Both Of Neither--Cellar M Remembrance

Dredging up the past is like adding noise to the mix. On the superhighway it's even more iritating. That is, if one is bothered by noise, or bored by the past. But without the past, etc. . . . more noise.

One past I know of is the time I shared with a bunch of San Francisco "electronic musicians", way back in the early 70s. It was a seminal time in electronic music's evolution, but decidedly underground. (The term "electronic music" is mostly denegrated by the pioneers of such aural realms, though a more appropriate label has apparently not been found.)

The name we gave the group was Cellar M -- after the giant 3rd-floor locker of the abandoned Regal Pale Beer bottling plant where we officially inaugurated our sound. (One recorded cut can be found on a Rhythm & Noise retro CD.) There were several floors of concrete cellars at the plant, walls busted open to the rain -- Cellar M just happened to be the optimum chamber for live sonic explorations. It had a natural 13-second echo.

Naut Humon (then Mark Sprague) and I, with a few friends, assembled a Buchla synthesizer there, with electronic gadgets and weirdly-played amed instruments (through a classic Echoplex), all driven by a Marshall stack system; a Honda generator down on the ground floor powered the project; recorded on a Revox half-track. The giant room was the ultimate psycho-echo chamber; we experimented with mike placements, and at the height of the (psychotropically enhanced) sessions, we impulsively added physical noises to the electronics, using pipes and bottles, etc., to exploit the 13-second echo to its limits. Artist associate Sharon Grace (now of SF Art Inst) videotaped the experience. Surviving recordings are few, however -- we always said the best sessions escaped recording, somehow, us knowing it would be to the detriment of the tradition. We did want to establish a tradition, to be effective to the future, and in a way we did despite ourselves. Cellar M is part of the prequel, like that to "Star Wars." And in some of the "music" it could be given that moniker too: "Star Wars Music."

Cellar M's most important contribution to tradition, beyond recordings, was the adding of place as an instrument. Like Paul Horn, but with full-on Hendrix-style electronics. Where we played was as important as what we played, because the environment was given influence over every instrument and voice. It was a tradition that could not be mass-produced easily, so it became a rather inside-group experience. A core of Bay Area artists of the time took part, sometimes bringingt their own concepts to the experience. Some have gone on in the mediums Cellar M first explored to become "names" within that genre's community, now worldwide. Cellar M members and collaborators include the following:

Naut Humon (Mark Sprague)and myself (Will Jackson), Z'ev (Stephan Weisser), Rex Probe (Chris Gruelich); Sharon Grace, Perry Spinali, Gabriel Stern, Paul Kalbach, Jon Berle, Ed Williams (Nik Fault), Chako Ishibashi, Madeline Ridley, Lloyd Cross (holographer), Richard Waters, Rich Gold, Michael Bell, Willard Van De Bogart and Lemon DeGeorge.

Many of us met at CalArts in its inaugural year of 1970, and have remained in touch. Naut and I met in Seattle in 1967, when he was still in high school (Garfield -- Jimi's last school). Naut(Mark), a brilliant actor, virtually ran the theater dept. It was through that venue that we began our official "theatrical" collaboration that led us to CalArts. That is another story. By 1972 we had evolved into production of electronic multimedia environment events, in which we and our friends performed, on whatever instrument, as long as it was "nonmusically played", in whatever environment and situation we devised. The sole criterion: How did it affect the sound?

Session locations included: Golden Gate gunmount tunnels; SF Steel plant; China Basin barges; downtown Union Square, Joshua Tree Monument desert; Mount Diablo sand caverns . . . we set up inside dams, under mountains, even in mortuary storage cellars. We enjoyed the underground; but pressure to surface was felt. To bring our esoteric "show" to a wider "audience", we moved to urban multimedia studios, gallery theater spaces, institutional and other more conventional venues: UC universities, Mills College, SF School of Holography, Intersection Theater, Teleporter Lounge, Video Free America . . . and so on.

Cellar M also was the product of a seminal synthesizer workshop run by Serge Tcherepnin at CalArts in 1974. The first Serge System models were created there, three of which became the core of Cellar M's technical array. Technically, the period was transitional, moving from limited, crude analog electronics to infinitely-applicable digital. Control of sound, pure or otherwise, became the virtuoso's challenge, as daunting as the challenges facing the first piano makers, or violin makers, or even drum makers. The synthesizer was the latest in an elite line of iconic, uniquely original instruments: drum, guitar, violin, piano, saxophone, synthesizer. That's it. The synthesizer is the last unique instrument. There cannot be another. And it is consuming all others. Total audio capability has been reached -- the ultimate aural level for the "musician".

