Summertime Archaeology

New genres require new tools

Because my work is unusual, it’s potentially instructive to investigate the factors that influenced its development. Some of those factors are general, like the psychedelic milieu of my childhood, or the remarkable popularity of music with odd time signatures throughout the 1970s. But general factors inevitably have reduced explanatory power. Millions of people heard The Beatles’ Revolution #9 or Yes’s Long Distance Runaround, but few of them became composers of polymeter music. Similarly, millions of people saw kinetic sculptures such as Alexander Calder’s mobiles or Thomas Wilfred’s Lumia machines, but few of them became phase artists. There’s an element of mystery here. Why did the concepts of polymeter and phasing occur so forcefully to me but not to other people? How did I become so obsessed with making art from phase shift? These questions lack definitive answers. It’s more constructive to unearth the decade during which my polymeter music first evolved, from 1993 to 2003, and to focus specifically on my final composition of that period.

I wrote Summertime on October 17, 2003 during a radio show, live on the air. My friend Jeremy Grainger had a weekly show on the Boston College radio station WZBC, and occasionally called me to substitute for him. ZBC was then one of the most underground college radio stations in America, and may still be. ZBC was particularly known for its evening format, called No Commercial Potential (NCP), a loose collection of extremely diverse shows, one of which was Jeremy’s. His show was called Temporary Autonomous Zone or TAZ, and like most of the NCP DJs, he sometimes played sound collage.

I first heard sound collage on ZBC in the early 1990s, probably on Gary Geiserman’s infamously transgressive show, which was called New Metaphysics. Gary lugged suitcases full of cassette tapes into the air studio and wove his eclectic sources into a dazzling tapestry of contrasting narratives. The expressive potential of juxtaposition and layering greatly inspired me, and I started making my own sound collages, focusing particularly on field recordings, sound effects, and carefully edited snippets of dialogue from my favorite films. The two best examples of my sound collage are Demons In My Head (1993) and I’ll Just Die If I Don’t Get This Recipe (2005). The latter is especially relevant because it was performed live using a software called Mixere, which I created solely for the purpose of making live sound collage from digital audio clips. This exemplifies a larger trend of developing custom tools to facilitate new production techniques, and more generally to create new genres.

Throughout this same period I was also composing techno and electro, but I was often frustrated by the glacial pace of electronic music production, like building a cathedral out of matches. With most music production tools of that era, you’re either editing or listening but never both, and this dichotomy makes it easy to lose your original inspiration. My musical background is primarily in jazz and improvisation, and I wanted composing to be similarly fluid and intuitive. I gradually arrived at the idea of performing the arrangement live while simultaneously recording it, not as audio or even as MIDI, but as automation data. This would allow the arrangement to be created in sections and tweaked afterwards, and even more importantly, it would temporally separate arranging from instrument choices and mix levels, which could be finalized later.

My dream was to create a software composing tool that combined editing and listening into a single unified activity, similar to how a drum machine pattern can be written incrementally while it’s looping. I wanted my composing process to resemble the live mixing of a sound collage. I became obsessed with performing a composition in real time, as opposed to knitting it like a sweater. The irreversible nature of real time would encourage me to improvise, fail creatively, and build on the momentum of my previous choices, making my composing process more like a guitar solo. Instead of agonizing over the structure of a composition, I would play with its parts until an inspiring structure emerged organically from a continuous flow of instinctual behavior.

The key is to make structure performable and inexpensive to change. Many production environments oblige the artist to envision the entire structure of a work beforehand, because any changes to the order of its parts would require unacceptably laborious reediting. In contrast, my system lets me postpone structural decisions while the parts evolve, and arrive at a suitable structure gradually and informally by iterative jamming and recording, possibly even during live performances, as occurred with Summertime. My system also permits collaborative live composition, with multiple performers controlling different facets of the arrangement, like instrumentalists in a band; Sex Is Good With Marilyn (1997) is an example of this technique.

I was using Cakewalk’s MS-DOS sequencer which was cutting edge tech in the early 1990s. Initially I tried live arranging in Cakewalk, but its interface proved too cumbersome, so I hacked it and built a custom arranging software on top of it. My software was called Jock (from Disc Jockey) and it worked by peeking and poking in Cakewalk’s memory, a brittle but viable strategy at the time. My interface was partially modeled on a PC-based lighting controller that I had previously encountered at a club in Munich called Ultraschall. In particular, I borrowed the idea of using right-click to select items to be toggled, and then left-click to actually toggle them. This is the select/execute paradigm, which is common in lighting control.

The Cakewalk sequencer allowed each track to have its own independent loop length. This unusual feature had an enormous influence on my development as a composer, because it made it easy to create complex polymeter, which I define as the simultaneous use of three or more relatively prime loop lengths.* By 1994 I was already using Cakewalk to create works in complex polymeter, such as Tarot (21 loops having lengths 1, 2, 3, … 21) and Planets (loop lengths that model the orbits of the planets in our solar system).

Shortly after that, I figured out how to write my own MIDI sequencer for MS-DOS, so that it was no longer necessary to piggyback onto Cakewalk, though I still used its file format. My C code was hardware-dependent to the point of being “bare-metal”—much of it was interrupt service routines—and a nightmare to debug and maintain, but it got the job done. By merging my Jock performance interface with the sequencer, I made my dream come true: I could live arrange complex polymeter tracks while recording the result as automation data. Thus was born a composing workflow that I still use to this day. Some early examples of techno/electro in complex polymeter that I created using this workflow are Sex Is Good (1997) and Buy (1998).

