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 SAUL STOKES
I first heard about Saul Stokes
when I stumbled across a review of his music. It sounded very
interesting, so I set about trying to locate some of his music. This
was easier said than done. Finally, I did manage to track it down on
Napster, and even then it was only a few songs that were available.
The music was fantastic. Lush synths glided smoothly over abstract
beats, conjuring up imagery of futuristic cities and distant worlds.
This is only one way to describe Saul Stoke's music. I finally managed
to obtain a CD of his music, and I found out that he has quite an
extensive catalogue of music which can be ordered directly from his
website. Another fascinating detail I discovered about is the
instruments used in making the music which he designed himself. In
know way does it resemble a traditional synthesizer. All of this
sparked my curiosity so, I emailed him about doing an interview, and
he graciously excepted. Here is the complete interview that includes a
link to his website and a new song from his forthcoming album Fields.
1. When did you decide you wanted to be a musician? What moved you
into the realm of electronic music? What were your influences early
on?
If I think back to my earliest inspiration, it would have to be my
grandmother. She has an incredible collection of organs, leslie
speakers, rhythm machines, old Marantz tape decks and even a tape
reverb. When I was a young kid she would let my brother and I sit on
them and play around. It all seemed very high tech at the time. I was
learning trumpet and violin, but I was always much more excited to sit
down and play with the sound possibilities of these organs when I got
the chance.
My dad had a really wonderful little wurlitzer mechanical/electric
piano and a univox electric keyboard. I remember listening to The
Talking Heads and Grace Jones while pretending I was playing keyboards
to the songs. On a visit to his place when I was about 7 or 8 years
old, he had an Oberheim synthesizer sitting in the corner. What a
blast that was! I actually remember going back to grade school that
next week and telling my music teacher about the synthesizer while I
tried to make sounds with my mouth of what it sounded like. It was
pretty tough to keep learning a traditional instrument like the violin
with synthesizers around. Too many sound possibilities at your finger
tips. Later, my dad started taking me over to a friend of his who
actually had a music studio with gold records and the whole deal. He
had written a song for Elton John, was a working jazz musician, and
was quite successful doing commercial jingles. I couldn’t believe how
much music equipment one person could have.
As all of this was happening, I was growing up under the influence of
my older brother. He was bringing home Lp’s of happening late 70’s,
early 80’s electronic stuff like Depeche Mode, Telex, Bill Nelson,
Tears for Fears, OMD, YMO, Fad Gadget, etc. Again, I found myself
pretend playing quite a bit and just wondering what was behind this
music. How where they doing this? I especially remember Bill Nelson’s
Living in My Limousine. I actually use to lay in bed with headphones
and dream about performing this song at my school show and tell. How
funny is that? We’re talking 6th grade here!
Around 15 or 16, my brother started buying a few pieces of equipment
including a little 4 track, a casio synth, a simple sequencer and a
doctor rhythm. With this, I started to sort of put together the puzzle
of what it took to make this kind of music. I began to perform in
bands in Tacoma Washington. I was actually in a band for quite some
time with DJ Donald Glaude and some kids that ended up making it
semi-big during the grunge faze that was happening in Seattle and
Olympia. All the time, I was always playing keyboards, programming
sequencers and listening to any electronic music I could find. At this
stage in my life, the Vancouver music scene was happening and I was
floored by what Netwerk records was putting out. Moev, Skinny Puppy,
Chris and Cosey, and especially Severed Heads changed electronic music
for me. I use to drive up to Vancouver and hand deliver demos to them.
I’m sure they got a good laugh listening to these. Perhaps my greatest
influential album to this day is Severed Head’s Come Visit the Big
Bigot. I have several pages of hand written letters from Tom Ellard (Sev
Heads) describing his studio.
Turning 20, I moved to Germany briefly and had the chance to
experience the techno movement that was happening in about 92. I came
back blown away, pulled out the Ensoniq sampler I had been paying off
for years, and began to really start recording music alone, and with a
partner, performing live at local raves and night clubs. I also use to
write a monthly column back in the early days of XLR8R magazine
focusing on techno related equipment. In December of 95, Future Music
Magazine contacted me about a demo I had sent them. They featured a
track on a cd that came with the magazine, which is how I eventually
got in contact with Hypnos Recordings. Hypnos has been releasing my
music ever since.
