delurkification

Its a relief to read about tuning & its environment in something other than
mathematical language. My initial observation of the cross section of tuning
list participants whom have revealed themselves all seem to have a rigorous &
serious (read professional) approach to their musics. I come from a very
different world.

We (my partner Lyx & I) began a eco-village project in part of a very tiny
unincorportated town in Southwestern Wisconsin. Our project is being built
around a large old brick school that we are slowly (almost exclusively a
volunteer project, no funding) starting a school called DREAMLAB where what
it takes to live & what there is to learn dont have the typical academic
separations. Understanding how to grow a good organic tomato is inseparable
from the sounds you make while youre in the field (or the tuning of your
instrument, for that matter). I myself have a "rigorous" understanding of
20th century experimental music & its relations to performance, media, &
installation. Since 1980, Lyx & I have created 150 performances, each one
unique, which include ritual, text, tapes & sampling, invented instruments,
mask & costume, environmental installation, audience participation, lowtech
hypermedia (hypercard, a mac se, a video camera shooting the screen &
projecting on a big tv monitor,(this was after all 1985))...

This is to say that we are "rigorously" trying to integrate our experiences
of performing & touring to non-profit artspaces, lofts & people's houses into
creating a localized village culture where the activities of the arts &
performance have value to the people living at Dreamtime. This task would be
simple if the people living here where the same people that are out there
doing it, but largely the people that live here have never heard of Harry
Partch, have never been to an art gallery, & probably listen to radio &
mainstream music.

So the direction we have always taken is creating an environment where there
is a culture of do-it-yourself & perpetrate ways for everyone to participate.
In this situation the process & concentration in being involved are key, the
aesthethic object is more transient & background.

& this is where I might depart from others here, as the concert that still
stays with me as the most profound memory of weird tuning was a trio of truly
autistic street musicians who were playing on Library Mall at University of
WI-Madison in 1980. All 3 were quite dyslexic, none were all that capable of
speaking, but the tunings they had mutated into were like non other. It was
a very precise auditory ritual.

Other interests in tuning are similarly outside the norm. We grow different
varieties of gourds & fashion them into simple reed, string, & percussions
instruments. Each instrument is unique & all have very limited ranges (which
we extend in performance with computer & sampler). For sometime now we have
been using a tuning meme which we call Hand Print Intonation. On a very long
dipper or trumpet gourd I fashion the openings but not the finger holes. I
then mimic playing music on the gourd until my fingers naturally settle on a
place that feels inherent. Holes are made & that tuning becomes a signature
for that instrument. Then ensembles can be made with different combinations
of instruments.

One other project of late is a series of pieces I made using SoundEdit for
the Macintosh. Using its tone generator, I create samples using only prime
number frequencies, then created clusters of these pitches. Then a player
for them was created in hypercard. Caveman computer music. One piece we
created under the name The Wisconsin Department of Noise called "Qazingulaza"
was released in a book/CD called Sounding Off from Autonomedia in 1995.

Enough of that, I am actually quite interested in the range of information
twirping thru this space, but find even things that interest me not in a form
that is usable. Im more excited about the networking, reports, information
access & in particular the education aspect. Id like to see more things
happening that make this highbrow meditation of tuning be usuable to some
anarchist college dropout hanging out at dreamtime. Because I know that the
sounds that we are all talking about are one of the evolutionary
languages/intelligences of the future & no one should be denied access.

Miekal And
The Driftless Academy of Botanical Apparitions
Dreamtime Village
can be visited virtually at:
http://net22.com/dreamtime

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