Demonstration Disc is, ostensibly, a new album by Jason Grier; equally so, it’s a collection of free samples and generative music tools which Grier spent the past 4 years carving, cutting, and coding from studio recordings of acoustic and electronic instruments, field recordings, found sounds and wayward sonic data.
Jason Grier: Download his Unique Sound Library
Sounds range from lushly psychoacoustic sounds – hundreds of guitar harmonics woven together into gossamer threads, field recordings of Berlin’s raucous New Year’s Eve fireworks – to sounds which are usually left unheard, for example, outtakes, gaffes, and editing remnants preserved as artifacts of artistic labor, as well as rips of Facebook video feeds of mass protests following the US election.
Musically, Demonstration Disc furthers the approach taken on Grier’s 2013 album Unbekannte, described as “a series of mysterious short films” by Julia Holter – who makes a cameo appearance on Demonstration Disc, whistling a sliced-up “Au Clair de la Lune”. Unlike Unbekannte, which was largely hand-edited, Grier’s sound-monoliths on Demonstration Disc are machine-tooled by Grier’s often unpredictable “generative playback engine”, a sample-dot sprayer which he jokingly dubbed “Seurat MIDI” in reference to the pointillist painter Georges Seurat.
Issues of labor theory, social practice, and sonic activism underly an abstract surface worked and re-worked toward a hallucinatory depth of field. Loud, decadent, irreverent, and cinematic, Grier himself describes Demonstration Disc as sounding like “...mashing down all the preset buttons on your sparkling-new, cosmic-avant-garde monster synth.”
The album is, nonetheless, part of a larger project which includes the “open-sourcing“ of Grier’s HEM sound library, the mainstay of his long-duration performances since 2013, comprising 1800+ audio samples, plus the Seurat MIDI device. Not only are the sounds and the tools freely available, Grier even provides tutorials and has planned expansion packs, making this act of framework development a part of the larger artwork itself.
The first question is why? I mean, while these certainly aren’t bread-and-butter materials, just in terms of the quality and variety of the samples and the sheer amount of work and refinement that presumably went into the various devices, this is certainly on par with commercially available sound packs. So, why give away this library of sounds and tools that you’ve been making over the last few years?
In the end, it just seemed out of keeping with the material to sell it. Cause I started off with a kind of malediction which was that my next album was never going to materialize and that I was going to spend as much time as possible deferring the creation of an album in favor of the non-creation of some-album-or-another’s anonymous materials. That credo was kind of like (as Satie would say) the “gravest immobilities“ for me, but also, an actual plan, that followed through even to the distribution phase.
My kind of “thesis“ was that art-labor tends to get overwritten by art-works. Not just in the case of some art assistant toiling away in some art star’s studio. Even when you’re a so-called bedroom artist, you’re an art-laborer and an auteur sharing the same body. The moment your artwork goes on display (in the case of music albums: getting a street date, getting reviewed in Pitchfork, getting distributed to stores, licensed for film, etc.) there’s this symbolic erasure of the real/invisible body who labored, in favor of the artist, a kind of symbolic/visible body.
So my exercise, itself, became a kind of performance in which I deferred, for as long as possible (okay, well, three years, in any case) the body of the art-laborer from being overwritten by the body of the artist by simply placing myself (my body) in the role of a perpetual sound editor. But now that I’m “Jason Grier“ (the artist, being interviewed here) how I can monetize this ex-laboring-body’s labor?
So my decision was to open the performance to other laboring bodies, who might then make their own albums, or just labor further, editing and contributing new raw materials to this “open-source“ sound library.
By the way, there’s another aspect to this free giveaway stuff, of course, which is that, if you see my project as more of a software product (rather than some conceptual art piece) then you probably realize already that free software is hardly un-monetized these days, it’s just “differently monetized“ than, say, vinyl records, downloads, paintings, laptops, etc. And, of course, conceptual capital is still capital, so nothing is so idealistic in the end.
Is Seurat MIDI the instrument you used to compose the tracks on the album? How did you arrive at its current incarnation? Can you explain how it works? What do the Macro controls do and how do they interact with one another?
Yes. Seurat was helping me a lot to compose the Demonstration Disc. Seurat started off as a kind of paint-sprayer/belt-sander kind of device for manufacturing textures by randomly “spraying“ MIDI notes (like paint dots) onto a drum rack filled up with one-shot samples. Georges Seurat being this dot-painter, it seemed a fitting name.
