Mark Trayle, pfMENTUM, May 2000

By Jeff Kaiser

How about the bio stuff?

I was born in 1955 in San Jose, so I qualify as a native...

Ah, so you have silicon in your blood...

I do...we lived there for a year, my dad was in the military. Then we moved to Portland, Oregon. We moved around. My dad was involved with radio stuff - which is another connection. I started messing around with tape early on. You know, he was bringing home tape recorders from the radio station. I remember making tape pieces when I was like 13 or 14 because I had this ancient Roberts deck with something called sound-on-sound...something really cheesy, you had this big knob that moved the head over so you wouldn't record on the stuff you had just recorded. But then you could overlay something else. Or you could make a loop and re-record. So, I had this cheap Fender guitar that I would do that stuff with.

This is when you were 13 or 14?

Yeah.

So had you been exposed to more experimental electronic music at that time?

Well, I didn't have any musical training. My parents didn't push me that way. But I found that I really liked music quite a bit and as a teenager I liked pop music. I just got bored with it, or more curious. I started listening to jazz and found out about the Art Ensemble of Chicago and some of the more out players, and thought, "Oh that's cool!" Then I figured out that the "art rock" bands like Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer had stolen from composers. So I started looking at classical music, particularly 20th century classical music. A typical weekend for me in Portland was to take a bus to the Multnomah Library and check out the scores. They had Earle Brown scores, Stockhausen, Cage. That was when I was around 16. I was curious about this music and started studying instruments. I took cello lessons. Didn't like that. Tried viola lessons; that lasted a bit longer, but I wasn't nuts about that. And then I got into the oboe and took lessons with this guy and we hit it off really well. He was kind of a free thinker and we got along well, so that was what I stuck with.

So that was your primary instrument, oboe?

Until I got into electronics a big way a few years later at college.

So where did you go to college at?

University of Oregon. I went to Portland State as well, because I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. So I went to Portland State as a chemistry major for the first year.

So, at the University of Oregon they do the Bach Festival. Were you exposed to that?

That was early on. It was like 1975 when I was there. It was happening, but I wasn't that into it. I was more into interesting music...

I saw Penderecki conduct his St. Luke's Passion there...

I don't remember any of that kind of stuff there in the seventies. They just did Bach. Nothing wrong with that, I just didn't take the time to go to it. At U of O I had this really great teacher named Homer Kelly who was a student of Sessions or somebody. His own thing was really conservative, but he was very open minded. When I was showing him my Stockhausen rip-off European Serialism scores of the time, he was really into it. He really took an interest in me. It turned out that everyone at the time was only interested in fusion jazz, so nobody was using the electronic music studio. So I had pretty much twenty-four hour a day, seven days a week access to this big Moog system and two Teac four track tape decks. My last year at school I basically lived there. I think it was just happenstance. I wasn't particularly interested in electronic music, although I had some Mort Subotnik records and stuff. It was interesting to me - but I was more interested in instrumental composition. It just so happened that I was at a place where I could use this electronic music facility and none of the instrumentalists at the school wanted to play anything interesting or difficult. They all wanted to be in the pep band. So that was how I made that left-hand turn into electronics.

Now they have Jeffrey Stollett and Robert Kyr there...

Yeah, it's a much more interesting program they have there now.

So you were using the synthesizers, when did you get into computer programming?

Well, you know, in 1975 personal computers were pretty rare. I knew that I wanted to go to graduate school but took a few years off, had a good twenty-something lifestyle for a couple of years - just had a good time. Then I went to Mills. I applied to a few places, but went to Mills because Ashley and Behrman were there. While working with David Behrman, I found out about all these interesting characters in San Francisco, like John Bischoff and Paul de Marinis; and all these interesting composers there working with microcomputers.

What was the microcomputer of choice then?

These things were called Kims and Syms. Kim 1 and Sym 1. A 6502 machine, 8 bit, 4k of memory, and it was fat. It was a good unit, you would run it in assembly language or you could type in the machine code on a calculator type keypad. Totally primitive, but these guys were doing this rocking music with it - great stuff. So I just decided to look into it, I had this big analog system...my interest had really turned to finding behaviors and setting up systems that would generate music. The systems would be complex enough that they wouldn't just beep out some kind of sequence, but you would have some sort of complex interaction going on. I could do that with the analog synth by patching these modules together. There were a lot of random noise generators on it so you could always get an interesting result. So when I was living in Eugene after leaving school I would set up the synth and leave it running for two days. I became interested in this idea of making the interaction between different musical automata form the piece. So when computers came around I realized I could get a little more control that way and do more in software and less in hardware. My programs would do it; I would build my own circuits and then have the computer run them. So I got a Sym microcomputer. But first I started building musical circuits. My lessons with Behrman consisted of making schematics of music circuits, or putting them together, or advice on fabrication. That has been the focus of my work since then.

When you talk about the different relationship between the automata, do you think of each one as playing together, or just doing their own thing? Are these your jazz roots coming out to play?

