CD 2: Dog Whistles
1. Means From an End IV: Means to a Means(7:37) 1998
2. One (Strength in Numbers) (3:45) 1999
3. There Was a Girl/There Was a Boy.INTERSEX (5:38) 2000
4. What is Between is Missing (7:35) 1998
5. Genrecide (I Wish Tricky'd Die Any Way I Hope) [Edit] (5:20) 1999
6. Cycles [Edit] (3:55) 1995
7. Names Have Been Changed [Edit] (6:55) 2017
8. Little Girls Couldn't Murder Anyone [Edit] (5:35) 2007
9. Admit It's Killing You (And Leave) [Edit] (3:08) 2017
10. Taking Stock in Our Pride (2:47) 1999
11. There Was a Girl/There Was a Boy.WENDY (2:05) 2000
12. Trans Am (Transgendered American) [Edit] (3:24) 1997
13. She Maybe May Be... [Edit] (4:03) 1999
14. D.C. D.O.A. (1:10) 1997
15. Facilitator [Edit] (5:13) 1997
16. Between Empathy And Sympathy Is TIme (Apartheid) [Edit] (4:32) 2003
17. Schizophonalysis (5:34) 2000

"Electroacoustic" typically refers to the compositional use of electronic devices to manipulate sound sources, which could be anything from acoustic instruments to recorded sounds. Experiments with electracoustics began with the earliest days of electricity, and by the start of the 1910s they were already becoming formally aestheticized through Dadaism, Constructivism and Futurism. With the emergence of magnetic audio tape in the '40s, the genre quickly began revolving around sample-based works that might be categorized as concrete music (musique concrète) or digital signal processing (DSP). Although electroacoustic compositions were most widely produced by music academicians and sound researchers, by the '60s they had found their way into mainstream pop music via groups such as The Beatles and The Monkees. Or, perhaps more precisely, via their sound engineers and producers who wove tape effects into the bands' songs. It is no coincidence that these pop cultural trends emerged at the same time that tape technology was becoming a regular fixture in home and car stereos. As tape played a larger role in how people experienced music on a daily basis, so did it become a compositional element of everyday music.

Like many children growing up in the '70s, I developed a strong interest in electroacoustic audio without having ever heard the word itself. I made hours of cassette tape recordings and loops playing with my dad's portable recorder, developing simple distortion techniques along the way. For example, I realized I could make recordings sound warbled and irregular by pushing the record button only half way down, and that the slowed motion of tapes recorded with low batteries would cause sounds to become faster and have a higher pitch when played back at a proper speed with fresh batteries.

Culturally, tapes and audio samples became even more prevalent with the explosion of hip-hop and techno-pop in the early '80s, along with the advent of digital sampling keyboards. As a teen, I was particularly drawn to Carlos Peron's tape effects on early Yello albums, sound collages by Negativland and Severed Heads, Haruomi Hosono's sound experiments on Monad Music, and early works by industrial ambient producers such as O Yuki Conjugate, Laibach and SPK.

By the early '90s, as both academic and commercial computer software for analyzing and synthesizing sounds became more available, the term "computer music" became synonymous and interchangeable with "electroacoustic."

Although ambient sounds had long been a part of electroacoustic audio, the start of "ambient" as a genre is most commonly credited to Brian Eno's 1975 album, Discreet Music. By the early '90s, ambient music commercially exploded. It was the soundtrack to "comedown rooms" in UK rave culture, where dancers could find reprieve from the high energy of the main dancefloors (emphasis on high). Producers like The Orb and Irresistible Force released records that combined Eno's more introspective ambient of the '70s with elements of mellow rhythms and dub. The connections to club culture were strong, with most ambient producers also being DJ's - myself included. In 1993 (two years after I lost my residency at Sally's II), I was invited to be a regular DJ at New York's first all-ambient weekly event, "Electric Lounge Machine," organized by the late DJ and music journalist Adam Goldstone along with Alex Kaplan, one of the founders of Eightball Records. Eightball staple Frederick Jorio (a.k.a. Lectroluv) also made guest appearances doing improvisations on his Moog synthesizer.

However, things were slightly different in the US, where electronic dance culture was far less popular than in the UK and Europe. In the US, ambient was more widely associated with new age music and all of its spiritual trappings. New age had gained massive commercial success in the US during the late '80s, and that financial draw derailed the sonic direction of many initially more promising experimental and instrumental electronic music labels. Private Music was one such label that immediately comes to mind.

Of course, my interest in ambient came from a very different vector defined by non-spiritualism, constructivism, historical materialism, social organizing, the AIDS crisis, sexual perversity, and gender deviance. In relation to sound, the operative metaphor to all of this was succinctly stated by Jacques Attali in Noise: A Political Economy of Music: "[Music's] order simulates the social order, and its dissonances express marginalities." However, actual approaches to the utilization of sound in direct social organizing and demonstrations remained few. As Dont Rhine of the audio action collaborative Ultra-red once told me, "While the development of Queer-positive imagery and graphics exploded with AIDS activism in the 1980's, sonically we have little more than, 'Hey-hey, ho-ho, Homophobia's got to go!'"

