Since then, to me the word “Zaire” has always been synonymous with “trouble.” And it made me think that people that have touted the idea of “anarchy” as the ultimate solution obviously have never really experience it. If they had, I’m not sure they would like the idea of sleeping in the woods, being bit by insects, nothing to eat, nothing to drink, sick and scared to death, with a past that is irretrievable and a future that is unseeable, perhaps your family is dead or maybe you yourself are waiting to die. That’s the kind of paralyzing chaos I think of when I hear the word “Zaire”. A confusion that’s so oppressive it makes you long for the days that seem ordinary and boring. So that would be the “Zaire” part, and then there’s the Eureka part…
Plenty of times while struggling with ideas, ideas not exclusively musical or artistic, I have accidentally and surprisingly found the solution!! Eureka!! … I believe these moments are what truly gives a person’s creative drive it’s momentum. It’s these moments that make it possible to keep an idea going. To see it through. It’s these sparks that break up the tedious boredom of a big project and encourage you to keep at it. It gives ideas force, and it’s the force by which an idea comes into existence that gives it the momentum to go from being an inner thought to an outward reality. And sometimes this force is so great that it seems to bypass all the usual check-points of reasoning, striking with such impact as to make it’s receiver appear insane, stupid, or retarded, but none the less invigorated…
So anyway it’s Zaire fused with Eureka… Zaireeka!!
Both of these spheres of thought happening at exactly the same time --- a kind of progress because of decline --- Simultaneously --- but instead of one canceling out the other --- one uses the other. Anarchy using inspiration to guide it. And inspiration using anarchy’s abandon and power to crash through any road blocks… whatever that means??... But somewhere in there is the spark that, I think holds this concept and these songs together… Anyway, I had an idea.
In the fall of 1996 I put together what has come to be known simply as “The Parking Lot Experiments.” This was an idea I had been working on in my head for a couple of years. And at the beginning of the summer of ’96 I started to do the actual physical work of recording and mapping it all out. What the “experiment” was and continues to be is this: Using up to fifty cars with loud tape decks, all strategically parked in a covered parking garage, I give each car a cassette tape, each tape contains very specifically arranged music, sounds, and frequencies. Each car is then instructed to engage their tape decks, all starting together… What resulted, with varying degrees of non-success, was a sort of surround sound, inner sound, random precision, tape deck performance… well, a kind of mutated symphony where the musicians are just tape-decks.
These experiments were mostly for my own amusement, but I was finding that the small audience, mostly made up of the folks who brought their cars, were intrigued as well. What was happening was a kind of “new event”????? I wanted to surround the audience with sound from all around, and since it is a tape that you are hearing, there would essentially be no “performer.” And since there is no “performer” the sounds could be… unexpected. For instance, I could fill half of the garage with the sound of mosquitoes buzzing and the other half with lush orchestral melodies, and then without warning, the whole garage erupts into three-hundred different horn players all playing different melody patterns. I felt totally unrestricted and it seemed that the freakier the combination of sound the better. All coming together telling a sort of “sound story”… but also without the usual fanfare that goes along with a “rock concert” setting. What I mean is --- not just to go and witness an event but to be the event. Not just to experience the “show” but to have the “show” and the audience participate in each other. To have the curiosity and anticipation of the audience be the thing that gives the event its excitement. What I think I was getting at when I said “new event” was something where the rules and logic have not even been made up yet. I remember at the second experiment someone asked me, when it was over, if they should clap?? …and I said, “well… if you want to”… they honked their car horns instead. But it did make me wonder, how sometimes people in a movie theater after the movie is over, people will applaud the screen…? I’ve done that… even though there is no “real” performer in front of you, you applaud the …film? So anyway, with each experiment I was more encouraged --- and even though it had its limitation, I was discovering the possibilities of using separate sound sources to expand on the ideas of composing and listening. And at the same time I was finding that the audience liked the idea of participating in their own entertainment… it was from this process, these failures and successes, that this four CD concept came into being. Through not the same compositions, much of the same ideas are used.
My initial recordings of the “parking lot” things were, I was finding out, dull and flat compared to the way they really sounded. I was finding that the multiple dimensions of having separate sound sources is what gave the compositions their dynamics. What I mean is, when I took the composition that was meant to come out of sixty speakers placed all around you and turned it into a composition that came out of just two speakers right in front of you, well… it was kind of boring, so I set out to see if I could capture the “unstructuredness” and “unexpected” elements of what was going on out in the parking lot and put it into a format that could be played in someone’s living room…
The way the parking lot compositions/performances were fused with a “multi-dimensional” dynamic is what I would try to do to songs and the recording process. What I mean is… I wanted to abandon song structure but not abandon the song. I wanted to make songs that were different every time you played them. I wanted to veer away from even the way songs were listened to… I wanted to get away from the things that were… known. So anyway… I got a couple of CD players together and played some tracks that I had on two separate CDs. You know, the same song but on two different discs, like say a track off an album and a track off a single… anyway --- I played them together simply by pressing the play buttons at the same time. To my surprise they played relatively in synch for the first minute or so… but even more of a surprise was that they would wobble in and out of synch sort of arbitrarily. From what I can tell, CD players will not play in synch with each other. They get close, depending on the quality of the players, but for the most part it can be pretty random. It was this part that excited me, the fact that they played close enough together that you could tell what was going on, but also played unpredictably in front of or behind the other making it confusing. Sometimes one would start behind and catch up to the other, other times the opposite. What I liked best about it was how different and out of whack an otherwise simple song could get… and with that in mind I started to think with an “expanded” view of what music and songs could be… I would try to present music that was both clear and confusing, where rhythms fought each other, where time signatures were simple yet unpredictable… Music that would be unfamiliar even after a thousand listens. Music that, according to the normal ideas of what music is, doesn’t work… Instead of listening to a song and passively being either entertained or bored the listener would be engaged and agitated.. Soothed but suspect… In a state of suspended anticipation… The listener could hear an exaggerated dimension of sound where sometimes reverb comes before a sound occurs, other times it’s delayed… Where a melody that’s pleasant and uplifting, upon being shifted slightly, becomes dissonant and interruptive… Where crescendos miss their cues either late or early or both… making music that purposely destroys its own momentum… and instead of hearing these things and thinking of them as being wrong or annoying… I heard the possibilities of a bizarre new format.
