Bob Ostertag Performing Homemade Electronic Instruments

BOB OSTERTAG: Designing an electronic instrument that you can play in any sort of meaningful way has proven far more difficult than anybody imagined. When I was a student, my teacher Dary John Mizelle told me: "Don't use technology to make new sounds. There's no point. Your ear is very smart. What's more interesting is to make new relationships between people with technology." And I took that to heart. So a lot of my early pieces were precisely about using technology to create new relationships between people. I built an instrument out of three tape recorders and six helium balloons that created a relationship between me and instrumentalists who were being recorded into the system. It was a relationship that really wouldn't have been possible without a machine. But I think gradually what I came to realize was that I was suspicious of claims that machines enabled new relationships between people. What was being created was a new relationship between people and the machine.

Bob Ostertag's Homemade Glass Instruments

I was frustrated by that for a long time. But I've since decided that this is not a problem of lack of imagination on my part or any other musicians. I think it's a reflection of the fact that the relation between humans and their technology is more complex than we thought. And in particular, the relation between human bodies and the machines that they create is actually fraught with tension and difficulty. When I started seeing it that way, I thought well, okay. It's no longer a frustrating problem, it's actually an interesting issue. Because I don't think it's a problem that can be solved. This tension between bodies and machines is actually the central fact of our time in history. And the problem of how humans and their machines are going to share this planet is actually the main thing on the table in front of us at this time. And precisely those kinds of problems — problems that are not ready to be solved but yet are staring everybody in the face every day — are just the kind of problems that art is the right tool to use to address.

Karlheinz Stockhausen

It’s interesting to go back to what are considered the seminal documents of electronic music. There's an essay from 1936 by Edgard Varèse, who is probably the first serious high art composer of any renown to fully embrace electronic instruments. He wrote a sort of manifesto about why electronic instruments were going to be important for the future of music. And to go back and read it now, it's quite disconcerting to me, because there was a time in my life when Varèse was quite a hero of mine. In fact, Varèse was quite a hero to a lot of people. Frank Zappa used to put quotes from Varèse on all of his record covers. He argued that electronic instruments were going to be crucial to the future of music for several reasons. One was because all the sounds we could possibly get from conventional acoustic instruments had already been explored. It was going to open up this new world of sound. But it was also going to free the composer from having their works interpreted by musicians, giving them much more control than ever before.

Twenty years after that, Stockhausen wrote an essay in which he argued almost exactly the same thing. Now of course, he was Stockhausen, so he claimed that nobody else had ever thought these things. But he paints the picture even more emphatically that the music studio of the future will be the genius composer surrounded by machines and technicians, so his great ideas can arrive unfiltered at the ears of the masses. Now, the notion of a machine as a perfect interpreter of human will is a rather problematic idea. And I think today we look back on that as a very naive notion of technology. But this was the mindset that electronic music emerged out of.

Whole Earth Catalog

Now I'm from a different generation that came on the scene in the 1970s when there was a sort of countercultural take on art and technology. My generation grew up reading the Whole Earth Catalog, where you could find advertisements for composting toilets, organic seeds, garden hoses, Moog synthesizers, and books by Buckminster Fuller all on the same page. You could learn how to give your cow dental hygiene and program a synthesizer from the same book. And there was this idea that if you made access to tools a democratic right, then we would create a more democratic culture. So when I first started using synthesizers, we're talking 1974 here, that was my generation's vision. We thought these tools were so radically different from all the ways humans had made music on planet Earth until now, that we were convinced there was a new music just around the corner that nobody had ever heard before. And we busied ourselves trying to figure out what that new music was going to be.

Switched-On Bach and "A Clockwork Orange" Score By Walter Carlos (aka Wendy Carlos)

Back in the 70s, one of the big debates in synthesizer design was whether or not to put a keyboard on them. And there were sort of two camps. There was the Robert Moog camp. When he made his synthesizers, all of them had piano keyboards on them. And Walter Carlos took a Moog synthesizer and made Switched-on-Bach. Then he made the soundtrack for A Clockwork Orange with the music of Beethoven. And most of us thought that was pretty lame. Orchestral instruments play that music just fine. Why would you take this new technology — which actually doesn't do as well at playing that music as the original technology did — and play music that's 200 years old?

