Carl Stone: Electronic Music from...
Navel-Gazers #70 is an interview with Carl Stone who is going to talk to us about his ‘Electronic Music’ retrospective series on Unseen Worlds. Leapfrogging from decade to decade on these collections - which span the years 1972 to 2022 - I’m reminded how much ground one artist can cover over time and what an influence experimental music can have on the broader culture. For Mr. Stone, a pioneer of computer music who has been called “the king of sampling”, it’s always been a blurry line between technological and artistic experimentation. His trajectory resembles a microcosm of electronic music from the last half-century, churning generation upon generation of found, preexisting productions through new and emerging technologies using an ever-fresh set of ears. It’s a practice - echoing origin stories of several veteran Navel-Gazers from Annea Lockwood to Robin The Fog - birthed deep in the vaults of a sound library, where it was his job to dub records to tape. Carl Stone’s music is always cerebral but it is never pretentious. In fact it’s often quite funny, offering us glimpses of the uncanny and the absurd in the media we encounter every day. He hails from California but is speaking to me from Japan where nowadays, he spends most of his time. This is going to be a good one!
AC: Thanks for joining me on Navel-Gazers! Please tell us about your background. Do you remember when you first did anything artistic?
Carl Stone: I studied piano when I was very young, from the age of five, and I would improvise, to the annoyance of my teacher. I’d take a piece of music that she had given me to practice and learn, play it and then I would do kind of a cadenza at the end or improvise a coda or a new ending.
This greatly irritated my teacher who said: look, if you want to compose, become a composer. Here’s a pen, here’s staff paper, get to it. I didn’t really do that but I took my improvisational impulses into high school time where first I played the washboard in a jug band but then moving into something a little more current, I began to play keyboard in a band inspired by the Soft Machine. In the 60s I saw them in their initial incarnation.
AC: In California?
Carl Stone: Yes. They opened for Jimi Hendrix, who I’m old enough to have seen perform live in Los Angeles. Hendrix was great and very inspiring for a kid like myself, my girlfriend at the time had the total hots for him - I was kind of jealous maybe! - but it was the Soft Machine that really intrigued me and the people I went to the concert with at the time.
We formed a band together based on the same model: keyboard bass and drums. Our music was heavily improvised, kind of progressive, no vocals, not based on songform, maybe if the Soft Machine and the Grateful Dead got married and had a baby. The bassist was James Stewart, who I think everyone’s lost track of as a musician, but the drummer was Z’EV, who at the time was performing under his birth name Stefan Weisser.
Z’EV and I became friends in this high school time and continued our friendship until he passed away a few years ago.
Then out of high school was just the time when synthesizers were coming into the fore as commercial entities - if you had $50,000 you could buy a synthesiser, which of course I didn’t, I was just a poor student but I went to California Institute of The Arts which had three synthesizers, and the head of the electronic music department was Morton Subotnick who was a pioneer in synthesis and synthesiser music. I abandoned keyboards completely and started to work with synthesizers.
I began to encounter not only classical music but electronic music, world music from all over, fantastic collections like the entire Ocora series put out by Radio France, and albums that the teachers in the world music program would bring back from their home countries, from India, Indonesia and so on and so forth.
Through that I had exposure to a lot of different music and I began to integrate these influences into my own. My first pieces that I composed myself which were released into the wild were around 1972/73.
So those were the key turning points for me in terms of when I first did anything artistic.
AC: Your answer to the question is interesting to me, as you mentioned that you were taking piano lessons but it was only when you improvised that it sounded like you were describing something artistic. And again with the jugband versus the other band.
Carl Stone: Yeah well there’s a lot of creativity that goes into performance as well as composition, so I don’t mean to disparage performers in any way but if you ask when did I create something new from tabula rasa, then yes for me it would be my late high school years and my early years as a student at the California Institute of The Arts.
AC: The Unseen Worlds label has been anthologising your music, culminating in the collection called Electronic Music from 1972-2022. Electronic music technology has changed dramatically in those 50 years, how has this affected your work and do you note any observable examples of that on these selections?
Carl Stone: I think the underlying aesthetic concerns that I’ve had haven’t changed that much, but the ability to enable that aesthetic and communicate it has become different as the technology’s evolved. It’s become easier in many ways because of technological innovations.
