JA Deane Interview

The interview with Dino came out yesterday.

Not sure how I managed to get the day of his performance wrong in my copy for the print edition, which had him playing Saturday, May 19 (which is when Roscoe Mitchell's show is). I've had way too much going on lately.

The Roscoe Mitchell interview airs at about 2:15 mountain time this afternoon, KSFR 90.7 FM, streaming from www.ksfr.org

Here's a few more of Dino's comments on conduction and sampling for which there wasn't room in the SFR version:

What is conduction?
Lawrence “Butch” Morris, who originated conduction, defines it this way: "A vocabulary of idiographic signs and gestures activated to modify or construct a real time musical arrangement or composition. Each sign or gesture transmits generative information for interpretation by the individual and the ensemble, providing instantaneous possibilities for altering or initiating harmony, melody, rhythm, articulation, phrasing or form."

In your work with Butch Morris and CK Barlow’s role in Out of Context, sampling and live sampling are mentioned. What is that?
Basically, a sampler is a digital recorder that allows the player to manipulate prerecorded and live recorded sound in real time. Painting or sculpting with sound, I think best describes the
process, but with the added ability orchestrate multiple events in real time. More than any other instrument of technology (tape recorder, electric guitar, synthesizer, multitrack recorder) the sampler has forever changed music. It’s influenced or altered nearly all evolving music in the world today, from concept to creation, and has even changed the way we listen to music (the iPod, for example, the “fast food” version of the sampler).

Why do you use samplers?
I always envied that painters could realize large scale works completely on their own; composers couldn't. The first time I saw Butch Morris conduct he was using samplers but with musicians painting with sound in real time. It was a large scale sonic sculpture. Then the question becomes “what's your palette?” Are you going to use the same four on the floor beat as everyone else? A lot of what I hear people doing with samplers is relentlessly boring, smothered by this beat. The sampler can be the definition of option anxiety...you have to determine your parameters. What has emerged is in a narrow range dictated by the fashions of social dance music. If you get rid of the unrelenting beat, the real sophistication emerges.