And so the other camp, which was spearheaded by Don Buchla (who's still here in the Bay Area) said no, we have to figure out a different interface between the player and the machine. We should not just stick a piano keyboard on here. There are so many other possibilities. And so the realm of alternative controllers opened up: how were we going to interface our bodies with these machines?

Buchla Lightning Wand + NASA Rocket Fuel Sensor Touchplates Repurposed As Electronic Music Controllers

I’ve tried all kinds of controllers. I’ve tried infrared wands that you wave in the air, and there's this little computer that watches the gestures you make with the wands so you can control things that way. I've tried graphics tablets that I can draw on, and made software that turns the shapes I draw into sounds. I’ve tried game pads, and joysticks, and built a plexiglass window that illuminates my hands and translates their movements into music. Long before samplers, I performed on a collection of tape recorders and answering machine tapes, each one modified to malfunction in a different way.

And to this day, I don’t think we've managed to take bodily input from a human and put it into an electronic instrument that has enough depth and enough nuance to motivate somebody to sit down and practice for twenty years and become virtuosic at it. Certainly nothing that would inspire someone to be like my friend John Zorn, who back in the '70s was living on food stamps and potatoes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, so he could practice his saxophone twelve hours a day. We're not even remotely close. I think the fundamental problem is that the things that make the sound in synthesizers are things you can't touch. There's electronic circuits in there that are just going automatically: it’s an automated process. You can touch something like a keyboard, or a knob, or a pedal, or something more esoteric. And you can generate electronic impulses that affect these automated processes that are already underway in the machine. But you can't actually touch the sound. So there's always these layers of technology between you and your sound. Which is a radically different situation than any acoustic instrument.

Clara Rockmore Playing The Theremin

Interestingly enough, I think the most successful electronic instrument that's ever been made is the very first electronic instrument: the theremin. The theremin was invented in the very early part of the 20th century by a Russian inventor. There's this little box with one sine wave oscillator inside. And when you wave your hands over it, the position of one hand changes the pitch and the position of the other hand changes its volume. And that’s it. It was an electronic instrument that required the presence of a physical body, because it worked on the capacitance of your skin. There were no extra layers of technology between you and the sound; you were actually sticking your hand into a circuit and closing the circuit. And people became virtuosos on the theremin. Clara Rockmore played Rachmaninoff and really difficult pieces perfectly in tune on the theremin.

Jimi Hendrix

To me, Jimi Hendrix would be the second electronic music virtuoso after Clara Rockmore. The electric guitar is not really an electronic instrument...it's an acoustic instrument with a little pickup that can broadcast the sound of a vibrating metal string at ear splitting levels. But if you see Hendrix play, he’d get these giant stacks of amplifiers and turn up the amp so loud that the sound from the amp would resonate the strings, which would go through his pickups and back to the amp, so it would create a feedback loop. And then he would put his body in the feedback loop. So that everything about his body was involved in the sound: not only where his fingers were on the string, but the angle he was facing or turning from the amplifier, and whether he was dampening or releasing the strings. It was an approach to guitar that had nothing to do with an acoustic guitar; it was another instrument. So that's a meaningful interface between an electronic instrument and a human body.

Christian Marclay Turntable Performance (1987)

And I think the third successful electronic instrument is the turntable. We have DJs who we can say are virtuosic, like Mix Master Mike and the guys in Invisibl Skratch Piklz. But again, the turntable is actually an acoustic instrument. There's a little needle in there that is mechanically responding to vibrations on the physical surface of a rotating disc, and all the turntable does is amplify that. Instruments that have automated processes are much more difficult. So in my music, instead of trying to find the most gee whiz device that will wow my audience with its bells and whistles, I want to come up with pieces that don't hide the problem behind the curtain, but put it right out on the stage and investigate it. When I got to that point, I started making very different pieces.

Bob Ostertag + Pierre Hébert's "Living Cinema" In Taipei

My main performance project of the last few years has been this duo with a filmmaker Pierre Hébert, who makes live animations by scratching on film with a knife. For years, he would sit in the audience with a film projector that had a one minute loop of black film in it, and as the projector would start going he would grab a piece of film and start engraving on it with a knife. And when he would feel the projector tug, he’d let go and grab another piece. And by the time the concert was done, he would have filled the loop with an animation. I thought that was fantastic that in this age where we're accustomed to the idea that it takes millions of dollars to make a movie, there's this guy making a movie with a knife.