People like Rhine and myself were drawn to ambient because it eschews melody in favor of peripheral environmental sounds - i.e., emphasizing the sounds of a given material context over a musical performance within that context. This grounding of sound in the material was the antithesis of the spiritual or psychedelic release sought by most fans of the genre. Therefore, directly addressing the antagonisms arising from our different approach to the genre became a necessary and regular component of our work.

Additionally, I was drawn to a wide use of tape sources and found samples (i.e., the "copy" or "fake") as a spurning of traditional musicology's championing of creativity, authorship, authenticity and genius. I did not approach audio composition as a creative process, but strictly as an act of cultural production rooted in decontextualization and recontextualization. As such, audio samples served as sonic footnotes. I have always held that establishing cultural reference points is integral to the development of any discourse. And yet, while writers can quote from texts by other authors with relative ease, audio producers face strict legal restrictions and copyright battles around sample usage. Music industries constantly encourage us to internalize and develop deeply personal connections with the inescapable songs and artists they flood our daily lives with, yet at no point are we as individuals allowed to culturally possess that music. In my early days I diligently tried to obtain legal clearances for the samples I used, only to be repeatedly denied. The exact reason provided time and again was that my compositions were a "defamation of the original source materials." I eventually learned to take the compliment and move on. However, the legal risks when making collage based audio remain an ongoing concern for myself and countless other producers operating on the culturally minor level.

Paradoxically, most sample-heavy ambient producers still considered themselves "musicians," and spoke of their work and careers in typical musicological terms. On the other hand, I was interested in unpacking the cultural processes through which societies constructed value around concepts of musicality, and identifying the power systems they reflected and perpetuated. Whereas many listeners sought journeys in sound to help them either "find themselves" or "lose themselves," I was more interested in the sounds of social and cultural processes through which our senses of self are constructed. In the West, these processes are typically driven by commercial audio industries.

Most people think of talent - especially musical talent - as something innate. It appears as a gift of the gods bestowed upon some people, and not others. Accordingly, most people consider a healthy society to be one that nurtures individuals' talents. By this logic, social aesthetic forms (music, art, literature, culture) follow from the natural. Historical materialism helps us understand that this line of reasoning - wherein the values of things cherished by a society are thought to flow from the wellsprings of a supra-social, natural order - is precisely the kind of ideological production through which societies reinforce and naturalize their hierarchies. In doing so, any biases or processes of exclusion enacted by those hierarchies are morally justified as expressions of the existing "natural" order. As Attali pointed out, this extends to aesthetics, such as the cultural endorsement of one sound as music, and rejection of another as noise; the recognition of one person as gifted, and another as ungifted. Correspondingly, talent is invariably aligned with things that hold aesthetic value within a culture.

Even when speaking of something like alternative music, counter-cultural audio, noise or punk, each of those genres reflect codified systems that hold value within their respective subcultural sites. As an example that I am sure some of you can relate to, my parents used to describe the records my siblings and I listened to and enjoyed as "talentless." Meanwhile, us kids were able to easily identify and discuss the talent of those various groups and musicians with fluency.

Of course, certain people seem to have a propensity for developing skill sets that far outshine others, which can also be related to physical and cognitive abilities. Even so, it is only a convergence of those skills with cultural expectations that results in the identification of talent. In reality, all people are not in agreement about what constitutes talent. Nonetheless, we misleadingly speak of it as something universally recognizable. This contradiction reveals how concepts of talent are inherently relational, inherently contextual, and in that way can be understood as a social construct.

This analytical approach to unpacking the social workings and biases through which we construct our sense of the innate is called "non-essentialism" (or "anti-essentialism"). Those familiar with my work have read the term regularly in my writing, and know it has played a tremendous role in my own practices. It emerged in the late '70s as a response to the cultural problems of "essentialism," by which people traditionally rationalize and naturalize their identities as things emerging from an inner essence. For example, the justification of racial apartheid based upon members of one race believing they hold an intrinsic supremacy over another race. From an essentialist perspective, the social privileges of the race in power - and the cruelties enacted to sustain them - are understood as an outgrowth of a natural and/or divine superiority. To question the social order is not just a political issue, but a challenge to the very order of the universe itself. To change the social system would entail the destruction of a communally shared (and individually internalized) sense of self. In this way, essentialist identities are one of the most common ideological devices for sustaining the social workings of bias and violence. With regard to identity (race, sex, gender, etc.), most people feel they were "born this way," without considering how their "way" is culturally specific. In a difference place and time they may very well not be socially perceived or accepted as the "way" they believe themselves to be on a gut level. In fact, certain important specificities of their identities may not exist at all in some other cultures.

"Born this way" is currently the most popular (and populist) argument for obtaining civil rights under liberal humanism. Its effectiveness rests in the fact that it ultimately does not undermine traditional cultural notions that the social order - including all of its hierarchies, exclusions, abuses and violence toward those perceived as outside or resisting that order - is an immutable and justified expression of a natural order of things. The essentialist social organizer's appeal to those in power for civil rights is reduced to an appeal for the patriarchal "father" (or matriarchal "mother") to take pity upon a physical condition that could not be avoided. The operative logic is that if a culturally minor or disenfranchised identity is not a choice, but a precondition of birth, there is no intentional violation of social mores. Therefore, not only should there be no criminalization, punishment or ostracism of such bodies, but they should receive all of the rights and privileges of the "father." This is how liberal humanism works, by gradually expanding the definition of who is legally recognized and protected as "human," identity by identity.

