“Randomness is very different from creativity. I’ve found over the years that I’m much more interested in algorithims when they don’t do anything interesting or surprising, a simple process is usually the most interesting. Those are the things that we can conceptualize and maybe build a model of in our own minds.”
When New York-based artist and composer Tristan Perich brings his Interval Studies to Temple Bar’s Monster Truck Gallery this April, it will in some way be the second installment of last June’s successful show The Sound Sweep show. “My girlfriend Leslie Flanagan performed at Monster Truck last summer and really loved the space.” But while The Sound Sweep revolved around a theme of feedback loops, Interval Studies instead centres on Perich’s fascination with lo-fidelity digital sounds and coded information. He explains:
“One-bit sound is a waveform that is restricted to only on and off values – 1 and 0 – and it comes out of binary representation of information. Comparing that, for instance, to 16-bit sound of a CD, you have 16 ones and zeros that can represent the soundwave at any moment in time so you get 2 to the power of 16 possible values and thats around 63,000 different possible values. One-bit is the opposite. All that extra information doesn’t exist with the soundwaves that I work with.”
Perich’s aesthetic both sonically and visually can seem abrasive and even chaotic on first impression. However after time, the sense of order and reason emerges from the aggregated ones and zeroes.
“What I like about the one-bit stuff is that it comes from code, because I’m a programmer and I’m interested in the expression of code in sound, in visuals. The one bit waveform has an incredibly meaningful tie to code and information and mathematics. I’ve been using it in various media both in sound and also in video and at a more conceptual level in my work for a number years now.”
“It has a very particular primitive electronic sound, a very gritty, raw sound that I love. In college I was exposed to a lot of new electroacoustic and electronic music and it never had the teeth of a violin. The unlimited capability of electronic sound didn’t really mean anything. Starting to work with the one-bit stuff changed that. All of a sudden electronics became interesting because there was some meaning behind what was happening.”
“One of the things I’m trying to do is emphasize some degree of transparency in technology. It’s similar to a nostalgia for old technology, back when things had a physical aspect to them that we could understand. Back in the day you could repair a radio and now its entirely beyond our level of expertise as the average consumer. So there’s a social aspect to this, which is about how technology and abstraction of technology especially is totally running rampant.”
Perich’s one-bit music bears the influence of American composers and artists that emerged in the 1960s, such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass, whose music often arose from strict use of patterns and process. “I played piano since a really young age and my composition came from being bored playing classical music at the piano. I always thought of the piano as an incredibly patterned intstrument. It had all these notes that represented pitchs but it also had this shape built into it. If you played a chord it had a certain shape to it and the shape translated into different sound if you moved your hand. And when I started scoring for other musicians the ideas I think came from these almost geometric patterns at the piano.”
“I don’t write any of the music in code exactly. I use code to develop a framework for writing music for realising a sequence of numbers as notes in a score and the code is able to capture those simple repeating patterns and intersecting lines very directly. In a strange way I almost feel like I was lucky to already be writing music that could be expressed in code in a very simple way.
“I grew up with Reich’s music and with Sol LeWitt. I loved all that early minimalism and I think that their conceptual stuff is the stuff I really respond to. LeWitt and Phil Glass especially, somehow they’ve touched this incredible thing where something that’s entirely conceptual also has so much emotional content. It becomes a very personal thing when you dive so strongly an idea. In my own work I think that content is always the basis of the framework, but I always try to have all of the content itself written by hand. The bottom level of the music or the drawings, even though they are made algorithmically, come out of some composition that’s done by hand. I don’t literally mean pencil on paper, but something that I create instead of an algorithim.”
This code-driven modus operandi has seen him move back and forth through different media. “I started working with electronics with the idea of creating kinetic art. In Machine Drawings I use two motorized pens controlled by code. If I want to make this drawing a certain size, I set up the system, measure it, input those parameters and then describe the visual composition. The drawing will be an entire rectangle of randomness and in the middle of that there’ll be this polygon that corresponds to straight lines with zero randomness. Then I let go and the drawing process is essentially just an infinite loop. The machine has no sense of what it’s doing or how long its been going, it’s just executing this one small step of the algorithm over and over again until the drawing feels done and then I interject again and stop it.
“I have no idea what the drawing will look like on a precise level. But, since randomness is built into the code I also know exactly how the drawing will be made and so basically any possible drawing that comes out of this code will look like a drawing that comes out of this code! In a way I think it’s similar to a John Cage piece of music that involves indeterminacy. If he tells the performer to randomly turn the dial on a radio, the piece will be entirely different than the last time it was performed but at the same time, its clearly the same piece.”
The centrepiece of the show, Interval Studies uses one-bit tones in a sound-art installation. “I love that piece [La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Dream House], I’ve spent a lot of time in it. What I’m doing [with Interval Studies] is essentially a very banal transformation of pitch by taking an interval and splitting it into smaller pieces and then presenting all of them together. In that sense, the composition is the interval and the number of divisions that I want, its really not about the mathematical ratio between the pitches, the fine-tuning, the cluster that comes out of that.”
“I think it was a nice mechanism to explore this idea of pitch and to spatialise in some meaningful. There’s no way to create a perfect system, you can’t be equidistant from everything always. Our world is very very rich, so whenever we put a system into it, whether that system is a string quartet, or the Dream House, it suddenly takes on the richness and the biases of the real world. So presenting presenting pitch, which is a linear idea in a two dimensional system was something interesting to me.”
Tristan Perich: Interval Studies runs at Monster Truck’s Temple Bar Gallery opens on Thursday 7th April at 6pm, including a short musical performance and runs for three weeks.
Words: Ian Lamont
To read a full transcription of the interview, check out the Totally Dublin Blog here.
