Chris DeLaurenti is a self-taught composer currently living in the Seattle area who swears allegiance to both Stravinsky and Harry Partch; to judge by his intriguing CD release THREE CAMELS FOR ORCHESTRA, he also apparently sold his soul to the devil in exchange for astounding mastery of the arcane skills of tape editing. Seriously, he rivals Merzbow for tape manipulation (although he puts his razor blade to different uses). He got started on the path he now travels when his grandfather left him a cornucopia of used school band instrumentations and old analog synth gear; what he's done with the tools of the trade since often defy description. Hence, we'll let the man himself fill us in on the details....

DISSECTING STRUCTURAL METAPHYSICS WITH CHRISTOPHER DELAURENTI:

DA: You attended Evergreen College, although I gather that didn't have much to do with your music... did you learn anything useful there?

CD: I wandered through the usual interdisciplinary fog studying foreign cultures, ancient history and that bastard of epistemology and phenomenology, semiotics. Like most colleges, Evergreen prepared me to become an academic, and little else.

More importantly, my music was silenced for two years. KAOS, the campus radio station, filled my vintage Ampex reel to reel and other music gear with insurmountable interference and sonic garbage. I wasn't clever enough at the time to utilize that cacophony, so I waited and just thought about music.

DA: I like the answer you gave once on your "credentials" as a composer: "You may find my credentials in my music." :) Sounds like a quote from an Ayn Rand novel. Do you find critical recognition (prizes, fellowships, etc.) useful in any form?

CD: Critical recognition by the media should be distinguished from the critical rewards such as prizes and fellowships bestowed by institutions.

In its ideal form, critical recognition in reviews, interviews, and articles can be helpful by introducing new music, new composers and perhaps new ways of understanding music. But too many mainstream critics stick to regurgitating deadline-proof press-release reviews, rather than take the risk of being wrong or approaching the editor and saying: "I want to review this composer who records ventilation systems in skyscrapers and rearranges the sounds in the style of Haydn." Such a review would most likely require a lengthy explanation of the composer's means and materials, and with hundreds of dollars to the column inch at stake, most editors can't take the risk. Journalism beholden to the almighty dollar cannot be trusted, especially journalistic organizations that have never published a precis of the aesthetic beliefs and qualifications of their reviewers.

I am complaining too much: there are good critics, but my experience teaches me to heed an over-the-counter recommendation rather than obey STEREO REVIEW's exhortation to buy the latest Shostakovich retread.

Critical rewards are helpful, especially to famished composers and musicians, but without a fabulous publicity-generating sum such as the Grawemeyer prize of $100,000 that John Adams won a few years back, I doubt prizes attract new listeners. The money would probably be better spent promoting festivals that present a cavalcade of artists to the general public. No one in their right mind composes orchestral music -- or ANY music for that matter -- to earn fabulous prizes. To do so is the definition of madness!

DA: You inherited a number of musical instruments and gear -- how did that change your approach to composition (assuming it did)?

CD: Being blessed with these instruments obligated me to use them. How could I let a xylophone rot in a dank shed? Not only did I inherit a Noah's ark of school band instruments including violins, clarinets, a xylophone, a bugle, and a trombone, but I was also the lucky beneficiary of some great 70s gear including MicroMoogs, a Mu-Tron Phasor pedal, sporadically functioning microphones, and several quarter-track reel to reel tape decks.

Every instrument I use changes my approach to composing, whether I'm playing a clarinet with a bum key or wringing the wobble out of my Universal 3 Transistor tape recorder. Flaws in my instruments suggest ideas and inspire me to make choices that traditional procedures (strum in E for 4 bars....) do not offer.

I am always on the hunt for instruments that challenge my notion of music and prod me to find new sounds.

DA: Do you have any particular method to approaching composition, or do the pieces essentially dictate how you work?

CD: Typically, I have a problem in mind that I would like to solve such as how can I make true rhythmic polyphony? or, when can I use a vibrator in this piece of music? or how can I make this piece different from my last one? My attempts, or to be honest, failures, spur me to make new pieces.

DA: Do you aim to imbue the pieces with any kind of formal "meaning," or are they intended to stand on their own, for the listener's interpretation?

CD: I would hope my pieces stand on their own without a sympathy-evoking program. If my music moves you in some way, I am pleased; if not, then I have failed.

DA: You employ a lot of interesting sounds, esp. on the opening track "The Old Frontier" and "Use the Test Data." How do you find/create them and what informs your decision on when and where to use them?

CD: "Use the Test Data" features a 3 string guitar of cardboard and wood which has not been tuned since 1974. The resulting uneven tension caused the fretboard to warp, which give certain notes a beautiful buzzy twang. I also used a tenor banjo in places along with an old Korg DS-10 corroded by knob-damaging cat piss.

