Five years ago saw the Other Minds release of TOM DJLL: SERGE WORKS, (Here on Bandcamp) an overview of improvised and composed electronic music I did in the 1980s, using the Serge Modular Music System. Usually, trumpet was involved. The piece titled TOMBO was published in Chris Cutler’s ReR Quarterly Vol 3 # 3, 1991, along with a letter I had written which Cutler printed under the title “Synthesizer + Improvisation = Impossible?” (The letter was a scream of protest against what we today call presets. I didn’t have any idea he would publish it.) Around 1990 I added a digital delay, the Digitech RDS 7.6 TIME MACHINE. It was a far more affordable (and noisy) copy of the legendary Lexicon PCM 42. Via the TIME MACHINE I was able to live-sample my trumpet, or anything else, and further process it through the Serge system, or use the latter as a kind of backup band for trumpet craziness, and so on. I even did some ‘plunderphonic’ work with this setup, as heard on Rastascan’s compilation (Y)Earbook Vol. 3. (Here on Spotify)
Anyway, Bay Area writer and blogger Stephen Smoliar did a nice writeup of SERGE WORKS on his blog The Rehearsal Studio.
