From Aural Innovations #19 (April 2002)
AI: I was reading the descriptions of your first recordings with Debbie Jaffe, and the chance process, coincidence, randomness and juxtaposition you described back then still seems to be an important part of your recordings today. 20 years later, how do you think your approach and the results has changed or evolved since those early recordings?
Hal McGee (HM): I think I've maintained my interest in those same kinds of processes and working methods, and essentially what I'm doing now isn't all that different from what I was doing 20 years ago. There are some differences. I've started mixing improvisational structures with collage structures. A lot of the things you mentioned as I got to my early studies in Dada and Surrealism, I feel like I've remained true to the same kinds of ideas. Now in terms of specifics of how it's a lot different I think I just been trying to stretch the boundaries of sound exploration using those methods.
AI: So you continue doing what you're doing and you've had different collaborations over the years.
HM: Right. And I think the collaboration thing is an important aspect of all of that because I love feeding off of other people's energy, ideas and sounds. So that keeps me moving forward I guess. Looking for new ways to mix and match those things like the spontaneity and the noise textures and the chance processes. I've always preferred collaborative work over solo work anyway. I think it's part of the D.I.Y. aesthetic. Part of working with others in sound exploration. That's a very post modernist kind of idea [laughs]. But I've always liked to work with other people.
AI: You've described your first recordings as consisting of words rather than music, and listening to all these CD's it's clear that the word is still prominent. Did you originally consider yourself a poet?
HM: Well the roots of this probably goes back to my involvement in drama and theater in high school. I've always considered myself primarily a word artist. Now this may seem kind of strange when you think that a lot of recordings I've done are abstract electronics... there was no words in them... but I guess my way of thinking about sound has a lot to do with the voice. I'm a very word oriented person. I actually spend more time reading books than I do listening to music. There have been periods where I have gone for weeks and months on end without listening to music.
AI: I guess that keeps what you're doing pure in a sense... you're not drawing on any influences from anything you've listened to.
HM: Well, I would say that the biggest influence on my recorded work is probably William Burroughs and the Dada artists. And Burroughs whole approach to material... the idea that when you're making sound recordings you are essentially working with a material that has a shape and a texture and can be manipulated in various ways is a very important point for me. And I also over the years have placed great emphasis on the idea that my recorded works are sound objects. That they have a tangibility. I like to create works that you can almost reach out and touch or feel. I'm not really trying to entertain, but I'm trying to create objects that can be contemplated. In the same way that a sculpture... walking around a sculpture and looking at it in its various aspects and all the different facets of things like that.
AI: Cutting and pasting words together, experimenting to see how words sound together... we learn our language and when we hear words we expect that someone is trying to communicate with us. So I'm curious when you work with words like that are you deliberately flying in the face of meaning or treating words like any of your other electronically produced sounds?
HM: To a great extent when I work with words I'm working with the sounds of the words. And meaning might very well be conveyed, but perhaps in spite of myself. I do see it though that my word work is expressive of my mental or psychological state. And to that extent I guess I am trying to convey something about the meaning of my experience. But I'm not spelling it out in a story or linear form or whatever.
AI: If your first recordings were mostly words was it just a natural progression to start getting into the electronics? How did you make that transition?
HM: I'm not altogether sure. With Viscera we were using some pretty primitive instrumentation. Like a Casio keyboard. We started out using those and then eventually we borrowed a Moog Prodigy. But even then I wasn't really doing any of the instrumentation or the electronics. It was only when I started doing the solo recordings as Dog As Master that I really started getting an interest in the electronics. And I guess the reason I got interested in the electronics is a lot of the same reasons that we were talking about earlier... that you can shape sounds very spontaneously... just raw sound material. And so I kind of got into the electronics because I realized that you could really create something out of nothing so to speak. And taking the properties of the acoustic world you can shape sound organisms even. I really do believe, going back to the tangibility thing, I believe that a lot of the sound works I've created are actually organisms that have a life of their own.
AI: Listening to your work it certainly seems to grow and develop. I suppose you could think of it as an organism in that sense.
HM: Right. And I think to a great extent once I've recorded the work I like to think that they take on a life of their own. And I somehow at that point become detached from the works. Once their recorded and once they've been put out as a release, it then becomes, once again, an object to me. A product I suppose. I keep thinking about this one thing that I read several years ago, and I'm going to paraphrase this badly, but something that Frank Zappa was saying that maybe an artistic product is really very simple. You take something, create it, and put a frame around it, and say this is mine and there it is. But that's kind of what I've always felt that a lot of times even the sounds that I've used were not all that important in and of themselves, but it's the combination of the way I put those sounds together and the way I treated them. And then the context of all those sounds along with the other pieces and selections on the tape or the CD that makes that work the unique object that it is.
