What comes around

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.

Playing the 4-panel Serge at a New Year’s Eve session at the home of Ben Lindgren, 1988.
ATA Gallery, San Francisco, 1986. Using the Serge to process scraped Chinese waterfall gong and trombone (and found text recitative!) in my improv band The Philosophers.
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