A pioneering collective of experimentalists in San Francisco’s Bay Area between during late 70s to early 80s, The League of Automatic Music Composers were widely regarded as the first musicians to incorporate microcomputers into live musical performance - creating networks of interacting computers and other electronic circuits with an eye to eliciting surprising and new “musical artificial intelligences.” Approaching the computer network as one large, interactive musical instrument made up of independently programmed automatic machines, resulting in a music that was noisy, difficult, often unpredictable, and occasionally beautiful.
The work of the League partook of the distinctive cultural atmosphere of the San Francisco Bay Area in the 70s and 80s, a rich blend of communal ideologies, radical culture, technical innovation, intellectual ferment, and a hands-on attitude that has been a hallmark of California life since the pioneer days. In the air then was a sense of new possibilities, and the feeling of the need to build culture from the ground up. For music specifically this meant redefining everything about how it’s done, from the instruments and tuning systems to the musical forms, venues and social relations among players and audiences.
As yet unnamed, Silicon Valley was springing to life, where the almost daily announcements of new integrated circuits made possible the birth of a new subculture, where hobbyists and hackers outside of—or marginally connected to—technology industries were creating the microcomputer revolution. In the Bay Area, access to the new digital technologies and to the people who developed them was perhaps the best in the world. In those heady early days, many of these hackers were less focused on the potential riches following from this technology than on its revolutionary potential: a dream of a new society built with the assistance of artificial intelligence and the free and open access to information.
From the American experimental music tradition, as represented by fellow Californians John Cage (1912–1992), Henry Cowell (1897–1965), Harry Partch (1901–1974) and Lou Harrison (1917–2003) came the sense of being far from Europe, and that our musical culture could draw equally on any of the world’s traditions—musical and otherwise—for influence and inspiration. These composers also formed the basis of a West Coast tradition of instrument building, from Cowell’s “Rhythmicon” (1930), a machine for exploring complex rhythmic relationships, to Harrison and Cage’s garbage-can and brake-drum orchestras and Partch’s homebuilt microtonal instruments.
Also in the cultural mix of the time was a living tradition of noisy improvised music. Living outside of institutional or commercial support, and practiced by musicians coming from hippie jam sessions, free jazz, classical music, and punk rock, it embodied a sensibility of exuberance, dissonance, free rhythm, and collaborative composition.
Of no less importance were some of the intellectual currents of the time. A flowering of more-or-less scientific writing about the nature of complex systems and their behavior made strong claims that a new level of understanding of physics, biology, and culture was just around the corner. Cybernetics (Norbert Wiener), complex systems theory (Ilya Prigogine), genetic algorithms (John Holland), synergetics (Buckminster Fuller), catastrophe theory (René Thom), neural networks (Warren S. McCullough), chaos theory (Jim Crutchfield, et al), cultural ecology (Gregory Bateson)—these writings all supported a belief of the moment that complex phenomena can be understood by analyzing the dynamic interactions of relatively simple components connected in networks. (It’s not much of a jump from saying we can analyze complex life-like processes into simple interacting components, to imagining that we can create complex, life-like behavior by connecting simple components—and do so in a musical context.)
Finally, the fact that there was a lack of significant opportunities on the West Coast for the support and presentation of art music made composers in the Bay Area more likely to embrace experimental aesthetics. Since the audience was sparse, and opportunities for an actual career futile, why not spend one’s efforts following the potential of fantastic ideas, rather than worrying about the practical applications of those ideas within traditional musical domains? Why not extend experimental ideas about communal composition, algorithmic music, and emergent network behavior to the new electronic technologies? Why not risk creating music that may not succeed at being intelligible music at all? —Tim Perkis and John Bischoff
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1. Dense Drone, home recording, October 14, 1980. As in several of the tracks, Perkis’s station is configured as a virtual network of nine units, each of which controls one voice, and decides what to play next based on the state of its neighbors and the recent activity of Horton’s voice. The pitches are chosen from a set of just-intoned possibilities. Jim Horton’s station plays part of Max Meyer’s psychological theory of melody, using a different 29-tone-to-the-octave justly intoned scale. Bischoff’s program constantly checks for the accidental occurrence of certain harmonies between Perkis and Horton, and marks or emphasizes the relationship by chiming an accompanying chord. This activity is typical of one of the basic strategies of League music: using mutual automatic “listening” or data communication to provide a layer of coordination to the “sub-compositions” that each player develops independently and brings to the group context. All sounds are square waves, filtered and run through analog envelopes in Perkis’s case, and paired in slightly detuned chorusing voices in Horton’s voice.
2. Martian Folk Music, EAR Magazine benefit, March 28, 1980. As on several tracks, Bischoff’s station is running his piece Audio Wave, which does direct 8-bit audio sound synthesis with the KIM-1. Audio Wave was developed as a solo performance composition/instrument, and adapted for use with the League. The original performance gestures of pressing hexadecimal keypad keys are simulated by parallel port lines from Perkis’s machine, which is running code similar to track 1, but with envelopes set to form percussive pulses rather than longer tones. Horton’s melodic engine is interrupted and sent into glissandi by triggers from Bischoff.
3. Finnish Hall, February 18, 1979. In this early recording, the founding trio is joined by guest Paul DeMarinis, who was filtering both Gold’s and Horton’s voices through a band of computer-controlled analog filters. Gold was running his “Terrain Reader” KIM program, in which a virtual traveler traversed a loop through a virtual terrain at audio rates, and the elevations of this terrain defined an audio waveform; changes in this orbit were controlled by Gold manually and from data lines from Horton and Bischoff. Bischoff is running an early version of his pitch matching program (see notes for track 1).
4. Oakland One, home recording, October 18, 1980. In a variation on the basic setup described in track 2, Perkis has added another voice of analog timbral punctuation, while the data lines connecting players in each station have been reconfigured to cause starts, stops, and repetitions of each player’s activity, defining a different and unpredictable phrasing structure. Analog tape echo has been added to Horton’s voice.
5. Radio Air Check 1981. Perkis has added Phase Lock Loop hardware, which attempts to harmonize with Bischoff’s voice, at a pitch interval set by computer control. It does so imperfectly, sometimes failing to find the pitch and sliding in an attempt to lock on.
6. Oakland Three, home recording, May 25, 1981. Similar to track 5, with Perkis tracking Horton instead of Bischoff.
7. Oakland Four, home recording, May 25, 1981. This is an example of the mysterious emergence of patterns of influence beyond the intentions of the players.
8. Blind Lemon, November 26, 1978. This recording is from the first concert performance under the “League” name. Gold, Bischoff, and Horton are performing software similar to track 3; Behrman is running a computer-controlled analog filter bank, which silently sweeps through the Horton and Gold’s audio signals, and emits “knocking” sounds and pulsed chord sequences based on the frequency distribution detected.
9. Pedal with Twitter, New College, EAR Magazine benefit, March 28, 1980. Live concert recording. (Voices are inattentive audience members!) Horton plays a slow bass-line.
10. Oakland Two, home recording, October 18, 1980. Here Perkis’s state machine orchestra (see notes for track 1) plays in a scale derived from Javanese gamelan, with Bischoff’s Audio Wave tracking pitches.