AI: Well that leads me to a related subject. I'm not a musician, I'm a listener. And I was struck by your friend Rick Karcasheff who stressed the importance of the listener in post-modern avant-garde experimental music, and that the listener must complete the audio work by active listening. I know how I listen actively, but what did he and you consider to be active listening? Is it simply undivided attention or something more?
HM: This was a point that Rick really drove home especially in a small press magazine that we published at the time called The Active Listener, which dealt with a number of subjects... avant-garde and experimental music and poetry and things like that. But what I take all this to mean and what I got from him out of all this is that the nature of a lot of the kinds of music that you and I and a lot of your readers like to listen to, it doesn't have a lot of the usual hooks and tags that more conventional music does. I think that the listener has to create the work themselves. The human brain will always look for patterns in chaos. Like when you're a kid you look up at the sky and look at the clouds floating across the sky and go, Oh that clouds looks like a horses head, or that's a dog. Well that horses head and that dogs head aren't really there. And your perception of that is fleeting anyway. But I think that a lot of my work and a lot of the music we like to listen to, it often takes three or four listens to even pick up a pattern. To a certain extent the music has to burn a new pathway in your brain. It's like traveling back down that pathway that starts to see patterns in it. And I think the listener makes the pattern. I've had works of my own in fact that have taken me four or five months to become fully familiar with enough that I finally hear it in a real way. That it finally clicks. When I'm performing, or recording, or improvising, or whatever... to a certain extent I shut off a lot of the filters. And I just let the audio event happen of its own. Later on by shaping it and mixing it it becomes something else and then it's up to me to discover what that is.
AI: Do you have to hear it this much before you come up with something you'll release or are you talking about even after you've released something you're still digesting it?
HM: After I've released something it will often take a few weeks to get to know it. To see what the piece is all about. Or what it has become in my mind. Even then it takes a great deal of listening on my part as an artist to discover what it is I've done. And I think especially when you're in an improvisational setting with other musicians, that's the main thing that makes that kind of situation work... listening. Listen to what goes on and know what not to do as much as what to do based on what you're hearing.
AI: I had mentioned to you by email that the Wired For Sound CD stood out for me (see reviews), and you responded that it was special to you as well. Do you get any feedback from listeners as to what they get these recordings?
HM: I do get some emails from people saying that a particular CD really made a big impression on them. That it didn't sound like anything they had heard before. It's really more general. Now some people will go into more detail, but I like those responses where people are saying that it was a different kind of sound experience for them. And I think that Wired For Sound is kind of a shock in a way. Because it's almost defiantly low tech. I recorded that entire thing on one normal bias tape in a hand held cassette recorder, and I composed the entire thing on that hand held recorder. Now with all the pops and clicks and the machine turning on and off, that becomes part of the work. It's part of the sound experience. So what kind of statement is that? I don't know [laughs].
AI: Yeah, if you forced me for an explanation as to why I liked it so much, it's hard to say. On one level I felt like a voyeur following you around hiding in the bushes.
HM: Right. I take these long walks with my dog every day. Down 20th Avenue here along the sidewalk, and I just carried the recorder along with me in my hand and my little shortwave radio, and just spontaneously started cutting things into the tape. Some of the words on there are taken straight off of signs that I saw along the roadway. There's a lot of apartments here for students that go to the University of Florida. But it's just like taking phrases off of the signs in front of the apartment complexes. I'd record five seconds of me saying that and then next you'd have a blast of shortwave radio and then me just thinking off the top of my head about a thought that crossed my mind. And then here comes an ambulance down the road. It's one of those things I think where because I went back and forth through the course of several days recording over various parts and cutting in at different parts, I think there's a lot of time suspension kind of thing going on there too. Where all the moments in time over the course of me recording this become recontextualized. Re-referenced I guess. I don't know how else to explain it. That's a very personal tape.
AI: What you're describing certainly sounds similar to musical improvisation. Whatever strikes you... like a sign, you're reading it off.
HM: And of course there goes the juxtaposition thing again. Now I didn't calculate how this sound would sound next to that. A lot of it was kind of arbitrary and random. But that's where the active listening part comes in because when you listen to it you have to decide what this sound next to that means, if anything. The texture in your eardrums. I guess that kind of thing works on several different levels. I'm not sure.
AI: And again, on the highest level I guess it's going to be the clouds in the sky what do you see kind of thing as you said.
HM: Yeah, I think there's a great deal of that. And I think when you talk about works that are the clouds in the sky kind of thing, those are more open kinds of works and not quite so dictatorial to the listener. When the listener gets to take part in the creative process by discovering it, or making sense of it themselves or finding the patterns in the chaos, then it becomes more than just a mere music product. It becomes an experience that you take part in. That's essential to any meaningful art. Hopefully each person that listens to these works is going to hear something different based on their own experience and how they put the patterns together.