Of course, to claim one deserves rights based upon a condition of birth is ultimately an anti-democratic, feudal argument. Like aristocrats of old, identity essentialists advocate for civil rights based upon a claim of birthright and genetics - all the while holding a misguided belief that they are structurally creating a more open society. In reality, their arguments literally rely upon those same old structures, thus perpetuating the naturalization of those who have traditionally held power based upon historical claims of the blood in their veins.

In response, the basic argument of non-essentialism is that democratic organizing (including more radical forms of democracy such as socialism and communism) is most effective when it revolves around peoples' abilities to make choices. Societies become more democratic when social change is the result of people making conscious choices to act differently. It becomes less democratic when change comes through mandates in the absence of choice. From a non-essentialist viewpoint, all identities are inherently relational. They emerge from social relations, and take shape in response to the people around us. One's own identities rely upon an ability to relate with or disassociate from the identities of others. In this sense, they are less expressions of the self, and more political sites. These sites are demarcated by the social boundaries of power through which bodies are allowed or denied to move.

A non-essentialist view rejects social organizing around essentialist models of identity precisely because claiming one's identity is "not a choice" effectively erases one's political agency and ability to make conscious choices about the social issue at hand. This is not to say that biology is irrelevant. From a non-essentialist perspective, biology is the undeniable reality of materialism. Non-essentialism recognizes that our communally shared definitions of the body - what constitutes a man and woman, or a homosexual and heterosexual, etc. - are socially constructed, learned and internalized. They are typically binary, revolving around rather blunt distinctions of "us and them" that are easily relatable to most people precisely because they embody the most base level social dynamics of inclusion and exclusion we all experience. In turn, these presumptions guide the direction of scientific and medical research about the body. It not only affects who can obtain access to medical care, but directs the flow of finances and scientific research.

Consider the history of women's access to HIV medications. In the early days of the AIDS crisis, HIV was considered an exclusively gay male problem. With time, it also became understood as a problem of IV drug users, the majority of whom were also male. The fact that AIDS most affected men who were considered undesirables - fags and junkies - was a large factor in the general lack of research and medical treatments for HIV. As a barometer of the cultural climate in those days, I can personally attest to multiple fagbashings in my teens when the people punching me unironically warned, "If you fucking bleed on me and give me AIDS, I'll kill you, faggot!" From their perspective as proudly upright citizens, even in that moment of their inflicting one-directional violence, apparently I was still the one threatening them - no longer just culturally, but also physically via HIV. Amidst this anti-gay sexpanic, most medical professionals subscribed to what was called the "rugged vagina" hypothesis. The thinking was that women could not sexually contract HIV because the vagina, which had evolved to sustain blunt abuse by penises and fetuses, was too formidable of a barrier for HIV to pass through and get into the body. By association, straight men (who naturally only have sex with women) were also considered safe from sexually contracting the virus. Gay men, on the other hand, fell prey to having "vulnerable rectums." As a result, for decades more federal funding went to research about the effects of HIV in lab mice than in women.

A non-essentialist response to these social problems would be to identify the ways in which particular bodies are affected differently by systems of power, and advocate accordingly. Non-essentialism in no way denies biological differences between bodies. Rather, it is an insistence upon recognizing how social mores constantly render certain bodies visible, and others invisible - all of which relates to the boundaries of our scientific understanding of biology in a given time and context.

In contrast, even when speaking from a position of oppression, essentialists often times uphold the very moral codes leading to their maltreatment. They do this by insinuating an ethical distinction between themselves as innate operators, and those who make active choices to behave in ways considered "perverse" in the eyes of a majority. This is how the history of movements originally focussed on decriminalizing homosexuality became coopted and twisted into today's LGBT movements obsessed with begging authorities for bureaucratic and legal recognition. The transition of LGBT into an ever expanding collections of letters and typographical symbols - along with more stripes on the rainbow flag - is also a manifestation of this same mental submission to the liberal humanist demand for formal administrative cataloguing. (I am old enough to recall when it was just GLB - in that order - and people were debating whether or not to add a T because transgenderism was more about gender than sexuality.) LGBT Pride^TM is no longer a fuck you to those insisting we feel their shame, but an orchestrated desire to share in dominant, heteronormative pride and power.

