Every time Carl Stone performs he takes his listeners on a different journey.
Stone is pioneer in collecting and rearranging fragments of music and other sounds, and remixing them to
create soundscapes.
On Monday at 8 p.m. at the Cla-Zel in downtown Bowing Green, Stone will present "Fujiken," an
aural travelogue through Southeast Asia. The free concert is part of the Music at the Forefront series
presented by the MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music at Bowling Green State University’s College
of Musical Arts.
The piece brings together using what the composer calls a "super collage" technique field
recordings and music from cassettes that Stone gathered while traveling in Vietnam, Thailand and
Cambodia as well as Japan where he now lives.
That includes, he said in a telephone interview this week, a recording of a fire in Bangkok. It caused
"a huge commotion" as the fire spread and firefighters were called. "It turned out to be
a very, very interesting acoustic event," he said.
That’s just one of the elements he weaves into the work. That includes samples of cassette recordings of
classical, folk and pop music he purchases along the way.
Those sounds are stored in a database on a computer. In performance, Stone said, he defines where he will
start and where he will finish. In between he pulls up samples as the spirit moves him.
"I call them up and mix them together and process them," he said. He manipulates them so the
sounds become at times unrecognizable. "I can radically stretch them out so they become super long
or mash them together so they become short and instantaneous."
He layers the sounds on top of each other. The structure arises spontaneously. "No two performances
are the same," Stone said. "The performance can take many twists and turns depending on my
mood, on the acoustics of the space, on the reaction of the audience."
Steve Smith writing in The New York Times said Stone’s music is "a powerful stimulant with lingering
euphoric effects."
"Voices stretched like taffy were folded into ghostly choruses; the whine of a stringed instrument
became a mosquito arabesque. Noises normally rejected, like surface scrapes and static bursts, provided
fertile sonic lodes."
Stone’s interested in sonic collage and sampling was piqued while studying composition at Cal Arts.
He was trained as a classical pianist, and also played keyboards and drums in high school influenced by
the progressive rock of Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Soft Machine and Jefferson Airplane.
At Cal Arts in 1973 he had a work study position in the music library. The library was transferring its
LPs to cassette tape as a way of preserving its vinyl collection.
Stone transferred LPs working on three machines at a time, switching back and forth to monitor the
recording. "I found that Baroque music might combine with African music which might combine with
some 20th century electronic music in an interesting way."
That set him on the path of sampling, and mixing to create music that defies labels.
"It’s not dance. It’s not classical. It’s not improvisation. It’s not minimal or maximal," he
said. "It’s Carl music."
The emergence of personal computers facilitated his ability to perform these aural collages.
Even the larger and heavier computers of the time allowed him to tour.
And digital technology allowed him more precise control over the materials than the physical splicing of
tape did.
His work and the work of other electronic pioneers resonates throughout music, extending into the worlds
of hip hop, trance, beat and drum genres, he said.
Stone, who visited BGSU back in 2000, will perform "Fujiken" at the Cleveland Museum of Art on
Thursday and then travel to New York to premier a new composition.