AI: I got a kick out of your story about performing at the Country & Western club. I was wondering if you've since had incidents of imposing your art on an audience that you knew wouldn't have necessarily sought it out or if you've since decided that it's better to focus on or target those who would be genuinely interested in what you do?
HM: Well I think that's probably the way I've gone. The few performances I've done over the years since then have been to audiences that were at least a little bit sympathetic. However, a Dog As Master performance in Pittsburgh back in ‘87 was an audience that paid to get in and wanted to be there, and yet several people in the audience, who I perceived as somewhat frightened, got up and left. That was a pretty abrasive in-yer-face kind of performance. Then I did another performance later that year in Memphis, and some people came up to me afterwards and said they've never seen anything like that before... with this kind of awestruck look on their face.
AI: But it sounds like they stuck it out.
HM: Yeah. That was a gig put on by Chris Phinney, Al Margolis and I. We did a tour in October ‘87. We went up to Boston and played on Dave Prescott's radio show. And we played in Toronto to an audience of 200-300 people. We made about $500 that night. Just doing live improv kind of things. But then the next night we played in Windsor, Ontario at a sports bar to an audience of 5. Those people were just the regular patrons of the sports bar. But The Sanctuary experience (the C&W club) was pretty interesting. I think we did feel lucky to get out of there without getting beaten up.
AI: But you did a tour. Have you continued to do live performances over the years?
HM: No, I have not done any live performances since ‘87. Everything's been tape work.
AI: Do you prefer it that way at this point?
HM: Yeah, I do. I tend to be a loner and a hardcore hermit. And there's just nobody living here in Gainesville (Florida) that I have run into that's into the same kind of music. I mean I'd love to find 2 or 3 people to do some improvisation with. But my efforts have been fruitless.
AI: Moving on to networking and publishing... I never got into networking heavily until I got on the internet. So I know the ease of finding and communicating with people by email, web sites, and newsgroups. How did you hook up with all the people you did in the pre-internet age? Was it all just by reading about them in Op and magazines like that?
HM: Right. And just writing to people. Writing long letters. Writing many letters. I'd write 5 - 10 page letters telling people about the kind of music Debbie and I were doing, and would they like to trade recordings and could we distribute each others work and various things like that. And it was all through putting a tape in an envelope with a letter and mailing it. And trying to make contacts that way. I don't know if you're familiar with the Contact List Of Electronic Music that was a major source of information back in the 80's. I think the guy's name was Alex Douglas. It was a big source of contacts between labels and artists. That was a very different deal, and very costly in its own way. We sold, traded or gave away 5,000 cassettes in three years. And dubbed them all by hand the old fashioned way. Printed up the covers at Kinkos. Cut them out and folded them. That was a lot of work.
AI: Did you sell a lot through your Cause and Effect catalog?
HM: Oh yeah. I would say that out of that 5,000 we probably sold 4,000 of them. And gave away or traded 1,000. But it wasn't a thing where you could live off of it. The kinds of prices we were charging, we weren't going to make a living off of that. And this is also a time... you talk about the pre-computer and internet... this was also the time where cassettes were actually to some extent a viable artistic medium. Of course vinyl at that time was the big brother, and to a certain extent people looked down on people who did cassettes. But let's face it, anyone could go out and buy a cassette. So I think the reason we started Cause and Effect was we were getting the idea that there weren't a lot of really good distribution services or vehicles for getting works on cassette out there. We tried to provide a centralized international distribution service. We had people in that catalog from all over. Japan, Germany, England, Scandinavia, Canada... we were in touch with a lot of people in those days, and people who have gone on to continue as pretty well known names in the scene. We were distributing early Controlled Bleeding things. We even put out a 3 tape box set of the first 3 Nurse With Wound albums which were out of print at that time.
AI: So did it all get too cumbersome, or did it die down...
HM: Well it never really died down. After three years of doing that it just became too much on a personal level. It just took up too much personal space I think, and a lot of conflict on a personal level. And this has always been true of me. My personal life is inextricably intertwined with my creative thing. I live this stuff. This is my reason for being here... these works that I put out... the tapes, or CD's or whatever. So I really live this every day. I don't record very much at all. For all the 100 or 120 different albums worth of stuff I've recorded over the years I've probably only spent maybe 10-15 days out of the entire year actually recording stuff.
AI: Looking through the Cause and Effect catalog there really were very few names that I recognized. Would you say a very small percentage of the artists in that catalog are still plugging away like you are today?
