Networks
For more than 30 years, East Bay composer John Bischoff has been almost quietly leading a noise revolution.

By M.P. Klier

BEFORE MEN HUNCHED over laptops playing electronic music became cliché, decades before there was a whiff of indie appeal in electronic music, whether played by '80s throwbacks or artsy-ambient bands like Fischerspooner or even Beatnig-channeling breeds like Wolf Eyes, there was the League of Automatic Music Composers ...

Previously, deep in the heart of Oakland, the League worked diligently to free the world from preprogrammed music. Armed with the latest technology (i.e., microcomputers), home-brewed circuitry, steely resolve, and their exceptional sonic and rhythmic capabilities, the League pursued their fantastic ideas of free and open access to musical information – dodging the traps of tyrannical conductors, fancy-tour-bus-hogging soloists, and austere academic electronic composers. They created networks of enhanced capability and longevity ...

Meanwhile, back at the Hall of Music Justice at Mills College, League founding member and Bay Area composer-musician John Bischoff continues to improve upon the world of sound as we know it. Bischoff, a former Mills College graduate student and current music professor, is the rare sort who performs the pieces that make the small world (after all) of electronic music fans happy at both "highbrow" new music festivals around the world and "lowbrow," BYOS (bring your own syrup) pancake brunches at Pubis Noir (R.I.P.). He's also successively pushed the forefront and underground of analog, digital, and computer music – but unlike other sonic crusaders who hide their identities behind costumes, he's never worn a mask. He's proof that good guys do win.

Let's do the time warp again

Allow me to backtrack/fast-forward by saying I'm no new music expert, nor do I play one on TV. Though I did for years attend weekly concerts at Mills (an invaluable primer in listening for the unexpected), that don't qualify me for no music degree or nothin, and until recently my knowledge of electronic music was patchy at best.

In fact, it was hearing Bischoff's latest CD, Aperture, released last November by 23five, that really got me into his music, and thus the history of electronic music in general. His sounds of four months ago led me back to his sounds of more than two decades ago, and what struck me most along the way was how timelessly beautiful (a quality often lacking in current new music releases) and historically important they are.

Bischoff, a Bay Area native, started out with classical piano lessons and an interest in jazz and moved on to composition. After a few years at the San Francisco Conservatory, he studied at Cal Arts (in the school's first year of existence), where, despite the rise in new synthesizers like the Moog and Buchla, he was mainly interested in instrumental music. "I took an electronic music class with Morton Subotnik [of Silver Apples fame], which was almost worthless," he tells me over pale ales at Ben and Nick's in Oakland. "The first year it was arranged really badly, and you didn't have access to the synths." But it turns out synths didn't even interest him much then. "My initial reaction was of them being too synthetic, and I was really into gritty acoustic sounds, noisy acoustic sounds. So that was kind of a stumbling block, until I heard the music of David Tudor, who was really into amplifying small sounds with contact mics and feedback, really gritty. And there's an album I heard that completely knocked my socks off, Tudor's version of Cage's Variations II. All inside the piano, very noisy.... It wasn't like I thought, 'Oh, I just love this'; it was like 'What the hell is this?' It was completely outside my consciousness, and for that reason, very interesting."

In 1971, inspired by Tudor's explorations and the appeal of making music by himself, as opposed to trolling for orchestra commissions, he came to study electronic music at Mills, where Robert Ashley was the director of the school's Center for Contemporary Music. "One of the things that's been very characteristic of Mills, particularly since he's [Ashley's] been there – it's kind of a tradition – is that the teachers and the students are a community of artists, there's a leveling, and that's really a very empowering thing," he says.

After graduating, Bischoff hooked up with a group of like-minded artists connected to the school (like many a Mills alum) whose passion was painstakingly wiring and jury-rigging together hand-built analog circuits to create noises they'd never heard before. Their underground scene followed in the wake of and drew inspiration from the innovations of California instrument makers like Lou Harrison and Harry Partch and the cultural upheavals of the '60s. And then another big event in California history came along that changed everything: the advent of cheap microcomputers. And thus the League was born.

Birth of a nation

In 1976, Commodore released the KIM-1 microcomputer for $250, one of the first your average struggling musician could afford. "It was this momentous, watershed event," Bischoff says. "We were building little low-cost circuits – we had heard of computer music being done at Stanford and other institutions, but we weren't into what they were doing aesthetically. They had mainframes and were doing stuff in nonreal time. Initially even mainframes couldn't generate sound in real time; they could do the calculations to generate samples, then in a separate step you'd feed the samples into another computer, and that computer would read the samples to generate the sound. It was a two-step process just to make a tape!"

What Bischoff and his circle of fellow Bay Area experimenters – Jim Horton, Rich Gold, David Behrman, and later Tim Perkis – were into doing aesthetically was pushing the literal envelopes of live electronic sound. "We wanted electronics to be electronics – not trying to sound like a trumpet," he says. The KIM – which Horton sent away for after seeing an ad in the back of Radio Electronics magazine – meant they could now write software programs (using some arcane code known as 6502) to control their individual circuits. But the KIM's control aspects weren't what most interested them; what they found fascinating was its potential to open up their DIY software and hardware to outside influences and to become an interactive musical instrument in itself.