One-off Pride^TM parades have grown into a Pride^TM Month during which major corporations blanket barrage everyone in societies around the globe with transparently pandering LGBT advertisements. These campaigns obviously only have to do with maintaining investor DEI (Diversity, Equity & Incusion) scores developed by brokerage firms like BlackRock and Vanguard. Even more nauseating, military and government intelligence agencies use queer recruiting campaigns to wrap rainbows around their programs of murder, torture and authoritarianism. Culturally, all of this bewildering and exhausting propaganda is bound to raise more anti-LGBT ire than solidarity among the general public. In this day and age, such ire is not the final vestiges of prejudice from a bygone era, but is literally generated by today's algorithmic social herding. The semiotics of liberalism are conscoiusly being used by corporations and governments to bring about endless reactionary social fracture and conservative identity entrenchment on all sides. It is business as usual so long as we are morally attacking each other as individuals, rather than coming together across ethical divides in opposition to structural abuses of power. On the surface, societies might appear more open because the number of visible identity categories has grown exponentially, yet the clannistic and moral rigidity demanded when participating in that plethora of identities has also exponentially intensified. Decades ago we fought to come out of closets, only to once again find ourselves socially boxed in tightly by the suffocating rules of contemporary LGBT identity politics.

I believe the coopting of LGBT direct action groups first seriously began on September 15, 1989 - one day after members of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) who were protesting the greed of the pharmaceutical industry had successfully disrupted trading in the New York Stock Exchange for the first time in history. That was the day LGBT organizing truly came on radar as not just a moral problem, but a political force that could interfere with the workings of the oligarchs. The result was to quickly infiltrate ACT-UP and other organizations, break them up, and under the guise of cultural autonomy employ their leaders in CBO's (Community Based Organizations) and NGO's (Non-Governmental Organizations). Their personal income then relied upon grants from those same local and federal government agencies they had protested. I witnessed this first hand, as my partner at the time was one such person who became a CBO director. The compromised philosophies of those coopted community leaders then became the sanctioned ideological foundation of today's intersectionally queer academia, where global liberal humanist agendas are refined and perpetuated ad nauseum. All of this is how LGBT organizing has been strategically coopted into the opposite of a challenge to the status quo. It also means those of us who continue to deliberately act in resistance to the status quo remain outsiders - culturally and legislatively still inhabiting the realms of perversity.

When approaching sound with a non-essentialist ear, one soon hears the ways in which any recognition of talent relies upon a cultural placement of value in peculiar skillsets. Those skills emerge from a confluence of social access to specific tools and instruments, time for study, personal interest, an ability to tolerate endless repetition, and social reinforcement of one's results. Anyone who has ever been physically forced to learn an instrument knows the relationship between a tolerance for repetition and a fear of punishment. Music histories are plagued with stories of children heralded as geniuses being subjected to cruel indoctrinations. Of course, for every celebrated name there are tens of thousands of other children who suffered for naught.

My own parents regularly spanked and berated my siblings and I for not practicing the instruments they forced upon us throughout elementary school. A close friend of mine lives her life with permanent nerve damage in her left hand because of her childhood violin instructor's sadistic techniques. To teach the proper way to play vibato, which requires keeping a distance between the palm of the hand and neck of the violin when fingering the strings, the instructor would stick cello tape pierced with an array of push pins to the underside of the neck. When the tiny child-hands of my friend and other students invariably held the necks too closely, they would be repeatedly pricked by the pins. This was done with the parents' knowledge, who actively sought out this instructor's stern approach.

Parallel to all of this fiendish instruction, alcohol and drugs also become commonplace ways of fostering tolerance for repetition, and entering trances. While most people hold a basic understanding of the connections between music and drug cultures, few consider how the sonic direction of musical genres themselves are literally connected to the chemical workings of specific drugs on the mind. Just pick any music genre, look up the drug of choice from that era, and do the math. For ambient music, we were often stuck with the MDMA guru ramblings of Terence McKenna, et. al.

Whether taken openly at public celebrations, or secretly in desperation, the basic impulse behind most alcohol and drug use is a desire to escape the material miseries of life. One might describe it as an anti-materialist impulse. Thus, it is understandable that in most cultures the hallucinations of transcendental experiences are overwhelmingly taken at face value as proof of an ability to psychically and spiritually extend beyond the human body. Personally, I think the ease with which our sense of reality can be chemically altered is proof that everything we mentally experience - right down to our sense of soul - is traceable to the chemical workings of the brain. As a friend who has spent his life on anti-depressants once told me, "that's why Prozac works, because we can chemically change who we are." For me, this is not in any way a denial of spiritual experiences. Rather, it offers a largely unexplored materialist means of understanding how we experience the spiritual. This includes looking at the cultural links between spiritual experiences and misery. It seems telling that the combination of these two dynamics is a defining characteristic of the "suffering artist," whose talents are revered above all others.

All of these components to talent are invariably tied to issues of class. And while wealth certainly plays an advantage in most things, on the cultural level there are always multiple and simultaneous codings around what constitutes talent throughout all layers of a class structure. The most basic of these revolve around high and low culture, with high culture typically being more elite and low culture more populist. However, beyond populism, definitions of low culture are further complicated through non-populist genres that might be described as culturally minor, alternative, subcultural, underground, etc. These commonly lack the scope of distribution and acceptance of popular musics. In their scarcity and unrecognizabiity, they can also be mistakenly seen from a populist perspective as bearing the same elitist otherness as high culture. Thus, music genres exist an endless push and pull of validation and rejection in all directions. An ability to identify these simultaneities and tensions is integral to any analysis of the material workings they express.