When I started using found or appropriated or - some might say - stolen musical material as a starting point, it was with LP recordings or tape recorders, a fairly laborious process.
If you’re familiar with the first release that came out on Unseen Worlds which was called Electronic Music From the Seventies and Eighties, a piece of mine, the opening track called Sukothai was done just with several tape recorders and a turntable.
I was taking a recording and dubbing it from an LP onto channel 1 of a tape recorder and then onto channel 2 of the same tape recorder slightly displaced in time, and then mixing those two recordings of a piece of harpsichord music by Henry Purcell, down to mono, then recording them on one channel of another tape recorder and then rewinding and recording them again on the second channel and displacing it in time, then taking those four harpsichords, mixing to mono, and sort of multiplying in that way.
That process would take working throughout the night to end up with 1,024 of these harpsichords. I’d start working in the studio in the evening and by the time I was finished the sun was coming up. Now, through digital technology you can approximate the same effect with a little bit of programming and the push of a button.
So the amount of time to transfer from concept to realisation has become shorter, which is great, and also through the compactness of technology - the fact that things become smaller, more efficient, cheaper - means that you can move around a lot more as a touring artist. It’s a lot easier to move around with a laptop in my case, versus bringing big computers, recorders, racks of music gear which is what I used to have to do.
All those things have changed both my approach and my efficiency, but haven’t really changed the underlying aesthetic that I have which is to take very often a known musical object and transform it radically into something new and unanticipated.
Carl Stone: Well Z’EV, a really interesting and unique individual. He was a drummer at that time, he was also a poet, doing a lot of artistic activities and we met in the 60’s at this thing called the Renaissance Faire, which still exists but now has become a lot more commercial. At the time it was sort of a gathering of the tribes, kind of like a love-in might be, with a renaissance theme.
Somehow or other, a friend of mine in junior high who had a friend who had a car, he and I and a bunch of other people who later became friends but were strangers at the time, we piled into a station wagon and we went to the Renaissance Faire. Z’EV was very charismatic and I was immediately drawn to him. I don’t think we began working together right away, but it wasn’t that long after.
We then both were students at CalArts. He left after less than a year but I stayed on to get my degree. He ended up moving out of Los Angeles but we were always keeping in touch.
Before he moved out of LA he was doing this concrete poetry and reading his poems himself, and I had become interested in the so-called text-sound movement which was a kind of netherworld between poetry and music. Text-sound often involved electronic manipulation of voice, people like Lars-Gunnar Bodin, Kurt Schwitters, working with abstract sound rather than linguistic content.
I invited Z’EV into the studio to record his voice and I developed a series of pieces, some of which I don’t think have withstood the passage of time, but a couple of them have and I’ve released them as part of the ‘Electronic Music from 1972-2022’ three-album release on Unseen Worlds.
AC: Oh, so there are others.
Carl Stone: Right but… you’re never going to hear them as long as I’m alive.
AC: I see. They’re in a shoebox somewhere.
Carl Stone: Yeah. The two pieces we released, I have some semblance of pride about, even though they’re early works, they’re not great but they show something about my musical development.
AC: Yeah those pieces are stunning. Edgy for the time I think.
Carl Stone: I’d say they stood apart from pieces other people were doing.
AC: Yes.
You have a way with titles! I had to take careful notes while listening to remember that the piece I think of as “T-Bird” is actually called Vim, and the one I think of as “Bicycle” is actually called Morangak. I’m interested in how you come up with titles, but let me situate that within a broader question: how do you come up with a piece? What sets the process in motion, when are you consciously working on a piece and when have you got a finished product with a title?
Carl Stone: Well, all my titles are random. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the technique I use.
AC: No. Tell us!
Carl Stone: Basically I’m not into titles at all. I put 100% of my creative energy into making the music itself. To me a title is just an identifier, a way to distinguish one piece over here from another piece over there. It could even just be numerical but that isn’t really helpful because I know very few people who could keep the numbers straight in their head: Carl Stone piece #64, that one’s so much better than #21, and so on.
When I was finishing up school and getting out on my own, I was really getting into Asian food. This was a time when in Los Angeles, there were maybe three or four Thai restaurants in the entire city, maybe four Korean restaurants, a couple of Japanese places. It’s completely different now of course.
