Bleepwatch

[David Keifer interviews Robert Nunnally (a.k.a. GurdonArk) of Negative Sound Institute]

Negative Sound Institute is a relative new-comer on the net-label scene. The label’s focus is on ambient music—but always ambient music with a twist. Some of the releases are folk-influenced and some are fairly experimental. All of them are worth checking out. The label is run by Verian Thomas and Robert Nunnally, both of whom are also musicians. Robert—who releases gorgeous music under the name GurdonArk—was kind enough to grant an interview recently, in which we discussed music, net-labels, technology, and other unusual stuff.

Q. How did you guys settle on the name Negative Sound Institute?

A. Verian Thomas, my collaborator, and I, have a very good working relationship. We’ve never met in person, and live an ocean plus a Texas apart, although we’ve been weblog friends for years. Whether we record together (as the Thomas Nunnally Ensemble) or we conceptualize record label things, it’s common for one of us to have an idea, and the other one to grasp the point immediately. I’m not suggesting we’re twinned thinkers, as we’re rather distinct people. We value that sense of mutual critique we each bring to working together. But in the matter of names, as we often do, one of us (Verian) suggested the name a priori and we instantly knew it was our label name.

For me, ambient music is so often about not only the sounds, but the silence. Similarly, I value not only the melody/harmony, but also the darker drones. The spaces between the sounds matter—the negative sound, if you will. From that way of thinking, it’s a short leap to being an institute, because Negative Sound Institute communicates that sense of self-aware formal whimsy we hope to project.

Q. So far there are 11 NSI releases, encompassing a wide range of music—everything from Dava Sobel’s folk-oriented material to Mystified’s really spacey stuff. And yet, each release seems to be a piece of a greater picture. How have you gone about finding music—and artists—that fit together so well?

A. We actively hunt (and are hunted) with an aesthetic in mind. Call it “ambient fellow-travel”.

Verian and I have a common notion that our label is not an ambient label per se , but instead seeks out things that fellow-travel, if you will, with ambient music. We think that a lot of really good net-labels—Webbed Hand, www.intelligentmachinery.net and www.darkwinter.com come immediately to mind—already fill the role of being a more “pure” ambient/experimental genre label. We don’t want to be (relatively) narrow-cast in that way. I’m more an ambient buff; with a love for rock. Verian travels more in the rock and jazz field. We both seem to love 20th Century classical. We both love folk. Yet neither of us is hide-bound. We like to release what we like to hear. We conceptualize and we hunt for an “NSI” sound. We love artists who understand ambience, and take the understanding into other places, whether noise, folk, weirdbient or odd drone. We’re not very interested in experiment for experiment’s sake, and we are far too old to do merely what the cool kids are doing. But we hear something and say “that’s very NSI”. Then we release it.

We sometimes ask artists to release with us, and artists ask us to release them. It’s like dating, but with a lot more civility. We’ve turned down artists whose work we admire, because it’s not “NSI”. But the criterion is not “genre”, per se, but a feeling we have. So sometimes we’re in the drug store, celluloid heroes waiting to be discovered, and sometimes we’re the film “moguls”, Creative Common contract in hand, out discovering Lana Turner. Usually, by the way, Lana Turner drones on just wonderfully, using acoustic guitars and a VST freeware softsynth, with suitable ambience.

Q. Speaking of freeware—you list a number of free music tools in the notes for “Tallgrass Canticle.” Which is a really neat example of the kind of thing a net-label can do that a traditional label can’t do (or can’t do as well)—which is to not only present music created with a particular tool, but to also provide access to the tool itself. Net-labels can also foster online communities through message boards and such, which traditional labels don’t really do. Do you think that this might become an important aspect of net-labels as they continue to evolve?

A. That is a really good point. I believe that netlabels have a unique ability to strip away a number of artificial distinctions between audience and performer. In a sharing, Creative Commons/GNU/PD netlabel environment, it’s not really so important who is the creator, and who is the listener. I certainly will never be any grand star of ambient music. It’s not even a goal. I believe instead in what I term sharing culture, although I use the term without the patchouli-stained associations of the graduate teaching assistants of my seventies college years. The artificial distinctions between audience and creators can and should dissipate.

