Roaming the Sonic World, Laptop in Hand

Composers generally fill their minds with basic creative questions: What will the musical language be? What about its shape? How will it go?

For composer Carl Stone, who will perform with his trusty laptop at the Schindler House sound. series on Saturday, those old questions enter in, but his primary concern is data, and the streaming, chopping-up and processing thereof. His basic musical language is built from samples, the digital sound bites that become tiny particles in ornate sonic mosaics.

That alone wouldn’t make him special in a world where digital manipulation in art and media are ubiquitous. The difference is that Stone’s data-head music goes back more than 20 years, making the San Francisco-based Los Angeles native a pioneer of sorts.

Over a meal in a noisy restaurant in San Francisco last week, Stone admits, “On one level, I feel like the trends and the fashions of today have vindicated what I was doing 20 years ago. Maybe I’m a little bit, I wouldn’t say resentful, but I feel a little bit overlooked from time to time, because I was doing that stuff” early on.

Still, he says, “technology now has made so much possible. I’m as happy as a pig in manure about that. The field is getting better and better.”

He should know. Stone has worked his way through various machinery and evolving technology, from intricate tape-loop systems in the early 1980s to his use of an expensive French digital delay unit, the Publison DM89, along with turntables. That segued into relying on MIDI, or Musical Instrument Digital Interface, with Mac desktops, and finally a laptop, once Mac G3 technology afforded enough processing power and programming flexibility.

Whatever the mechanics, Stone’s method has stayed the same. He likes to appropriate existing musical source material to create new textural worlds with splicing and looping fragments of sound. Over the years, the vast materials list has included Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” the Temptations’ “My Girl,” snippets by Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix, Indonesian music, and untold archives of other found musical and sound data.

By nature, he’s a traveler, and after having been a frequent flier to Japan over the years, where he found a receptive audience and an agreeable culture, Stone has now become a part-time expatriate.

Taking a post as professor in the School of Computer and Cognitive Sciences at Chukyo University in Toyota, Japan, he spends eight months of the year there and the rest in the States or touring the world.

In San Francisco, he lives in a comfortable two-story house in the Mission District with ample room for his CD library, computer and wire-filled work lab. The backyard has been converted by the Japanese couple who stay during Stone’s absences into a spartan, Zen-like garden. Walking through the yard, Stone adds, half-seriously, “I may add some tiki torches or something.”

The tranquillity of the space pointedly contrasts with the forested backyards all around, as well as the clamor of the busy street out the front door. A similar dichotomy could also refer to Stone’s music, at times chaotic and jampacked with data, but also strangely contemplative and formal in design.

“I’m comfortable with who I am,” he says. “I don’t know where it fits in with music today, or yesterday or tomorrow. Music in the laptop world tends to be kind of formless, or anti-form. Initially, [my music] may appear to be casual or formless, because it’s a weird approach, but I’m also into classical form, in the broadest sense. Maybe, in that way, I’m an old fuddy-duddy.”

Stone, 49, grew up in the San Fernando Valley and studied at California Institute of the Arts in its formative days in the early 1970s. After graduating, he worked in L.A. as a composer, radio programmer and co-director of the 1985 New Music America festival, before moving north in 1993. He has since performed in his hometown several times, but Saturday’s appearance will present his first new work here in two years.

He sees the new “Nak Won,” about to be released on CD, as a field report from his experience as a long-term visitor in Japan. “My conscious musical influence from Japan is zero, as far as I can tell,” he says.

“But there must be a lot of unconscious, unquantifiable influence. It’s not the music, and it’s not the culture, but it’s just this sound world that’s so startling.

“I’m convinced that Tokyo is the noisiest city in the world, in terms of intentional noise--speaker projections, voices, announcements, ding-dongs, bells.

“I can speak the language, kind of, but not that well, so it’s still fairly abstract. To Japanese,” he adds, the noise is “very pedestrian. A salesperson barking on the corner, saying, ‘Buy my shrimp,’ to them is boring, but to me, it’s like wow.”

Stone traces his interest in offbeat music to his high school days in the Valley.

A rock keyboardist, the teenage Stone was drawn to the maverick music of Terry Riley, Harry Partch, Captain Beefheart, and Soft Machine, and was intrigued by the newly opened CalArts in Valencia.

There, with mentors such as Morton Subotnick and James Tenney, Stone delved into electronic music, abandoning keyboards for circuitry.

Important early inspirations included the early tape-loop work of Steve Reich, Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room” and a live performance of Philip Glass’ “Music for Changing Parts.”

After years in the ‘70s spent creating “tape music”-- working with such synthesizers as the then-cutting-edge Buchla in the CalArts lab, then presenting the finished work on tape--Stone had an epiphany. He wanted to unleash the performer within. “Something about tape music kept you abstracted from your audience. I wanted a closer, reactive relationship.”

He established himself as a composer-performer. He “plays” the laptop. Inputting samples and then manipulating them, he immerses himself in his instrument, the sound of which he can change every time he samples something new and manipulates it via software he personalizes as well.

He compares his setup to Chopin’s piano.

“He knew it and he mastered it. He could speak it. He ate it and drank it and slept it. That’s kind of what I do. It’s not just the computer, but the software that I build around it.”

Laptops have logically become a common tool of choice for many experimental musicians, who can tinker with sounds and sequences, all with a highly flexible and portable box. Stone’s music, however, is unique. He doesn’t create scores, and only Carl Stone can play a Carl Stone work. There is a structure attached to a set of samples, and that allows him to revisit his pieces, but each performance is at heart an improvisation.

To his mind, what sets him apart is the practice of sampling.

“On some level, my music is very unfashionable--not because of the laptop, but maybe because of musical grammar,” Stone says. “Sampling has become very unfashionable. In Japan, it’s all music made from air”--from the computer itself, he means--”clicks and pops and glitches. It’s all very electronic sounding.

“I am a confirmed sample-holic,” he says, “and I have not entered into any 12-step program.”

It has earned him some good reviews: In the 1980s, the Village Voice dubbed him “one of the best composers living today.” Along the way, though, Stone has built up his defenses about his borrowing tendencies.

“At face value, it’s like Brahms doing variations on a theme by Handel, which I think is a very cool idea,” he says of his process. “This is part of our whole classical tradition. Bach did that, and Handel did that, and Brahms did that, and Berg did it.

“But it’s more than that.” Instead of grabbing a musical theme, he says, “it might be that I’m capturing the pitch contour. Another time, I’m capturing the rhythm and separating it out. I might take the production value of a beautifully produced rock record and somehow fold it over onto Moroccan trance music, and then fuse that onto the rhythm of a bebop piece by Thelonious Monk.”

As the artist in “the middle” of all the possibilities, Stone is bent on making his music his way.

“I keep a guarded eye on what’s going on in music,” he says. “Some of it’s really interesting and can be very stimulating and causes me to rethink my direction. But some of it strikes me as being hip today, gone tomorrow. That, to me, is a waste of time.”

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Josef Woodard is a regular contributor to Calendar.

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CARL STONE, “Nak Won,” Schindler House/MAK Center for

Art and Architecture, 835 N. Kings Road, West Hollywood. Date: Saturday, 7 p.m. Price: $15. Phone: (323) 651-1510.