Living Cinema In Ft. Worth, Texas

Now when we perform together, we sit at this table where he'll draw something, then he hits a button so the image is captured and projected up above. Then he throws that paper away and puts another one down, draws, throws that paper away, and gradually creates an animation, similar to what he used to do. But instead of being limited to just engraving on film, he's got paints, chalk, pencils, toys, garbage, food, newspapers, and anything else that ignites his imagination. I'm at the other side of the table creating a live musical score with wind up toys, small explosives, junk food, and objects that are all chosen for the social and political connotations they have. There's a camera on my hands too, so he can also incorporate what I'm doing into his animations. So we actually make a movie as a performance activity. We like it because it puts us in this very tense relationship to the technology, because we have to scramble to get this movie up on stage. And as we do, this pile of garbage accumulates. It's all about our moment in history: here we are with these two computers and these ever accumulating mounds of science and garbage, and this automated process underway that we're frantically trying to keep up with but can't quite.

99.99999% of music that people think of as electronic music now is in dance clubs. And that's an interesting thing, because remember when I said that in the '70s we thought these tools couldn't help but lead to some radically new kind of music? Well, they did. And I hate it. I mean, electronic dance music is a radically new kind of music. And what's new about it is that through the whole history of human music up until electronic dance music, musical time as a perfectly segmented grid of time existed only in the abstract. So when people would play music, they would have this grid in their head, but that was never what you heard. What you heard was people playing OFF of that grid. Now, in jazz, playing off of that grid became such a science, and such an art, that it acquired a name: swing. But in fact, all human music plays off of that grid.

So with electronic dance music, this grid that had only existed in the abstract behind the music, and that you never heard, was actually made audible for the first time. Well, that's a revolution. I mean that is a radically new kind of music, and it's the most generational divide in music I've ever known. I don't know anybody who grew up listening to humans play rhythm, who think it's interesting to listen to a mechanically precise, repeated beat. And I don't know anybody who grew up listening to that, who has any problem with it at all. It was absolutely generational, which shows that as fast as technology is changing, our tastes change even faster.

Bob Ostertag Making Live Electronic Music Using His Kayak Paddle As A Controller

I'm very fascinated by how rapidly our tastes accommodate machines. I think the impact of screens on human culture has been profoundly underestimated. So I could contrast telepsychiatry — a rapidly growing field in which people see their psychiatrist via screen — with computer games, and internet pornography, and show how in each field, a screen-based activity which began as a second-best substitute for the real thing quickly becomes the preferred mode of the activity. Internet pornography now has become so ubiquitous that for a lot of people it has stopped becoming a substitute for sex, and has actually become the preferred mode of sexual activity.

Steve Elkins Filming Bob Ostertag Kayaking Around The Golden Gate Bridge (San Francisco)

I interviewed a pornographer who told me that twice in the month before I interviewed him he'd been on a porn film set where one man has an orgasm, then they turn off the camera so the other man can masturbate until he's ready to have an orgasm. Then they turn the camera back on and edit it to look like both men came simultaneously. Both times, the second guy who's masturbating can't come. And so everybody's looking at their watch, like "hey, we've got to get this thing done," and finally what they do is bring in a laptop and lie it on top of the first guy so that the guy who's masturbating could look at a screen instead of the person. And looking at the screen, he's instantly ready to come. So they turn on the camera and at the last second they pull the laptop away.

What's amazing about it is that the image on the screen is pretty much what's there in front of him already. But it's no longer as erotic unless it's on a screen. And to me the same thing has happened with music. Listening to machine music has taught us to like music made by machines. Looking at sex on a screen teaches us to like sex on screens. As fast as technology is changing, I think humans still change faster. And machines teach us to like machines. We see it everywhere: in sex, in war, in Iraq, in global warming. How are we going to live with these things that we've created?