For example, wealthy people are the most likely to have access to canonical tools, instruments and training, while people in lower classes are often exposed to different sets of instruments and techniques. However, many times the lower classes also work with tools that have fallen out of fashion or become technologically obsolete for the upper classes. The history of underground electronic music has been fueled by people with little money buying the cheapest synthesizers they could get their hands on, and finding unexpected ways to use them without access to manuals or training. Consider how the defining sound of acid house came from the economic failure of the Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer. The TB-303 was originally developed for guitarists to practice along with at home when their bassists were not around. Despite its high price when first released (over $1,300 US dollars in today's currency), the synth didn't sound anything like a bass guitar, and programming it was a bit too complex for guitarists and other non-electronic musicians. As a result, the abandoned synths could be found in pawn shops throughout the mid-'80s. This change in economic access to the synth ultimately led to their usage by an unconsidered audience in completely unintended ways. With time, acid house's popularity actually redirected Roland's synthesizer engineering towards facilitating those newer and unintended approaches to sound. However, that same popularity also drove up the price of used TB-303's to ridiculous heights, which in turn spawned independent synth enthusiasts to start manufacturing their own TB-303 clones on a small scale. Their success has since been undercut by the larger Behringer company's mass manufacturing of incredibly cheap, quality clones that sell for about $130 USD - a tenth of the TB-303's original cost. In this way, culture and economics tumble like a washing machine.

During the '90s, something similar happened in electroacoustic music as audio producers, including myself, began compositionally focussing on the glitches and errors generated by newly emerging DSP software. These errors affected both sound and timing, and resulted in a series of counter-aesthetics to what the software engineers intended. Many of the sounds heard on this album are from that era. The software programs that made them were eventually lost to advances in sound algorithms and computer processor speed. The majority of programs I used ceased to function with the introduction of Mac OS X in 2001. Losing that software was equivalent to throwing an entire studio of analogue synthesizers into a dumpster. To explain that software shift in visual terms, one might compare sounds made with early audio software to a GIF image. When you zoom in on a GIF, the pixels remain distinct and sharp. At times, the contrast can be jarring. The current generation of audio software tends to work more on the principles of JPEG images, in which algorithmic smoothing generates relational fields of color that appear to blur pixels together. Like JPEG images, the sonic results are cleaner, and recordings of acoustic instruments sound more convincingly organic. The inherently digital qualities of computer generated audio become increasingly repressed, and increasingly inaudible.

Commercial industries and academic institutions developing digital sound technologies have doubled down on conservative notions of accurately replicating acoustic sound and enabling live musical performance. The most recent AI music software is also focussed on portraying the organic, or "human." With time, my early cultural interest in the sound of the break points of DSP has become increasingly lost and buried - both culturally and technologically. Conceptually (even if not sonically), I suppose the current public fascination with the technical limitations of AI song generation shares some potential philosophical similarities. However, I rarely find those discussions interesting because they invariably go down a rabbit hole of technology versus humanity - whereas I consider the actual crisis of AI to be one of corporations against individuals. Like robotics, at the core of AI is a labor issue strictly between humans - not between humans and machines.

With all of this in mind, and realizing it is the tendency of most listeners to seek the "timeless" in music, I encourage you to consider the finite timeliness of the specific sounds collected here.

As a producer, my insistence upon materialist analysis set me at ideological odds with virtually all other producers and listeners of ambient in the US, EU and Japan. These disagreements and misunderstandings extended to the staff at labels that released my projects - even those with a public image of political and philosophical engagement. During my years working with Mille Plateaux - named after the book of the same name by the philosophers and social activists Félix Guitarri and Gilles Deleauze - a majority of labelmates expressed their personal lack of interest in socio-political approaches to sound. They shrugged it off as a "label identity thing," and said they were really only interested in making "music for music's sake." While I got along quite well with several of them on a personal level, I still found myself largely operating in isolation when it came to developing culturally critical content - content that was ostensibly the label's advertised objective.

All of this was in many ways anticipated. In fact, my work within the audio marketplace has always been a deliberate performance of the impossibility for the social themes I considered most relevant to ever take cultural root on a mass scale. This pragmatically nihilistic stance was an extension of my experiences around many of those the same themes within the world of fine art during my university studies. As a student I saw the ways in which most everyone in the visual arts was aware of cultural criticisms of authenticity, originality, and other fictions that drove the art market. They could speak about them fluently, but simply chose to ignore their messages and continue with business as usual. Consider the work of Andy Warhol, who critically explored those very themes through his endless unauthorized prints of newspaper photos and corporate logos. Meanwhile, today the Warhol Foundation will sue anyone who reprints a Warhol print without legal clearance. It was my frustration with that hypocrisy which led me away from the visual arts.

However, my switch to the audio marketplace was not because of any misguided belief that music was a better medium for sharing those cultural critiques. To the contrary, I recognized that music was a cultural Petri dish even more infected with insurmountable spiritualisms and essentialisms than fine art. In fact, many of those same visual artists who actively question the social mechanisms behind authorship and originality in their own work will never question the creative authenticity of a musician. This authenticity is perhaps most crystalized in the image of the blues musician, who mythically inhabits virtually all popular music of the modern era.

