venues," they have their "experimental game-faces" on. Like, they can tough it out for half an hour, maybe more, of something "experimental." These folks are wallflowers, sorry fans. Well, when you play a biker bar––saw my friend’s band UUM (harsh noise ambience) play a biker bar last night––bikers want to hear Steppenwolf and Mettalica, not dark ambience, even if they are similar shades of color. I used to feel like it was unfair to play to an unsuspecting audience, but I think that hesitation was more out of fear. But I have grown more and more confident about what I am doing as a valid form of music and entertainment, so this is less an issue. I am a performer, I am on stage, people came for a show, probably more for a drink and they’ll get this regardless, so I have just as much of a right to be on stage at a biker bar as any power metal band does.
Earlier on in this interview Wayne described Therefore as being interested in "the deterioration of sound over time." Doesn’t time function as an engine of entropy over the course of a long-form performance? W: Isn’t time always the engine of entropy, or at least the framework by which it is measured?
11.
One of the reasons I was first attracted to your performances was that they answered for me a dilemma I’ve had for a while, which has to do with artists’ relationships with their audiences and with their environments. I developed an interest in this first in the early-nineties when I was going to a lot of punk shows, which at first was really thrilling, and then became repetitive. What was most annoying was this assumption tacitly assumed by everyone that if a statement is born from anger then it must be true––all else is bullshit. First of all, I don’t believe this; and secondly, I reject the logic behind it because it inherently justifies any statement just so long as it appears to be angry and "real." I was hearing 18 year old boys yelling from the stage about this or that, spewing uninformed inanities "justified" by heartfelt passion (sometimes fascist, bullshit, racist rhetoric). I also began to resent the way that the music wrapped the audience up and wouldn’t let it go. There was also a physical form of domination involved––the mosh pit, which in the beginning was liberating but of course often involved aggression towards women. I suggested at that time, in a kind of Greil Marcus-ish piece in Basta! (M): NOT A BIG FAN OF THEREFORE BY THE WAY...TOLD ME HIMSELF. (W): I DON'T KNOW ABOUT YOU MIKE, BUT I'M STILL A BIG FAN OF HIS. I REALLY APPRECIATE THE WAY HE CAN PLACE 'PUNK' AS A HISTORICAL MOVEMENT IN RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER ARTISTIC MOVEMENTS, AND AS A RESULT IN SOCIETY AT LARGE. WHICH IS GREAT BECAUSE PUNK IS TRYING TO DO ANYTHING OTHER THAN CHANGE THE WORLD, SO I BELIEVE IT SHOULD BE SEEN IN THAT WAY. I LIKE YOUR POINTS ABOUT DOMINATION IN THE PUNK SCENE. BY THE WAY, I DON'T KNOW HOW 'PUNK' IT IS TO PLAY THREE CHORDS AND YELL ANYMORE. I DO BELIEVE STRONGLY IN D.I.Y., OBVIOUSLY, BUT I CAN'T CALL A LOT OF WHAT PASSES FOR 'PUNK' THAT, A GOOD DEAL OF IT IS 'POP' AND MOST OF THE REST IS HARDCORE, that the punk scene in Buffalo should take a cue from the city’s far more radical avant-garde, in particular Morton Feldman, whose compositions (lasting 6, 8, 10 hours) turned their central motifs inside out, deconstructing themselves in performances which also included lots of silence. This silence seemed like the most radical thing in the world to me then, when every show I went to was dominated by hardcore tidalwaves (I had also seen a brilliant performance by early proto-"punk" Jonathan Richmond W: Big fan of his too. where he basically pissed off a packed room by refusing to perform loud enough to be heard over the bar noise–– "I can hear you," he told a heckler, "and I’m up here with a microphone, so if you can’t hear me, that’s not my fault." It was great because it reversed the equation: "I’m not your dancing monkey," he seemed to be saying. "I will invest my creativity if you invest yourself in the experience as well, and the musical material I’m negotiating right now involves silence." I thought it was totally revolutionary, that he was refusing to "perform" for his performance (although sometimes I have problems when