STEVE ELKINS: Kaffe, a few years ago, you wrote:

“Felicitations oh music for bodies!

We salute you 21st century music project, go forth!

Make new music and take it to the streets away from the confines of the concert hall. Build your vibrating instruments, your brilliant portable stages, your beasts of sonic delight for all away away from ticket sales and start times. Let us come lie in your Beds, your Chairs, your Things that play the music that moves, that spins and caresses us, that sucks us down deep and pushes our buttocks and shoulders and thighs in pebbles of questions and swathes of answers...

Yes, these materials already exist and we know you plan to use them - to make sonic clothes. Underwear that vibrates circular over meridians as you walk. Shirts that play your shoulders and shoot up your arms as you write...When will this chapter of solo sensations for wearers, cloudbursts of snowflakes running over skin scattering begin...is it not the feel, the subliminal and physical connection to our very own vibrating bodies that is the core that connects and communicates? Ah ~ when can the surfaces themselves be the vibrational source rather than just the transfer medium?

Your new structures that we await, the sonic footstools, baby bouncers, bathroom seats - the more portable ones we could fold in our back packs powered by the sun or the wind when we unpack them at bus stops...The stage still the place for some and so not for others. Let us acknowledge this finally. Gone is the spiritual, the ritual with so much music that now is made. Question the need for the raised platform......

The street is where we can live, where we can learn, where we can listen and smell and be alive with all the moments that are new and now...music for us bodies, please don’t take us down the route of solo wealth for solo pleasure. Maintain the Beasts public and shared and resourced and grown between us...A multidisciplinary team of professionals from finance, curation, social psychology, local politics, acoustic design, material physics, audio engineering, architecture, music, art, acousmatic composition, performance, digital media. Use their feedback. Push it back into your designs, your locations, your networks, your music, -
Activate systems!”

ELKINS (cntd): Kaffe, please tell me about your Music For Bodies.

KAFFE MATTHEWS: Music For Bodies is a collective project that pulls together people from different practices to collaborate on designing new interfaces for the enjoyment of music. We’re looking at being able to enjoy music through your body, rather than just through your ears. Acknowledging the fact that the human animal is one great big listening instrument.

ELKINS: How did you begin to think about music as something that we don’t just experience through our ears?

MATTHEWS: My way into making music with electronics was through the violin, inasmuch as the violin was my interface. Its this wooden box that vibrates under your chin, and it communicates with you, physically. And I think that has been an essential part of my practice, which in fact I’ve realized through the sonic beds that I started to make in 2006: these physical, tangible interfaces as ways of enjoying music, which is what these sonic beds are essentially.

Music is not just about melody and rhythm. Lots of people enjoy different frequencies in different ways. Why is it that we all enjoy different music in different ways? Why is it that some people love one music and not another? I don’t think it’s just education, or how tired you are, or whether it’s coming through your granny’s radio or a huge sound system, or whether you’re in your car, or what mood you’re in. I think it’s something more biological and physiological, related to how your nervous system functions. So when I began to make the Music For Bodies Project and the sonic beds, it was not just about exploring how different frequencies are effective on different parts of the body. It was also about creating a means by which different people, more people, could enjoy experimental music.

MATTHEWS (cntd): I mean, let’s face it, the majority of people are not interested in going to an experimental music concert. It’s generally the same kinds of people who are there: young, white, male. And they are usually involved in making or producing that kind of music. So I started thinking around 2004 or 2005 that I wanted this music to be available to more people. When I made a sonic armchair in ’97, I discovered that old women and kids would actually cue for an hour to ride its frequencies. Yet if you had played that same music to them through speakers, there’s no way they would have tolerated it. They would have been like, “Give me a break love, where’s the tune?” But playing it to them through a chair, and setting it up so that it moves and vibrates up and down through their body, they’re getting this tangible, physical, gorgeous experience. They love it. It’s a massage, actually.

So then I thought, what would it be like with the body lying down? Then you’ve got much more room for sub woofers. Because essentially the frequencies that we feel are those below 100 Hz, at the bass end. Then you can work with a multi-channel system and send sounds through different parts of the body. Compositions are made specifically for the bed. They move up and down your body, and your neighbor lying next to you might be getting something different. I didn’t anticipate it would produce as much of an instrument as it did.

ELKINS: Your music tends to reflect a desire to become more sensitive to the space you’re in. In what ways do the sonic beds reflect the places in which they are made? How do they allow people to experience their surroundings differently?