And of course they all had names, like Dong Il Jang, Shibucho, Chao Praya, which meant nothing to a Westerner like myself, and so the abstraction attracted me and because of my preoccupation with these restaurants I started to develop a list, which essentially was a kind of database of restaurant names. Most of them were Asian at the time because that’s the kind of food I liked. And I began to just randomly assign them to my pieces.
There’s absolutely no reason why the piece currently known as ‘Vim’ couldn’t have been called ‘Sukothai’.
AC: Was Sukothai a restaurant?
Carl Stone: Sukothai was a restaurant. It was also the name of the ancient capital of Thailand, but that’s what the restaurant was named after. If there were no restaurant called Sukothai, there would be no piece called Sukothai. And Sukothai was in the very first generation - as was Chao Praya - of Thai restaurants that opened in Los Angeles back in the 70’s.
I was never trying to communicate anything about the music in the title. It was random, and it didn’t have any associative value for a non-native speaker. To this day I keep a list of restaurants that I like, and I use a random system for assigning a restaurant name to a piece.
AC: So ‘Vim’ and ‘Morangak’ are restaurants as well then.
Carl Stone: Yes. The other thing is - Vim for example, if it still exists in Los Angeles I would be amazed, but it might. It was another Thai restaurant, and Morangak was a Korean restaurant, and so on.
But I’m not limited just to Asian restaurants, I have pieces named after say, French restaurants…
AC: I’m seeing it everywhere now! I’m glad I asked, I’m sure you’ve gone on the record about this before, but I had no idea.
AC: Yeah so I guess this gets us into the other part of the question: does the title get tacked on at the end? Is the piece done by that point?
Carl Stone: Yes. Done or almost done.
AC: Right so more generally, how do you come up with a piece? And when are you working on something, beyond just futzing around?
Carl Stone: There’s certainly a lot of futzing around, through the idea of what would happen if I did this or that, how would it sound… or at times, what would happen if I took this piece of music that I have some weird attraction to - like “Barbie Girl” - which I then begin to explore.
A lot of times it just comes from the need to experiment and see what results, or it could be the result of a commission, or a project for a film or for a choreographer or something like that, where you have a deadline or maybe some guidance from your collaborator as to what kind of material they want. But usually with those things I like to have carte blanche and do whatever I want within the most general constraints.
But often it starts with a what-would-happen-if.
AC: Yeah and also that motivation which could be something that’s a bit unique to your approach - the fixation on specific source material?
Carl Stone: Absolutely yes. That happens a fair amount, where it’s the music itself that gets me started. I’ll have an attraction - for whatever reason - to some music which I may not even particularly respect, but I like it somehow.
AC: I guess you’re drawn to it in terms of your own artistic design or purpose, not consuming it as a listener in the usual way?
Carl Stone: Yeah that’s right. There’s something about it for whatever reason, it may have to do with the production value, something that’s harmonized, or the way the bassline works, and whatever that is suggests something, and then I roll up my sleeves and I work in a kind of play mode.
AC: In the liner notes for this collection, you describe a technique which you call “injection” that is used on pieces such as “Al-Noor” and L’Os à Moelle. This concept caught my attention - as did these pieces - could you elaborate on the topic?
Carl Stone: With injection, the metaphor is injection moulding if you’re familiar with the term in construction. You might have a hollow shape of something, and then you inject foam or some kind of material into it, which takes on that shape. Like a dental plate, where a dentist will take some kind of liquefied plaster and put it up against your teeth.
AC: I’m looking up at my shelf actually, because I have one of those of my teeth sitting there which I’ve had for 20 years!
Carl Stone: Ah right! So here I’m taking a mold which comes from one piece of music, and I fill it with the spectra of another piece of music, so it has this ambiguous quality where metaphorically - and metaphors only work so far - the shape comes from one piece of music and the internal workings come from another. So it’s a kind of interesting dichotomy.
I’ve experimented with this process using different materials: one piece for the shell and one piece for the contents. ‘Al Noor’ would be one, ‘L’Os à Moelle’, and there are others as well.
AC: Yeah through your explanation I think I’m understanding this a bit more. So if we take ‘L’Os à Moelle’, by the way what kind of restaurant is that?
Carl Stone: French.