performers demand submission from their audiences, so it wasn’t the perfect answer). The crowd, confronted with silence, responded by trying to fill it with their own noise, which wouldn’t have been a bad thing if it was built into the performance in some less negative, reversed fashion. I just liked that the whole apparatus of musician-audience hierarchy was falling apart and I wanted to see it crumble further, in a more fruitful fashion for everyone involved). (M): AGAIN, SORT OF IN RELATIONSHIP TO THE BOREDOM ISSUE...I AM INTERESTED IN ALLOWING A VIEWER/LISTENER TO CREATE THEIR OWN AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE. I CAN'T DICTATE THAT EXPERIENCE, THERE ARE WAY TOO MANY FACTORS THAT I CANNOT CONTROL. I AM NOT REALLY INTERESTED IN CONTROLLING THOSE FACTORS. I WANT TO PERFORM, I WANT TO BE A MUSICIAN, I WANT TO PERFORM TO AN AUDIENCE, BUT I WANT MY AUDIENCE MEMBER TO CONSTRUCT THEIR OWN EXPERIENCE AND BE CHALLENGED TO DO SO, NOT SPOONFED ANY OF MY AESTHETIC ASSUMPTIONS...EXCEPT FOR MY ASSUMPTION THAT YOU CAN PSYCHOLOGICALLY SHIFT YOUR PERCEPTION TO EXPAND YOUR DEFINITION OF BEAUTY/MUSIC ETC.
Is there a connection between the process of decomposition in your music and this desire to allow the audience the opportunity to create its own experience? W: Yes. I think so. We set up a sound installation a few months ago at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival that incorporated both the idea of the audience configuring the composition of the sounds, and the idea of our sound sources deteriorating in the tape players day after day and in the sources deteriorating in volume as a result of other listeners changing their values and being passed through the audio mixers in the rest of the room.
12.
I wrote a soundtext at this time, ABCDEFG, which cataloged every word you could spell using only those letters that could be played musically as notes and splayed them across an open grid. The method of the performance was simple: pick a word at random, play it on a keyboard or conceivably, any musical instrument, cross the word off the score, and repeat. When all the words have been crossed off, the performance ends (there’s also a 4-movement version, which involves playing the performance 4 times into a 4-track recorder, so that the earlier performances clang against the later realizations). I personally preferred to play the piece on a keyboard with a booming chime, so that silence/and or environmental noise would follow a single percussive sound. My hope was that the music would sort of fade into the environment, that it would be there and not there at the same time. I wanted to play music in reverse: whereas usually a performance is 95% performer and 5% audience, I wanted it to be 5% performer and 95% audience. (W): I THINK I'D LIKE OUR PERFORMANCES TO BE DIVIDED BETWEEN THE SOUND WE CREATE AND THE NATURAL SOUNDS OCCURING IN THE PLACE WE CREATE THEM, AT ABOUT 30%/70% OR 60%/40%. (M): NO, 40%/60%. originally I wanted to perform the piece without announcement on a street corner, where people would come and go without realizing a performance was going on at all. When I discovered Therefore, I became extremely excited because it almost perfectly answered my original call to mix punk music with modern new music, with process, with life. (W): THANKS, THAT'S GREAT, I THINK WE ARE A PUNK BAND. The music, especially when fabricated on the spot, did not seem to replicate any of the structures that usually control musical performances and the audiences that attend them. There was silence, there was process, there was life, and it really established a model that could revolutionize performance as an artform, even if it’s kind of a hard one to consider a "performance."
Have you played in more traditional punk venues? What was the response like? M: Traditional Punk, is that conflict of interest?
13.
To me, the point at which Mike duck-taped/fishing-lined an electric guitar on each leg and began to walk around the room was the absolute highlight, because on one hand the noise it made was amazing, but also because that sound derived from no "musical" incentive whatsoever. It was quite simply the music of what people do, amplified in reverse. (M): SURE, THAT WAS WHAT I WANTED TO CONVEY. REALLY.
14.