"The Old Frontier" is a tangled jungle of sounds: I only really remember the several hundred splices I made to create the piece. I used a host of instruments, from aluminum pie pans to a Hammond reverb box to masses of overdubbed violins and percussion made cloudy by the peculiar frequency response of a doddering reel to reel deck.

But to answer your question: generally, I will simply pick up an instrument, roll the tape and play. Afterwards, I edit out all the crap and decide when and where the good parts go and what additional treatments (if any) -- delays, distortion, etc. should be applied.

Two examples: I have always loved the idea of a whammy bar, which, in 1980s heavy metal, was a popular escape hatch for many bad guitar solos. I recently bought a reasonably-priced approximation, a whammy pedal, and thought "why not run an entire symphony though the whammy pedal?" Most of the "symphony via whammy" turned out to be useless, but I found a few seconds that were worthwhile.

A few weeks later, I happened to be cleaning a few squid and thoughtlessly left two of the cartilaginous spines on a shelf above my stove. I found these thin, desiccated strips a few weeks later -- if you can imagine rolling papers made of a silky plastic, you'll have an idea what I mean -- and discovered that they add a quiet buzzing resonance when placed (or dropped) on almost any vibrating surface, such as a bass drum.

Neither of these ideas are original: animal parts have been used as musical instruments for millennia (the ram's horn or shofar, the bone flutes of various Amazon tribes, etc.) and stuffing a signal through a box is old, old hat, but these two examples illustrate my musical credo: every object is a musical instrument.

The "when" and "where" of sounds in a composition is trickier. I follow my ear. If I am moved, I am pleased.

DA: I understand you don't care for digital processing equipment (particularly of the synth variety)....

CD: Digital synths suck. Typically, the interfaces force you to navigate tiny, poorly lit, incomprehensible menus that do not compare to the flexibility and satisfaction of grabbing a knob and turning it. Part of the joy in making music is controlling sound, but the big music instrument manufacturers (note that I did not say "makers") want you to tinker with sound in way that is convenient for them, not you.

There are some exceptions: the Roland JP-8000 is festooned with knobs and sliders, so that looks promising. The Clavia Nord Lead also looks good, but these two are tiny islands in a sea of nascent home-organs.

Most of the rack mount digital effects are the same way. This is fine if you trust their presets, but the obscene variety of sounds out there today all but obligates the musician to find their own sounds.

DA: You achieve an impressive brooding drone on "Iszkarrchse." Are you influenced by the minimalists like LaMonte Young or Philip Glass, by chance?

CD: After Ravel's "Bolero," the first minimalist pieces I heard were Steve Reich's "Octet" and Terry Riley's "Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector." I love those pieces for their absolute fusion of rhythm and melody. I wanted to fuse rhythm and melody in "Iszkarrchse" but on a slower, smaller scale. Instead of discrete pulses, the drones in "Iszkarrchse" are the interflailing of various frequencies which pulsate in an out of phase. No silence, just slabs of sound piled high.

I'm not familiar with LaMonte Young's music, so I have no opinion, though his Dream House sounds like a marvelous place to visit.

Philip Glass baffles me. I do like the triumphant bombast of "The Canyon," though. The piece begins with waterwheel string figures churning along for a few minutes only to be interrupted a sub-Varese low-budget "Ionisation" middle section which soon returns to the bombastic strings. But the other pieces I've heard -- "Einstein on the Beach," the solo piano music, the Low Symphony (Bowie was better!) leave me cold. Like a lot of pop music, it does not change quickly enough and the melodies are too small for these elephantine works. This mahout would rather walk!

DA: In "pop" (as opposed to classical or jazz), lately there seems to be a move away from accepted structure/instrumentation and into more experimental realms. (Main, Third Eye Foundation, isolationism, etc.) What do you make of this?

CD: Two causes: one economic, the other boredom. Judging from what I have heard, my guess is that these groups couldn't afford the trendy gear and thusly mastered the instruments they did have. Pushing cheap gear to the limits is the perfect antidote to the boredom so easily induced by the "alternative sound," which to me was just Black Sabbath with better compressors.

Ellington said that composition was making the best use of the available materials; composers today bemoan the lack of tools, but I think there are too many tools. The incessant marketing of the latest guitars, keyboards, software, amps and other musical paraphernalia by the big musical equipment manufacturers obscures the importance of mastering an instrument or a musical process like recording or sound projection. Obviously, Yamaha, Roland, Fostex, Alesis, Marshall, et al., would prefer that you buy their latest, slickest stuff so they can stay in business. They do not want you to spend several years absorbing the idiosyncrasies of one synthesizer and a tape deck.

DA: You've said that everything beyond the music itself is pretty much irrelevant... so do you think that music journals and criticism serve any useful purpose, then?

