Steev Hise - interview : november 1999 IA: For someone who has never heard your work and is unfamiliar with non-mainstream forms of music, how would you describe Original? HISE: I usually tell people like that that what I do is "sound collage", taking recordings of sounds and music from many places and cutting it up and mixing it together using computers and other equipment. I don't know if that gives anyone an idea of what it really SOUNDS like, but it's a good short explanation. In fact I'm always interested in hearing what they THINK it sounds like after I tell them this. It would be great to somehow record what they are imagining my music is like. IA: What are your motivations for appropriating other artists works into your own? HISE: There are a few different reasons, some mostly past and some still valid, and they are developing and changing their relative priorities as I go. When I was first exposed to the technology, first tape machines and then samplers, there were immediately 2 aspects that interested me: first, that the artist had the ability to incorporate sounds piecemeal into their work as a way of harnessing the sounds and making them "say" things that they originally did not say. I didn't realize this consciously at first, it was simply a way to make a piece of music instantly be "about" something. (My first real piece of "electronic" music was a musique concrete piece made with a reel-to-reel tape machine and some delay units, called "You, Only Better". It was done in 1990 as the soundtrack to a dance piece about the treatment of women in the media and it had lots of fragments from commercials, oprah winfrey, people reading lines from Cosmopolitan, etc.) The second early reason was that sampling provided to me a much, much richer pallete of sounds, without a doubt, than any other instrument. I was always very very bored with synthesizer keyboards and the sounds they made, and when I first got my hands on a sampler I instantly saw the world of electronic music divided into 2 camps, the synthesizer people, and the sampler people, and I completely threw myself in with the latter, because the sounds were just so much more interesting. Then as time went on I became aware of and more interested in the philosophical or political ideas that were behind the work of some of the most self-conscious sample-based artists. I first got really excited about this when i discovered the Tape-beatles' zine "Retrofuturism" and read an interview with John Oswald there. That and other writings got me very interested in the subversive implications of sampling, and aware of the fact that it was an art form that was inherently problematic from a legal/economic point of view, but something that clearly resulted in great work and should be allowed to continue. Of course as I got more and more involved with that school of thought I also became more aware that there was a much larger number of artists using appropriative techniques in a completely un-selfconscious manner, to the extent that now, in 1999, we have sampling being used even by pop bands as just another technique, just another instrument like the guitar or the drums. But even before it got to that point I began to more and more firmly place myself in the camp of the subversives, the selfconscious ones who were saying "look at me, I'm appropriating, and it's okay." But of course there was still always that "richness of sound" motivation, too, and as the tools became more and more accessible it became more and more easy and tempting to want to play with sounds and make new sounds out of them, just process the hell out of them, purely for aesthetic reasons, just to make sonic landscapes that are pleasing (or not). Now the latest stage in my thinking is that I've continued to get more and more interested in the political/philosophical side of the sampling issue; and, as i've studied more of the related scholarship, I've become increasingly convinced that this struggle, this fight for the freedom to participate in culture by recycling culture, is really just a symptom, just one part of a larger struggle, the struggle against what's called late capitalism. So in the future my work is going to be increasingly informed by that view, and more concerned with that larger struggle, rather than just specifically about sampling and appropriation. IA: Do you think this shift in focus will change the actual sound or style of your work or will it mainly just be a shift in what motivates you as an artist? HISE: Actually "Original" represents the cusp of that shift - there are several pieces that are very ambient and abstract, that are the results of a long series of complicated digital signal processing steps, and they are mostly about the pleasure of listening and playing with sound, and that temptation toward doing that and making very abstract work. For example "Softly Ultra", a piece that went through so many stages of processing over the course of about a year, that I can't even really remember now what the source material was. (It also went through 3 or 4 different titles.) Then there are other pieces that are very plainly recognizable as to their source material and that are saying "look at me, I'm appropriating! I'm doing something illegal!" And then, further, there are pieces that are saying that but are also attempting to say something else, make some other point too, like "The Liquidators" or "Retrofuturist Trip-Swing". So, to answer the question, yes, it will change the style and sound, I will probably use less and less transformative, esoteric signal processing and concentrate more on what source material gets juxtaposed together, and on simple cutting, pasting, looping, mixing, etc, and what those juxtapositions MEAN, what concrete ideas are suggested by them. The emphasis will be on semiotics, rather than technique and texture. Of course this is a tall order and something i've been struggling to do more of for a few years now and am still not satisfied with, so it's a gradual process of learning how to do this effectively and avoiding a result that is too... didactic, for lack of a better word. IA: Two of the RealMedia samples from Original have video clips. Also, a recent performance of yours started off as a spoken word piece. Do you see yourself expanding into other mediums or forms of expressions? HISE: I've always been pretty "multi-media". It's actually been sort of a conscious effort to concentrate on audio for the past 4 years or so. But I've been doing video, poetry, performance art, painting, fiction, sculpture, a lot of different things at different times of my life. The video clips you mention are part of a larger video/performance piece I did in 1995 called "Requiem for (Un)dead Popstars". It involved me doing things on stage while a video collage was projected behind me and the music played. The opening segment, "The Secret History of Vinyl", appears on my 1995 tape "Detritus" (Viral Communications). In addition to the 2 tracks that appear on "Original" (the Elvis piece and the finale section which features everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Kurt Cobain to Buddy Holly), there's also a Billie Holliday/Janis Joplin duet section, a Beatles section, and a middle section where i tell a story about learning to play guitar. The whole piece is held together as an examination of the iconography of celebrity, and celebrity martyrdom. Spoken word interests me, especially in live performance, because it adds a more human, personal element to the work, which I find important in the world of "tablecore" shows (geeky guys sitting hunched over, twisting knobs while incomprehensible noises come out of the speakers). I especially am intrigued by the idea of orally telling biographical or semibiographical stories in such a way that they "resonate" with the "story" told by the found media that I'm recycling. I'm probably going to do more of that kind of thing in the near future. IA: You are involved with a lot events and projects in the San Francisco area. Do you find that community essential to your artistic efforts? HISE: Not essential, necessarily, but certainly very helpful. That' s one reason I went to graduate school to get an MFA, because art school provides this instant and intense community of people creating stuff and really dedicated to it. The Internet provides somewhat of a feeling of community that wasn't there before for people in "out of the way" places, that wasn't there before. That's one reason why I started Detritus.net, to enhance and focus the community of artists doing the kind of thing I do. However, the "virtual community" can only go so far. It definitely is a great thing to have people right in your neighborhood that you can meet with face to face over coffee, get together in the studio and do collaborations, and organize live shows with. There's not a lot of places where that can happen, especially in this "genre", so I'm definitely very thankful to find that here in the bay area. IA: Who are some of the artists in the bay area that you associate with? HISE: Wobbly, Peter Conheim (of Negativland and Wet Gate), Carl Stone. Until recently, Mr. Meridies (who just moved from here to Michigan, unfortunately). I feel like this is "shout outs" time - who else? let's see, there's Bob Ostertag, this new group called Pepito that I've come to know recently, and my friends at South to the Future who lately have been really inspiring to me (they are writers and conceptual artists who are much more about that "larger struggle" that i mentioned earlier). Those are the main ones, the ones who are focused most similarly and who I interact with directly. IA: And so what are you currently working on? Currently I'm doing 3 things: - Right now the big priority is a piece for a compilation CD of "twisted children's music" that's going to be released by Etoy, the European net art group who are being hassled for trademark infringement by Etoys, some stupid internet toy company which hasn't been on the net nearly as long as Etoy. They want to try to have this CD rushed out by Christmas, so I and a bunch of others are rushing to get tracks to them. - Working on a new live instrument, some software that runs on a linux laptop that I will hopefully be soon using to do most of my performances with. The idea is to travel really light and yet have the ability to access and process a lot of sound in a live, improvisational context. - Doing source collecting and "research" for a major series of pieces about technology, property, the internet, and capitalism. I've done the first of this series but have been kind of "stuck" for several months. I work very slowly, stewing about ideas for awhile and then every once in a while there's a burst of activity. [also available: an interview recorded on kpfa in realaudio] top