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Signal Hybrid Recursion
“MSHR: Signal Hybrid Recursion” is a conglomerate of sonic and sculptural forms cultivated by MSHR during the spring and summer of 2019. The project is centered around the entangled relationship of electronic sound and sculpture in MSHR’s work. The sculptural and sonic forms contained in this release blossomed jointly as the artists enacted algorithmic and intuitive procedures along with feedback between the mediums and one another. Images and recordings from the growths of these entities were collected, sequenced and crystalized into the format of a book, record and webpage.
The sonic aspects of this project were created by using feedback systems between MSHR’s hand made synthesizers and software instruments programmed in the computer music environment SuperCollider. The emergent sounds of these living systems were recorded and through-composed as concrete compositions.
The digital sculptures were modeled in Blender, using intuition and presence to flow with the logic of the software’s architecture. As with the audio, static images of the emergent virtual sculptures were rendered and arranged sequentially.
Throughout the development of the project, the artists focused on the intersection of the sonic and sculptural forms, emphasizing influence between the mediums in terms of procedure, form, texture and arrangement. Each step of the process involved reflection on the formal overlaps of the mediums and the ways in which their respective processes of their creation reflected one another.
The resulting electronic compositions were inscribed on paper and vinyl and compiled into a 72-page book in full color and album unit. By transferring the electronic forms into hefty formats, the artists offer an invitation to embodied people to engage with the compositions by receiving sound-waves from large speakers and turning pages of paper.
Meanwhile, a digital habitat has been maintained in the form of a webpage that hosts its own arrangement of the sonic and sculptural forms, along with an animation and a downloadable file of the album. A diagrammatic screen-printed t-shirt with a QR-code portal is available as a bridge to the domain.
Listen/View online version: http://mshr.info/SignalHybridRecursion
Order physical copy: https://www.deplayer.nl/releases/dob-101
Artwork, Music and Website by MSHR
Production by DE PLAYER
Mastered by Timothy Stollenwerk
Created during a residency at Cashmere Radio in Berlin (DE) – at WORM’s sound studio in Rotterdam (NL) and in Portland, Oregon (US). This release is part of )HRHED( by DE PLAYER; a research project for new social and artistic interfaces for sound- and performance art
)HRHED( (DE PLAYER) is financially supported by Mondrian Fund, Creative Industries Fund NL, City of Rotterdam
DOB 101 – DE PLAYER, 2020
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Birch Cooper, a biological classic, interviewed by Sean Christensen
Hey Birch, in the name of fleshing you out for our readers I would like to talk about an amazing vision into your abilities that you once gave me. To my friends this story in now legendary. I tell it all of the time as an example of how to live awesome & do things in a free & creative way with all of your life. Once i was at a karaoke bar with a pack of friends just getting awesome, and you and some mutual friends arrived at the bar. After some time a song I normally can’t sit through came on. I was ready to cast a bummed glare and I turned back and saw you, who somehow so complemented, in an incongruous aesthetic way, the vibe of “No Woman No Cry” by Bob Marley that I knew I was in store for something beautiful that would change my life! You were wearing a bejeweled baseball cap with your sandy long locks creeping out and your shirt was buttoned all the way to the top and hugged by a beach-worn denim jacket and some post-Hammer shorts. The song began and oddly the karaoke recording of that track at that bar is pristine with deep bass & crisp backup vocals. Your moment to make or break this thing was about to begin. Confidently you closed your eyes with a smile and as purple light washed your face you began to sing gently & softly in a low voice, almost like Serge Gainsbourg but more you. The words that came out were not Marley’s but your own. I believe you were freestyling a cosmic love ballad from beyond the cosmos. Love in the stars and across galaxies, you proclaimed! You would come back to Marley only for his chorus that hit just right with your back up women, who you made seem as though they were themselves being broadcast across time & space from another dimension. Or at least that’s the way I remember it. Once you were done I clapped harder than I maybe ever have. I have yet to see a karaoke performance to beat it, and furthermore few art or music performances that got me so moved.
How did you do that? I don’t think I would be sad to know it was practiced like so many karaoke performances in this city of Portland, but there was certainly something special there.
This also brings me to another question. I have listened to a lot of your recordings. Ye olde Oregon Painting Society, Slaves, The Greys & of course MSHR & your solo recording, but none of these have any vocal contributions from you, to my knowledge. There is the human voice buried within the sounds, but that voice I believe is usually one of your bandmates or a collaborator. I feel as though you would make such an amazing cosmic ride of an album with your voice as storyteller. You could be like Gary Wright’s dreamweaver enlightened. You could be the dreamweaver. Why have you never gone that direction?
I do really like singing and actually I’ve used my voice and words in a fair amount of music, Slaves, Greys, OPS and MSHR included. I sing in almost every song by the Slaves, for example, but rarely “in the front.” I think that people who only hear our recordings often think that Barbara is the only one singing because her voice is usually higher in the mix.