The 8-hour show in Buffalo was continuous but over the course of it you moved through various sound modes, each with its own instrumentation and style. You have names for the fragments of the pieces you play on your tapes, if not your CD, although I suspect that naming them is a matter of convenience, of accessibility and for cataloging purposes. To what extent are they "songs" in a more or less conventional definition of that term and to what extent are they pre-arranged? (M):RECORDED THEREFORE IS A WHOLE OTHER BALL OF WAX, OR AS WAYNE HAS SAID, TUBE OF ANYTHING. WE WRITE SONGS, BUT OUR PROCESS IS MORE BASED UPON A ONE-TAKE APPROACH. W: ‘Based on’ might be overstating it some. We do have ideas in mind to begin with, and we do overdubs, so they’re generally not one-take songs. Maybe I’m wrong but what you do varies from traditional improvisation in so far as your music is not freely "formed"––jazz musicians, for example, reshape the history of jazz every time they play but there is a history to work with at the start––but rather, your stuff is freely "invented." Very little comes before (I guess I base this observation on the fact that you created music from objects you found in the space, instruments you created on the spot, etc.). (M): JUST AS MUCH AS JAZZ CAN NOT DIVORCE ITSELF FROM ITS HISTORY, NEITHER CAN OUR MUSIC. WE HAVE INFLUENCES AND THINGS WE PLAY TO, AND USUALLY AN ALBUM HAS A GENERAL GENRE THEME. OUR FIRST ALBUM WAS A BLUES ALBUM, OUR SECOND ALBUM DIGITAL HARDCORE, AND THE MOST RECENT RECORDING IS AN AM RADIO SOFT POP KIND OF THING. OF COURSE WE DON'T OBEY ALL OUR OWN RULES, BUT WE PLAY AT THESE THINGS, WHICH IS REALLY I SUPPOSE ALL THAT ANY ONE PERSON CAN DO. Are the shorter performances invented on the spot in an experimental sense or do they rely more on pre-arrangements? (M): WAYNE? (W): I DON'T KNOW. A LITTLE OF BOTH, WE CERTAINLY CHOOSE WHICH INSTRUMENTS WE'LL BE PLAYING BEFORE WE GO ON STAGE. BUT I DON'T THINK WE REALLY KNOW WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN. To what extant are the basic motifs already in your head? Like, I remember you asking after your show if we had enjoyed some pop song you had played, like a Madonna song or something, which I thought was a joke but you both seemed to be saying that embedded in the music somewhere was the loose pursuit of this motif. W: I think Mike and I have been playing together long enough that we hear a lot of the same things when we’re playing. The ‘motifs’ just come up I think.
15.
Mike, you are a videomaker––a manipulator of images, and yet you refuse "images" relating to your music. By this I mean that you don’t want to be perceived through the prism of some visual image (like press photos), nor did you provide me with words to describe what you do, nor are there conventions present in your music that we can use to contextualize it. (W): I THINK THAT THIS RELATES TO THE IDEA OF NAMING SONGS...RATHER THAN THROWING MEANING AND IMPLICATIONS OUT AT LISTENERS THAT WILL LIKELY RESONATE IN DIFFERENT WAYS THAN WE INTEND. THERE'S AN INHERENT DANGER IN USING WORDS TO DESCRIBE THINGS. WE ALL HAVE DIFFERENT IDEAS ABOUT WHAT THESE 'WORDS' MEAN, AND VARYING ASSOCIATIONS TIED TO VARIOUS WORDS. IN TERMS OF IMAGES, ONCE AGAIN, IT HAS TO DO WITH PREASSIGNED IDEAS. OUR SONGS, AND OUR MUSIC, WHILE OFTEN MADE WITH PRE-CONCEIVED INTENTIONS AND IDEAS, IS ALWAYS CHANGING IN THE INSTANT THE SOUND IS CREATED—that’s very interesting. IT RELATES TO THIS IDEA OF NEPANTLISM, WHICH IS SO IMPORTANT TO WHAT WE ARE DOING. THAT THINGS (I.E. SOUNDS, IMAGES, ETC.) ARE GIVEN MEANING BY THE RECEIVER AT THE MOMENT THAT THEY ARE RECEIVED—I find it interesting that you leave so much up to the audience in terms of defining their own experience and yet all throughout this piece we’ve sort of struggled to come up with