Resipiscent Q&A

[Heule] Resipiscent focuses on Bay Area musicians, but has also released albums by artists from around the nation. There seems to be a unifying element of playfulness, looseness, humor, invention, and experimentation in the Resipiscent catalog that seems particularly strong on the West Coast, if not in the Bay Area itself. Do you see the Bay Area as a special place for this sort of music, or is it thriving in obscurity everywhere?

[decker] We’ve released internationalists in Masonic Youth, and talking with Freeka Peeka and Company Fuck among others but hard to jumpstart from afar.

There does seem to be a connection between playfulness and obscurity, the kind of play that experiments and discovers doesn’t have time or energy for popularity or acceptance. Often, it’s those who gave up on social acceptance (not hindsight claims of being maverick, but actually gave up) who came to dwell in experimentation as play. Contrast that to retro and pop bands that want to entertain and be super uncool, they forms tons of new bands that quickly dissipate into clothes fashion, that long popular recess of irrelevance on the “upper playground.” Artists of obscure music would love to be cool, but they aren’t. Obscure music attracts audiences with terrible social skills, awkward human beings paralyzed by the high stakes of starting a conversation. That kind of community draws artists whose own ideas are a real threat to themselves, they may produce horrible results which fascinate audiences but also may both audience and artist alike by catching a current of totally unique potential. Either way, you can’t afford to miss it.

The artists we put out have to be heard live since experimentation is so much about time, accident and the manifold rifts between thought and action; but recordings are an important secondary point of reference, an idealized space where you get to hear what musicians achieve in an environment of artificial time. Recordings are also essential for audiences to acclimate to unorthodox sounds and non-repeating compositions. Once people do acclimate, few can go back to repetitive conventional self aggrandizing music, so caveat emptor.

[Heule] Modular synthesis is all over the Resipiscent catalog, notably on the new Serge compilation, and Loachfillet's new album. Of course Don Buchla invented this instrument here in the early 60s, in collaboration with Morton Subotnick and the SF Tape Music Center. Serge itself was eventually based in the Bay Area. And Mills College has for years been training an army of modular synthesists. Do you see the Bay Area's rich history and leadership in experimental electronic music as a direct influence on the musicians released by Resipiscent?

[decker] Absolutely! Unlike so many bay area cultural institutions helicoptered in as the requisite establishments of a big city (e.g. SFMOMA, ACT, sfOpera, etc), the street-level advent of electronic music in San Francisco proved beyond doubt what a willingness to shed conventional methods, materials and aesthetics can yield. Maybe not the great shopping mall of Haight & Ashbury, but when the SF Tape Music Center found a home at Mills it established music as the most vital art of experimentation in the bay area, challenging composers, musicians and audiences alike to forge new sensibilities. That in and of itself is distinct from entertainment that measures success by prestige whether top40 or fetishist classical anachronisms (both of which substitute formal repetition for composition.)

When Buchla, Subotnick , Oliveros, et al. disabused us of the idea that there are rules or limits to what materials, modes and aesthetic norms are possible, they accomplish something tantamount to inventing the cello, or drum! Yet monied patrons insist on dressing up as Nelson Rockefeller for yet another rendition of Mahler and refuse to even hear local contemporaries, Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick much less Hans Grusel, sfSound, or Anti-Ear. SF Symphony’s American Mavericks effort was apparently a one-time-only nod. MTT knows where his bread gets buttered and he’s keeping that Barry Manilow golden retriever look well-honed for the long haul.

Rather than assail 18th century music fans, better to praise the SF Tape Music Center and Buchla who fundamentally changed how audiences worldwide hear sound and conceive of music. Along with a new texture, pitch, and tempo (not to mention the stacks of circuitry with patch cables pouring out that forged new visual associations for sound) musicians on older instruments gained license to play extended technique, microtonal, harmolodic, disassembled and bent instruments, though certainly Partch and others didnt wait on that license.

Many of the artists on Resipiscent came out of Mills’ world-class program, but it’s the ability of those composers and musicians to collaborate with and be influenced by emerging self-taught artists (who spent those same years outside any academy) that’s most unique. That collision is what makes bay area experimental music as unpredictable and rich as it is. That sensibility seems to arise from the street-level origins of the SF Tape Music Center, invention and performance joined there to forge a playfulness that proved resistant to dissipation as clothes fashion.