I think in a way it is. It definitely is. They don't just run parallel; they influence each other. Their musical behavior depends on what other ones do. So in a computer you need to have some kind of randomness or some way of making choices. But with people it is different. People are much smarter than computers and create.

And we are also random...

And we can also be random. That is part of creativity. It's interesting, now that I have moved down here to Cal Arts with more access to players, I am doing more of these computer-like pieces, but with instrumentalists. I am coming up with more game-like pieces where people have to listen to each other and then make responses based on what they hear. I am interested in all facets of that technique, or compositional style, where you set up a network of behaviors - make up the rules - and then turn the thing on and let it go. That's what I did in this group I was in called the Hub, a computer network band. Most of our pieces, at least the ones that are most idiomatic and indicative of our thinking, are the ones that do that in a very clear way. Setting up a situation and then somebody hits the switch and this thing has all these interactions. We have pieces that were hands off, and others that have intervention - actually pulling sliders on the screen, using MIDI controllers. You interact with each other, but you do it with data. The computer mediates everything. It is very easy to mediate those kinds of things when you have a computer, but with instrumentalists it is a little bit harder because instrumentalists take in more of the gestalt of the experience of playing. Whereas the computer can quantify everything, the computer can say, "here the pitch stuff going on," and, "here is the tempo," or a measure of density. The computer can separate all these. But when people are playing they have more of a gestalt of what is happening. It is very different working with people, as opposed to computers, but it is very fulfilling.

It is very interesting. The more traditional way is to have the realization of the composition as a representation of the composer's aesthetic. But you have an extra level in there. You give them an outline of your aesthetic, and then they interpret it, bringing in their own aesthetic view.

It is letting the players do the realization. It is like providing people with a sketch and letting them fill out the details. But there is more control on the inside of this sketchy thing. I try to make the pre-composition ideas as obvious, as clear, as possible. I prefer not to add too much of myself into the mix, because I like the process to be very clear.

Sounds like a lot of fun. What will you be doing at City Hall?

I am going to do my credit card piece. Each credit card is like a player. Every time I swipe a card, I take the numbers off of the back of the card and parse them into musical information, musical parameters. The swiping of the card generates that musical micro-composition and that interacts with others that I've swiped beforehand. Then they sort of battle it out for supremacy. In this case, I have defined supremacy as being like pop music. That is, the cards with the most harmonious melody, most harmonious numbers, and most rhythmic numbers win out over the more "inferior" avant-garde styling credit cards.

You have the parameters defining the "harmonious" programmed in?

I have little algorithms that look at the numbers and rank them. There are a certain number of micro-compositions running. As they accumulate, the ones that are "musically inferior" disappear after a while and the ones that are "superior" last longer. So it is a real musical Darwinism going on.

And there is a chance that the MIDI Gramophone might appear?

Yeah, I'll do that. And then the group will come on. The group consists of people from the Crispus N-Tet. They have their own thing going on but I wanted to work with them. Some of the people I am working with have done a cover tune of Britney Spears.

I don't even know who Britney Spears is...

Britney Spears is like the big, pre-teen pop idol, idolette

Oh man, I hate that stuff...

Spears is incredibly vapid, it's like, Madonna-lite...

I have to be careful, because there are true artists working in the popular realm, but there are so very few. I was just interviewed for this festival in Big Sur by this weekly magazine in Monterey. They asked me what I thought of pop music. I said that most of pop music is a reflection of everything mediocre in society. I tend to be a little harsh on pop...

That's pretty harsh, man. I find stuff that I like out there. I'll channel surf on the radio. I don't pay that much attention. I usually find hip-hop most interesting because of the great sampling. You know, it is great electronic music; especially if you find a way to ignore all the sexist, violent stuff.

Another guy who will be playing is named Jesse Gilbert, who plays sax. He does a lot of computer stuff. But I want him to play sax. The idea is to do more of a fun, improv set with players. And we will do one piece that is a game I came up with.

I have this problem. All of my improvising friends think of me as an electronic composer and my electronic composer friends think of me as an improviser. Do you have these difficulties?

In the Bay Area I was really pigeonholed and hardly ever got to play in improv situations because I was playing computer, not sax. But now, down here, maybe because I've just recently established myself here, I've been playing with more people. I've been playing with Vinny, Wadada Leo Smith, and others. People in this area know me from the get go as someone who improvises with computer. Plus it is five years down the line and people are more open to integrating electronics with improvisation. And not necessarily just on a computer level: turntables, pedals, people doing all kinds of cool stuff like that. You don't have to use a computer, that's just my bag; I know how to make the tools and use the tools to make circuits and to do basically what I've been doing since I was 20 years old.

And this is your first Ventura Concert? You haven't played at any of the gigs I produce yet...

Well, is there anything else in Ventura? Jeff, it would be you or nothing. It will be a while till I'm invited to the Ventura Chamber Music Festival...

Me too...