I attribute these deeper ideological indoctrinations around authenticity in music - as opposed to fine art - to its broader cultural functions on a folk level. Although there are elitist genres of music (most obviously classical), a majority of people also cultivate interests in more populist genres that are in antagonism with the classical. For many, their personal taste in music becomes a means of signifying their rejection of authority. Therefore, our public associations with music are more easily internatlized and naturalized as extensions of our private identities. Fine art, on the other hand, is more widely associated with high culture, and in that sense is more likely to always be alienating and (despite Warhol's best efforts) less likely to be pop.

On top of this, most peoples' notions of "musical content" or "political music" is strictly limited to a song's lyrics. Music's potential for social organizing is typically nothing more than the superficial gesture of assembling people at a concert or dance, or selling a charity compilation. We are not taught how to deploy deeper social applications of sound, or how to hear non-lyrical socio-audio content in ways that make sense. Understanding all of these various factors as cultural preconditions, I have always recognized confusion and gaps in understanding to be part of audio work itself. Thus, most of my projects simultaneously take critical aim at myself, the record labels, their owners, the broader music industries, journalists, and listeners.

My first technical exposure to sound generating computer software and digital signal processing (not to be confused with the computer control of external synthesizers and samplers via MIDI) came through Erik Dahl, who ported C-Sound to the Apple Macintosh PowerPC platform in 1994. We became friends while working together in the Office of Academic Computing at Cornell University Medical College (CUMC), located in a windowless office in the basement of New York Hospital. He was a tech and I was a secretary. Dahl's historic first three recordings ever produced with C-Sound on the Mac were featured on the vinyl EP, Comatonse.001: Anti-Instrumentations as Programmed and Generated by Erik Dahl, which was the second release on Comatonse Recordings. C-Sound was also used to develop around one third of the sounds on my second full-length album, Soil, released by Instinct Records in 1995. Soil abandoned the more rhythmic tracks that defined my first full-length album released two years prior, Tranquilizer, and established the increasingly abstract direction of future releases under my own name. (Meanwhile, I would continue self-releasing deep house and other dance music under different aliases.)

Dahl encouraged me to join him at the International Computer Music Conference '95 (ICMC) in Banff, where we met fellow New York sound designer, programmer and audio engineer Fred Szymanski. Coincidentally, Szymanski had actually worked in the past with my childhood idol Peron. The three of us became registered members of the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) for access to their software, and attended a few local gatherings of computer musicians at Columbia University organized by Brad Garton, Director of the Computer Music Center. These were unquestionably insular academic circles. One of their recurrent topics of conversation was the presumed impossibility of crossing over from academia into commercial audio marketplaces.

To wit, Soil proved to be a commercial flop for Instinct. However, this came with the hidden benefit of them releasing me from a restrictive multi-record contract. I was freed to produce works that more openly rejected the new age and P.L.U.R. (Peace, Love, Unity & Respect) rave culture aesthetics that had taken over ambient music. From that point forward, a key part of my projects was the inclusion of culturally critical texts. I had originally planned to include such writings in both Tranquilizer and Soil as well, but Instinct refused out of fear it would alienate their desired audience.

Up to that point, any discussion of the social intentions or themes behind my work had been relegated to a few interviews in zines and the music press. It was after Rhine stumbled across one such interview around 1994 that he arranged to stop by my office at CUMC and introduce himself. We spoke briefly, and he passed me a collection of tapes and writings related to Ultra-red. I was amazed to discover the texts not only addressed possible uses of sound in political organizing, but specifically referenced struggles related to the AIDS crisis and the policing of sexuality. It was a surprising and deeply profound moment of connection around quite specific topics of sound and politics that I had assumed I would never fully share with others.

The reasoning behind my wish to include somewhat academic-sounding culturally critical texts within commercial audio releases was twofold. Firstly, it was an insistence upon inserting socio-material content into the commercial audio marketplace, in contrast to the vapidness of most commercial music releases and journalism. Anything less felt masturbatory and best kept to myself. Secondly, it was a thumb in the eye of academics who wittingly and unwittingly reinforced the notion that electroacoustic work could only ever have cultural relevance within the walls of ivory towers.

As absurd as it may seem - and just as the management at Instinct had predicted - the inclusion of these CD texts resulted in frequent hate emails from "former fans" ranting about how my texts had destroyed their peaceful listening experiences. These were the early days of the internet when academic email accounts were the norm, so of course I was receiving the messages at my Cornell work account, which I used publicly. They claimed I was forcing my ideas down their throats, at times calling me fascist. My default response was to remind them they were not obligated to read the texts, and could simply ignore them when playing a CD. They generally found this response unsatisfying. Considering how most of the comments came from people who only knew of me through my releases on Instinct, I suppose kudos are due to the management for knowing their audience.