AC: French. So if we take that as an example, what you probably wouldn’t want the listener to misunderstand is that it’s not a symmetrical mashup of two pieces. One’s serving as the shell, and one’s the contents. They’re in different roles, it’s asymmetrical is that right?
Carl Stone: Yeah that’s right, you could say that. Your standard approach to a so-called mashup is to take one piece of music and layer another piece of music on top of it, vertically, and use different techniques to align things and make them work together so that they sound good in a musical way.
AC: So with ‘L’Os à Moelle’, it’s around 10 minutes long, it sounds as though you’re “molding in” the other piece… steadily, to the end? Although the shell remains to the end, which to the typical listener - for me - what sticks out is the rhythm.
Carl Stone: Yes it’s basically adjusting the balance between the un-injected material which you hear at the very beginning - completely unprocessed - and the gradually sneaking in the processed version, so it kind of takes over at the end.
By the end, the original version is not in the mix at all. But you hear it, because it’s a fundamental part of the resulting injection - the rhythm as you say is still perceivable. That’s what ties the whole piece together is the rhythm in fact: you hear the clanging of the guitars and the drum hits and so on, which remain when it’s completely processed.
But yes your perception is correct that it’s a gradual shift of the balance.
AC: I was listening to your 1988 interview with Frank Zappa, who had just released his final studio album “Jazz From Hell”. At one point Frank (I’ll just call him Frank, as though I know him!) comments that there’s no clear-cut image in his mind for the consumer of the Synclavier music on the album, which he therefore approaches differently. What sort of person do you think takes an interest in your music?
Carl Stone: Well, I don’t really think too much about who the audience is. I compose mostly because I want to see what happens and if the result is interesting to me, and I feel confident that it might be interesting to other people then I might release it or put it into rotation in my performances.
To my pleasure though, I think that audiences have been skewing younger and younger. 10 or more years ago my audience was people familiar with classical electronic music or the experimental music tradition from Cage, or minimal music traditions like Reich or Riley or Glass.
Now, just looking at my audiences, those people still attend but there’s a much younger crowd that has discovered my music thankfully, through my releases I guess, and come to it with a different point of view. It’s a different generation, they live in a different media environment, they have different musical influences. While I’ve never targeted a younger audience, I’m grateful to have one.
But again I’ve never really targeted any audience.
AC: Do you think your music from the past 20 years is what the younger audience is interested in?
Carl Stone: I’m not sure. I think that people listening to my music today just have a much wider worldview and a much more open ear towards listening to all kinds of music.
The internet has opened up a lot of things for people, access to radio stations from around the world, obscure album releases, music from Africa or Asia or other parts of the world that would have been hard to find in a pre-internet age now is a click away. And I think people are clicking and discovering and enjoying things and this has changed their whole definition of what music is.
I think that’s opened peoples’ ears and minds, and I’ve carved out a small niche inside of that openness.
AC: Yeah I guess young people being in that environment are just less fazed by something they don’t understand. They’ve always been bombarded with things they don’t understand, so they’ve got a confidence or a muscle for that. If you go back 30 years I could picture people thinking: oh that’s high art, or something for academics or professionals of whatever.
Carl Stone: If I’m lucky, if they’re open-minded they might find some value there. A lot of times they just don’t understand it or they don’t dig it.
It depends on the music also. Some of my music is more generally accessible, some pieces are more challenging, especially those which are very very repetitive.
Take a piece like Shing Kee, which is based on a song of Shubert’s, sung in English by a Japanese pop singer, Akiko Yano. It’s relentlessly repetitive. It starts with a short loop and over the course of 8 minutes or so, the loop gradually expands. So if you’re not listening carefully or if you don’t have the mindset to listen, it just sounds like: …ah, stop this torture!
But ‘Shing Kee’, along with Banteay Srey, these are also two pieces that I get the most positive feedback about. People say: you changed my life, I was depressed and then I heard this music and listened to it every night, helped me through hard times… I get these messages a lot. But then for other people a piece like ‘Shing Kee’ drives them completely up the wall.
‘Banteay Srey’, less so - I think people who have no familiarity with experimental music can listen to ‘Banteay Srey’ and enjoy it because while it’s also repetitive, it doesn’t present the same challenges. It has a peaceful calming quality, it has a voice, a background music element, it’s gentle in its overall nature, uses traditional harmony in a way, it’s less challenging.
