Nathaniel Clark

Going along with the idea that “if you build it, the ideas will come”, I have cre­ated homes for my recent audio work. Guitar/Synth/Band for­mat stuff I believe will become Engine Ares {work­ing band name, based off an old song from my for­mer band and one that hit me with the force of epiphany this morn­ing on the walk around Avo­cado Lane}; exper­i­men­tal synth/noise work will prob­a­bly go to The Invis­i­ble Noise Expe­ri­ence, a name that’s bet­ter than the ones that kept cir­cling through my head about quiet noise, though that’s the way I think about a lot of my sound work — quiet noise. Invis­i­ble Noise opens up the world to para­nor­mal audio, methinks.

In honor of the truth, the pic­ture above is not my audio set up — but oh, how I wish. No, it is an image from an MIT Media Lab vet­eran who has been build­ing this thing incre­men­tally, for years, or so I just read today. Here are some audio works from the owner’s web­page.

Post­ing the “cart” before the “horse” is an attempt to trick myself into dis­ci­plined action — now that I’ve put it out there, I need to ful­fill it prop­erly or know myself as truly, deeply “lame”.

So inter­est­ing thing sort of just hap­pened… I was too tired to tackle the “music” music tonight (though I got a few ideas off a deep-listening to the scratch tracks), so i decided I should play with some of Logic’s soft­ware instru­ments and make some cool and non-specific textures.

OK, wait, back up, impor­tant point skipped: Aunt Jenny gave Lucian a sleep-noise machine (I for­get what its real name is) which has sev­eral dif­fer­ent set­tings. Cur­rently, he is in there past the gates of deeper slum­ber whilst dig­i­tal waves crash with white-noise crests on the vir­tual shore. Lest you think I am mak­ing fun, I am not: I love white-noise machines, could lis­ten to them all day long (cf. my sound art). I am ‘mon­i­tor­ing’ the baby through a ‘mon­i­tor’ which is sit­ting next to me, god’s-eye view of my son curled up asleep.

A highly com­pressed, noisy, distortish-type sound comes thru to me, through this mon­i­tor, but I really didn’t notice it before, mostly because I had on my record­ing head­phones on which heav­ily (though not com­pletely) fil­ter out ambi­ent sounds.

Any­way, I set up some syn­the­sizer through a series of com­pres­sion, eqs, and dis­tor­tion, then played with an EVOC Fil­ter which, in total cool­ness, allows one to chop up the har­mon­ics in two ways and gen­tly morph them into each other, fueled by an LFO. I got the sound med­i­ta­tively cool, deep grainy dis­torted breaths of sound heav­ing in waves, sort of liq­uid noise undu­la­tions. I looped it for a while, try­ing to think to what pur­pose I might put the sound…

Now to the meat of the story: tak­ing off the head­phones, blink­ing my eyes, and real­iz­ing the sound i just spent 20–30 min­utes craft­ing and zon­ing on was pretty much the sonic equiv­a­lent of the waves being hushed out by Lucian’s sleep-noise-machine. I mean, nearly iden­ti­cal. Must have leaked through and bent the synapses towards the sound. Sort of viral, or inva­sive. Or maybe my brain is just sort of ‘yield’-y lately.

There you have it, the funny/odd/interesting thing. Two ends of a psy­chic elec­trode touch. An aural ouroboros. Sort of.

Except, in the end, i have to say: my sound was better.

Some­thing that I have — through expe­ri­ence — thought myself:

Mul­ti­task­ing is bad for you {from CNN, from Hivelogic}:

“Com­pared with those who rarely used more than one type of media at a time, heavy mul­ti­taskers had slower response times, most often because they were more eas­ily dis­tracted by irrel­e­vant infor­ma­tion, and because they retained that use­less infor­ma­tion in their short-term memory.“

I do think there are those who are quite adept, per­haps genet­i­cally wired for an adroit­ness, at this this mode of thought + action. I mean, we all can do it to greater and lesser degrees, and Katya’s gen­er­a­tion seems to be con­di­tioned to pre­fer it (though I am not con­vinced that this is *not* to their detri­ment(1)); I have known peo­ple who live in this post­mod­ern, frac­tured state of mind and make envi­able progress — reJon comes to mind. But I mostly think about Schopenhauer’s essay on noise — not due to the noise itself (for noise, I do love), but rather the ‘dia­mond’ mind, which when cut into bits by an inter­rup­tion loses its value.

This may come as a sur­prise to any­one who has cared enough to track my pro­gres­sion as an artist and musi­cian, and the things I have espoused pre­vi­ously. I have been influ­enced by Cage, by chance, by Rauschenberg’s being the writ­ing on the wall ethos. I have cre­ated free-for-all struc­tures for art, I have spo­ken of chaos as other peo­ple would of ‘free­dom’(2). These things have always held an amaz­ing intel­lec­tual appeal to me. How­ever– gem­ini that I am– I think my deep­est con­nec­tions are to the Beuy­ses of this world — those who are, to use a word I am not even sure is a word, the mythopo­etic ones.

Ah, too much there to get into now. But let’s bring this back to the beginning:

I have noticed, per­son­ally and with many oth­ers I have observed qui­etly or not so qui­etly, that our con­stant state of task-bombardment is like an itchy pox: irri­tat­ing, unful­fill­ing, unful­fil­l­able. It’s like being trapped in the shal­low end of life. Itchy :) I have read pre­vi­ous stud­ies that track the amount of time it takes for a per­son, once inter­rupted, to return to their pre­vi­ous task/thought– approx­i­mately 15 min., if mem­ory serves me. Given the schiz­o­phrenic nature of most of our day jobs, this adds up quickly.

I think about watch­ing my lovely daugh­ter, Gen Y through and through, sit­ting in front of the tele­vi­sion, chatting/listening/looking up tat­too designs, while tex­ting on her phone, and osten­si­bly keep­ing track of the con­vo­luted plot line of Lost(3).

I am not say­ing that this ruins us as human beings, not at all. We’ve proven our adapt­abil­ity and mirac­u­lous natures over and over again, and we still find ways of keep­ing all our shit together. But I won­der if we– all of us beneath the enfilade (self-imposed, or no)- might be more, with the ancient art of focus.

Lord, some­times I sound just like some­one I never thought I’d be, when I was younger.