Over a 50-year career, Carl Stone has seen a lot of changes in the field of electronic music.
The pioneering electronic composer first encountered the genre while studying at California Institute Of The Arts in 1972.His experimenting began with dubbing vinyl records on to tape where he noticed the multiple records playing concurrently would create strange new sounds that would catch him by surprise, and he would further manipulate using tapes.
These early experiments with turntables – occurring at the same time as hip hop pioneers were doing the same in New York City – led to him being dubbed The Godfather Of Sampling.
As technology developed, Carl closely followed. He has rummaged through the coloured cables of the massive Buchla synthesizer and was one of the first to use digital delay harmonizers in the '80s. He upgraded to computers in the mid-'80s, lugging it around to perform his music for live audiences.
Now, Carl's equipment has shrunk down to the much more portable laptop. However, his curiosity remains strong, discovering new textures in his reinterpretations of everything from Okinawan folk songs to Aqua's 'Barbie Girl'.
Carl's pioneering talents will be on full display when he performs as part of Brisbane Powerhouse's Open Frame (alongside concerts in Sydney and Melbourne), joining a line-up of experimental musical artists indebted to his life’s work.
Where are you right now and what are you doing?
I'm in my studio in Tokyo, answering your questions! A welcome break after a morning of business emails.
Later today, I'll be going to a rehearsal with one of my musical partners, Akaihirume. We are preparing for a performance coming up in Tokyo in early July, a few days before I come to Australia.
You have been creating electronic music over the past 50 years. What innovations and/ or equipment in the early days excited you most, especially in terms of being able to perform live?
In the early days performing live was a low priority for me. The medium I had adopted when I started was magnetic tape.
I composed my pieces in the studios at CalArts where I was a student, and later at the radio station KPFK, where I was the music director. These recordings were my finished compositions and, of course, they were set pieces, like a painting or a non-interactive sculpture.
However, after several years I began to look for a way to adapt my processes for live performance because I was interested in having more spontaneous flexibility about time and form, and thus my early live pieces were done with multiple cassette decks, microphone input, reel-to-reel tape recorders etc.
So the equipment that I relied on the most were Revox tape decks, Nakamichi cassette players, a Technics turntable – and a few years later I started performing with a Publison DH89 stereo digital delay/ harmonizer.
A current innovation in the world that is igniting debate is AI. Have you experimented with it as a tool or do you try to avoid it?
I have been using AI even before it became a catchword, but these have been software tools with specific functions, such as separating a stereo track into multiple elements and so forth.
With recent advancements in the technology and the emergence of models like ChatGPT and music generation assistants that produce raw audio from lyrics, genre, artist, and mood inputs we are in a new territory.
I have been working without AI modelling on some of the techniques implicit in cross-genre fertilisation for more than a decade. People who might want to hear examples could check my release 'STOLEN CAR', which came out on Unseen Worlds in 2020.
I am keen to try out these ideas with the aid of 'assistants' that exist now as well as those to come. That said, AI overall is something I'm very concerned about. It has obliterated the distinguishable elements that allow us to tell truth from falsehood.
I love ambiguity, misdirection and pranking in art. I am sure that propagandists everywhere are as excited about the ability to spread all-too-believable disinformation as I am about the artistic potential for AI in electronic music.
You have sampled pop artists such as Aqua and Queen, and dabbled in J Pop. Are there any other artists who have recently excited you?
Yes: The Japanese singer-songwriter Manami Kakudo. She was a student at Tokyo Fine Arts University and works in a number of areas of expression including experimental sound art, handmade instruments, and film/ TV scores, along with music with enough commercial potential to have two albums on the Universal label.
Actually, I don't do a lot of discretionary listening to music, and when I do it is usually indigenous music from around the world or western classical, especially music from the Renaissance through J.S. Bach.
This is not to say I dislike pop or other genres, but just that here are many artists who have escaped my limited-range radar. When I have turned to artists like Aqua or Ayumi Hamasaki it was because I encountered their music randomly while playing in the background somewhere and I heard something that intrigued me.
Your music shares some DNA with a plastic and artificial sounds of hyperpop, as exemplified by the music of Charli XCX. Have you encountered this sub-genre in your travels?
I will have to check out Charli XCX!
Most people would associate live electronic music performances with DJs pushing a play button on a recording, but your performances seem to be created on the spot. How would you describe what your performances entail?
My solo performances are a blend of fixed and improvised, usually with a pre-determined form where the smaller details are flexible.
When I use an iPad in performance I have to do a lot of preparation in advance, so the results are not fully spontaneous but they do have random elements. On the other hand when I do free improvisation (usually in an ensemble context or when I pair up with musicians like Akaihirume, Ned Rothenberg, Kazuhisa Uchihashi and so forth) I work directly on a laptop using programmes I have coded in MAX.
Your set to perform on line-ups alongside the likes of Kenyan sound artist Nyokabi Kariũki and Japan's Chihei Hatkeyama. What have been your observations of the electronic music created across the globe?
I am always happy to discover what other artists working in the same broad area of electronic music are doing, and these festivals and group tours are a great way to do so.
Because I live in Japan, I am friends with Chihei and like his work very much. I am thrilled to have a chance to share the stage with a younger artist like Nyokabi Kariũki, because I am keen to see how she adapts her a capella studio constructions to live performance.
You name a lot of your compositions after your favourite restaurants. What are some of your favourite Australian restaurants?
I have only been to Hobart! I had some good meals there and also some excellent coffee. Dinner at Templo was very nice, and I have good memories about Sawak Cafe and Little Missy Patisserie. I can't wait to hit the mainland this July. Hopefully, I'll get a title or two out of the tour. :-)
Carl Stone 2024 Tour Dates
Wed 17 Jul - Art Gallery NSW (Sydney)Fri 19 Jul - Open Frame @ Brisbane Powerhouse
Sat 20 Jul - The Substation (Melbourne)