CD: Let me answer by depicting journalism at its worst: several months ago, the editor of a prestigious classical music magazine telephoned and proclaimed his love for my cd, THREE CAMELS FOR ORCHESTRA. He qualified his affection, however, by promising that his reviewer would love my cd even more if I purchased an advertisement in his magazine.

Dejected, I refused to pony up for this journalistic "payola." Later, I leapt for joy when this esurient editor decided to "follow up" and left an explicitly incriminating message on my answering machine. I will add some instruments to his greedy voice and presto - a new piece!

Academic music journals can be useful to composers who seek new ideas and want various composing techniques exposed and explained. The general listener, someone who prefers experience to analysis, needs none of the necrophilia of musicology. Criticism and analysis should not be confounded with the experience of music. Theory exists to teach and guide composers, not to bully listeners in the liner notes; after all, we call it "music" not "music-text."

Our world is filled with other "music-texts" that attempt to address some or all of the senses by combining elements from various arts and sciences. Since Wagner conceived his "total art work" of The Ring, artists have sought to fuse the arts to create something new. Film is probably the best example of this sensory convergence: music, drama, movement, pictures, and prose intersect in the occasionally successful attempt to form a valid aesthetic experience.

Music is the coherent experience of sound, and retains its maximum expressive power when undiluted by the sensory distractions of other arts.

I cannot prove the truth of my statement any more than a ship's rudder can be said to cleave the sea in two. This view only describes how I experience music and guides my creative spirit. Hard axioms are a soft cushion for the neurotic and the determined.

DA: Do you think it helps anybody in any way to divide music as a whole into categories (jazz, classical, pop, alternative), or is it just a marketing tool?

CD: Alas, the sheer quantity of music ensures categorization. The real issue is which categorizers -- historians, composers, advertising executives, store clerks -- you listen to, and more importantly, whether you let the categories influence your experience of music. Expecting any less of a piece because "it's only pop music" will plunge you into the dangerous waters of second-guessing the composer.

DA: For that matter, do you think it's damaging/pointless to divide musicians into composers vs. everything else -- in effective creating an elite, a class system?

CD: All musicians are composers. My favorite fried-hair metal guitarist may not have suggested the walloping chord structure of a particular song to her bandmates, but she did compose, after several takes, the guitar solo. Dividing musicians from composers perpetuates the barriers among the artificial categories of music and reinforces the myth that we have nothing to learn from each other.

Musicians and composers are all brothers and sisters seeking and creating through the medium of sound. I've read a few books on music in my time, but I have learned more from watching, talking and listening to musicians. Thelonious Monk was once asked why he didn't play any of those easy chords on the piano. He replied, "Those easy chords aren't so easy to play anymore."

DA: Who, in your opinion, is making some of the most challenging and rewarding music at the moment?

CD: Recently, I heard several pieces at an electro-acoustic music concert by composer Dirk Reith that completely knocked me out. Also, I just discovered an album, THE BALLAD OF HUMANOID, by Michael G. Breece, a compelling monologist who shrouds his psychotic tales in murky bleeps, blurps and splinter-shedding drones.

DA: What's your observation on the mainstream record field's current slump?

CD: I doubt there will ever be another THRILLER; the impenetrable excess of "product" and the erosion of shared values makes it impossible to reach a mass audience anymore. But don't take my word for it; look at how radio has fragmented into a dozen formats during the last 10 years!

I am no emblem of eclecticism, yet a quick look at my stack of cds/LPs and tapes: Sun Ra, Heliocentric Worlds vol. 1, Kenton Plays Graettinger, Breece's the Ballad of Humanoid, a 12-inch single of State of Shock (don't ask) The Dramatics "Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get", an old 808 State disc, Mort Sahl's The Future Is Now and The Best of David Sanborn (to rise above dirt, one must first be as dirt, saith the philosopher) makes me wonder. How could any big record company expect to market anything to me?

Almost everyone I know has an impenetrably diverse taste, thanks to the flood of reissues precipitated by the compact disc and its corollary, the stacks of cut-rate LPs found at thrift stores and garage sales.

Record companies will still pan for big pop hits but their current strategy mimics Microsoft: find small profitable companies, acquire them for tons of money and hope for the best.

DA: Do you foresee heading in any particular direction with your sound in the future, or do you expect it to evolve in a more idiosyncratic fashion?

CD: I am very interested in exploring the interstices of sound, the transient noises that occur very quickly in the cracks and crevices of every sonic event. Also, I hope to shift into more live improvisation, where structures will be looser, and then take the live results and edit them into a structurally sturdy composition.

I will always quest for the perfect form and new sounds in order to subjugate them to what I hope is the beautiful.

Words are a way to seek for truth, so I thank you for indulging my rambling quest.