These experiences only further encouraged me to investigate the cultural tensions between academic and commercial audio marketplaces. One of Garton's undergraduate students, Jane Dowe, was heavily involved with the plunderphonics and anti-copyright label Illegal Art. In 1998, Dowe and I produced Institutional Collaborative, an album commercially released on Mille Plateaux. The title was a nod to the "institutionalized" academic and commercial economies we variously inhabited. At the time, we never met in person and only communicated by exchanges of email, digital audio tape (DAT) and CD. I got to meet Dowe in person years later after moving to Japan, while she was completing her graduate studies under Christopher Penrose at Keio University. Penrose had developed a special process of sample cross-synthesis called "codepend," which played an integral role in the sound of my 2003 release, Lovebomb/Ai No Bakudan, and can be heard on "Between Empathy And Sympathy Is TIme (Apartheid)." That same year, Dahl, Garton, Dowe and Penrose were all featured on the free album, Below Code: Comatonse Recordings 10th Anniversary Compilation, alongside non-academic electroacoustic and computer music producers Ultra-red, Robin Rimbaud, Simon Fisher Turner, Takashi Kojima and SND.

Before the emergence of stable real-time audio processing in the late '90s, it typically took hours or even days to digitally render certain sounds. This meant the default format for electroacoustic music performances was a tape listening session. Typically, a group of people sat in a university performance hall facing an empty stage, listening to playback from a DAT. Prior to my involvement with computer music, my primary experience with performance was as a club DJ. In that era, DJs were less the frontal spectacle they have become, and were often times hidden away from view of the dancefloor. A large part of my interest in DJ-ing was a critical rejection of conventional music performance and the theatricality of the rock stage. Therefore, when I began getting requests to perform my electroacoustic projects "live," I adapted the anti-spectacle of DJ-ing and the empty stillness of tape listening sessions as my main performance strategies.

I never liked attending concerts or live performances, and considered my own work non-performative. However, doing shows was an economic necessity for most all commercial electroacoustic and ambient producers because royalties from record sales were not enough to live off. I knew that anything I did would unavoidably be just one more kind of theater I disliked. This was inescapable, as the music marketplace was structured around spectacle, right down to the architectural separation between audience and stage. The physical parameters for performance were generally fixed, and at my financial level there was no budget to make structural alterations - not that they would make a difference anyway. Some performers tried stirring things up by sitting audiences in the round, but such gestures usually came across hokey and presented no actual changes to the systems of performance. Knowing that a restructuring of the conditions of performance was impossible, I went the other direction and embraced banality. My typical performance at a music festival or club became me sitting in a chair on stage, often in femme drag, pushing "play" on a DAT machine and sitting still for the duration of the hour long show.

Although live performances by many other electronic producers at that time were also being played from a DAT, they typically faked performing live by pretending to do things in realtime such as twisting knobs on a mixer, and moving their bodies to the sounds. Most of these shows were in non-queer contexts where audiences were generally unconcerned with issues of gender or sexuality (at least in that moment), and the other performers were typically straight males - all of which I only point out as a matter of fact that contributed to the absurdity and awkwardness often caused by my performances. Unconsidered by many at the time, as a drag queen technically doing a drag show, my use of stillness and anti-spectacle was also an abandonment of the glitz and extravagance of the conventional transgendered stage. As both a generic electronic musician and a dull drag queen, I was interested in actively denying audiences of conventionally anticipated entertainment pleasures. In lieu of entertainment value, I delivered boredom in which there was little else to do but sit, think and listen. Of course, in many situations audiences were drunk or high, so the passive-aggression of my approach was received by many as raw aggression... and not the cool kind of punk or hard-noise raw aggression that garners cheers at concerts. Booing, cries of frustration, or just getting up and leaving were all fairly common. At the same time, there were a few people who connected with my intentions, such as the members of the Belgian cyberfeminist collective Constant VZW. It was through their performance invitation that I met one of my long time collaborators, Laurence Rassel.

I continued with this performance strategy until the early 2000s, by which time the arrival of real-time digital processing and MAX MSP software had spawned the phenomenon of laptop performers. Those previously gesticulating and knob-turning electronic producers were now seated behind the glow of MacBooks, staring at their screens, motionless except for keystrokes. Performative stillness had become an unanticipated commercial norm. As I used to always joke with queenish shade, "those bitches stole my act." I then began introducing text projections and other minor visual and theatrical elements into my performances - if only out of non-cooperation with the new norm. Gradually, others began performing before video backdrops of what can only be described as cyber-slick CGI animated screen savers. In response, I began producing lo-fi, text heavy videos to better convey my projects' themes to audiences.

One of the first of these was the partial video adaptation of Interstices, developed under commission by Mark Fell and Mat Steel through the Sheffield-based digital arts organization Lovebytes. Fell and Steel were also the two halves of SND, and were labelmates at Mille Plateaux. In contrast to the Futurist polish of most performers' videos, which signified their wealth of technological access (even if only illusory), the visible limitations of my production quality was an open incorporation of real economic limitations. It was a conscious rejection of the image game played by so many European producers at the time, who cultivated personas of economic success and high cultural demand as part of their attempts to gain funding through art grants. I also began insisting that organizers allow for Q&A sessions after my performances, further disrupting the flow of music from the stage. In response to the romantic claims most people made about music bringing performers and audiences together in harmony, I attempted to force the question of whether or not group participation in actual dialogue at such events was possible. This became my standard performance format that has persisted to the present day.

