Interview with Alexander Overington, Notes

March 10, 2009 by Rafiq

I want to start by re-expressing what has become my perennial sorrow for the lack of recent updates, but I promise to make it up to you. In the next couple of weeks, you’ll see my response to Mr. Vijay Iyer’s question about so-called “college age serious listeners of music”, a musing about the ever-elusive “tradition” in jazz, and an interview with the incredible Steve Lehman, who recently composed the first work for jazz utilizing spectral harmony.

For now, enjoy this interview with one of the most promising young musicians I know:

Composer/Programmer/Producer Alexander Overington, a student at Oberlin Conservatory, is one of the most promising and versatile young artists on the scene today. Recent projects include acting as Assistant Director of Photography for the World Premiere of Leave Me Alone!, an opera by Harvey Pekar and Dan Plonsey, a composition residency at the Banff Centre in Canada, and a surround sound + video presentation of Steve Reich’s Cello Counterpoint while on tour with Grammy Award-winning new music ensemble eighth blackbird. He is set to work on the highly anticipated debut record from indie-rock outfit Brasstronaut and will collaborate with composer Lewis Nielson on a multimedia chamber opera for Opera Cabal’s 2009/2010 season. In April, he will be performing his works Less Yes, Morneau! and Fricatine with the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble at the annual festival hosted by the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the U.S. (SEAMUS).

RB: The theme of this year’s SEAMUS conference is “human interface devices”. How do you utilize such devices in your own music?

AO: The vast amount of sonic control afforded to the electronic musician is often suppressed by a perceived disconnect between physical movement and musical gesture. To that end, I am fascinated by interfaces that extend and express this sonic virtuosity. I like working with the tiny gestures often associated with “live” electronic/electroacoustic music: the tapping of the keyboard, the movement of a mouse. I like playing with these elements – exploiting the drama of contingency.

RB: Give some examples of how you achieve this.

AO: Most of my electronics are triggered and processed in Max/MSP/Jitter, a program with the ability to respond to external controllers and sensors. Fricatine, a piece I co-wrote with David Meade Bernard, is scored for a circuit-bent 1980’s Casio DH-100 saxophone, the control data of which is utilized to wirelessly trigger the playback of samples in Max/MSP. We also outfitted the saxophone with a cadmium sulfite cell, which detects relative proximity to an active light source and a multi-axis accelerometer, which measures the device’s non-gravitational accelerations. In performance, there is a flashlight attached to an onstage microphone stand in order to control a number of continuous parameters by changing the photoresistor’s relationship to the flashlight. We use the accelerometer to gage the velocity of the saxophone over time, and route that information to control a series of sound transformation processes. In addition, I perform at the LEMUR, a programmable multi-touch LCD control interface, which affords me a very fine resolution of control over an infinite number of parameters. Fricatine is a sort of dialog between these two worlds of control—on the one hand we have something that is very direct and transparent, as in the case of the outfitted DH-100, in which case gesture and sound correlate, and on the other hand, with the LEMUR, I’ve programmed an instrument whose rhetoric is constantly changing what sounds the saxophone can produce, the way in which it can produce them, and the spatial orientation through which those sounds are diffused- a hidden or abstract projection of causal relationships.

RB: How did you get involved with Brasstronaut, and what impact do you hope to make through working on their debut LP?

AO: I met the band while we were all in residency at the Banff Centre. I ended up playing with them a few times and going on a small tour of the Calgary area as their unofficial manager. We found ourselves not at cross-purposes—pop and classical, according to age-old and outdated recipes, do not play nice—but in fact very much on the same page. They, like me, were looking for a sublime mix of disparate musics: jazz, classical, rock, and hip-hop blended equally and without reservation. Actually, we mostly just sat around and talked about Vijay, Tyshawn, and Peter Evans- 75% of the band, Bryan Davies, Brennan Saul, and John Walsh are killer conservatory trained jazz musicians. Edo Van Breemen, the singer/keyboardist, is an ace songwriter with a voice capable of taming wild beats and melting frozen hearts. They’re a great band to see live- they have all the interplay and finesse you’d expect out of a really tight jazz combo, except they’re playing these really catchy pop tunes. They also have a great methodology when it comes to incorporating improvisation into set pop forms. What I hope to do is to help them capture that exciting live sound while also encouraging them to expand their palette by utilizing electronics – both in live performance and post production.

RB: It seems that an increasing amount of popular music is heading to some extent towards being “art” music, or music-for-music’s sake. I’ve certainly noticed this trend in indie rock/pop/hip-hop. Does a relationship/dialog between “art” music and “popular” music exist today? If so, how could it be made more expansive/compelling?

AO: I’ve been wrestling with this idea for a long time. How does one incorporate the disparate elements of one’s musical background into a coherent output? It’s a delicate issue and I actually think that “incorporate” is the wrong word to use in this situation. It shouldn’t be about inclusion, but fusion. You must completely and utterly destroy all of the materials you want to work with. From the wreckage, you then have to pick up the scraps, codify them and analyze their most salient and essential structures. To start to rebuild a new music out of these miniscule strands of DNA would be one step closer to creating what is identified today as “hybrid” art. This idea of rebuilding is what I was after in Less Yes, Morneau!, a chamber ensemble piece that utilizes materials and electronically triggered and processed samples from the record RoadKillOvercoat by Los Angeles Hip-Hop artist Busdriver. I’m using the same materials as Busdriver, but as I reallocate the style of their presentation, the paradigm of their rhetoric begins to shift. In essence, to rebuild after destruction is to invent a new kind of music; one that draws from and is linked to pre-existing forms without being tethered or governed by them.

RB: How do you think “art” music can increase its visibility among younger audiences?

AO: Not without a fight. Today’s composers are going to have to prove to the rest of our generation that our stuff is just as relevant as everything else out there, if not even more so. Most of the young composers I know aren’t listening to Babbitt and Feldman – they listening to M.I.A. and Fleet Foxes and have secret fetishes for Young Joc and Scandinavian death metal. The material is universal; the playing field is now level. I think one solution lies in creative concert programming. Once it is established that Keith Fullerton Whitman, DJ Spooky and Panda Bear can and should be enjoyed at the same show, then the precedent will be set for younger audiences to begin to accept and cherish the merits of “art” music as a form in itself and to appreciate its role as a constituent part of the greater musical world. Shout-outs to Wordless Music and Bang on a Can for already spearheading this initiative.

RB: What are you trying to achieve through a career in music?

AO: I’ll let you know when I find out myself!

posted March 10, 2009 by Rafiq