Carl STONE

Carl STONE was hailed by the Village Voice as "one of the best composers working in the country today." He was born in Los Angeles and now lives in San Francisco. He studied composition at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton SUBOTNICK and James TENNEY. His works have been performed in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America and the Near East. His most recent concert tour in Japan included concert, radio and television appearances. Recordings of Carl STONE's music can be found on New Albion, CBS Sony, Toshiba EMI, EAM Discs, Wizard Records, Trigram and New Tone labels. Carl STONE's music has been used by numerous choreographers including Bill T. JONES, Ping CHONG, ORITA Katsuko & Blondell CUMMINGS. Collaborations include those with TAKAHASHI Yuji, YAMADA Setsuko, SAWAI Kazue, TAKAHASHI Aki, KISANUKI Kuniko, AKAO Michiko, Rudy PEREZ, STELARC, Z'ev, Bruce and Norman YONEMOTO, TOSHA Meisho, OTOMO Yoshihide, Hae Kyung LEE, Min XIAO-FEN and Mineko GRIMMER.

Yan Vun Sen

by Carl STONE"YAN VUN SEN" was originally conceived as a collaborative project between myself and composer TAKAHASHI Yuji. The concept was a serial exchange of works of art, each of which would stimulate and inspire the next and where each piece could provide the materials for subsequent works in the exchange. The medium of exchange would be the Internet and 'viewers' could access the project at any point in collaboration and watch its progress. In this idea, I sought to update several other collaborations I have done, notably "JAKUZURE" (with TAKAHASHI Yuji), where MIDI computer data is exchanged between two composer/performers in realtime, and also "MONOGATARI: AMINO ARGOT" (with OHTOMO Yoshihide), which was a CD project where each composer submitted materials to the other, which served as the basis for the other's compositions. These exchanges continued serially and the final work was the compilation of all sequences.

At the beginning of discussions of "YAN VUN SEN," TAKAHASHI and I, both composers of course, agreed how the materials we exchanged might not necessarily be sounds or pieces of music, but could perhaps be poetry or visual imagery.

Unfortunately, due to health reasons, Yuji was forced to withdraw from the project just days before it was to commence and so I was left with no partner to collaborate with. My solution, rather than to completely overhaul the concept at such a late date, was to create a virtual partner to exchange with. The 'collaboration' would be bolstered not only by the art works but also an exchange of letters. The piece would then serve not only as a study of the progession of works of art over time (as I would be constantly sampling and re-sampling my own works) but also the notion of virtuality in 'cyberspace.' At the suggestion of SAKAKIBARA Ken'ichi, I decided to give some thought and attention to the personality of my imaginary partner who I named P. M. D. SPAIR (the Charles IVES of Calcutta). I seeded enough absurdities in SPAIR's biography, letters and artworks so that careful viewers would sense that he might not exist. I also allowed him to suffer a bit of a nervous breakdown as the piece progressed.

As a composer, I work in the time-based arts. And I often use sampling technology to make my compositions. I felt that the current state of the Internet did not serve these facts well. Completed compositions would either be too huge to access or would be forced to suffer from extremely poor fidelity due to down-sampling and reduced resolution. So, as one further challenge, I chose to try to express certain ideas about time and development not in musical terms, but in visual ones, drawing on a wealth of scans created for me by Miss Yuko NEXUS6.

This piece is a virtual session conducted by exchanging text and graphics files over the Internet. The session progressed through a kind of on-line epistolary correspondence between Carl STONE and P. M. D. SPAIR and included both letters and other files. Remarkably, the the media technology of the Internet made it possible for two people who had never actually met to work together creatively on a very high level. The letters were accessible through the WWW, and animated audio-visual files were available for downloading.

Due to administrative delays, Mr. Carl STONE's work and description were never exhibited as he planned and developed it.