The first sounds in the library were these sounds that involved basically clipping attacks off of hundreds and hundreds of plucked string samples and then cutting and pasting these little swells together manually, to make a kind of sound-surface, like these endless rolls of hypnotic materials that you see at TAP Plastics or Planet Modulor or wherever. So there was already this materials/manufacturing metaphor entering into my work, but it was labor-intensive as hell, so I thought why not automate that by hooking up a bunch of arpeggiators and drum racks. And as the library grew, Seurat became essential to browse all the samples cause there were just too many clips to click on by hand.
Eventually I figured out how to make Seurat deal with more long-term events by controlling a slow arpeggiator with a fast arpeggiator (that’s the first four top row of macros on the device) and at that point he got kind of smart enough to compose little musical motifs.
So I set him up to run for day-long intervals in which I just kinda stopped him whenever I heard a pleasing combination of textures, and those combos became the tracks on the album. It’s all in the tutorials, how this was done.
The idea was to only use default Ableton MIDI devices, so there ends up being some absurd stuff going on with macros chained to macros chained to macros deep down in there. Seurat contains like over a hundred sub-devices that help narrow down how wide a field of samples he can spray MIDI notes on, how thick these samples get sprayed out, and whether or not the spray comes in bursts or a continuous stream. There’s a sub-device that has a macro with 128 different range limits connected to the device-on buttons of 128 Ableton Chord MIDI devices to create Seurat’s spray width, another that uses macros and velocity randomizers to (paradoxically) confine Seurat’s center-of-spray to just one note. There’s another use for velocity randomizers that basically throttles Seurat’s spray density, and a use-case for pitch randomizers that moves a whole spray jet around kind of like a searchlight (the “wander“ macro).
I guess the next step is to add some or another AI library, like Google TensorFlow or something and see what kind of music Seurat makes after that upgrade. I imagine this would be a standalone app that triggers Ableton Live via OSC or some remote script or something.
Also, there’s potentially further use-cases I never thought of. For example, recently, there’s been this poet [Annelyse Gelman] who’s been writing/scrambling poetry with Seurat, so instead of one-shot instrument samples, she’s using words/phrases/stanzas, and she made a tutorial video on how that’s done.
There’s a track on Demonstration Disc that’s made with samples of studio chatter, door creaks, cables being plugged in, mixer hiss, and other recording process “detritus”. The sample library includes all of these sounds and many more sourced from what would normally be edited out or minimized (microphone feedback, noise reduction artefacts, amplifier hum, hiss and crackle, etc). What is your interest in using these kinds of sounds? Are you mainly looking for a variety of textures and timbres or is there a larger point you are making about the perceived musicality of sounds or the music making process itself?
I’m always questioning this decision, to include these “artefacts of studio labor“ in the library, cause maybe that’s too literal/cheesy. But I’m curious what people think. And I do like the way they sound, just as a variety of textures and timbres and sounds-as-such. But it’s also comic relief, cause these are many gaffes and stuff that was really difficult to see as “pure sound“ like the live-room door squeaking so ominously, or people laughing and talking about how fucked up that last take was, etc.
But lately, I’m selecting sounds for so-called “non-cochlear“ reasons, like trying to figure out what does it mean for me to choose one sound over another sound? What’s the criteria? Pure pleasure? What’s the difference/pollution-factor between an editor and a curator? And so on… When I play live/DJ sometimes I just stop the “music“ and sequence political speeches or lectures by critics/academics. I was wary of including, like, a whole Judith Butler lecture in the library, but, in relation to this idea of including detritus as a “philosophical“ question, there’s also some more directly political resonance to including “non-sounds“ in the library.
For example, there’s this one sample set that’s literally recorded off a web browser, and it’s a Facebook Live feed of protests in NYC following the US elections. The internet connection was so slow at my flat in Berlin that the video was glitching like crazy and making this fierce growling, “abstract“, kind of sound with lots of loopbacks and beat-repeat-esque stuff happening. Now is that really “fierce“, in the aesthetic sense? Noise music? An art of noises? An impromptu automated remix of a demonstration? Is that even sound as such? Of course not. The recording itself is a situation, imbricated and bound up in an accident (the horrible accident of history, of our historical time, which is the recurrence of fascism) and of a confluence of accident, telecommunications, and sound, and the promising event of the global reach of activism.
The library also includes some conventional instruments (electric and acoustic guitars, bass, drum kit, saxophone, clarinet, viola, etc). But these too are presented as played in unconventional ways or with advanced techniques. Did you play and record all the instruments yourself? How and where did you find the Antique Piano?
I recorded quite a bit of the “traditional“ instrumentation myself, but I had a whole lot of wonderful help from many friends who generously lent their time and probably thought this idea was crazy but did it anyways.