In music and other collaborative situations, I try to foster the emergent system that forms between the minds of the people involved in the project and try to assume as little as possible about what the structure will be like before hand. This approach doesn’t always result in pop-style singing…
I like to sing a lot when I’m by myself, but it hasn’t been my main “creative voice” recently. Playing an instrument often feels more like singing than actual singing... Lately I’ve been using my oral bioport to play oscillators, which has been rewarding.
“I was a Teacher,” the name of your solo album for digitalis, is actually a future past tense correct? You are as of this current time a teacher I hear. What do you do in the school system & are you able to integrate your skills as sculptor of object, environment, sound and cosmic mind travel into that?
The name “I Was A Teacher” actually comes from a dream that my friend Morgan Ritter had and then told me about. In the dream her cat looked up at her and said “I love you Mommy… I was a teacher.” It’s a quote, which is why I use quotations on in the album.
That story really stood out to me (<~!~>) and it felt like an appropriate title for the album. But yeah, I’ve also been a preschool teacher for about 6 years now. It’s hard to describe how psychedelic that is. When I was in college, I actually did a project in which I gave a group of preschoolers a bunch of oscillators that were controlled by the knobs on Etch-a-Sketches. The idea that I had at the time was that I would try to use something that the kids would do “naturally,” like draw on the Etch-a-Sketches, as an input~ which would be converted to audio in real time as a performance and actualization of the piece. In reality, the kids didn’t care at all about the Etch-a-Sketches and just played the loudest, highest pitch sounds they could on the oscillators. So the piece wound up working backwards from what I had imagined at first and the drawings that they made wound up being a sort of graphic artifact from the experience.
After having worked with kids, it’s pretty clear that they’re more focused on making loud high-pitched sounds than drawing with Etch-a-Sketches. I do think of kids often when I’m working on interactive parts of an installation. They seems like a good target audience and it’s always important to “child proof” things.
The idea of being a teacher has been on my mind a lot lately. I’m in a transitional phase where I may well become one over a few different honed skills or topics. This idea is interesting to me because growing up we believe that teachers know all & that is why they have that job as opposed to our parents who don’t know everything. Of course if your parents are educators — that’s a whole other thing. But later our studies get broken up and we find that people are skilled in certain topics or skills individually. Then we realize we are all human and just know and do what we can, or have interest in. So in turn being in control of a class feels funny to me. It’s loaded with questions. If you had the choice to teach people about any imaginable thing, what would you desire to teach most? What sort of structure or form would the class take? Can you give us a syllabus?
I find the idea and experience of teaching really interesting too. I would love to teach art students. I’ve imagined doing a class that explored making art collaboratively, where everyone had to start art collectives and go as deep as possible. I think that working in a truly collaborative way is incredibly important and undervalued in our culture.
Really, I like to teach anything that I’m able to teach to people who are interested in learning it. This week Brenna and I will be teaching a class at U of O about what our work flow with 3-D software is like and about our collaborative work.
Birch, Some time back you used to make these very post-modern psychedelic comics that I and my buddy Tim Goodyear were total fans of. They featured childhoods memories rearranged in foreign shapes and then placed in what seemed like your psyche battling out your struggles with work & relationships and your troubles with everyday living. Mickey-Mouse-faced ninja turtles struggling with teenage hormones. The last I recall seeing was when you produced an epic silkscreened box set of your comics for a zine symposium some time back and then shortly thereafter made beautiful prints of some related imagery on metallic paper that gave it a both metaphorical mirroring — as well as actual mirroring —effect of the subject. Do you still work in the comics format? And do these characters live on somewhere out there?
I still really love comics. As a kid I would read the dailies over and over again. Something about the medium is so compelling to me that when I pick up a comic book I instantly forget that I even have a body, but making comics isn’t something that I’ve been doing seriously in recent years. It takes so much time for me to really be present with the medium, and I have other projects that I’m more excited about right now, so it’s gone by the wayside for the moment. Working in a lot of different mediums makes it difficult to maintain a high-functioning level in all of them, so I’ve had to make some choices on how I spend my time… I sometimes feel nostalgic for the period of my life that I was doing a lot of comics, because the work felt so fluid. But when I actually read my old comics I’m usually kind of appalled and I feel really glad to be over that phase of life. A lot of that work was pretty fucked up! I’ve found that feeding off the darkest vibe possible isn’t the healthiest route. That said, I’ll probably be doing them again by next year…
You have designed & built many instruments for yourself & specifically for the use of MSHR as a unit. These are maybe some of the most dreamy beautiful creations I could ever imagine! Can you give us a rundown on the meaning, use and purpose of each of these?
