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The other place where you can find new sounds is here, on my Tapegerm page.
Statement of Intent:
This is not something I can easily relate because, like Coleridge in his prose, I draw a wide range of disparate ideas and feelings together in my work; two decades of experimentation have brought me a large stockpile of artistic resources. I mentioned one of my favorite poets, and I could also mention Picasso, but that would be only because I've been watching a documentary on the Spanish painter.
Really, anything I say about my intentions is a translation into the conceptual frameworks of others as I become aware of them, so I could write just about anything. I'd rather be asked questions and answer people directly, because then I could adapt my statements to each individual's framework. A drink or two make it a lovely evening!
It's hard to resist quoting here. Lord Byron wrote in Don Juan, "But if a writer should be quite consistent,/How could he possible show things existent?" Again, in his journal, he said, "If I am sincere with myself... every page should confute, refute, and utterly abjure its predecessor."
It seems that there's a great deal of variety in reactions to my work, but I've noticed that a number of women react fairly uniformly to its emotional intensity and sensitivity. It has been said that music may have evolved as a sort of mating display, and perhaps there is a veneration of women at the core of all I do, meant to speak directly to female listeners.
Bio:
As a child in the 1970s, I developed a devotion to a local easy-listening radio station that deeply affected my understanding of emotions and their expression. The effects that appealed to me most in that music formed a strong core of the knowledge of feeling in me that persists to this day. From familiar songs I formed a private world that I shared only with girlfriends and wives until I began experimenting with sound.
A teenage love of Andy Warhol, and a later interest in Jeff Koons, taught me the aesthetic value in conceptual tension that may make a viewer or listener uncomfortable. Therefore, I have felt free to use Muzak-like approaches to sound with very un-Muzak-like effects. I imagine that the best time to listen to my audio work is when one needs semi-engaging but not entirely distracting listening, such as when doing oft-repeated chores at home. I invite the listener to let her or his mind wander to and from my sounds.
A brief stint in art school during the late 80s, a time when work such as that of Mapplethorpe was put on trial, encouraged my tendency to express the unusual and taboo. Although my approach is more gentle and less in-your-face, I do have to admit that I learned a sort of latter-day romanticism from the art of that period. My sexual themes developed much earlier, during a precocious childhood.
A love of Romantic poetry and music, developed during my twenties, informs my expressiveness, particularly the writings of Shelley and Byron, and the lieder of Schubert. A great deal of my personal motivation to make art is of a Romantic type, seeking exalted emotion as an antidote to the dulling effects of consumer culture and late capitalism in general.
Sexuality fully entered my art during adolescence, but my recent stay around the UVa grounds, and the resulting access to an excellent library, sharpened my focus on the subject. A great deal of scholarship has arisen in response to philosopher/historian Michel Foucault's assertions, and my access to this varied body of work granted me a sharp awareness of how I construct sexuality in my work. This may be its most playful aspect.
Otherwise, my themes mainly involve spiritual struggle and general experience, sometimes underlying or overlapping sexual ones. These themes are a result of years of experimentation and experience that cannot be summed up here.
I've been dedicated to fine art for about twenty years, as I implied earlier, but my relationship with sound started ten years ago. During an odd night alone in 1998, a time in which my art was exclusively visual, I attempted a crude sound experiment using three tape recorders and a TV/VCR combo. I recorded with one device while manipulating the others. Soon after, I was mixing sound using many connectors I'd collected from Radio Shack, enjoying the greater control while my neighbors enjoyed the silence.
It wasn't until 2002 that I started exploring digital manipulation using Windows Sound Recorder and the freeware drum machine HammerHead, and at that time my style truly began to develop. I now rely very heavily on WavePad sound-file editing software, though I return to older techniques as I see fit. The internet has also greatly helped me in my bricollage approach by allowing access to a vast range of audio sources.
More personally, I grew up in the suburbs of New York City, in the same Long Island county as the original tract-house development, Levittown. I identify with the paintings of Eric Fischl because of my experience with the struggle beneath the veneer of suburban utopia.
Recently, I've been heard on the radio courtesy of Little Fyodor at KGNU Boulder/Denver, and have taken part in MaryClare Brzytwa's sound-art project, Village Nomade Radio.
Who I'd Like to Meet:
I'm interested in taking on all sorts of projects, commercial ones not excluded, and will gladly consider collaboration. I'd like to experiment with making portraits of people with sound. I'm very flexible, as long as I can maintain the basic integrity of my work.
For more sounds, please check out my Tapegerm page and my Virb.com page, and please see my YouTube channel for some of my recent experiments with video. Also, please visit my blog. While you're at it, you may like to hear my piece of the day for Village Nomade Radio.
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