Chris Cobb is a noise/experimental artist currently in California who's been working with loops, found sound, and noises for quite a while now. He's released a couple of tapes and more recently helped assemble and particpated in the Northern California Experimental Music Festival on September 12-13, 1997. He will most likely be involved with subsequent ones, although since he is relocating to Germany this fall to study, there's no telling how that will come about.
I got interested in talking to Chris largely on the strength of the work he had done making loops and tapes of trains, and also because of an intriguing project in which he taped the sound of busy areas of the city (such as Chinatown, for instance) and then "relocated" those sounds to other, quieter areas, and vice versa. It seemed like an interesting idea, and thus I was moved to chat with him. My original idea of an interview actually turned into more of an ongoing conversation, as relayed below:
The fun begins with moi:
Hello Chris! I know this has taken forever... i have, as usual, taken on way too many things to do. ;o At any rate, here are some questions for the interview. If you think you can answer in time, i'd like to run it in the forthcoming issue out at the end of this month. Short notice, i know; if you can't, i'll bump it to the next one....
(This was followed by a lot of my usual inane questions)
To which Chris responded:
I thought I wrote back, but then maybe I didn't...?
Anyway, I'm working on an installation with buckets and bowls and the sound of rain falling into them. All laid out they each have a cassette player in them playing the sound of water leaking into that particular bucket. The thing is, the patterns of drips are altered by affecting their syncopation using Sound Edit 16, an amazing tool....
What I thought I had written back was that as I was answering the questions you sent I felt like I was like, you know, writing my own interview. So if I were to write my own interview like "Cobb on Cobb" or "Cobb versus Cobb" or "Cobb Defends Chris Cobb" then why not just write something and then give it to you?? Thus, logically progressing onward, I thought that I could perhaps send a lot of text and just have you edit the text, as you are the editor. And of course, if you want to slice and dice it, I leave it up to you.This way I don't end up sounding like I am pretending to be responding live to you pretending to be questioning me live.
Also, my priorities have been changing as I will be going to Germany in the fall to study and possibly exhibit my installation work. Noize is no longer purely noize when it is presented in another context, see? And so on.
The work I was doing with traffic patterns and the latent occurences in them (for example, you can depend that rush hour traffic will always happen in a certain way, in certain patterns, etc every day) has a lot to do with this new approach or attitude about systems. I seem to be drawn to systems which seem simple at first, but that are actually very complicated. A good example is that when I first moved into my basement studio in San Francisco's Chinatown, I had a bad leak problem in two places. It would rain and then it would leak. Simple, right? After several months and a dry spell, I tacked sheets of paper over the leak holes on the ceiling. Then what do you know -- the leaking ceased! Why? I have no idea. But all this season not a single leak from those holes in the ceiling. Is it the paper? It makes no sense whatsoever why it ceased at the same time I set the paper there -- and the paper itself isn't even wet or buckled.
After some time dealing with the idea of teaching busy streets how to be quiet by playing quiet street sounds at busy intersections I have begun a research project with a Professor at Stanford University named Martin Gutman. He is very interested in behavioral systems and the study of behavior. I'm not certain what will come of it so far, but it looks promising. I'm giving a presentation of my project at the San Francisco Art Institute on February 26.
As far as the Northern California Experimental Music Festival CD goes, I think I was not the only one thinking of making it happen, but I definitely kept bring it up and reminded people how nice a document it would make of the experience. EMRL and Floyd in particular did all the production work. You asked about the origin of the Festival. I and several others in Sacramento used to put on shows of our own work. For one winter the shows were in my living room and special flyers and invitations and little info packets were made for the between five and ten people who would be invited. It was nothing extreme, it was more like excersises in composing without the burden of "music." Shows happened in church halls, in clubs, in artist's studios, in all sorts of places. I started booking out of town acts and got an abandoned supermarket for about eight different groups to play in -- they were mostly from San Francisco. I also organised a large performance of work by John Cage in North Sacramento, which is really a horrible run down place. The upside of it was, I got a huge warehouse to play in and it was fantastic. We did Imaginary Landscape #4 and Music for Radios. I even created a booklet for the event and wrote an essay about cage. I eventually got involved with the Art Commission there and was curator of performance art for a festival so I got to bring noize to Sacramento officially! I invited Trance (Mason Jones, Joe Colley, Elden M, and lots of others in that incarnation), the Haters, Mandible Chatter, the Sandbox Trio, and lots of other interesting and disturbing performers. So I think the S.F. / Sacramento exchange was very important and that led to the creation of a larger audience I think which led to the possibility that a festival wouldn't be just a completely futile act. Sacramento is off the beaten path, you know. We'll see what happens this year in San Francisco. I'm putting together a Festival -- but with more art, less Noize. My first shows here all happened in laundromats around the city. Noize artists had to deal with the space of the laundromats -- and that it was technically illegal for me to just appropriate the space. But I think too many people like rules and often when you ask -- the answer is no. So I believe you should just go and do it. To paraphrase Survival Research Laboratories -- sometimes it is your moral obligation to not ask permission. In the mean time I am having small but intense Noize shows in my basement studio in Chinatown. Upcoming shows will include MSBR and Kazumoto Endo, both from Japan. Maybe the group Anal Sadist as well. It is a way to continue with my mission to spread the word about the glorious noize, an almost religious delirium for those seeking something to challenge them - not coddle them. With noize music you need to put in some effort. People don't realize what freedom from music really means.