Nestar 1
Nestar 2
Nestar 3
Yoni 1
SunBox
Eyeguy 1
This question could have been the whole interview!! But I’m glad that you asked about the other stuff — I almost never get the chance to talk about so many different projects in the same conversation. Designing and building my own electronic instruments has been central to my art since I started doing it, which was pretty early on. I began designing analogue electronics in order to have interactive sound in my installation and sculpture work. I’ve used interactive electronics to explore augmented reality, environmental prosthesis, cybernetic composition, biological interfaces and to try to feel out some meeting point between virtual and physical space. We did this sort of thing a lot in OPS, and Brenna and I have continued to explore these zones in MSHR.
Initially all of my electronic interfaces were designed to be engaged by a visitor to an installation, not to be used as a tool for a musician who would learn how to play them. I got started making instruments for musicians during Oregon Painting Society, and OPS eventually used them exclusively for our performances and recordings. I’m committed to the idea of starting from as close to a “ground zero” as possible in creative projects and developing from there, and I think that a good way do this is to start by defining for yourself (as much as possible) what are the systems and tools that you will use.
When Brenna and I started MSHR, we wanted to try to build from the most basic elements that we could. So, we built all new instruments with the specific intention of using them ourselves to perform and record with. We developed our sonic palette using our voices and synthesizers that I designed as our only audio sources, developed our own system of playing them and specific language to talk about the structure of the music.
I’ve used these ideas in my solo work as well. So the approach is similar, but working alone unavoidably leads to different results than collaborating directly. Recently, I’ve been learning to use the computer music program Pure Data, which feels like the digital software version of building my own analogue electronics. I’m super excited to see where it will lead!
Anyways, the names of our instruments are pretty intuitive. The Nestar series is our classic “mirrored ziggurat” form. That’s sort of where the name comes from… Mirrored Zig, Nested Face, Nested Star... R. Nesta M… =“;~{} !!
A big part of how I design instruments has to do with how their interface works. We’ve often used plants and human bodies as controllers, which I really love doing. Our Yoni synth is designed to receive input from up to six different resistive controllers and we often use it with the human body or plant interfaces. I think that touching a living being as a way to control electronic music is a really beautiful experience. The name comes from the Hindu form Yoni Linga… a biological classic.
But in the case of the Nestar series, I wanted to be able to have the instruments be able to switch between different interfaces fluidly, to be portable and to be as playable as possible. So, one thing that we’ve wound up doing a lot is using optical controllers, implanted in gloves. This interface lets us do “VR” style gestural playing, which feels really intuitive and lets us mix in a lot of dance and movement into our performances. Each Nestar is slightly different in the way that it functions, but based on the same design.
The Eyeguy is a color organ that divides our audio output into 3 different frequency ranges, which then trigger incandescent light bulbs. So what we work with a lot in our performances, and recently in our installations, is light-audio feedback using optical controllers in conjunction with the color organ.
The SunBox was the prototype for using a lot of optical controllers in a Nestar instrument that I made for Brenna to take to Europe last year. We still use it often... because WE LIKE IT! They all sounds a little different, so we like to switch between them for different things.
One of my favorite bedtime stories is when Phil Collins was once asked to do some drum workouts for Brian Eno in trade for some Genesis production work Eno had completed. In the sessions Eno had many creative directives for Phil. During this time Phil confided in Eno that he felt a creative drive that led him to think he should pursue some solo experiments & Eno told him in so many words to go with his gut on that one and be creative! Phil then, in studio with Eno, developed his signature gated reverb drum sound and went that year and made his 1st solo album.
Eventually a lot of popular musicians age and grow even more removed or out of touch with what is happening, or what has been done, or what it is to be an artist and construct something that is innovative, creative and true to the self but also speaks to people.
You have your fingers on the pulse of creativity and with no bounds. You are making work that is original from scratch. If you were contacted by Phil Collins tomorrow and he wanted to work with you as his guide & producer to get him making new material that would feel like he was truly alive & had a sense of adventure and the desire for new discovery, how would you handle it? how would you guide him? Can you give us a play-by-play of what you would do?
My work with Phil ("Pill") is private I have to keep it in strict confidence. Let’s just say that we’re just trying to have as much fun as possible. Actually, I might have somewhat of an answer to that question... “try to do something that has absolutely no hope of making any money” might be a start. But really I don't even know what his music sounds like these days, so maybe he's already doing that.
Do you think a lot about the future or are you a mind that is comfortable in the present? And how do you see things in either walk?
I’ll try to answer this question with a non-linear list:
~ I think about the future, past and present all the time. Especially the future and the present.
~ I love The Tenses (and Smegma).
~ Although I used to be primarily focused on the future, I’m now trying to prioritize the present as much as possible because it’s “where” we manifest the future.
~ Art from ancient, non-western and pre-columbian civilizations is fascinating to me.
~ TIME =%?0
~
MSHR will be performing at Gridlords at the Hollywood Theatre on Saturday, April 27. You can see some of Birch’s work here.
A free download of MSHR’s album InwardConchUpwardSpiral
