Music
Tristan Perich will premiere Drift Multiply, an ambitious new work, as part of the Red Bull Music Festival New York. Ben Ratliff explains his process.
The 35-year old composer Tristan Perich is associated with creating complex works for agile musicians. He's also associated, for now and possibly forever, with 1-bit electronics, which is the simplest sound that can come from a digital source.
Music programmed on a 1-bit chip comes down to a simple question: Noise or no noise? The waveform can only be a one or zero, with no further amplitudes. Tristan Perich has used 1-bit electronics in most of his compositions over the last dozen years. Some of his best-known works include 1-Bit Symphony, from 2009, and Noise Patterns, from 2016, both of which he released as chip-and-wire constructions nestled within CD jewel-boxes. You plugged your headphones into the jack which was designed into the package, turned on the switch, and you heard the piece: not as a playback of a recording but as live execution of software. Surface Image, premiered in 2013 and performed widely on stages ever since, was commissioned by the pianist Vicky Chow; it was written for solo piano and 40 1-bit chips.
Drift Multiply, Perich’s newest and most ambitious work, to be premiered at the Red Bull Music Festival New York at Cathedral of Saint John the Divine on May 9, is composed for 50 violins and 50 1-bit chips. The tones from the chips – as per Perich’s normal working method – are run through 6.5in (16.5cm) speakers, and activated by a 50-output circuit-board designed and programmed by the composer himself, soldered in his Brooklyn studio.
Coding is central to Drift Multiply, but it's not computer music in the sense of most electronic music today. This is important. “Computers have so many layers,” he explained to me recently. “I just want to cut out all of that. You don’t really know what’s going on with this thing... it’s built in such a way that you can’t even repair it yourself – there’s all this stuff that pushes us away from technology on the low level. The circuit boards are my way of getting closer to it.”
For the performance of Drift Multiply, the violinists and speakers will be arranged side-by-side by in a checkerboard-like arrangement; the audience will sit on three sides. The musical director for the piece, working with the instrumentalists and leading them through workshops and rehearsals, is the percussionist Doug Perkins, who has collaborated with Perich on various different performances and recordings over the years. Perkins will be in front of the group, not exactly conducting but finely controlling, with hand gestures, the sound balance of the piece for the performers and the audience. Perich himself will be sitting in the audience. He might flip the 'on' switch at the beginning.
Drift Multiply uses ingredients which have become well-known in Perich’s work: strings or one-bit tones entering a section in layers of evenly-spaced notes or drones; quickly advancing depths and densities; harmony spreading across the space of the music in flickering, cascading, or wave-like motions; white noise, rendered in pulses or fields of sound. For the listener, there can be an exciting disjunction in Perich’s music. The chip sounds are limited and sometimes harsh, but they imply strong human narratives: growth, dissipation, struggle, rising and falling motifs. “Tristan programs as well as you and I speak,” said his wife, the composer Lesley Flanigan. “It’s just another language. It’s easy for him.”
Steve Reich has been a fan since hearing 1-Bit Symphony. “I started listening to it, and I thought, my gosh,” he remembered. “In some ways it reminded me of [Stravinsky’s] Petrushka. Who would think of electronic chips as summoning up anything as beautiful, musically, as that?”
Listen to Perich's 1-Bit Symphony for yourself:
In late March, I visited the converted warehouse in Williamsburg where Perich and Flanigan live with their two young children and their materials, including chips and wires and speakers organised into dozens of clear, neatly stacked storage boxes. Flanigan’s music is also closely involved with speakers, though they tend to be inside cabinets (or what she calls “housings” or “enclosures”) of her design. Her music is dependent on real-time performance: her singing, in particular, through a single microphone, and her interactions with the speakers, which create feedback in precise ways. As Perkins put it, “Lesley’s pieces start organic and happen to use electricity. Tristan’s music starts from programming and ends organically.”
At the time of my visit, Perich was troubleshooting his circuit board and deep into other revisions. He was cheerful but preoccupied. In the bedroom, he had arranged his 100 sound sources vertically on a makeshift bookshelf in the same checkerboard pattern: the 50 speakers he commonly favours in his work, just the raw speaker cones themselves with no cabinets, made by the Spanish company Beyma; and 50 other small studio-monitor speakers playing MIDI versions of the violin lines. With a lot of apology, reluctance and caveats, he played me parts of Drift Multiply in its temporary state. “I’m so in the middle of it,” he said, “that I don’t know how to talk about it yet.”