Naut was sharp to adopt the tag of "traffic controller of noise" (all and any sound); that is simply what his job is, to control totally a given space, and contrive an environment into which he can introduce the curious ear. The ones who stayed, and followed, were the ears that loved to be outraged.

We knew in the beginning -- in those garages and basements of those early-70s artistic hinterlands -- six synthesizers wailing in the night made no noise unless a human ear was near. We knew it was still the human that changed the mix, and the human who judged the mix. It is humanity judging itself even as it trips grotesquely over its own desperate defenses. Spiritual assumptions and mental enfarctions -- this is what we set out to expose, exploit, and evolve. This is Naut Humon's favorite audience. And it seems the real reason for his guiling nom de guerre. For to be beyond humanity is his inclination, his birthright, ironically. I'm amazed he can keep it up, going where even Frankenstein couldn't go.

Our collaborations were inspired, often in long campaigns marked by dark self-deprivation and a soldier's devotion, with the goal of mounting events to blow minds indellibly, not unlike war. Not through theatrical tricks, but through extreme magnification of situational ambience, skewed to produce boggling torments of art. We worked to displace realities, and thus baffle judgment (not just toward our work but toward everything), and thereby befuddle pretense of any kind. This we called, at turns, theater of cosmic concrete cruelty, science fantasy magic, the source of uncertainty, random noise generation, or just, inexplicably, both of neither.

Naut went for the black hole core, and discovered a new frontier, in noise. He became a controller of pure noise, which he found to be not only anything but pure, but everywhere. I would imagine Naut enjoying the suggestion that the universe is just the endless plasticity of noise. One could denegrate such a view, but it would be foolish, like viewing a Jackson Pollock as so many spills and drips.

Z'ev is a whole other matter, a matter-mind. In this incarnation, he is both of neither. If Naut is the most iconic person I've ever had the honor of working with, Z'ev is the most ironic. For a time Z'ev and I were quite close. We managed a performance symbiosis in the mid-70s that carried us all the way to Tokyo. Live, of course -- always live. And always different, as the genre we tried to dub "electro-acoustic" demands.

Playing with Z'ev (then Stephan Weisser) was sonic jazz, sound and rhythm beyond music entirely. The farther beyond, the hipper. If we managed a performance that was beyond everyone, we were in heaven. It became sheer aural phenomenon. We praticed at reaching sonic places where the physical phenomenae of soundwaves made the "music" for us. The soundwaves we mounted became the zeitgeist muse.

We called ourselves TO. Sufficiently enigmatic and open-ended to accomodate both our viewpoints. We managed to record enough of our explorations to compile a decent library (though much of it, by must needs, was on cassette). We had moments with the tempered-scale-based jazz-sound group Paul Winter Consort, and virtuoso futurist violinist Takehisa (sp?) Kosugi, among others.

Z'ev went on to establish himself mostly in the Euro art world (again labels insult!), gradually expanding his tours worldwide. His singular approach to total sound -- even his post-literate art pieces, inspired by his mother's work in linguistics -- seems curiously prescient now in the world-net information age. Z'ev, to me, epitomized the lonely, hungry, not-angry but driven artist, sitting right in the middle of the world's riches but interested only in its echoes. He heard the voice of the metal sink, the heartbeat of a stick of wood. He knew why the sound he could make with matter was the sound the matter was making. He became the wizard of it, the spirit inside the molecule, a voice for physical world. He was the feelings they told me in Sunday School -- the feelings the table leg doesn't have.

There should be a place for such seminal characters, their lost histories. People like Naut and Z'ev should be given full scope, for such is their talent (though I suspect Naut prefers darkness as the Normal for his board). I feel blessed to have met them and worked with them, to have gone through the eye of many an electronic needle with them. There are more histories to be uncovered, and where I can, I will do so. Links may eventually be added, as I figure out this system. A "Both Of Neither Series" might develop, to bring you more ironic realities that make our world. You might be surprised. Add this blog to your faves, and surf by now and then.