In some cases, like the sax, cymbals, and the finger drumming, for instance, there’s virtuosic performance and proper extended technique going on that’s really quite dazzling. (…And useful, I hope, cause I feel like there’s not much in the way of resources for people who want to work with these kinds of sounds to make either mock-ups or finished pieces out of them. I hope the library continues to grow in this direction, as well.)
I found the Antique Piano rotting away in a villa in the mountains in Tuscany where I was a guest for a lavish wedding. The piano was a rare kind of anomalous sort of failed design somewhere between a grand piano and an upright piano. Namely, the strings and soundboard were tilted diagonal! So the whole thing looked like a big doorstop. Suffice it to say, pianos of this type weren’t made for long. I did some digging and learned that this piano originated in the mid-19th century. It seemed like it hadn’t been tuned since the mid-19th century. It sounded like a John Cage prepared piano, but not intentionally prepared, just literally “prepared by neglect“ because it was going all to dust inside. So I decided to do one of these “meticulous“ string-by-string multisamples of this rotten thing, cause, yeah, I liked how it sounded, but also it brought me back full-circle to this “sonic detritus“ issue.
It’s your name on the cover (or on the Spotify tag, the download link, etc.) but a strong collaborative spirit seems to be present in this project on multiple levels. You had friends play some of the instruments, the Seurat MIDI device is a kind of collaborator, and you mention that you hope that others will use the library and add to it. What do you hope / imagine the library will become and how can people add to it? Do they become collaborators by augmenting the library or using its contents for their own music? How does collaboration tie into the various connotations of the “Demonstration” in the title?
Collaboration is very important to me. Of course it goes back to the many mutations and forms of my label, HEM (Human Ear Music) which started as a collective of like-minded artists, and then became a non-profit, and later, something else, and now… this library adventure. But still, I always have to be careful using that word – “collaboration“ – without a well-defined (socio-political/methodological) context. Lately – in the past three or four years or so – the importance, and form, of collaboration for me comes first from the idea of seeing music as a situation. This idea kind of got into my head during the time we were recording Michael Pisaro’s Tombstones in San Francisco. Cause we went in there in this fancy recording studio with these text scores and there was a delicate balance of trust between the composer, performers, producers, engineers, and administrators, all the human roles involved; the indeterminacy/fragility of the work itself, which is the “experimental situation“ into which Michael refers to having put these pop songs; and this site of mechanized music production with lots of music machines everywhere, which is a highly industrialized material and commercial situation.
So after that experience, during my first studio sessions of my own music in Berlin, during which I had already begun recording the library material, I came to see the recording studio as a situation as an end in itself, and as a shared space of labor, a necessarily collaborative context, and not necessarily a place where albums are made, nor even where “studio experiments“ are performed that ultimately get released for their aesthetic value. So the library began as an effort to see a recording studio as a situation of bodies, materials, roles, and various labor/political horizons, as well as as situation in which machines, and, ultimately, robots can find themselves, as well, and this is one crucial form of what I’d call collaboration, in my view. The audio that comes out of that collaboration, I think, can certainly be an experimental-aesthetic object as such, or music-as-such, and these kinds of objects should definitely exist, I believe, but what also can result is a labor document, a certification or an archaeology of the collaborative labor that was performed in a shared space of labor, every sound sample in some sense serving as an authentication of labor and a kind of pot shard left by a temporary community.
Now when it comes to distributing this labor document, a library seemed the obvious choice. One encounters a library as a resource and enters a library with the possibility of a use in mind; learning, or doing, or making, etc. In this sense, the sound library is already an extended labor situation. And in terms of breathing new life into the set of sounds themselves, I don’t plan to stop here. Already I’m working on “expansion packs“ for data sonification (images, text, and big data sets rendered via various means as audio) cluster chords (using my houseplant-encrusted piano at home) and the Omnichord (barring any copyright issues with the original manufacturer).
So, of course, I would like this extensibility to be open-ended and to not be the only person working on it anymore. Coming from a software development background, I liked the strategy on Github where you can distribute code in a repository and contribute to that repository by making what they call a “pull request“ and submitting your modifications for review by the core team. If all goes well, your changes get merged into the core codebase and the project grows in that way. So it seems natural to just put the whole library on Github and see Github as an alternative release format, in addition to digital/streaming/vinyl/whatever.
It’s possible as well that each library expansion itself comes with a new “Demonstration Disc“ (or “Demonstration EP“, as it were) and continues the process on and on. And, of course, we have the pure engineering angle as well, as Seurat becomes smarter and migrates to Javascript, or becomes a desktop app of its own, there’s a lot of potentially collaborative development implied there as well.