Derek Holzer
Interview (2023)
Starting with a few questions about your origins. Please tell us about your background, including what kind of environment and community you grew up, and what were your passions as a child and teenager.I grew up between the high desert of northern New Mexico, the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Cascadian mountain forests of Portland, Oregon. My father was an artist working in a number of media, and at various times during my childhood he had large studios with tools of every description laying around to experiment with. I feel very fortunate to have been exposed to this from an early age! I was also exposed to a lot of creative people growing up, since all three locations seemed to be where America’s weirdest people somehow ended up. There were a lot of holdovers from the 1960s countercultural scene hanging around, and I was simultaneously fascinated and repelled by their esoterism. I still am! My rebellion as the son of a broke hippie artist was to become fascinated with science, and my earliest dream was to be a paleontologist. This ended around the time I discovered psychedelic drugs in high school, and realized that the worlds of science and myth were closer than I had realized. My first education after high school was actually as a silversmith, and I think my obsession with craft and tools really comes from this place. I was taught —and still strongly believe— that the trace of the human hand on an object is what gives it value.
Which people and works have influenced the development of your sensibilities and taste?There were two catalogs laying around my house as a teenager, both of which functioned like search engines for alternative culture long before the internet. One was very well known: Stewart Brand’s 1971 Last Whole Earth Catalog, where I could read about cybernetics, Buckminster Fuller’s architecture, chaos theory, ecology, sustainable housing, handcrafts, alternative communities, surviving in the wild, harvesting energy from the sun, growing plants (psychedelic and otherwise), and quite a bit more about the whole spectrum of sexuality than was available from either school or Hustler magazine. The other was the far lesser known Amok Fourth Dispatch, which was sort of the dark opposite of the Whole Earth Catalog. It specialized in books which analyzed various real and imagined societal power structures; provided resources on crime, weapons, disasters, and forensics; discussed alternate mental states and parapsychology; delved into the furthest recesses of popular culture; and explored sexuality as a life-force energy. It also featured extensive literature on serial killers, Satanic cults, dead celebrities, bondage, S&M, conspiracy theories, fringe political beliefs, and many other areas of knowledge which might be considered extreme or forbidden. As I said, not too different from the internet of today! I think these two collections of knowledge and resources about different ways to live, do, make, and be influenced me more than anything I was given to read in school.
I read that you have always been interested in sound and not music. What specific “sounds” are you attracted to, and how do you yourself see the reason why you are attracted to sound itself rather than music?I first heard Einstürzende Neubauten, Coil, Skinny Puppy, and Throbbing Gristle in my teenage years, and they changed forever how I thought about music. I’ve always had a bit of a neurologically queer brain, and despite the fact that I owned a keyboard, a bass, and an electric guitar, I never found the discipline to learn any of them. So my encounters with noise and industrial music were totally liberating! Can’t play the guitar? Bang on a shopping cart. Can’t play the keyboard? Sample some frequencies from the radio and loop them at various pitches. Can’t play the bass? Hang a microphone down a hole in a glacier or put a piezo on a rubber band or a spring, and you have bass sounds for days. Sound is a massive area, with what most people refer to as “music” being a small area partly overlapping with speech as carriers of meaning within that larger space. I like to look at the largest part of the picture.
Why did you start to create your own devices instead of using existing ones? What was it about making devices that drew you to it?When I got seriously into sound in the late 1990s, I was doing AM radio from my university in the US, and later got involved in some of the first live internet audio broadcasts from Eastern Europe. I was looking for tools to create and manipulate sounds, and like most people at that time I started downloading pirated VST software. What immediately stuck about most of them was that they were meant to imitate instruments which already existed
Another interesting problem was that, unlike a real synth or drum machine, you couldn’t take apart the picture of the synth or drum machine on your screen to figure out or change how it worked. You were stuck with what the programmer offered you. I found a software called Audio Mulch, which let me patch different things together into very wild combinations, and later graduated to Pure Data. With Pd, everything is open source so you can take apart, reverse engineer, and redesign instruments created by other people. The community nature of the software encourages sharing and collaboration, which are also very important to me. I’ve been using Pd for all of my digital instruments now for the last 22 years!
Do you remember the first piece you ever created? What was the concept/purpose behind that, and when did you create it? Also, what possibilities and following issues did the production process and the finished device bring to you?I don’t remember exactly when I took my first DIY electronics course —it was also some time in the late 1990s — but I do remember that the way it was taught was a revelation. Rather than bogging us down in math and theory, the instructor just asked us to bring parts we wanted to work with. Then he helped us hack things together. I found a sound generator chip used in old pinball and video arcade games, and together we started to figure out how to make it into a synthesizer using the time-honored technique known as “reading the datasheet”. I probably did everything wrong that one could do while building an analog circuit, and it was quite a mess! Later, I met Mika and Ilpo from Pan Sonic, and they showed me the infamous “typewriter” synthesizer built for them by Jari Lehtinen. I immediately saw just from the panel that it was built around the exact same chip I used: the SN76477 complex sound generator. I still have the guts of mine somewhere, waiting for the resurrection.