Bob Ostertag And NATO-Bombed Bridge (Novi Sad, Serbia)

So let’s go back then to the Whole Earth Catalog, and that whole idea of access to technology as the path to liberation. I come from that generation where the threads of technology and ecology were actually married for a time. But it's interesting to know that the collective of people that put out their catalogue has split. The man who published the Whole Earth Catalog is now a strong advocate of building more nuclear power plants, for example, as a way to stave off global warming. One whole element of that Whole Earth Catalog scene basically invented personal computers and had a large, important hand in launching Silicon Valley. They've gone the technology road and the other half of that scene went back to the land and started organic farms and created what we know of as environmentalism.

One of the things I learned through years of political organizing is that it's important to keep track of what you thought before. Because things can slide around over the years, and eventually you've become so accustomed to arguing with familiar old words — like "liberation" — that nobody notices the ideas behind them have changed.

Bob Ostertag Kayaking In Alaska

The promise of the computer industry is that you can do anything you want. I'm constantly amazed at discussions of GarageBand and things like this, about how computers enable anybody to make music. What an incredible notion. I mean, have we already forgotten that there are still cultures on this planet where EVERYBODY makes music? If you go to Bali, everybody makes art. It's a religious duty. So this notion that we need technology so that any of us can make art is really a wild idea.

In the early days of electronic music, the technology itself was quite primitive, but it wasn't yet embedded in a culture. It was designed as a very open ended idea. Once the technology became more advanced, electronic dance music had become a huge market, and all the instruments were very narrowly engineered to serve that kind of music. They are embedded in a culture that says electronic music is this, but not that. So there's an interesting conflict between technology and culture right there. And I feel very ambivalent right now having acquired a certain amount of expertise using electronic tools to make music...tools that I feel increasingly alienated from.

I think the crucial thing you need to support a really creative art scene is not technology, or grant money, or even a steady income from your work. The crucial thing is cheap rent. Cheap rent was what brought the hippies to San Francisco, and what initially made Greenwich Village the bohemian center, and what’s been drawing people to Berlin in the last ten years. It’s become a very scarce commodity in the current world economy.

I mean, when I first moved to New York, there were a lot of abandoned buildings in the East Village...the neighborhood had gone to hell so badly that the landlords would just torch the building for the insurance and then abandon it. So the city would inherit all these buildings filled with junkies and rats. But if you would agree to bring a building up to code, you could buy it from the city for $1. I lived in two storefronts, and still have friends who live in a building in the East Village that they bought for $1. And people write about that time in lower Manhattan as being this seminal period in music in New York. It certainly didn't feel seminal at the time. What it felt like was that we were living on food stamps, and eating potatoes, and nobody was coming to our concerts. But after being in El Salvador for a decade, I came back to music and realized that my old buddies had become musical stars, and that John Zorn — who I never thought would get out of the food stamps and the potatoes — was somehow considered this important musician. And people thought I had participated in something influential, which was just wildly unexpected. That was a great lesson in the value of sticking to your guns, and always being aware that your understanding of what you're doing now will change.

Underground Tunnels And Secret Guerrilla Camps In El Salvador

At the same time, I was involved in the movement against nuclear power, which was one of the biggest mass movements in America, with hundreds of thousands of people involved, and tens of thousands occupying nuclear plants. Many of us lived off very little. And it all fell apart in acrimony and dissension. It wasn't until years later that people looked back and realized that while we hadn't successfully shut down any of the construction projects we were trying to prevent, we had created such a fuss that the regulatory process for approving nuclear power plants had become incredibly burdensome. In other words, we failed to shut down any one plant, but actually closed the whole industry. So we really couldn't see the forest for the trees at the time.

In both political struggle and art, you have to start focusing less on outcome and more on the dignity of the daily details and find meaning in the creative thread. So to me, living a creative life is not about any particular artistic endeavor, or a career track, but an approach to living. It means following your creative thread, even if it leads you in directions you didn't anticipate. By conventional terms, I've committed career suicide on numerous occasions. You know, I had a promising career as a musician in downtown New York, and I gave it all up to help the guerrilla movements in Central America. Then I had a promising career as a journalist in Central America, and left it all to come back to music. You just have to be willing to throw all that overboard. Your understanding of what you're doing now will change. And it might keep changing for a long time. So the important thing is to keep doing. Just keep doing.