Five questions with Jeremy Bible
The malleability of sound is what really intrigued me the most.”“
- Courtesy Ian Hawgood
Over the past two decades, Jeremy Bible has built a body of brutally poignant work that pushes the boundaries of every musical discipline the Ohio-based artist touches. Whether editing together harsh but transcendent works of light and video, creating maximalist sound installations of quadraphonic immersion, or producing heady sets of drone, noise, and other sonic ephemera on record, Bible leaves an indelible mark on the experimental music scene. Behind the scenes, Bible curated the Experimedia label and online shop, distributing some of the most forward-thinking sounds from all over the globe. Before his upcoming set at Eyedrum on Sat., July 26, Bible took a few minutes to discuss his earliest experiments with sound, his quadrophonic sound installation “Collisions,” and his upcoming Fractures album.
When did you start experimenting with sound?
It was about 1994-1995. The ages of 14 and 16 were my transformative years in many ways. That’s when I really started diving headfirst into music in every way I could: helping put together and promote local shows, home dubbing tapes, and tinkering with sound and recording. It started with some old tape decks chained up, a VHS deck, some cheap keyboards, and some FX pedals. Then later, I got my hands on an old mixer and 4-Track cassette recorder. I was always more interested in experimenting with making sounds and the recording process than playing an instrument. The malleability of sound is what really intrigued me the most. Any instruments I did pick up over the years were more of an afterthought to that, in order to utilize them in the recording process. I started viewing the speaker itself as the instrument.
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You’ve worked with Jason Henry quite a bit. Would you see yourself collaborating with other artists?
Certainly, but probably not as extensively as I did with Jason. Our several-year collaboration was an excellent learning experience for both of us. And feeding off each other. It was a very natural process. The transformation of that project happened so rapidly. Our first performances together were very much in the techno realm, but we rapidly and naturally evolved together into more esoteric sounds, as we were both interested in exploring.
Overall at this point I am most interested in exploring my solitary practice in further depth, but I do occasionally get together with local friends to record. A tape coming out later this year with Hausu Mountain arose out of recording sessions with my friends Curt Brown (a.k.a. Black Unicorn) and Joshua Novak (aka Faangface) who record together as Mouse Cop. I have been toying with the idea of inviting a large crew of regional artists over to record individually and then editing, processing and mixing them into a sort of mass collaboration album. Just last night (Sat. July 19) my friend Ron Slabe (Pyrosonic) who lives just down the road came over, and we had a little improv recording session. It went really well, so we plan to get together regularly after the summer. He has been making music since 1980 and released a couple tapes in the ’80s. He kind of specializes in some really intricate, world-influenced electronic music and really knows his stuff. I’ll actually be putting out a tape of one of his old unreleased albums sometime in the near future. We actually met through him ordering from the shop. Before I even met him I was dropping orders off on his porch since he was nearby.
You recently released the Collisions tape, which initially began as a quadrophonic sound installation. How did you conceive that setup, and what does it entail?
Much of the raw material actually came out of a 16-channel semi-generative evolving sound installation utilizing small battery-powered speakers and over 5,000 individual sound files of varying length. The first of these installations was done for the Cleveland Museum of Art for the opening of their new contemporary galleries in the summer of 2009, which also featured Dan Deacon, Emeralds, and DJ Rekha playing out in the courtyard. I spent a year visiting and recording sounds from the museum and construction site, hardhat and all. That one started out with 10 speakers. Then I continued to slowly develop that process further, designing new sounds to add into the pool.
In early 2013, I took over a large room at the RCN Cave in Akron, adding in six more speakers and video. By the end of that show Karl Vorndran from the RCN cave asked me to perform at a special quad show he was curating the following month. So it was more of a quad live performance incorporating many of the sounds used in the installation work. I was pleased with how that turned out so I took the project back into the studio and mixed it down to two-channel using binaural processes to maintain some of the surround aspects of the original quad piece. The contrast of the work between electronic synthetic sounds and field recordings of nature is highly influenced by the combination of sounds that fill my own life… between living on a farm and the music I am deeply entrenched in as I commonly meditate on the natural sounds around me here on the farm.
What’s your instrument of choice, in the studio and live? What does your live show look like for this tour?
As previously mentioned, I have the view of the speaker itself as instrument. In front of that I see the mixer as my most important instrument. Most recently I’ve been working primarily with a sampler/midi sequencer, which is also controlling a custom modular system and a poly synth. In the recording process I also work with mics, field recordings, prepared speakers and instruments, software, and more. I like using a bit of everything in that process… exploring the best of all worlds, I suppose. For this tour I am presenting my work with the aid of my mixer, sampler/sequencer, modular synth, and poly synth, then a laptop strictly running my original video work, manipulated and synced by the audio. So that is the palette I am working with this time around, and within that I try to leave things rather malleable on the fly. There is quite a bit of improv involved. Each performance is a bit different and evolves in different ways from performance to performance. I try to maintain a level of surprise for myself, in order to keep it interesting for me by striving to maintain a balance between control and chaos.
Can you tell us a little bit about your upcoming Fractures release and how it differs from your previous work?
Fractures is another project that spun out of what started as an installation. I enjoy the generative installation approach because once it’s set I can sit back and enjoy the work and be surprised just as a member of the audience would. So it’s become a big part of my process that leads into and gives me inspiration towards my recording projects. Fractures further explores my view of the speaker as instrument but takes it a bit further by translating the vibrations of the speaker cones and the air it pushes into physical objects. What it involves at this point is several speakers lying on their back so the speakers are facing upward. I prepared several old analog 8 & 16mm projection film tins by filling them with small objects such as nails, thumbtacks, bearings, and bits of wood, and placed them on top of the speaker cones. I then fed primarily low frequencies into the speakers in order to vibrate the tins and their contents. I then used traditional mics as well as piezo/contact mics inside the tins to capture and mix the sound. The routing was fairly complex, using multiple mixers before and after the speakers. I consider this approach in its infancy at this time, but earlier this year I completed two extended pieces that will be released as two volumes via the Entr’acte label over the course of the year ahead.
Jeremy Bible, Brainsurgens, and Psychic Drivers. $5. 9 p.m. Eyedrum Art & Music Gallery. 88 Forsyth St. www.eyedrum.org.