3. Tell us a little about the synthesizer you developed. It looks
more like a construct of alien technology, than a musical instrument.
How difficult was it to develop this instrument? What advantages does
it have over traditional synthesizers?
It’s perhaps a little much to say that I actually developed the
circuits themselves. For the most part, I have two hand forged synths,
a large old school sequencer, a tubular performance instrument that’s
been coined the "cocktroller" (it’s quite phallic) and an 8 key Buchla
Touch Plate keyboard I built from scratch. The synths are a hodge
podge of early electronotes circuits that were never developed
commercially. Added to this are circuits from Moog, VCMS3, Serge,
Buchla, TB303, Terrence Thomas, and some other stuff. I have a degree
in Industrial Design and during my college years had access to a great
metal / wood shop. I applied for a research grant and was awarded some
money to built a synth and control device. The cocktroller is
completely my own concept, very simple as a circuit, but incredibly
useable as a performance device and made of machined aluminum. I have
a wonderful hand made wooden case that the cocktroller resides in when
not being used. Much of my album Abstraction was recorded live using
this performance controller. I always make sure to stress the point
that I’m not an engineer and really know nothing about electronic
components. I learned just enough to understand simple circuit
diagrams, how to etch copper boards, how to identify a part, and how
to order parts. Truely, what my instruments have going for them is my
lack of understanding of the engineering aspects. Meaning, most of my
circuits I have built end up sounding nothing like what they would
sound like if they were built properly. Thus, the originality of the
instrument is greatly enhanced because of the way I built them. When I
perform live, I always get to talk to a couple of tech guys after the
performance. When I open up the back of instruments and show them how
bad you can successfully build a circuit their mouths hang open. I
rarely leave my studio with my homemade instruments on out of fear
that one of them is going to catch on fire. Lately, the best piece of
equipment I have built is an 8 key Buchla Touch plate contoller. Small
copper keys create different control signals according to the amount
of finger contact to the key. This was a major project but it’s just a
beautiful little device and incredibly musical. One of the coolest
things about it is that since it’s just copper your touching, there’s
nothing to press or push down. You get instant notes from your touch
and the inflection of the notes can change just by how much of your
finger touched at that moment. So, you can play it sort of like a
tabla, very fast and accurate. Not too long ago I finished a project
called Thermal Transfer, a collaboration between myself and Vir Unis.
I used this touch keyboard all over this album.
The advantages with these instruments are numerous. They have an
incredibly strange sound to them and are truely modular with no fixed
routings. The extremely volital nature of ciruits means they sound
slightly different every time I turn them on. The biggest compliment I
get when playing live is, "oh my god, I didn’t know a synthesizer
could sound like that." This is pretty special because most of the
people who attend my shows dabble in synthesizers. There’s a strange,
slight dullness that resides over manufactured and soft synths. I
can’t place it. It’s the difference between real fresh creamed butter
and margarine. Margarine’s fine until you’ve tasted real butter. I
think there’s certain amount of musical arithmatic that exists in the
circuitry that’s missing from the digital realm. I’m not anti-digital.
I heavily rely on sampling and a digital multitrack to make my music
possible. But, there’s definitely a quality of sound that these
instruments make that could never be "virtualized."
4. What types of sounds do you like to sample
All of my music is created from my hand forged instruments. I spend
tons of time multisampling string pathches and rhythm patches during
the process of writing a song. I rely heavily on an Akai mpc2000 for
rhythmic and sequencer work, an Akai S6000 for string type sounds, and
I have a hard drive based multitrack. I’ve been reluctant to bring an
actual computer into my studio mostly because I earn a living working
on a computer and I can’t imagine coming home and going right back to
a mouse and screen. I have a slight case of carpo tunnel that I deal
with so my computer resides in my apartment rather in the studio. When
I finish a song, I will take the file out of the studio and master it
on the computer. Sometimes, I will do a small amount of sound
processing on the computer but for the most part I’m still using
mostly hardware. As for sounds, there’s been one or two occasions
where I’ve used an acoustic drum sample from a sample cd because my
instruments couldn’t produce what I was looking for. Everything else
originates from my instruments. Speaking of samples, this year
England’s AMG Sample CD company will be releasing a sample cd of 400
electro percussion sounds extracted from my instruments.
5. We spoke earlier about using computer based synths. You
mentioned that you had not moved forward into that area, but were
looking into it for future use.