MATTHEWS: I made the first sonic bed in London in 2005. I made music for the bed with my theremin. And very quickly, I realized that this thing I made had fantastic potential because it was not just an instrument, it was a portable venue. I could get other people to write music for it. I wanted to make beds in other places and collaborate with people from that place, using their own local materials, and sounds from that place.

MATTHEWS (cntd): Almost immediately I was invited to make one in Shanghai. I already had a long fascination with the Chinese development of acupuncture and the meridian system. And in making the sonic beds, I incorporated my research into bio-resonance, which assesses the frequencies at which your cells and organs are vibrating: a kind of Western or technological acupuncture. It seemed like a perfect place to start developing this thing.

I researched how furniture was made over there. We came up with a hand carved design, and students at the local music conservatory have made pieces for it. I made my own piece for it with sounds from the Bund, a river that goes through the center of Shanghai. There’s a lot of vibrant life around there. I processed, mixed, and structured recordings I made of the sweeping sounds from countless brooms people use around the river to clean up the pavement, and the gorgeous horns from the boats on the river, the voices of ticket sellers along with these little push-along carts that play sweetly synthetic flute music, and other sounds that I felt really captured local life there. These all became music for the Shanghai bed.

The next sonic bed was in Taipei, Taiwan. Then I made one in Quebec. It was -25 degrees when I went and the St. Lawrence river was just breaking up. I made recordings of ice flow and Inuit singing as the music for that bed.

The next one I made was sonic bed Scotland. We used local elm wood. To make the music, I spent a week in a cabin with two Scottish pipers. One was an Uileann piper and played Northumberland pies, and the other played the bagpipes. And we went to Belfast to do this. It was politically quite interesting with the links between those two countries. (A video of their music and the making of Sonic Bed Scotland can be viewed here: http://vimeo.com/26954210, and here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DImLYvVcYJs).

MATTHEWS (cntd): After Scotland, I made a bed in Marfa, Texas. I processed sounds of insects I recorded there for the music.

One of the things that’s been really interesting about making the beds in these different countries is that you learn the economic situation in each of them, and where art falls within all that. Every new bed that gets made is looked after by a team of people who know how it works and can enable other people to make music for it. So that we build up these libraries of music for the bed that then exist online. The idea being that you can be in any country in the world lying in a bed and download a piece that might have been made in Japan, or Quebec, or Scotland, or wherever. I also plan to make beds in the Middle East, Africa, India, Japan, Australia, and South America. Then I can orchestrate pieces which are performed on all of the beds throughout the world at the same time.

I had anticipated that we would have made armchairs, 3-piece suites, footstools, clothes, and even sonic materials for taxi ranks, for pizza huts, for market squares, but so far it’s just been bed-bed-bed-tastic. Which has taken me around the world. People have to find their own way in, and their own meaning. The only instruction I give is “please remove your shoes.”

ELKINS: Didn’t you also make a sonic bench in Mexico?

MATTHEWS: Yes, I was really wanting to make these things outside. Because the idea behind the bed was also: yeah, let’s get on the street with it. I don’t want the music imprisoned in exclusive gig / concert hall situations, and I don’t want the beds to just wind up in galleries or museums either. You know, I would like them to be in shopping centers or parks. So I did manage to make a sonic bench in a park in Mexico City. There were these guys who would sit outside in the park playing vihuelas and they’d bash out these fantastic songs. And I want to go back to make music for the bench with them.

MATTHEWS (cntd): That’s one of the things about all this: you don’t realize the light and the space and the feel and the smell of that place until you get there. And that’s something I’ve used to make music all along. That’s why I’ve been an improvisor, and still am. And why I make site-specific work: because the place totally informs what the work is going to be. Because we do it together. It’s not just me coming in with my own ideas and saying bang, slam, I’m going to do this or that. It’s about being present with people in a place.

ELKINS: Don’t you sometimes actually sample the space that you’re performing in and incorporate it into your performance?

MATTHEWS: At one point I was making pieces whereby I would improvise in a place with my violin, but I’d always put a wild microphone somewhere, so that while I was playing, I could access it when I wondered what it was listening to during my performance. I would take the sounds from it, which sometimes were coming from outside the performance space, and incorporate them into my performance spontaneously. It would give me a surprise or something gorgeous, or something hideous: in each case, something I would work with to make music. It really was a revelation on the variety of music you could create dependent on where you’re playing. Actually, the world is really interesting if you start to use your ears. Let’s shut our eyes off. Everything becomes very different. Existence is transformed.