an acceptable language to describe your music accurately. I WOULD ALSO LIKE TO GO BACK TO THE IDEA OF REMOVAL OF SELF; I DON'T HAVE ANY PROBLEMS WITH US BEING ASSOCIATED WITH THE WORK, I JUST DON'T WANT TO 'SELL' OUR WORK BASED ON WHAT WE LOOK LIKE IN SOME MEANINGLESS 'PRESS PHOTO'. WE DON'T SOUND LIKE A TWO-DIMENSIONAL PHOTOGRAPH. ACTUALLY, MAYBE THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT WE SOUND LIKE, BUT I STILL AM UNCOMFORTABLE SENDING OUT 'PICTURES OF THE BAND', I THINK IT'S COMPLETELY INANE. (M): INITIALLY I WANTED TO INCLUDE A VISUAL ELEMENT IN OUR WORK, BUT WAYNE HAS TAUGHT ME A LOT ABOUT THE ARBITRARINESS OF THIS. IT HAS ENABLED ME HOWEVER TO FOCUS ON MY VIDEOMAKING AS AN ACTION IN AND OF ITSELF. Ironically, this makes your music function almost like visual art in that it just is, whether you embrace it to its fullest or not (this is not a characteristic I often associate with music, as I have found that musicians too often need audiences to complete their art, to justify it and make it whole, whereas visual artists are a little more likely to focus on the object, the art, and not play to the audience, who will likely move on after a 1/2 minute pause unless it really hits them). As an audience member, you come and go, take awareness of the performance or let it play itself out in the background, although it is forever dynamic. What is the connection between Structuralist video and your music? Is your music a Structuralist investigation of the medium of sound? (M): GOOD QUESTION. AS FAR AS STRUCTURALIST VIDEO IS CONCERNED...I AM MORE OR LESS RELATING STRUCTURALIST VIDEO TO STRUCTURALIST FILM, IN SO MUCH THAT THE MEDIUM AND MAKER IS CONSCIOUS OF THE NATURE OF THAT MEDIUM. I SEE A READY CONNECTION BETWEEN DUB REGGAE, STRUCTURALIST FILM, AND PRE-RENAISSANCE ICON PAINTING. I AM WAITING FOR SOMEONE TO WRITE AN EXTENSIVE ESSAY OR BOOK ON THE MATTER. IT WOULD SAVE ME A LOT OF TROUBLE HAVING TO DO IT MYSELF. BASICALLY, BY DRAWING ATTENTION TO THE MEDIUM, OR NOT HIDING THE NATURE OF THE MEDIUM, THE FLATNESS OF CANVAS, THE FLATNESS OF ANALOG TAPE, THE FLATNESS OF FILM, ALL OF THESE THINGS ARE EMPLOYED TO ASK US TO BELIEVE THERE IS MORE THERE THAN A FLAT SURFACE. IN MY EXPERIENCE, WHEN SOMETHING REFERENCES ITSELF AND DESTROYS THE ILLUSION OF BEING ANYTHING MORE THAN A FLAT SURFACE, IT THEN HAS A REAL OPPORTUNITY TO TRANSCEND. WHEN SOMETHING ADMITS IT IS IMPERFECT, BUT UNDERSTANDS THE POTENTIAL FOR GRACE, REDEMPTION IS NEAR.
You have, however, played improvised soundtracks to films––like at Galapagos. How does your method differ when you force yourselves to engage some sort of visual image? M: I suppose it is similar to how we try and respond to what is occurring around us during any other performance situation. It seems like any time there is a film or video element, we play at that element, not to it. Synchronicity occurs naturally, and if it doesn’t people will construct synchronous moments out of totally disparate elements.
16.
Your music’s about process––and therefore, it’s always inherently incomplete. It does not draw to a tight conclusion and isn’t about packing things up nicely. Because it’s not finished, it’s continually searching, because there’s no complete sermon being presented. What are your ideas about fragmentation, flaws and incompletion? How do you reconcile what I would describe as a method that respects human action in its purest, most human sense and yet builds itself upon incompletion? Is there a message there about the inherent value of human action, about human process even in the shadow of incompletion. (M): THE FIRST DESCRIPTION THEREFORE EVER TOOK FOR ITSELF WAS THIS IDEA OF MEDITATIONS ON IMPERFECTION, OR IMPERFECT MEDITATIONS. COMPLETION OR CLOSURE IS AN IDEALIST FANTASY, BUT I SEE NO PLEASURE IN IT... (W): YEAH, ME NEITHER.