I see a netlabel as a place where the artist doesn’ t really say “hey, listen to me, I’m amazing”, in the proverbial myspace way (not that I dislike myspace, which reminds me of university bulletin boards). The artist says instead “hey, I’ve done this, hope your computer and mp3 player like it, and, if you’re interested in making your own, here’s how”. We who long for a different way to relate to music have the tools in our hands. We need not pirate, we need not be imprisoned by the need for capital or the need for technical sophistication. The average PC, Mac or Linux user has all the tools within easy freeware/shareware reach. The only ingredient formerly missing is the rise of a sharing culture to appreciate the potential for a new way of experiencing music. The challenge now is not “how do I have a home studio” or even “I wish I played guitar like Bill Nelson”, but instead “how do we reach out and listen and perform and create a netlabel culture”. The beauty of it is that netlabel culture is unstoppable, and we’re just waiting to see which promotion formulae work best to cause its spread. Viral marketing of the ultimate freeware melodious virus.

Q. It does seem as though we might be revisiting the era of the parlor musician—except now we have computers instead of upright pianos. With, of course, the added benefit of having the means of musical production also be the means of distribution. What are some of the ways that you and Verian have been promoting NSI?

A. I’ve thought about that very thing a good bit—the whole movement has a parlor music feel to it, grafted onto rocket-ship-remarkable interconnection. Jane Austen meets Robert Heinlein. The roads must piano-roll.

Verian and I do a lot of promotion through the yahoo message boards, through ambient message boards, through wonderful netlabel sites (bleepwatch, obviously, included), through a myspace page (which seems to have been a good viral resource), and through posts in free on-line classifieds. I remix a fair bit over at http://www.ccmixter.org, and sometimes I’ll remix something NSI and post it there. We each have posted videos on www.Youtube.com of our work, which is great fun. We each run our own personal weblogs, and our weblog friends have been very kind and supportive. I record for www.disfish.com, and I must say that DiSfish folk, as well as ccmixter folk, have been very helpful thus far in getting the word out. I’m just in the process of actually running an inexpensive print ad—although I must admit that it’s mostly because I like the print/zine in the UK it’s in, more than to get NSI into print. I would like to do much more than we do, as I enjoy marketing.

I love to write descriptive copy and liner notes, and it is fun to see what a difference the right “ad copy” can make. We’re in early days, yet, and I am humbled and thrilled by the chance to learn more about how to virally get the word out. My day job is as an attorney, and marketing music is rather a different thing from marketing legal services. I’d love to see our downloads explode, although that sounds a sad form of vanity as I type this.

We’ve put up a sample pack of Verian’s work, but we’d like to encourage remixers to make more use of our releases as samples. We hope to focus on that aspect further as we go along.

Q. I also enjoy marketing. It’s interesting to see what’s going to work—especially since the online music landscape keeps changing so fast.You guys have a radio feature on the NSI site, as well as a podcast. If you could have any web tool at your disposal—real or imagined—what might that be?

A. I’d like to see the ultimate non-musician on-line sequencer and VST array, so that one could compose entirely virtually in a completely absurd way. This is inevitable, and the very cool remix site www.splicemusic.com has a solid on-line sequencer/sample editor which is fun to use. What I have in mind, though, will work in a much more visitor-friendly and odd way. Here are its useful features:

1. The sequencer is entirely open source and completely easy to use.

2. The graphical user interfaces for the devices are entirely whimsical, as is the case with www.ixi-software.net’s Slicer or the freeware Cygnus VST synth, which offers an optional picture of the solar system as the GUI as an alternative to the standard emulation-of-a-boring-analog-device of the standard GUI.

3. One can control it with a kazoo MIDI controller or a nose flute MIDI controller.

4. One can easily write chords if one fancies, as I do, writing in notation, as one can do with a proper music notation program but sometimes cannot do with a standard basic sequencer.

5. The included VSTs include a mountain dulcimer, a didge-from-space, an autoharp, bass and tenor kazoos, a comb, a musical saw, a bandaged telecaster, and a minimal techno beats program.

6. The flanger always works, the exciter sounds exciting and not like fingernails on a blackboard, and the echo function permits one to echo at 1/64, and has presets entitled “photobooth” and “room full of porcelain sinks”.

7. This wonderful device would be available on our site to each user, with large print instructions on an easy-to-use manual not containing the words “oscillator”, “DAW”, “GUI”, or “maximal compression synchronization” but containing liberal uses of the words “really cool”, “the purple thing by the red button” and “press here to select which MIDI of an NSI song you’d like to remix first”.

Q. I just checked out that Slicer—the interface is fascinating. I’ve never used anything like it. Do you find that the music you create is influenced by interface?

A. All of the ixi-software devices are fascinating in their own way, and all are completely open-source.

I definitely think that the limitations and advantages of the particular interface affect not only what I create, but also how I define music and its composition. The idea is not original to me, of course. Harry Partch posited the problem of harmonics as a matter of tonal interface, more or less, and redefined the scales and the instruments. Conlon Nancarrow circumvented the GUI problem in playing the piano by using player pianos to do what the “ordinary human interface” could not. I think that so many of the movements which led to ambient music—such as musique concrete—sought to change the way, even in an analog sense, in which we participate in and define music.