MATTHEWS (cntd): The sonic beds did three things to me. First, they took me off the stage. And I became really interested in how to work with space, rather than recordings. Then I became more interested in working with other people to make music. For example, I’ve begun making projects with 11-year old kids in Folkestone, England, for which I designed a satellite-linked audio bicycle. The daily routes the kids take on their bikes to visit their pals, their granny, the places they go shopping, their school, or wherever, are used as scores to lay an interactive blanket of music over the neighborhood. The bikes play the part of the score linked to the specific part of town they’re riding through via satellite and speakers built onto the handlebars. The bikes are made available to the kids, and they can create their own sequence through the score by determining their own bicycle route through it. Pedestrians, whether they know it or not, also create their own sequence through the score as the bicyclists pass.

One boy made a piece based on the sea and placed it on a street where you couldn’t see the sea. Another boy made a rap piece entirely out of his chomping and slurping sounds from eating a big mac and drinking some coke, which we laid out on the streets so that when you went from one Macdonald’s to the other Macdonald’s across town, the piece would play all the way.

ELKINS: Maybe you’re aware that our mutual friend Jon Rose has been working on his own type of bicycle music. In 2009, I went to Australia to film him assembling and premiering his chamber orchestra of bicycle-powered musical instruments in a former train factory in Sydney. The audience stood in the middle while the bicyclists rode around them in this incredibly huge, reverberant space. One major difference from your work is that most of Jon’s bicycle-instruments were mechanical-acoustic constructions without electronics. The way you rode the bike determined how an attached viola or turntable was played. And he built all kinds of variations on this. One bike played a rotating bass drum containing amplified ping-pong balls.

But one of Jon’s collaborators on the project, Garth Paine, was there creating a musical GPS bike that made live electronic music from all aspects of the bike’s movement, including direction and speed, as it traveled around the concert space. It was an extension of his work placing bio-sensors on dancers to make music directly from their body movements. The three of us, along with Robin Fox and Rod Cooper, went out to a skate park in Redfern to test out a musical GPS skateboard they were developing as well.

In an interesting coincidence, Jon's bicycle concert was surrounded by bicyclists riding through a city-wide interactive game which involved touch screen computers on their bikes that allowed them to access the inner thoughts of other bicyclists who had been in that particular location before them. It was produced by UK urban gamers known as Blast Theory, who have been exploring how social and political engagement is changing with technology since the early ‘90s. They make games that straddle real and virtual worlds across entire cities to probe the ideologies built into the technology we’re constantly bathing in. And investigate whether there is a difference in the emergent behavior of groups of people in real versus virtual environments. Their bicycle game in Sydney had a lot to do with investigating the possibilities and limitations of meaningful communication in real and virtual environments by using the city as a kind of “score” for them to travel through. It seems like you were exploring something similar by using your satellite-linked bikes to make riders aware of the internal musical worlds of people around them.

MATTHEWS: For me, one of the main motivations to use bicycles for music was to take music outside, but it was also about finding new ways to engage with local environment. I’ve done this in various ways over the years, including a piece in which I made music from flying a giant kite on an uninhabited Scottish island. The kite sent me data streams on the weather 100 feet off the ground and its journey through it, which shaped the music. I also made a piece with primary school children in England in which we investigated air pollution hotspots in their local streets and skies, mapped the results, and used it as a musical score to make its health and environmental effects tangible, and start a dialogue about the possibilities of city transport without pollution.

MATTHEWS (cntd): And then, bang, in 2009 I was invited to go to the Galapagos Islands for a month to work with shark scientists on making music with hammerhead sharks. I went diving with hammerheads and studied how they move and articulate space. A human being is a complete stupid, clumsy lump underwater, but the shark is the most sophisticated creature imaginable. They’re older than dinosaurs, and they’ve evolved with the geology of the planet. This “hammer” that they have on their heads is an electro-receptor system that they use like an aerial to read the variety of shifts in the magnetic field of the earth through the bottom of the ocean. So I have been finding ways to make music from the sharks reading the magnetic pathways of planet Earth. Its melodies will be made using the sharks' positions, depths and speeds mapped over harmonies determined by the underwater terrain to create a music we could never think of. It’s called “You Might Come Out Of The Water Every Time Singing.” It will be experienced by listeners in a pitch black space, just like the waters the hammerheads travel through. I think it’s the next step in composition for me. I’m ultimately wanting to make more sculptural music: music that actually exists in things that people have to experience by moving through, rather than by lying down. I’m working on making a giant violin, 35 times the standard size, which people can walk through while it plays, and experience it as a vibrating body. [Kaffe's giant violin under construction pictured below.]

