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SF bay guardian int. by RE/SEARCH mag founder V. VALE '01 round the bend:
IAS' 1998 debut 'sender /receiver' revealed a pop sensibility informed by 60s electronica and the 70s artrock of brian eno, wire's chairs missing and this heat. ias are dustin donaldson, cup and marc kate. their work combines futuristic ideas with elements of the past 40 years, creating what has been described as filmic soundtrack rock music. donaldson and i recently talked. the conversation covered - among many things - telephones, electricity, psychic phenomena, the vibrating universe, and the vision behind IAS. vale: i think of your band in terms of that famous quote "i'm interested in the future, because that's where i'm going to spend the rest of my life..." donaldson: that's really strange - i just pulled that exact quote out of a magazine yesterday! quite typical. anyway, the future...a lot of the inspiration for what we're doing comes from device invented 120 years ago: the telephone. we sing all of our live vocals into telephones. this is partly because a lot of my formative experiences surrounding technology involved the fact that i sometimes affect electrical objects. for example, i can't wear a traditional wind-up watch; the hands won't keep time for long before it goes weird. i grew up in the country, in the middle of michigan. my family only had one telephone and around the time i was ten or eleven, i noticed that the majority of times i dialed i would reach very wrong numbers. it got to the point where my family had to dial my calls for me. this is true! there have often been times when we couldn't rehearse because the synthesizers would be mysteriously out of tune, or the patches switched in the middle of a song. this only seems to affect my equipment. i regularly have psychic experiences or heavy duty coincidences involving technology like the phone. v: well, there's definitely electricity running through our bodies; wilhelm reich called it something like bioenergetic currents. d: yeah, reading about that stuff helped me understand it a bit more. everything that exists in the known universe is contantly vibrating, therefore everything is making a sound -whether audible to humans or not- and everything has energy. even the most seemingly "dead" objects around us are "alive" in some sense. in terms of the way the world works, i like the example of a bathtub; if you put bleach into a tub of water, it's not going to stay in one place, but will disseminate itself until it's in every particle of the water to some degree. to me, it's obvious that evrything has an influence on the things around it. i don't think that there's any "higher" level or entity at work here. a lot of people talk to us about the topics of telepathy and influencing objects as being related to some sort of "higher power", but i don't really believe that. actually, i don't really 'believe' anything - v: one of my favorite aphorisms is "belief is the enemy of knowledge". d: i agree with this! one of the objectives of this band involves a deliberate destruction of the idea of 'belief'... at the same time embracing the notion that if you believe in something strongly enough, it can happen. it's the"will to power" idea. IAS is very positive in trying to maximize possibilities, the idea that whatever you wish for can happen. v: right. part of the context for our discussion involves larger issues like information overload and how we're dealing with it, just to keep our sanity - and even the idea of "sanity" is changing. also, i'm interested in how technology affects one's art and creativity. let's talk about your creative output which isn't limited to just music, right? d: we're not working solely on the level of sound. we're actively engaged in wrestling with concepts: the ideas of pop art and notions such as uniformity and conformity. like devo, IAS is a "full concept" ranging from creative merchandise to the maximal embracing of opportunities. it's a warholian pop art project, too. in terms of how technology affects art, art is always dictated by the materials or resources at hand. probably the biggest innovation of the 20th century was the harnessing of electricity, which lead to the invention of... EVERYTHING.. including every subsequent electronic instrument. art is always limited to (governed by) the materials and tools with which a person is working. fifty years ago, synthesizers didn't exist. in the 60s the beatles were one of the first to have their own recording studio, but now almost anyone can have one on a computer at home to a degree. v: just a hundred years ago, the palette of sounds people were exposed to was so much more limited than now. radio, television, and all the mechanical devices that have been invented have greatly increased the whole spectrum of "sound and its possibilities" as we now know it . d: when i was growing up, studying music and looking back all the way to the futurists and marinetti, i learned that everything is sound, and that it's all available to us to use in our "artistic palette". people have said that our sound is "far out" but i don't think so. i hear music on the radio that utilizes heavy harmelodic content and traditional 12 tone theory, and to me what they do is way more "constructed" than what we do. we never walk into a forest and randomly hear a symphony. we hear cut-up sounds: the textures of the wind, the water coming in off the shore. those are rhythmic and textural, but not melodic in nature. melody is constructed by human beings. IAS uses synthesizers, which can capture and replicate any sound, in a quest to capture the sound of reality. v: maybe so - i'm not sure what "reality" is - but i hear some very pleasing melodies and rhythms on your cds. personally, i have nothing against pop music, if i don't have to listen to the lyrics. for example, i like madonna's records but discovered that i liked her songs much better performed by an indian female pop singer, because i couldn't understand the words. d: yes, me too. i discovered early on with music in languages i didn't understand that i could just listen to the sound of the voice without having their images in my head. sometimes that's wonderful - it becomes just another sonic texture. IAS is interested in traditional ideas of pop songs too. the beatles are my all time favorite. they were incredibly avant garde - they changed the concept of the traditional. they changed not only the business, they changed what was possible; they were the first people to use the studio as an instrument, the first people to get to put what they wanted on their albums AND covers. that's the basis of what we're doing as far as our recorded work: utilizing the studio as an instrument. v: let's talk about the idea of "progress" d: it's an illusion, i think. our "divine spiritual enlightenment" and other notions of progress have worked against us by making us lose sight of the fact that we're still just animals and that we're not larger than nature. it's the bathtub theory again: we can't put bleach in one part of the tub and expect it to stay there. that's why it's very important to talk about possibilities and positivity - not positivity at all costs, because we absolutely have to embrace the negative aspects of society and talk about them. it's better to talk about bad things than to sweep them under the rug. this is america's problem. always patching the tire instead of replacing it. talk of the future is very important, especially with the way media and technolgy are going, with the resulting fragmentation of consciousness. for example years ago, when people first saw a film of a train coming towards them - everybody in the theater got up and raced for the back exit! it was a "magic" medium that they didn't understand. now two year old kids can understand the incredibly complex language of television commercials and many other things abstracted from the experience of so-called reality. or is it really? it seems that reality is reflecting more and more like commercials: it's getting cut up into smaller and smaller slices; i think time itself is being cut up into smaller and smaller slices. it has only been this century that we have the concept of "seconds", but now we have milliseconds, the quantum... time, and by extension, reality itself, seems to me to be chopped and pureed into a very fine mist. nothing is concrete anymore. everything is dissolved and much more malleable. we are attempting to take advantage of this. |