27:Eng Interview 8 — Nigh Magazine

I would say this is true for the larger consumer base of electronic instruments in general. The majority of my clients weren’t looking to reinvent music or to discover sounds which no one had ever heard before. But they were interested in a machine which easily facilitated the creation of a certain kind of sonic landscape, and they were certainly interested in sounds which they themselves had never heard before.

While synthesizers, vinyl records, photographs, and other media are also developing digitization and its technology, there is also a trend toward a return to analog in some areas. How do you see this trend?

We could discuss consumer trends such as Polaroids, vinyl records, or modular synthesizers, or even whether their digital simulations imitate them well enough, but I think the question can be addressed on a different level. I rather like the position of Parl Kristian Bjørn Vester (aka Goodiepal), who has long insisted that we should all become as unscannable as possible. This feeling has only increased as commercial entities scrape the internet for any sort of scannable content possible to feed their hungry algorithms which crank out banality after banality. The idea that a statistical machine learning system can somehow replace human creativity only holds the slightest water only when we focus on the output of such systems, rather than consider the human processes from which creativity actually springs.
Interacting with a physical instrument is a complex process, and we fool ourselves if we think that can be reduced to measuring physical gestures or recording sound output. And even if we could someday plant electrodes in the performer’s brain and capture every part of the rich thought process involved in an improvisation, for example, would measuring and simulating it make life better for anyone? It might make business more profitable for extractive capitalist entities like Spotify, who desperately try to avoid paying artists anything close to what they deserve for their creative labor. Artificially “intelligent” musicians will never go on strike, and will deliver as long as the electricity bill is paid. In short: if digitization aids extractive capitalism, then perhaps there are certain things we should protect from digitization —at least until our ethics someday catch up with our technology. And that is a situation which I have my doubts about. Just because we can do something, doesn’t mean that we should do something.
This may well sound like a contradiction of my earlier statement, that perhaps all techno music was actually already written by the Roland electronic music corporation. Again, that only holds true if you remain fixated on the output. Recalling the users of the Benjolins I built, I think of them as participating in sound in a way which goes beyond simply hearing, spectating, or consuming a finished product. Their use of the instrument crosses over into interacting with the sound possibilities which the object provides in a meaningful way without concern of whether the output is art, music, product, or something else entirely. Perhaps at the best moments, the user of the instrument even loses any sense of self or ego whatsoever.

Earlier I asked you about your self-study, but you are currently enrolled in a PhD program in Media & Interaction Design at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. Could you tell us about your motivation and how you came to pursue education in the field of expertise?

The story of how I arrived in Sweden is quite simple really. At the start of 2020, I saw the my opportunities as a traveling performer and teacher dry up almost instantaneously. I assumed that my instrument building work would dry up as well, and that everyone would be sitting tight on any money that they had until the pandemic was over. However, what actually happened was that everyone sat around bored at home and ordered things on the internet, and suddenly I was buried in orders! However, I was starting to get restless with sitting alone all day soldering circuits and drilling holes in wooden boxes. Really, like everyone else in the world, I needed more stimulation and more human contact.
My future supervisor at the Royal Institute of Technology had just published a job call, looking for someone to research a collection of sound instruments used in the history of electronic and electro-acoustic music in Sweden during the 1960s and 70s. No less than five of my friends forwarded this posting to me, and every one of them told me: “Hey look! They invented a job for you in Sweden, why don’t you just go and take it?”. It’s true that I already had a bit of a relationship with Sweden, and in particular with Stockholm’s Elektronmusikstudion EMS, who is a partner in this project. So the fit seemed natural.
I’m still getting used to having what is essentially an office job, however! And the demands on my time and in particular on my mental attention have really taught me a great deal about care of the self. I contrast the office setting with plenty of trips to the museum archive to investigate old instruments. In particular, I am looking at one called the Andromatic, which was designed by Erkki Kurenniemi in 1968 for the Swedish composer Ralph Lundsten. It was imagined as a very futuristic instrument, built in a transparent plexiglass case so you can see the electronics inside, and had a plugin to control a series of lights in an installation. Kurenniemi told Ralph he was making an automatic pop music machine, which of course isn’t too far from what people expect from so-called AI tools nowadays!

What is your vision for the future?

Visions of the future are interesting — especially visions of the future which come from the past. Kurenniemi had some very interesting visions of the future. For example, he obsessively documented every banal detail of his life on audio and video tapes, and in journals filled with drunken musings and sexual fantasies. His hope was that he could be reconstructed as an AI from all of this marginalia in the year 2049, possibly housed in a golf-ball-sized spacecraft filled with other AI constructs, which could float endlessly through the galaxy. Kurenniemi would have been considered a trans-humanist in the parlance of today. Like Elon Musk, he believed that technology would one day allow us to transcend nature and the crises we have inflicted upon it, perhaps to travel to other worlds and repeat the process. But his ideas of auto-poetic music instruments are strongly rooted in the mid 20th century discourses of cybernetics. His sound technologies are conceived as autonomous, closed-loop systems which rely on internal feedback to reach a kind of homeostasis from which musical patterns emerge.
Lately I have been reading a lot about post-humanism, and in particular how humans can no longer consider themselves autonomous, self-making subjects separated from each other, and from the non-human worlds of both nature and technology. Utopian futures are quite unfashionable after the consumer excesses of the 1970s and 80s sunk the hippy utopias of the 1960s. Somehow we prefer to imagine how bad things can become, and current thinking around issues like climate change illustrate the cynicism and apathy to which most people cling. But if I permitted myself to think about a utopian future, it might be one where all these supposedly autonomous little boxes— which we use to preserve our senses of self and to extract wealth from all the other little boxes— could be turned inside out to really show the connections between them. I don’t believe that art alone changes society, but it can tell stories that become cultural narratives, which can eventually change societies. So right now I am trying to imagine exploded, inside-out synthesizers, which sigh and cough and sweat and breath and mingle fluidly with everything around them instead of hiding inside hermetic metal and plastic boxes, and perhaps which also die and decay and return to the Earth somehow. And I consider whether such inside-out synths might potentially point towards new ways of living, doing, making, and being.