Dan Perrone

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Dan Perrone is an artist, a DJ, and the creator of  Uokahd (Tapelake).  We talk about the differences between sound and music, noise and composition, and the process that brings one from inspiration to actualization.


What makes a work of audio a song, a performance, an installation?

I’d say that something you can hum or whistle is most likely a song and anything after that resides in a large gray area that we should leave undisturbed.

First, what do we call this thing? Is it a composition, a sculpture or an invention?

The actual title is Uokahd but the piece can also be referred to as tapelake. I think it’s a safe bet to agree on “sculpture” but there are elements of music composition in said sculpture.

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I'd like to hear what you describe what's meant to happen when an audience member takes hold of the steering wheel. [video demonstation]

What technically happens is that the audience member controls a wax rock/landmass that has, in its sub-strata, a Walkman tape head mounted to a radio control car and wireless transmitter that will pick up the pre-recorded signals on the surface of the tapelake.  The tapelake is comprised of 64sq feet of 1/8th” audio cassette tape that the radio-controlled playback module can travel freely over, read the tape and send the signal wirelessly to the amplifier where the sounds are actually heard. The once linear guitar-based tape recordings are now re-imagined in this three-dimensional sound sculpture that frees me from the ideas of traditional musical expression while allowing the some times alienating theories of indeterminate and experimental music to exist in a democratic manner, shifting the role of performer on to the audience. The standard Walkman plays the recorded signals forward while having a beginning middle and end point of the cassette. With my version of the technology you could just as easily go across 300 strips of tape as you can go forwards or backwards lengthwise along a strip of tape in order to create sounds.  Its surface is completely open.  What I hope to create is a new sound experience that in concert with the visual aspects of the sculpture, express more information faster than I could by simply showing a photograph or playing the guitar. Ideally I hope the audience has an experience that reminds them about how completely amazing sounds are and that the world in which we live is largely defined by our own perception.

In a way, this piece is a bit like a talented (and strange) DJ's manipulation of standard music into something completely unique. Certainly your piece is a long way from someone like Girl Talk, but it might be closer, oddly enough, to DJ Screw. Do you feel a kinship with people like that?

Maybe. I don’t think people can dance to tapelake, but with the right mindset, anything is possible. The idea in DJ culture that you can use a library of sounds or records to make a new musical world is really exciting.  Again, it is looking at things and seeing possibilities.  

How important is the interaction aspect? Would this piece be considerably different if you were the only one controlling the speed and pitch of the sounds (like a DJ might)?

It’s completely vital for the piece to be interactive.  If people were just watching me control Uokahd (tapelake) they might miss the point.  It would then be about my performance and they may not understand what is actually happening. I am not scratching off the labels on my records or taping over the names of my effects- I want the audience to be aware of the technology at work. This isn’t about the position of privilege the performer maintains, we are all equally capable of creating a musical moment while sounding the depths of tapelake.

In the vain of Christian Marclay, with his jigsaw collage records, this installation takes a standard of recorded music (cassette tape), turns it on its head, and creates an entirely unique sound... within today’s pastiche culture, where DJs mix songs and create "mash-ups" how is technology continuing to create new forms of music and art? When does a finished product, created out of existing recordings, become an autonomous and stand-alone product?

It’s all just tools.  30 years ago if you wanted to make a loop you needed tape, a razor blade and a whole lot of patience.  Now if you want to loop something it can happen almost instantly.  I am not fixated on the latest technology because I am still trying to fully understand and utilize the stuff that’s already here.  With advances in technology we can work faster which may or may not be a good thing.  In my case, it was absolutely necessary to work with a tangible, real-time medium like cassette tape.  I wanted the physicality of the medium and the immensity of the sculpture to impress upon the viewer my ideas about sound creation as a metaphor for biological and geological cycles while discussing the temporality of recorded sound. 

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On first hearing the sounds created by the tapelake, it sounds so unlike anything I've ever heard before. But it must sound like something you've heard before, right?

Thank you. I think I aspired to hear this or create it to hear it or even dreamt about hearing it, but I cannot be 100% sure if I have actually heard these sounds before.  I like to think of sounds as ghost plants and these plants can grow in ways I may not fully understand or even accurately hear but this is all part of the experience of the subjective nature of sound.

What do you think of Harry Partch? Do you consider him an inventor, and do you consider yourself one?

