The composer is a lonely creature wearing a wig, scratching stylized symbols onto parchment using a quill made from a bird’s wing. Well, at least in our romantically distorted ideal he is. "At the edge of large cities, where street lamps are scarce and policemen walk by twos, are houses where you mount til you can mount no further, up and up into attics under the roof, where pale young geniuses, criminals of the dream, sit with folded arms and brood; up into cheap studios with symbolic decorations, where solitary and rebellious artists, inwardly consumed, hungry and proud, wrestle in a fog of cigar smoke with devastatingly ultimate ideals", Thomas Mann wrote in his turn-of-the-century story At the Prophet's, and his tone is indicative of a deeply felt admiration for the artist's lonely struggle against life, death and bourgeois opposition. A hundred years later, this image still holds sway in the minds of most listeners and artists alike. One could even claim that the advent of multitracking, digital technology and home studios has actually reinforced the cliche, with producers creating scores of orchestral richness in their bedrooms. From this point of view, collectively working on a piece of music is nothing but an anachronism, an amusing side-thought or, from a label perspective, a clever marketing ploy to reach new and potentially more sizable target groups. In reality, however, what we today refer to as a "collaboration" constitutes the very origin and essence of creating music: shaping something intangible and intimate with a group of friends, colleagues or as part of a community. Digital tools are not just offering producers the possibility of opting out of this tradition, either. As the creative communication between Kenneth Kirschner and Herman Kolgen for their Toys project proves, they are also allowing them to find creative spaces capable of surpassing former limitations.
Remarkably, Toys was born from possibly the most widely despised form of musical interaction: the remix. After contributing to Kirschner's post_piano project with his then-partner Dominique Skoltz in 2003, Kolgen had something bigger in mind for the follow-up to that album two years later. "Where most people sent one or maybe two tracks based on my piano sketch, skoltz_kolgen ran amok and sent us an entire ALBUM – and it was ALL great!“, Kirschner recounts. In the end, Postpiano 07.05 came out in its entirety as a limited edition release on 12k in 2006, laying the foundation for a continued encounter between two willful protagonists: on the one hand the Feldman-obsessed Kirschner, a New Yorker with heart and soul, whose freely distributed work had cut a burning swathe through the artificial divide between contemporary composition and electronic soundscapes. And on the other, the sympathetically eccentric Franco-Canadian Kolgen, whose refined and tactile music infused academia with a touch of both crawly and charming tension. After Kirschner had gladly accepted the chance of contributing some "chamber music" to Skoltz and Kolgen's imposing Silent Room video-installation, the time was ripe for their first physical meeting at the duo's spectacular, personally designed and self-built home in Montreal. It was during this real-life encounter that their relationship took a decisive turn, as Kirschner points out: 'Kolgen and I were both very surprised when we met each other in person – we were not at all what we imagined each other to be. Kolgen, only knowing me through my music, had quite naturally imagined me to be this miserable, brooding person, wearing all black, making anguished existential speeches to skulls, etc. But of course, I'm in reality a ridiculously silly person. And I in turn envisioned Kolgen as an incomprehensibly cryptic French-Canadian techno-savant, profound and mysterious and serious. But in reality, he’s an even more absurd person than I am – hyperactive, childish, and totally insane. We hit it off immediately.' The episode points to an extremely important paradox: even though it would take place entirely within virtual realms and without the artists getting all "profound" and "miserable" together in the same room, the project would never have come about without this brief personal vis-a-vis. That said, considering the distance between their homes and their tight schedules, only the practical advantages of the digital space allowed them to carry through their plan of a co-operation. To their advantage, collaborations between digital artists have long evolved from their somewhat primitive beginnings into a diversified and creative field in their own right. Today, producers can choose from a wide range of alternatives, including the use of a pool of sounds, a shared process of constant refinement or real-time online interactions. For Toys, Kirschner and Kolgen opted for a cross-breed: inspired by each other's comical features, they would, on the one hand, send each other source materials recovered from a bunch of "random, silly objects". On the other, they would engage in a boomerang-shaped exchange about the aesthetics and results of their endeavors. Because of this inbuilt feedback loop, the process never left them feeling as though they were striking a compromise compared to sitting in the same room: "These two methods simply imply different behavioral patterns", according to Kolgen. "You cannot deny the dimension of human spontaneity in a direct exchange. You're constantly reacting directly with the other, and the work evolves and changes at the same rate of synchronicity. With Toys, the dynamic was very different. Time was elastic because it allowed each of us to work at his own pace. This meant that we were able to create a common work by layering two different working energies on top of each other."
