KENNETH
KIRSCHNER:
BOSTON'S WEEKLY DIG (US)
by
Susanna Bolle
Call
him the anti-Lars Ulrich, but for New York sound artist Kenneth
Kirschner, the free and unfettered distribution of his music
via the Internet would be something of a William Gibson-inspired
dream fulfilled. Indeed, for years, he studiously avoided distributing
his exquisitely crafted minimal electronics through traditional
media such as vinyl or CDs, instead making his work freely available
via mp3 audio. “I've always been a very strong advocate
of the freedom of information,” he explained recently in
an e-mail interview, “which I feel is one of the critical
political issues of our time. As our lives become increasingly
dominated by digital technology, I believe that it is essential
to resist the corporate drive to commodify and control all digital
copies. I think there's a genuine ambivalence in our culture
about the status of the digital copy: 50 million Napster users
can't be wrong!”
There was only one problem: Given Kirschner's self-described
pathological aversion to self-promotion, his music was not really
being heard. And so, however reluctantly, Kirschner has at long
last begun to publish his music on CD. The first release was
a collaboration with fellow New Yorker Taylor Deupree (a pioneer
of an ultra-minimal form of electronic music known as microsound)
called post_piano , and just this month, Kirschner has released
his first solo CD, the quietly engrossing September 19, 1998
et al on 12k.
Each of the three pieces on the album features a very different
character reflecting in some measure the various sound sources
that Kirschner employed in making them: from the ghostly echoes
and ethereal swirls of his mp3 collection on “February
8, 2003 (each of the pieces is named for the date that Kirschner
began work on them)” to the austere piano and clanking
household objects on the album's centerpiece, “September
19, 1998.”
What unifies the three seemingly disparate tracks is an underlying
methodology by which Kirschner attempts to balance elements
of chance and accident with rigorous editing. “I begin,”
Kirschner says of the process behind his music, “by crafting
a large number of individual elements, the 'molecules' of the
piece, if you will - single sounds or clusters of sounds that
are composed in isolation from each other, with no predetermined
building blocks. I then use chance procedures to determine the
large-scale structure of the work. I throw all the elements
together randomly, essentially splattering them across the canvas
of time. As with any random process, this creates some really
beautiful accidents and some really ugly ones. What follows
is a very long, intensive editing process in which I sift through
the debris of these collisions, removing the bad conjunctions
and emphasizing the good ones to slowly sculpt the final piece.”
While he is not an academic composer - not surprising, given
the methodology underpinning his work - Kirschner cites American
avant-garde composers such as John Cage and Meredith Monk as
his primary influences. By far the most important influence
on Kirschner's work is the very anti-systemic composer Morton
Feldman. Feldman's influence is most evident in the mesmerizing
drift of Kirschner's “February 8, 2003.” “There's
just no way to overestimate the influence of Feldman's music
on me,” Kirschner admits. “I feel that a lot of my
own work since has been quite obvious and desperate attempts
to imitate Feldman. I think it's inevitable that you try to
imitate those you most respect, and inevitable that this imitation
fails; but the hope is that you fail in interesting ways and
in the process actually create something new.”