I’d say he would be a good example of an inventor.  I was born in Edison, NJ, home of some of Thomas Alva Edison’s workshops and the birthplace of recorded sound, so I was introduced to Edison’s inventions and impacts at an early age.  While it is true that Edouard-Leon Scott invented his phonautograph some 20 years earlier than Edison’s phonograph; it was Edison’s phonograph that actually allowed for the playback of a recorded audio signal. So if you consider the canon of invention as a sort of conversation, inventors are just adding their ideas to a long running conversation- building on others ideas.  What I am doing with the tapelake is re-designing an already existing technology to suit different needs. The Walkman is a sound playback device that I have removed its linear function from so that it can play the audiotape in a new way with increased variables of direction, duration and pitch.  While the technology at work here is incredibly elegant and simple, the end result is something that I’ve certainly never seen before but I’ll stop short of calling myself an inventor. I have a hard enough time with “artist”.

What's the difference between sound and music?  When does sound become art?

For me there isn’t a difference. Unless of course I am tired and something is keeping me up. Then I call that noise.

When did this fascination for sounds begin for you?

I read somewhere how the beat of your mother’s heart while you’re in utero is your introduction to sound and I think that is incredibly poetic.  I can’t really remember a time when I wasn’t fascinated by sound so that theory sounds pretty good to me.

What about the source material that you created with guitar? Is that an individual piece in itself, or part of a whole? Would you exhibit that by itself?

The source material was generated with the idea that it would be fully realized only in the context of the completed sculpture.  The making of sounds with the guitar for tapelake was sort of like mixing paint for a painting. There was a great deal of recording and re-recording to get a consistency of sound that I felt I needed in the piece. I assume one could play the original tapes (or what is left of them) but it would be akin to a painter displaying a particular shade of red he had mixed for a painting.  In the proper context, it might be interesting.

You mentioned there wasn't a single "eureka" moment in designing the piece. Where did some of the elements come from that came together to form it?

It was kind of a long process that started back in 2000 when I was affixing audiotape to my photographs in place of titles.  This is the same simple tape head playback device I am using in Uokahd.  I shelved this re-appropriated technology until I felt I had a project that could really demonstrate some of the awesome qualities of the medium. Then one night in 2005 I was canoeing on a lake during a full moon and was struck by the sheer beauty of everything. At first it was a little strange, not really being able to see and being acutely aware of the sounds around me as I moved out on to the water. Insect drones, bats flying by, water lapping against the sides of the canoe, gasses rising up from the lake bed, etc... As my eyes adjusted, I saw the silhouette of the shore mirrored in the surface of the water. This effect created what looked like a visual representation of a sound wave but more importantly, the reflected image and reflected night sky on the surface of the water were so close in tonality and resolution that it was almost impossible to tell the difference between the two.  This profound experience informed the visual aspects of tapelake and my desire to create an original music/sound moment, alongside the frustrations that arise when setting out to do such a thing, yielded the audio component of Uokahd.  I wanted to use the raw power of sound to touch upon many themes with out having an audience wait through a 60-minute set or even a 3-minute song.  This wasn’t about the art form of the single or even the awesome glut of the double LP- this was about being tired of waiting for the right notes and creating an experience that allowed me to discuss many abstract ideas with a single, concrete object.

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Is this a complete departure from photography? Or are there parallels to what you're doing with photos?

With photography, I was trying to draw parallels from artificial and constructed landscapes to our own malleable perceptions of reality and transcendence.  I have always loved taking what could be called “landscape photographs” and the more time I spent on this subject, the more themes I wanted to discuss.  Perhaps I hit a wall with photography and I needed to make a model landscape that could have elements of fantasy and emulations of reality within it in order to discuss some of the metaphors and themes I was trying to discuss with my photography.

Are you a day-to-day artist, or more of a musician? Do you focus on art all the time, or is it the occasional idea, like this one?

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With Uokahd, it was all art, all the time. I can’t imagine ever working or thinking this intensely or obsessively ever again but knowing how I am, it is almost certain that the next project will devour my time whole. 

In terms of audio works, what do you feel is the difference between a musician and an artist?

I am not sure there is a difference.

Do you feel like this piece connects with any other project? I was thinking of connections between this and the projects of Theremin...

Absolutely. I think we were talking about the never fully realized Theremin that Leon Theremin and Edgard Varese were working on and how that involved a greater control field that would be played by a dancer. With the Theremin there is something happening that one could only describe as magical.   In any case, I would like to see the

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Supertheremin fully realized. I would also like to look into the possibility of recreating any of Luigi Russolo’s Intonarumi.