In the late '70s they began linking their KIMs regularly for performances in the East Bay under the name League of Automatic Music Composers (a sort of updated take on the acoustic-based 1920s League of Composers) and so became the first live network band. Their concerts involved each composer building and programming and debugging a mass of circuits and synths for a series of solo "subcompositions," whose melodic, pitch, frequency, and other data would be available to the other composers to interact with live. Clips of the League can be heard at the Minneapolis Walker Art Center's Crossfade site (crossfade.walkerart.org/brownbischoff) – an invaluable history of the League and its offshoot, the Hub, written by Bischoff and Chris Brown – and listening to them still sounds like a revelation. What's striking are the amazing variety of tones they built from scratch and how surprisingly they come together. It's a noise collage that occasionally sounds like a group of kids let loose in a room full of musical toys, an orchestra and soloists on speed, Lightning Bolt on sedatives. There are always individual noises to pick out and admire, and there is a structure, one you're always waiting for to go somewhere, which it does but never where you'd expect.

You've got mail

Despite the exponentially increased sonic abilities of the League's network, they also came to feel its limitations: mainly the tendency toward technical failures. Trying to rig together complicated and temperamental circuit connections with the KIMs' flaky 1K ability to remember software programs stored on cassette made it difficult to expand on their previous audio explorations and to hook up with new members. So in 1986 they came up with a new way to perform, which they called the Hub.

Whereas the League's pieces grew out of often chance meetings and tinkering between individual compositions and circuits, the Hub's focus was on a more overarching structure and accessible means of sonic data exchange, which involved using microcomputers as a sort of central mailbox or instant-messaging system to which each performer could send and pick up information. This less ad-hoc, more standard interface completely opened up the architecture of music. And as if to prove it, the Hub's first concert was even more groundbreaking than the League's: in 1987, Bischoff, Perkis, Brown, Mark Trayle, Scot Gresham-Lancaster, and Phil Stone played together in New York City as two live trios in different performance spaces, linked by their computer hubs and a phone line.

But the Hub were no mere novelty band ("They can play in two places at once!!!") – and, being more into connectivity than distance, preferred playing together in the same room. Over the next 10 years they continued to transform sound, welcoming new technology like MIDI and collaborating with acoustic musicians and writers; the 1989 radio piece "HubRenga" was a live, interactive collaboration between the Hub, multimedia artist Ramon Sender, and the audience of KPFA-FM listeners who submitted poems via local network the Well. While most of the Hub technical stuff, like "data-exchange paradigms" and 300 baud serial connectors, goes right over my head, the noise on releases like The Hub: Computer Network Music (Artifact, 1989) and Wrecking Ball (Artifact, 1994) miraculously flow right into it. As with the League, there are a multitude of individually interesting sounds, but in the Hub context they are given more space to develop into pieces that fall all along the lines between slow-brewing chamber music and total noise rockers. That their CDs still sound so loudly pioneering is no small feat in these almost free-and-easy days of sampling and mixing and ProTools and Reason; and while this may have something to do with the fact that pure electronic music isn't at the top of many radio hit lists, I have a feeling that if it were, certain Hub tracks would be on them.

(Sadly, the Hub, too, imploded under technical difficulties, at another double trio concert in 1997, with one group at Mills and the other at Arizona State University in Tempe. The system worked for only 10 minutes, Brown writes on Crossfade, before "the technology had defeated the music.")

Some universes don't play B-flat

Having sat through a number of electronic music concerts lately, I've come to believe that sometimes the genre is better enjoyed at home, in the comfort of your living room, say, with a cold beverage, and other projects before you in case you tire of watching the top of a head sway above an illuminated Apple logo to self-indulgent-sounding sounds. One thing I have come to appreciate, however, is sound development, those tricky transitions from one place to the next.

When I first heard Bischoff's music, after a friend gave me Aperture, my immediate thought was "Now, this is someone who knows sound development," so much so that the term transition was obliterated. Each frequency, and there are many, is explored on equal terms, pulled this way and that, until finally morphing into the next. Likewise with his seminal 1996 CD Glass Hand, in which low, percussive sounds channel gutteral bass lines and high-piercing tones resolve at the last moment into pulsing waves – and which, amazingly, was recorded live with no overdubbing. "I wanted to use system exclusive messages to pummel the synthesizer, to get beyond its limitations," he says.

With his focus now on solo computer music, along with occasional duo performances with Perkis (their Artificial Horizons is highly recommended), Bischoff works on building software from the ground up. Like a naive Mars rover, I ask him how he comes up with his compositions: does he think of specific sounds he wants to create and then set about making them to fit? But of course Bischoff's compositional methods evolve from a higher realm. "The inspirational start for a piece would be more how sounds behave, how are they generated, what kind of shape does their interaction take," he says. "I don't know if this makes sense, but it's as if [for each composition] you were imaging a planet that has a certain atmosphere and a certain degree of gravity, and then you'd imagine certain kinds of things happening, interacting in such a way because of all those elements; it's kind of like imagining that sonically – how would things propagate.... I want to make it sound like nothing I've heard before."

Growing up with everything from control voltage to computer code, Bischoff is still excited about the ways in which live electronic music can be transformed. He cites synthesis languages like MAX MSP and Supercollider, how the proliferation of new software tools is expanding the electronic music scene, and the decentralization of musical activity as among the most interesting developments, kind of like the "fruition" of where he started. "Literally, when the KIM first came out, the first guy to buy one, Jim Horton [who died in 1998], I remember when working with him at one point, he said, 'You know, John, someday there'll be machines this size that'll be able to produce hi-fi stereo orchestras of sound.' And that's happened.... I think it's a very exciting time ..."

John Bischoff plays at "Sound Rewound: Celebrating 20 Years of Sound Art at the Lab," Fri/13, 8 p.m., Lab, 2948 16th St., S.F. $10-$25 sliding scale. (415) 864-8855; and with Tim Perkis Feb. 29, 8 p.m., Luggage Store Gallery, 1007 Market, S.F. $6-$10. (415) 255-5971.