My automation data initially captured only the muting and unmuting of tracks. Muting and unmuting feature prominently in the genre of dub, for example in the music of Sly and Robbie. I played in several dub-influenced bands in the early 1990s, and those experiences gave me a taste for arranging a track by playing with the channel mute and solo buttons on a mixer. It’s due to my personal history with this distinctively abrupt mixing style that the corresponding automation events are called dubs in my software.

The scope of my automation data soon expanded to include continuous control changes, such as those produced by the knobs or sliders on a MIDI control surface. My tracks often feature live adjustments of synthesizer parameters, and it was necessary to capture these adjustments in order to fully reconstruct performances of such tracks. Each automation event includes a timestamp, so reconstructing a performance is simply a matter of applying each recorded event at its appropriate time to the same tracks and instruments that the performance was made with. This can be done in the studio using automated procedures, even years later, as was the case with Summertime.

Another key advantage of recording automation data is that it’s extremely compact, unlike MIDI or audio data. This compactness made it feasible for my sequencer to automatically record every performance, without me having to worry about storage or remember to press a record button. It’s thanks to this “always record” feature that I captured Summertime at MS Stubnitz in Rostock. Recording the automation data also eliminates crowd noise, and allows the mix to be revised during postproduction.

Summertime features unusually complex polymeter. A wide variety of loop lengths are used, and their prime factors are 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 23, and 29, the first ten prime numbers excluding 19. If all of the loops were played at once, the resulting pattern would only repeat after approximately sixty years, but this is by no means my longest polymeter repeat time. That record is currently held by Ala Aye (2019) which repeats after approximately 1.5 million years.

Summertime was the last dance track I wrote before a 15-year hiatus. In 2003 my polymeter sequencer was still a 16-bit DOS program, which imposed severe limits on its capabilities and prospects for enhancement. These limitations frustrated my creativity and certainly contributed to the hiatus. The only way forward was to redevelop my sequencer for a modern operating system, a non-trivial task to say the least. Fortunately I was able to learn the necessary programming skills at my day job, and after many distractions and false starts, in 2018 I finally began redeveloping my sequencer for the Windows OS, while simultaneously composing what became the Akoko Ajeji album.

Precisely because it was the final output of my sequencer’s first generation, it’s useful to examine the construction of Summertime in detail. My sequencer has always allowed a track to change another track’s mute state, and I call this technique mute modulation. This “auto-dubbing” is central to my composing method, because it provides a means of simplifying complex polymeter loops that would otherwise be excessively busy. It’s particularly fruitful when the loop doing the dubbing has a different length than the loop being dubbed. This applies the concept of polymeter at the level of mix automation.

A mute modulator is comparable to a stencil. A stencil transfers its content onto a substrate by blocking parts of the substrate from being painted. Similarly, a mute modulator periodically makes the modulated tracks inaudible and thereby transfers a higher-level pattern onto them. I even named one of my tracks after this metaphor (Stencil in 1998, which I subsequently reworked into Awose in 2018).

Nearly all of my tracks use mute modulation, but Summertime uses it primarily to vary notes rather than to create space in the mix. You can hear this clearly in its introduction. The initial “Aah” part consists of three single-note loops, having lengths of 3, 4, and 5 steps respectively. Normally this setup would repeat after a mere 60 steps (3 × 4 × 5) and would quickly become tiresome. But each loop has two variants that play different notes, and another loop alternates the variants. The controlling loop is 136 steps long, 136 = 8 × 17, and because 17 is relatively prime to 3, 4, and 5, the result is a much more complex pattern that only repeats after 2,040 steps, or nearly four minutes.

This note-varying scenario is properly called note modulation, and I first used it in 1997 for the trance-inducing polymeter melodic hook of Sex Is Good. It’s a gorgeous effect, but my software could only accomplish it indirectly via mute modulation, which was counterintuitive and awkward. Note modulation was the proverbial straw that forced me to reconsider my approach and ultimately see a much bigger picture.

The modern version of my sequencer supports over a dozen types of polymeter modulation, including mute and note modulation of course, as they’re foundational concepts. Summertime makes extensive use of note modulation, and in this respect, it’s the direct ancestor of the more radical polymeter techniques that have evolved in my music since 2018. Polymeter started out as an attempt to emulate an instrumentalist’s subtle rhythmic embellishments, but it became something deeper: a means of generating melody and harmony. Polymeter was a path that led me to become a generative composer and artist, and to build virtual kinetic sculptures that create music and art from oscillation with shifted phase.

*Two integers are relatively prime if the only positive integer that evenly divides both of them is 1. For example, 14 and 15 are relatively prime, even though neither of them is prime: as 14 factors to 2 × 7 and 15 factors to 3 × 5, they have no factors in common other than 1. For a set of loops having relatively prime lengths, the time to repeat is the product of the lengths.

Afterword

This essay really did involve archaeology. Summertime was created using the first generation of my composing tools, and their file formats are by now so antiquated and obsolete that they might as well be encrypted. In order to rescue Summertime from bit rot, I wrote a program to convert its tracks and automation data to the file format used by the modern Polymeter MIDI Sequencer. I undertook that task primarily to make my methods accessible, particularly to composers and researchers, and the resulting files are freely available. Whenever possible, the sequences for my tracks are archived at Internet Archive, typically including Polymeter files, MIDI files, Reason files, and production notes. Upgrading the file format also allowed me to generate a phase video for Summertime, which is available on YouTube. Finally, the excavation produced a table of all of the sections of Summertime, including their prime factors and repeat times. The table is an invaluable aid both to the casual listener and to students of polymeter, and accompanies this essay as an illustration.