So these two pieces are opposite ends of the spectrum, and yet are my two most popular ones.
AC: That’s funny. But I was thinking, aren’t people drawn to repetition in music? Or… certain kinds?
Carl Stone: Well yes and no… I guess rock music has tons of repetition. Baroque music has tons of repetition. Brian Eno had an interesting theory. I interviewed him once (here) and he theorized that the reason baroque music had repeats in it was because there were no recordings, so it was the only way to hear things repeat - there was no looping or sampling. Or in Mozart, there’s loads of “Da Capo al Fine” sorts of things.
AC: Yeah, minimalist repetition. It’s a fine line as well. I guess I’m thinking of through-composed experimental music where people have nothing to latch onto because nothing repeats. Often people react badly to something like that.
But then minimalist repetition, people can think you’re winding them up!
Carl Stone: Yeah it all depends, there are people who dote on Steve Reich or Philip Glass, and there are people who are driven absolutely nuts by that kind of music. But it’s true the trend is more towards people accepting repetition, even hardcore repetition.
AC: You have split your time between California and Japan for many years. What’s that like?
Carl Stone: Well I’m less enthusiastic about California these days, it’s part of the United States and I’m very unhappy with the current political situation, so I consider Japan more of a refuge at the moment. I do like going back and forth, and aside from my two base camps I also tour and so on.
But living in Japan as a foreigner… Japan’s a membership club basically and if you’re Japanese you have birthright membership. If you’re from outside you can be a guest, even an honored guest but you’re never accepted as a full member. Sometimes that can be frustrating, and even though I speak Japanese to an extent, it can be wearisome sometimes.
So going to the U.S. sometimes provides relief from that. Los Angeles is my hometown, I know it well, I’ve seen it change, I have a lot of friends there and musical associates from the past. It’s become more like my vacation home.
AC: How much of your time do you spend in Japan?
AC: Japan is different from the U.K. or U.S. in that way I guess. Like, this year I became British, in the same way one could become American. I’m not sure there’s quite a Japanese equivalent of that.
Carl Stone: Right. Where are you from exactly?
AC: New York.
… but have you ever pursued Japanese citizenship?
Carl Stone: No, I have no particular need to, because I have permanent residency status. But not even talking about citizenship, just that kind of…belonging. When you walk into a room, you’re immediately tagged as a foreigner, even if you speak Japanese, even if you know the rules, even if you act in a socially correct way, you’re still a foreigner. And I understand that on one level but on another level it can be frustrating.
AC: Yeah, especially when you spend that much time there.
Carl Stone: Right.
AC: What are your plans in the next year or so, any current or upcoming projects you’d like to mention?
Carl Stone: I’m working on a new longer, full-form piece, an evening-length work that will be premiered in December in Los Angeles as part of a celebration of 50 years of artistic activity from Hirokazu Kosaka, the artistic director at the Japan-America Cultural And Community Center.
They’re planning multiple events over several months and at the end, one of the featured programs will be a work I’m creating specifically to honor him. It’ll take place at the center itself which has a beautiful Japanese garden and Japanese architecture and so on. It’s a new work, even though it’s six months away - or five months away, yikes! I’d better get back to work - it’s not too early to be rolling up my sleeves on that.
AC: Yeah, sounds like you’re not stopping for the rest of the year!
Carl Stone: Trying to keep busy. I’m no spring chicken - I’m 72 - so as long as I have reasonably good health, I should try to do as much as I can.
You know, Terry Riley and Morton Subotnick are my lodestars in a way. Both of them are in their 90’s and both of them perform and until recently both were touring. So I’m going to knock on imitation wood to hope that I’ll be as active as my teachers and my respected elders are at that age.
AC: Good for you. That’s great to hear. I hope so as well. Thanks for talking to me.
Carl Stone: Thank you very much.
Images
All images by Carl Stone/uncredited except where indicated.
3) Photo by Loretta Ayeroff.
4) Photo by Edward Colver.
5) Photo by Shunichi Kurita.
6) Photo by Gina Koppel.
8) Photo by Edward Colver.
12) Photo by Hanae Hayashi.
13) Photo by Darren Moore.
14) Photo by Samantha Gore.