This was not true. He did know how to talk about it. Perich’s talk is made up of knowledge from the fields of music history, mathematics, signal processing and hardware. I am really only fluent in one of those, but when he was able to integrate all of them into a single thought, I understood him perfectly.
Tristan really views the chips and the electronics as a living, breathing thing
I asked him whether the chip or the speaker was the star of his 1-bit music. “I don’t know,” he said, and assured me that I wasn’t asking a stupid question. He considered that it might be a better question than whether the chip was an instrument, or whether the speaker or the chip was the truer instrument.
“You can still call something a star,” he said, “but it’s almost like the electronics is just a thin, understandable, base layer, and the music is on top of that. I want people, if they like the sound of the electronics, to not be in any kind of disbelief. I want there to be no magic at all to it. It’s not like when someone plays their instrument virtuosically.... This is kind of the opposite of that. I don’t want them to be stars at all, maybe.”
For years I thought Perich might be making a counterintuitive or perverse point about how chips, with their poverty of expression, deserved a little bit of our pitying respect; or how the complex imperfections of human tone and rhythm from real-live performers – what Roland Barthes called “the grain of the voice,” and all that – could ennoble the binary coding and the cold digital software when one is put next to the other. But that’s not it at all. He is a true musician-mathematician. He’s actually putting the chips and the coding on an equal plane with the musicians, which is more interesting.
“Tristan really views the chips and the electronics as a living, breathing thing,” Vicky Chow told me. “It’s almost like putting the expression and emotion into a computer, and trying to push it to see how a computer can emote, and vice versa for the live player: how close can we get.” In his music, Perich would like the chips to be considered as musicians. But the fact that musicians can’t truly be considered as chips – because humans have emotions and moralities and physical bodies – is not to minimise the chips, because chips can make things happen at inhuman speed.
He also isn’t asking the chips to be anything that they are not. “There’s no sense in which he’s imitating instruments like a synthesizer,” Reich added. “His 1-bit sound is a little bit abrasive, you know. But it also has a very sharp rhythmic profile, so he can integrate it with the rhythmic synchronisation of the live players.”
“I’m more interested in writing the same music for the machines as I would for the musicians,” Perich explained, “so that they have a meeting ground. The music I'm writing for machines is what they do well, and the music I’m writing for the musicians is what they do well.”
Perich is the son of Anton Perich, the Croatian photographer and artist, and Candace Dwan, a photography dealer. His father is a kind of advanced-level tinkerer and amateur inventor. Growing up in a farm village near Dubrovnik, Anton Perich strung up electric wire and built a speaker and microphone by hand to devise his own personal telephone system. Later, living in New York in the ‘70s, he built what he called a “painting machine” which could print his photographs line by line like an early inkjet printer but at giant scale. (“I grew up with that idea of machine-made artwork, really, my whole life,” Perich told me.)
Perich’s parents played Philip Glass records around the house a great deal, particularly Einstein on the Beach. So much so that the idea of rhythmic minimalism made by acoustic and electronic instruments – in many forms, from small-scale to large-scale – has seemed natural to him from an early age. The influence of Steve Reich, Terry Riley and others came to him a bit later, during high school. (It was the same for indie rock, electronic music and hip-hop; Perich became a drummer, learning to play along with DJ Shadow, Aphex Twin and Roni Size records.)
Perich went to Columbia intending to study acoustic contemporary classical music. But his interests outside of music always had a programming bent: “totally non-art stuff,” as he put it, “like writing shareware and putting that out online.” He became interested in 1-bit sound “almost by accident,” while building electronics to make kinetic visual art. Soon his music took on the practical concerns of coding and chips. But the music didn’t really change, he feels; what changed is his attention to the smallest elements of his composing – “the ones that represent themselves in code really cleanly.”
Perich wants his music to be understood as sitting in an indefinite space between classical music and electronic music, open to the considerations of both. But his place in the tradition represented by Reich and Glass is pretty clear. Einstein on the Beach, and Glass’s early piano works, he said, taught him about polyrhythm. He tapped out a three-against-two rhythm on a table. “That is math and music at its most pure form,” he said. “There it is. It’s number theory and pitch.”
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