Both musicians set out to work and quickly arrived at what seemed like satisfying results. Materials included "children's toys, bits of wood, little drums and mallets, flutes and whistles, Kolgen's cat's water bowl, Kolgen's cat, tiny harmonicas, telephones and walkie talkies, weird figurines, field recordings from a toy shop in China, cardboard boxes, a plastic cow, junk found in the recycling bin", and, amazingly, even more still. Kirschner spent that fall living at his wife’s family’s summer house on remote Block Island after their New York apartment had tragically burned down, where he had a lot of time and quiet on his hands. And, quite literally, the floodgates opened: "I started writing…and writing…and writing – just having fun and going crazy with all these great toy sounds. The end result of all this madness was “November 7, 2008”, a massive hour-long festival of chaos that to me captured the spirit of fun we were going for." Playing the outcome to his partner in crime, however, did not have the intended effect: Kolgen took a passionate dislike to the piece and their partnership seemed in danger of breaking apart at the seams just when it had seemed to lift off. This unexpected stalemate, in a surprising twist, turned out to be seminally beneficial for the project. Facing crises and creative disagreements with absolute sincerity and openness is probably what brings virtual collaborations closest to their "real-life" counterparts. Whereas others would simply ignore or tacitly accept disappointing contributions from their collaborator, honesty was a priority for Toys: "Receiving, appreciating and then taking the time to intervene with the work of the other was actually one of the great pleasures of this interaction", according to Kolgen. 'I think it is essential to stay honest, not just for the project, but out of respect for each other. It's the only way to learn about the work, creation and human side of the other person. In the end, our collaboration was a human exchange rather than just doing things on our own. Mutual criticism resulted in us sending each other lots of emails, and in each email, we discovered bits of the personal lives of each other.' As they quickly discovered, too, digital collaborations were giving a new meaning to the term "waste". While discarded proposals in a physical exchange will simply never get recorded, a rejected digital idea may simply not be appropriate for a particular project and can be stored away for future use on a hard drive. Microsound composers Shinkei and mise_en_scene have even turned this thought into an ongoing series of releases (of "leftovers"), in which discarded material from one session is used as a point of departure for the next. Subjective context, rather than objective quality, is therefore turning into the most important criterion for whether or not to include a particular idea, and rejection is elevated into a potentially constructive process. Kolgen affirms this impression by underlining the importance of personal taste for the final result: 'Our choices about what to include or not are not mathematical ones, and they cannot be explained through rules of logic. It was all about playing with what amused us without being hindered by habitual directions.' And so even though the discontent with Kirschner's first version had its downside, as it meant he had to return to the drawing board again, it also allowed him to venture beyond his proven recipes. After deliberating with friends and colleagues (so much for the ideal of the solitary genius!), Kirschner came to the conclusion that Kolgen's dislike was to be interpreted as a rejection of too overt use of instantly recognizable plug-ins. What had seemed playful and naive to its creator had kindled resentment against a music without secrets or mysteries in the other. It was not a dismissal of his compositional capacities but of the tools used for channeling them – what was needed was some serious tech-talk. After getting back to New York in early 2009, Kirschner's friend Morgan Packard organized an informal seminar to demonstrate his program Ripple, a piece of algorithmic software he had built in Supercollider. As Kirschner played with Ripple more and more, he realized he might have found the perfect way to impress Kolgen. During the last day of the seminar, March 1, 2009, while sitting in Packard's living room, he fed some of Kolgen’s sounds into Ripple on his laptop, started playing around, and came up with all the raw material that now makes up his piece “March 1, 2009”. After editing it all together, Kirschner played it for his collaborator, who instantly fell in love with it. They were back on track.
While "March 1, 2009" remained the centerpiece of Kirschner's contributions, he complemented the 19-minute composition with three slightly more compact ones over the next months. One of them was a short section lifted from “November 7, 2008”, which, to return to the aforementioned importance of context, suddenly sounded absolutely wonderful to Kolgen. In sync, his Canadian counterpart was using both his own sounds, Kirschner's original material as well as fragments of his pieces as a basis. Pushing the envelope, he started working with new software as well as working differently with old programs, while trying to bring sounds together which did not seem compatible at first. He also built patches which randomly redefined his structures and layers and, on a visit to Asia, bought plenty of little mini-toys. Yet even though everything seemed to be moving harmoniously, when they finally sifted through the music, they realized that despite their close cooperation, their individual works did not really form a coherent entity. The outcome was a double album with each CD exclusively dedicated to pieces by one of the composers. Rather than pointing at a failure, however, this split is merely the logical result of taking decisions according to what felt right in artistic terms and respecting the music rather than their egos. Artists have always been looking for ways to surprise themselves and infuse their music with unexpected, seemingly irrational elements, which they would not have come up with on their own. Collaborators, as Toys proves, can serve as ideal sparring partners in that respect. As Kolgen puts it: "The way I defined our esprit naive was to accept new accidents in the process and play with these accidents for no other reason than getting lost. It is about taking the results of these lost positions and re-including them in the creative process, until I arrive at something different". The finished pieces prove that the unique personalities of the two composers have remained firmly intact. In this respect, while creative spaces for digital artists are probably more diversified than they have ever been, the factors driving a successful collaboration are essentially still the same: a real desire to learn something from and about the other, a willingness to face rather than ignore conflict, and the ability to follow the material wherever it may take you. It is also becoming abundantly clear that our whole notion of composers as mysterious geniuses needs to be reconsidered. Kirschner: 'There’s no such thing as a composer, as this magical person who creates music out of thin air. Music is a distributed, collective system that remixes itself through us. There’s a single, incomprehensibly complex signal path that runs from every piece of music I’ve ever heard, into a messy tangle of neurons and sequencers and plug-ins, up onto a website and off into the net, and then hopefully onwards – and none of it looks anything like a guy wearing a wig scratching stylized symbols onto parchment using a quill made from a bird’s wing.' Thomas Mann may not have agreed, but those attics under the roof are suddenly not looking all that dark and sinister anymore. |
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