I am sort of working may way up through 20th century experimental music so I am not to familiar with the work of Marclay and the like but I think the writings of Russolo, Varesse and Cage are nothing short of visionary in their clarion calls for new sounds. Specifically, Russolo’s Art of Noise and Vareses’s Liberation of Sound helped me to re-enforce what it was that I was trying to do with tapelake. In a perfect world you would play Uokahd yourself and then read the above-mentioned essays.  Additionally, the poetry of A.M. Ammons helped to crystallize my own ideas concerning perception and the natural world and probably lead to the creation of Uokahd more directly than any of my exposure to experimental music.

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You said (and I agreed with you) that the worst part about Theremins was that people immediately tried to make them perform "normal" musical notes. Could you describe some of the frontiers of sound you'd like to see explored?

With sound, I am always amazed, so pretty much anything that has to do with sound will be of some interest to me.  Personally, I would really like a chance to go into an anechoic chamber to experience “silence”. I think the research being done on otoacoustic emissions, sounds emanating from our ears, is pretty mind blowing.  Even though they’re not technically a “frontier of sound” and they date back to ancient Greece, Aeolian Harps can be particularly inspiring. Perhaps the work of Daphne Oram could also use a looking into. She worked at the BBC in the ’40s and ’50s and would make instruments with names like the “wobbulator”. Oram also created a system for generating music called “Oramics”. This involved drawing on movie film that would then be read by photoelectric cells and turned into sound. I think she would get a kick out of tapelake.

The physical representation of the piece is also very striking. What were some of your goals with how the piece looked?

This was my first attempt at sculpture and there was a steep learning curve. I had a very early sketch on a napkin taped to the wall of my girlfriend’s studio where I was working and I never really added or embellished that sketch. It was essentially a seed and the rest sort of happened intuitively around that one scrap of paper.  I also had a line stuck in my head from the Tao Te Ching: “Hollow like caves, opaque like muddy pools.” I think that’s fairly explanatory.

Could you talk about how the piece is changing in the exhibition, with the dust and sunlight?

To be honest, I am not totally sure of what is happening, but the sounds are changing.  I have some theories as to emergence of new frequencies in the piece and it is most likely caused by a combination of factors. The general wear and tear of the tape and its exposure to wax, dust, sunlight and varying ambient humidity levels have begun to physically effect the tape surface and in turn effect the sound of Uokahd. Tape is a very real thing and while we switch over to virtual worlds, I find it comforting to experience the phases of something in a process of decay because this ultimately leads to creation. The wax-mountains have begun to melt on their south-facing slopes due to direct exposure from the late day sunlight. This has exposed their simulated geology in a way that is completely organic and also completely unexpected. I think Cage put in nicely when he stated “Art = imitation of nature in her manner of operation”.

Would you consider yourself a "Fluxus" artist?  I ask because your work is very DIY and fun... also, with your installation being interactive, how does this jive with the idea of Kaprow's "happenings"?

Maybe by default. I think that the size of Uokahd (tapelake) might not curry favor with some of the old Fluxus crowd but maybe the interactive and fun spirit would win me some pals. Cage would definitely be into it.

If you could only have one in the world, which would it be: popular music, rock n roll, etc. or experimental sounds and compositions by Feldman and Cage?

That is impossible to answer.   Maybe the Beatles- they are sort of the best of both worlds. I love so-called experimental music but even I need a chorus I can sing along to every once in a while. 

Name one popular band you like right now.

Well, it’s a mix tape and I am listening to it all the time. Side A Pavement -Westing (by Musket and Sextant) side B Guided by Voices -Alien Lanes. I guess that’s not really a mix tape but more of a “two of the best albums of 90’s indie rock” sampler. I also have a song by the band Beach House stuck in my head. 

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Will the next project be an expansion of this one? Or something different?

Projects. All I can say at this point is that I have several projects in the works right now that utilize audiotape technology in sculptural forms. I am committed to realizing Uokahd in a large scale installation as well as completing plans for an immense, immersive tapelake sound environment complete with cassette tape playback heads mounted to the underside of roller skates.  The working title is ‘tape rink” and you are all invited to play on it.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it...?

“Sound as it is mechanically understood will occur, but sound as it is understood by sensation will not occur.”

Video

Uokahd (Tapelake)

Website

danperrone.com

Photos

Joshua Kolbo
Ed Zipco

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