ELKINS: Kaffe, I'd say there are extremely unusual circumstances that brought us together to talk about your music today. You and I are two of the only people on this planet who can say we've been to the remote Slovakian farming town of Violin to visit the Rosenberg Museum, which preserves the creations and archives of the legendary Rosenberg family dynasty who were a central driving force behind nearly every musical innovation in the last century...but who in fact never existed.

MATTHEWS: Ah yes, I first found out about the Rosenbergs in ’92 or ’93. I was in Amsterdam and went into a book shop, and there was this book “The Pink Violin,” filled with articles by music historians from all over the world talking about the legendary Rosenbergs. I eventually realized the articles were all fake, written by our friend Jon [Rose], and that a lot of the Rosenbergs' musical inventions were actually his. He had basically invented an entire mythology around his own work. I read it and thought, “ok, this guy really is bonkers.”

ELKINS: I went to a public exhibition of Rosenberg artifacts in Brno, Czech Republic in 2009, and a bus arrived full of school children whose teachers were bringing them to learn about the Rosenbergs. That was when I really realized how far the line had been blurred between myth and history. And you were asked to perform at the Rosenberg Museum for its grand opening concert.

MATTHEWS: Yes, I remember Jon and I laid down on the train tracks playing our violins with Aleks Kolkowski and Phil Durrant as trains of people came in from all over to this concert. I think a lot of people were expecting something like a classical music concert, but what they got was Ben Patterson going on stage and making marmalade out of violin cases.

ELKINS: And according to the video footage I saw, you were being seriously harassed by a drunk local.

MATTHEWS: Oh yeah, he wanted to marry me. Something like that.

ELKINS: Well, I made a short film about the Rosenberg Museum ( https://vimeo.com/33099085) after traveling there with Jon for its 10th anniversary celebration. I was going through Jon's published biography of the fictional Dr. Johannes Rosenberg, and noticed something which I find kind of uncanny: in between winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his book "Yehudi Menuhin Serves Capitalism" and having his 11th Violin Concerto sent by NASA into outer space "in search of concert venues," Dr. Johannes Rosenberg is credited for having created, in 1961, the first piece for violin and interactive hammerhead sharks.

MATTHEWS: My god, you must be joking. You know, I've worked with NASA astronauts on a music project as well. That's incredible.

ELKINS: Indeed. Jon turned portions of his own musical history into the Rosenberg mythology, but you're turning parts of the Rosenberg mythology into reality. You've been carrying the torch of the Rosenberg legacy since you performed at the opening of their museum, without realizing it. It reminds me of something written at the entrance to the Rosenberg exhibition in Brno: "Today, the Rosenberg Museum is such an organic mixture of reality and fiction that even direct participants in its expansive game are at times unable to discern and separate its individual layers. A critic once wrote that the Rosenbergs were the only virtual dynasty to become a reality. But the uniqueness of the games surrounding the Rosenberg Museum is that the initial virtual concept had already been realized in life itself."

MATTHEWS: You should talk to Aleks Kolkowski and Phil Durrant, the other violinists I played with at the Rosenberg Museum. They are among the most crack violinists in Europe as far as I'm concerned, and have been up to some really interesting things.

ELKINS: I've been in touch with them. It seems that everyone from the inaugeral concert at the Rosenberg Museum have been taking music in radically different directions. Jon's instrument of choice, as you know, has become barbed wire fences in conflict zones around the world. Aleks seems to be going in the opposite direction as you in terms of technology, finding new ways to make music with 19th century recording technology like Stroh violins, acetate record cutters, and wind-up wax cylinder phonographs, which he uses in his live performances to create music that sounds like electronic music but without any actual electricity involved. It's part of his larger interest in examining our relationship to recorded sound in the age of the digital file by making new music with the earliest sound recording devices. [A great interview with Aleks can be read here: http://jussiparikka.net/2011/04/11/“sonic-alchemy”-an-interview-with-aleks-kolkowski/].


POSTSCRIPT: Kaffe is currently at work on an outdoor project in Galloway Forest, Scotland, in which she is making survival spacesuits that enable the user to lie down anywhere in the forest, regardless of ground condition or temperature, and look up comfortably at one of the only skies in Europe with zero light pollution. She is also engineering sonic furniture for the forest which creates silence for a human, so that the sky can be contemplated without external ambient sonic distraction. And a vinyl LP of space ballads for those who wish to use it. The space suits will be free for public use.

For more distasteful information on The Rosenberg Museum (specifically it's collection of violin pornography), I made the following short film on the subject: https://vimeo.com/33515964