I’m hoping that with the new usb / firewire controllers that are
coming out, I would eventually be able to move over to a computer,
using a dedicated work surface instead of a mouse and keyboard. It’s
really the mouse and keyboard that keeps me from upgrading. I would
still rely soley on my instruments for sound design but would look
forward to a more complex sequencer, multitrack and effects.
6. Any particular programs that interest you?
Yes, max interests me a bit. So does Reaktor. It seems like there’s a
certain sound that comes out of these programs because a lot of the
laptop music being made right now sounds similiar. I don’t know if
this is a result of people jumping on the current band wagon or if
there’s a limit to what you can do with these programs. I haven’t
tried them out yet.
7. The titles of your songs have a futuristic theme to many of
them. Are you an avid Science Fiction fan?
I’m actually a huge Sci-Fi fan. In fact, before I sat down to finish
this interview I went to see William Gibson read a chapter from his
new book Pattern Recognition. I’m a reader of Stephan Baxter, Greg
Bear, Larry Niven, among others. However, lately I’ve been trying to
squeeze out the desire to push my music into the Sci-Fi realm. I’m
much more inspired by city scapes and people watching. My album
Outfolding was recorded in Philadelphia in a 3rd floor apartment right
off of South Street. Much of the inspiration of this album came from
watching people walk down the hot sweaty streets of summer in old town
Philly. Today, I prefer simple titles that often have to describe
complex music.
7.How do you feel about the issue of downloading music for free?
Does it help or hurt the music industry?
Our genre is small and over the years I’ve gained quite a group of
friends. Not too long ago I found 3 of my albums on a webpage with
album covers and photos. What was really bad about this was it was
actually a promoter friend of mine that thought he was doing me a
favor. On another occasion a friend wrote me to tell me my music was
being uploaded to some electronic newsgroup. I was given the email of
the person with the list of albums of mine that he had available for
download. When I wrote him to ask him to stop I received a nasty/sweet
letter telling me that he loved my music and that I should just get
use to it and be thankful that he was doing this for me. On both of
these occasions, people thought they were doing me favor. I really
don’t mind if a person wants to trade a few songs of mine but trading
entire albums and thinking your doing an artist a favor is a little
off center I think. On the flip side, I sell so few albums that I
really don’t make any money off of my music so why should I worry
about it? Perhaps I should just be happy that a few people are willing
to take the time to share my music. As you can see, I’m sort of torn
two ways on this subject. I find the cd as a "package" is
inspirational to the music process. It’s the end result of a lot of
hard work. And it’s expensive when you’re doing such small runs. I
would hope that people would keep this in mind when they’re trading
music.
8. You are known foryour live performaces. How difficult is it to
translate your music from studio to stage?
I need to get back to performing live. I just had my first child so
I’m taking a bit of a break from doing performances for a while. Ever
since I started putting out cds on Hypnos Recordings, I’ve had to
split my live work from my studio work. I don’t like the idea of
performing a show using pre-recorded methods. Since I use a lot of
multitrack and sampling in the studio, there’s no way to really move
this over into the live realm without cheating the concert goer.
Instead, when performing live I’ve focused on creating improvised
electronics on my hand forged instruments. The result is a completely
different form of a electronic music, perhaps more drift / ambient /
experimental rather than studio / song oriented. This is why the cd
Abstraction, which is remixed live recordings, is so different
sounding from Zo Pilots or Outfolding, or my latest album Fields.
Before a concert, I spend a lot of time sampling drones or strange
flowing loops. Then, I will place these samples across my mpc’s pads
along with a few percussion hits. I use this as the glue that binds
the improvised work I do with my hand forged instruments. For those
interested, my last performance in San Francisco is available on CVD
or VHS from drummachine.com .
I’ve made available to readers of this Movement Magazine interview, a
song from my upcoming album Fields. You can download a high quality
mp3 of the track Iris...My Observatory from:
www.saulstokes.com/iris
Discography:
Fields, 2003,Hypnos Binary (coming soon)
Thermal Transfer, 2002, Hypnos Binary
Abstraction, 2001, GreenHouseMusic
Edge of The Forest, 2000, Wood Case Collectors Series
A selection of Live Music, 2000, Wood Case Collectors Series
Outfolding, 2000, Hypnos Recordings
Zo Pilots, 1998, Hypnos Recordings
Washed in Mercury, 1997, Hypnos Recordings
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