The first disc of this compilation, Snowflakes, focusses on tracks I consider more conventionally ambient or perhaps even "pretty." Dog Whistles, the second disc, compiles tracks featuring a somewhat chaotic array of samples and sounds that are more overtly related to themes of gender- and sexual variance. Although it happened by mere coincidence, perhaps the last few seconds of each disc best summarize their differences. Snowflakes ends with a sample whose source I have long forgotten (perhaps Simon Fisher Turner?), singing a lulling chorus that promises, "Everything's going to be alright." The end of Dog Whistles betrays that trust, as well as nihilistically undercuts any potential idealism someone might project upon my efforts to produce culturally critical content, ending with the dialogue: "What are you doing here?" "Trying to set you all free, but I don't know how." "Set them free? Never! Goodbye, good luck, and good riddance."

I will not go into detail about the intentions behind individual tracks here, since full album annotations for most projects are freely available on my website at comatonse.com/writings/. Similarly, most of the full length albums from which these tracks were taken can currently be found at comatonse.bandcamp.com. However, as this is a compendium of over two decades of work, it is hard to ignore a thematic consistency over the years. I attribute this less to my own personal commitment to a singular "vision," and more to the relentless persistence of certain social problems that will never go away. To quote UK labor organizer Tony Benn, whose speech was sampled in a house track I once did with Mark Fell, "Every generation must fight the same battles again and again. There's no final victory and there's no comatonse.001final defeat."

Several tracks on disc two feature cut-ups of dialogues and debates around gender that become intentionally absurdist and frustrating to follow. For example, in "What is Between is Missing" (c.1998), someone explains, "Gender's what's between your ears, not your legs," only to immediately turn around and insist, "Gender's what's between your legs, not your ears." Similarly, in "She Maybe May Be..." (c.1999), a mother describes how her newborn daughter's "masculine behavior" made her suspect the infant was likely a lesbian child, only to say, "she came out as bi-sexual about a year later, then eventually realized that, no, he was in fact a male, and I felt very, very relieved." Back then, I was not only reflecting the chaos of the day around such topics in mainstream media, but further edited the dialogue so as to sarcastically foreshadow the impending cultural and mental chaos that would result from essentialist identity politics being allowed to transmogrify unchecked.

Sadly, what was primarily absurdist dialogue back in its day can indeed pass as commonplace rhetoric within the algorithms of today's gender and sexual discourses. Within this current climate, I am just as likely to find myself declared a "science denier" by strangers online who have been programmed to presume all transgendered people are essentialist transsexuals, as I am to be accused of echoing "unchallenged arguments of anti-trans* disinformation about the alleged danger of puberty-blocking drugs" by a transgendered reviewer for the German art journal Texte zur Kunst. (My thorough refutal of that accusation is available in the Writings section of my website.) Obviously, the former have absolutely no interest in hearing about my very materially grounded views on physiological "sex" versus "gender" as a cultural projection of expectations around masculinity and femininity upon physical bodies. For them, I am simply a snowflake whose critical views amount to nothing more than evidence of mental fragility. Meanwhile, the latter was equally smug and content to professionally brand me transphobic without any journalistic rigor - not even including a quote from me to back up their accusation. Then, after placing me in a position of having to publicly respond, the reviewer and editors ignored me for months. When they did eventually emerge from their silence, it was with a dismissive tone that consciously passed over all of the detailed statistics, science, and anecdotes grounding my concerns about abuses enacted by medical industries upon both children and adults dealing with gender and/or sexual variance. For them, I am simply a peddler of dog whistle politics. I suspect both parties presume I have more in common with the other - their sworn enemy - when in fact, from my perspective, all of their behaviors suggests they have more in common with each other than with me.

Queerly, all of these contemporary dynamics could already be heard within the cacophony I put to DAT so many years ago. Perhaps some of the tracks in this compilation predicted today's socially cultivated neuroses a bit too well. Nearly a quarter century later, there is absolutely no surprise when a majority of people on either side of the mainstream's constructed binary arguments around transgenderism still have no capacity for - let alone interest in - hearing and understanding non-essentialist takes on issues of gender, sex and sexuality.

In the Q&A sessions following my performances, people often ask me, "What should we do?" I don't have the "right answers," and I have no interest in telling people what they should or should not do. Clearly, my projects are about actively complicating relationships to such positions of authority. They are about replacing the power-sharing ambitions of LGBT Pride^TM with strategies for smallness, non-cooperation, and divestments of power. These tracks are less about pointing people to the "right answers," and more about begging the "right questions" within any given context. Most of the questions posed over the years in these tracks remain in tension with contemporary mainstream views, including those coming from the LGBT establishment. In this way, one might say a thread running through my projects is that they remain "unlistenable" to most. Any potential critical use value of these tracks emerges from understanding how they are utterly symptomatic of a particular social system - even in their dissonance. Or, to be more precise, because of their dissonance.