This brings me, in a roundabout way, to one of my pet theories. I believe that digital emulation of analog devices is a wonderful thing—but I also think that softsynths and other devices which merely recreate a sound from a classic synth are limiting. It’s not the limit inherent in the design that I mind—after all, a piano is not a kalimba, and yet there’s nothing wrong with building pianos which cannot do what kalimbas do. It’s the way of thinking that we only interface with our instruments in an analog way regardless of their digital nature.

This is why I like Slicer, or Coagula Light, or a host of other “new generation” interfaces—my music is so often defined by whether I am using a synthesizer VST from a sequencer, or an interface completely liberated from that construct. The revolution is neither televised nor synthesized, but it definitely should involve connecting dots on easy-to-read charts. These dots, carefully dotted, may liberate us all from the tyranny of talent and scales.

Q. Place is obviously an important concept for you—”Tallgrass Canticle” is inspired by the prairies around your current home, and GurdonArk is a take on your home town. How does this appreciation of physical place correlate to your appreciation of the relatively disembodied non-place of web-based communications?

A. I do have a sense of place which makes a huge difference in how I think about things. I grew up in south Arkansas (and hence the name GurdonArk). I live now in a suburban area near Dallas which once was sweeping blackland prairie. Each of those rather mundane geographic facts tie into my ways of thinking about myself, and indirectly into my creative endeavors. For ten years, I lived in the foothills outside Los Angeles, and part of me still lives in the “elven forest” which is the southern California chapparal.

I am not sure if California made me more a scrub oak or more of “My Lord’s Candle” (yucca whipplei), but I am sure it grew on and within me.

In web-based communications, many of us continually try to create a similar sense of place. I believe that’s part of the allure of netlabels. It’s more than “I posted three songs at this commercial repository”. When one goes to www.stasisfield.com, one has a sense of its being more than a disemodied set of mp3s. Instead, it’s a set of ideas made real. I think that the creation of true destinations, with true friends, is part of the potential of these virtual communications. People spend a lot of time worrying about virtual interfaces that are so lifelike as to replace “real living”. I don’t worry too much on that score. I’d think, instead, that we come to view our interactions through the lens of the “places” we create—and we’ll all stay anchored to reality, as we can fire reality up in our mp3 players as we commute to work.

Q. What kind of things can listeners expect to hear from NSI in 2007?

A. One thing we respect about other netlabels is the way they define personalities, often through adherence to one particular genre. We mean to continue to define our personality a bit differently than this approach.

We’ll release a number of things in 2007 which cross the various boundary lines in search of an aesthetic that is NSI rather than “ambient” or “chill” or “techno”.

I’m particularly excited by Verian Thomas’ upcoming “Massive”, which is a companion piece to his earlier work “Miniatures”. Verian’s current work focuses on simple guitar ambience, which works very well.

We have an upcoming work by Sascha Muller, which varies from some of his other stuff by going in a more ambient-esque direction. We have at least two folk-influenced musicians in the works to be announced soon who do work more acoustic than has been our trend thus far—we hope to provide listeners sounds they do not get everywhere, whether from a Swedish nyckelharp or the coolest freeware softsynth someone invented in a basement and put on www.kvraudio.com. Verian and I will sometime this Spring release a set of songs by our electronica bit of fun called the Thomas Nunnally Ensemble. It’s the closest we come to anything resembling rock, but only in the way that distant cousins at family reunions are nonetheless family.

Our goal is that every album be different, but each one sound, in some odd way, very NSI.

We’re still in our early days as a netlabel, and we’re encouraged and humbled by the kindness other netlabel folks and listeners both old and new have shown us. The submissions we’ve considered have been of very high quality in the main, even when they do not fit our vision. I personally am grateful to the folks I’ve met through www.ccmixter.org and www.disfish.com, where I’ve posted a fair bit of music. They’ve been very supportive there, and on the web.

We hope to expose more netlabels and artists to our listeners through our NSI podcast. We also want to encourage remixing, as remixing is such a vital component of a Creative Commons sharing culture. My friend Fabien Claudel (www.zikweb.org) has been very kind to give us a shout-out, and his work frequently provides me with samples for my own work In my ideal world, we’d also build the Universal One-Stop Virtual Synthesizer, but I’m afraid that’s beyond our skills.

[visit NSI at negativesoundinstitute.com]