At which point i went into wishful-thinking mode:
i'm thinking of at some point trying organize -- maybe in conjunction with ND and 33 Degrees -- some kind of experimental festival thing here, if only to counteract the horrible overkill of SXSW, where everybody from all over the world shows up just to "showcase" and get signed. ack. but that's a project for later... much later....
To which Chris responded:
Sounds like it would be fun you say? Well, let me tell you... If we all examine just what it is we are trying to do here, like enlarge the audience for this sort of genre, then at some point the circles of networks must come together or at least generously overlap. I think in many ways it would be a better thing to have a large touring noize show with several good acts and treat it professionally, that is, if people believe in what they are doing. For example if you look into the background of Laurie Anderson, she was a fucking maniac workaholic who wrote, performed, sang and did art exhibits for years until she finally carved the figure that we all know. She did not get favors, she deserved and earned. So then really, in this light, what is it that people really want from Noize? What is enough, what is sufficient?
A word to the wise guy... be sufficient.
And it still seems like I would be writing my own interview. Do you have any of those old Laundromat show reviews I wrote & sent to you? My files all crashed, and split on me after those shows and I lost several of them. [Alas, I did not have them, which is too bad, because they were pretty damn interesting.]
I offered the following possibility:
or i can do something similar to the ECC interview way back in... jeez, issue 10 or something. go look at that one or the Shiva Speedway one (a few issues later) and if you find the results amusing, we could do something like that (with your final approval, of course). i like doing those incredibly surreal action-interviews, but they depend pretty much on the "interviewee" being into it....
But Chris was a mite nervous about this idea.
Don't get me wrong, I don't mind PRETENDING per se, but there is pretending and there is pretending. Good pretending to me seems, well, like good writing... the point of which is that whoever reads it finds it interesting or whatever to read to the end. The one with Bill Christman was interesting and highly successful, I thought...
So since we are both in this together, my suggestion for the best of all possible worlds is that you somehow synthesize a form for what you have from me so far & adding commentary or explanation or shape it into a narrative???
Something like:
I first met moonunit, esquire when, sorting through a website I followed a mysterious link to the edge of the unknown right into the middle of nowhere. When I looked up, I was in Austin Texas, the home of a bold and energetic e-zine that has made it into it's fourth year. Surprisingly as I read several online issues it dawned on me just how rare regular and interesting ezines are. This one seems to be a budding full-fledged clearing house of indie labels, interviews and reviews. And most amazingly DEAD ANGEL seems open to Noize Music. Everyone I know hates Noize Music. Everyone but me. My girlfriend hates it.People quickly grow restless when my enthusiasm compells me to play CD's for them. But not DEAD ANGEL. DA seeks to confront the very edge of where post modern identity lies. It is right there in the unknown, abstract field of clashing cultures, clashing ideas. So now where do we go? Noize music is one direction.
This led us back to the subject of the vague idea of an Austin experimental festival, at which point i said:
Well, i'm not so sure it would be so much "fun" necessarily as something that would be good to do in Austin. There's actually a fair-to-middling underground experimental/noise scene happening out here that almost no one knows about because all the CHRONICLE and the STATESMAN ever write about are the usual "we aren't aware that this isn't 1978" punk bands and SRV-clones. It would be nice to make people aware (in some fashion) that there's something else happening here.
And at this point, i made blanket responses to a few other point raised earlier:
[Regarding a noise tour]: That's a good idea, and i'm kind of surprised it hasn't happened yet. I'm not sure why the noize guys haven't organized some kind of tour -- at the very least you'd think some of the more well-known ones who are carried by Relapse could swing it, but so far the best we've seen are brief mini-tours of the east or west coast.
[Regarding worries of "writing my own interview"]: Actually, i think at this point maybe we should just keep talking (rambling?) back and forth and eventually i'll figure we have enough and i'll try to edit it down into something coherent and readable (rather than this endless back and forth and recap of earlier conversations, etc.)....
[And regarding proliferation of noise-related labels, etc.]: Interestingly, i've become a bit disenchanted with noize because it doesn't seem to be evolving very much and so many of the bands are just so bitchy about each other. It's like the same kind of factionalism that ate up the original punk movement. But i certainly have nothing against noize as a form, although i can't listen to anywhere near as much of it as i used to thanks to having blown up my ears via a bad bout of tinnitus while working on Korperschwache material. So now i generally only listen to stuff that's sent in for review, and even then i can't play it very loud, which kind of defeats the purpose -- but better that someone should be listening (even in crippled form) and reporting than no one.
At some point during all this, Chris said:
Ah, but here's the crux of the matter -- Noise is unique -- it is not music per se, and can't be "listened to" in the same way. Noise is about experience and expression just as much as listening to music is, yes, but it is a highly aestheticised form of listening which is also particuliarly post modern because really, anything you listen to can be interesting, even an old refrigerator humming in the middle of the night. To appreciate it as an experience I would say that being schooled in a noise aesthetic is important. And maybe when people wonder what that is, I say "does it work or doesn't it work?" if it does nothing to you then why pay attention?
Aesthetics is one thing that Americans are famous for not having -- that or just having bad taste. What many people, and in the noise world at large, rarely discuss are the properties of sound. Take voice for example -- that is who we are. It is so fundamental, voice, that we forget its vitality. We forget it's moving ability, its transformational properties, voice is really important.