HM: Yeah, a lot of these people you don't hear about too much anymore. But these are really rare works that are listed in here. This is a glimpse at a time when people were really trying to explore and do something different. And do it in a very personal way. I think that's what I really appreciated about the cassettes is they were very personal. You could get one in the mail and take it out of the package and know that the person who made the music was the one who duplicated it in their home tape recorder, and cut out the cover and put it together personally for you. And in that way it was a very personal artistic statement for each of those people.
AI: So it's really hand crafted.
HM: Yeah. And that gets a little bit into that idea that the whole underground tape scene was in a way a new form of electronic folk art, which I expressed more in the Electronic Cottage magazine days. With an accessible medium like cassettes... and today just about anybody can afford to duplicate CDR's at home... so it's a thing where the technology has finally filtered down to everyday people in an affordable enough form that they can take advantage of that technology. And in their own way make real personal artistic statements.
AI: Do you still have your own copy of all those cassettes that were in that catalog?
HM: I have quite of few of them. I don't have all of them. There's quite a few things from those days that I no longer possess. But yeah, I have quite a lot of those. And those people, like you hinted at, will never be heard from again.
AI: At least it's documented.
HM: Yeah. Probably the person to talk to who has the most complete collection of stuff from those days is Zan Hoffman. Zan is one of those guys who never throws away anything. Zan has a massive collection of... who knows by this time... 5,000-6,000 cassettes. That goes to show you just how active that whole scene was in the 80's. And people really were into it. It was a real lifestyle almost, the whole taper thing.
AI: Well it would have to be. It's not like you could just sit down at your computer and fire off emails or upload an mp3 to your web site for people to grab. You had to sit and write letters, and package things, and go to the post office. That's a lot of time so it would be a part of your lifestyle.
HM: And I feel to some extent that something has been lost too. I mean, ultimately, that's something that, as I did, you get tired of. It becomes too much stress on a personal level. But there was nothing like getting long long letters from people in every corner of the globe. And tapes of very unique music.
AI: Let's talk about the internet. I love being able to communicate with people all over the world by email. It's so easy to get music from people. You can download a sound file. I totally understand what you mean that it's depersonalized to an extent. But it just seems to empower people even more.
HM: Oh you're absolutely right. And again we get back to the accessibility and technology thing. Anybody can get their music heard now. I've been pretty much exclusively selling my CD's on Ebay. Which is a limited thing, let's face it. But there's the potential of getting my music heard by thousands of people, or at least the potential for thousands of people to read about it for the first time. So it's amazing where you can go and the information you can find. And aside from the cost of buying your computer to begin with, it's basically free.
AI: So do you think the tradeoff between maybe things being a little less personal but having more access and being more accessible is worthwhile?
HM: Sure. I think it's all part of moving forward. Trying to find ways to communicate... faster. Without having money be so much of an issue. Sure, cassettes were easy to purchase. But back in the Cause and Effect days we'd spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars a year at the post office. And never mind the time spent going to the post office. But on the other hand, to be quite frank, I have not caught up with the whole mp3 downloading streaming audio thing at all. I just have not gotten there yet. I'm still attached to objects. This goes back to what I was saying earlier about my sound work being objects that you can look at almost... touch or feel... tangible objects. I'm still stuck on things like... I've gotta have a CD there. I have downloaded mp3's and listened to various samples and fragments. But for some reason if I don't have an object there to touch or look at it doesn't mean as much to me. So I think the tradeoff is good. It's just that... I'm stubborn [laughs].
AI: You said most of your sales have been on Ebay. Do you find that the buyers are people that know who you are or are browsers intrigued by your descriptions of the music and are open-minded to checking it out?
HM: I think that's it to a great extent. I've never setup the listings as "Hal McGee's New CD". I mean who's going to come looking for that? So I put it in under something real vague like "avant-garde electronic music" and "free-improv". So what happens then is that people are going to come to the listing for my CD indirectly... because they're looking for something. Maybe they've heard so much stuff and now they're looking for something they haven't heard before. So they kind of happen upon my stuff by searching. That's a big thing about the whole Ebay system is the search engine. And the price is low enough. I sell my CD's for $4. The risk is so low. Why not try it? It's something different. It's a CD put out by the artist himself. And I think that turns a lot of people off too. There's still certain prejudices I suppose toward homemade products. If it's not mass produced they don't want it.
AI: Well the CD vs. CDR thing is interesting because there was never a vinyl vs. homemade vinyl thing. And a homemade cassette, in terms of quality, was probably the same if not better than a commercial cassette. But there's a more obvious difference in terms of perceptions between a manufactured CD and a CDR.
HM: Yeah. But other than all the fancy studio stuff that people might have access to... a CDR can sound every bit as good as a commercially pressed CD. So I don't know why there's that prejudice. It can't really be because of sound quality can it?
AI: Nope. I think it's just a simple perception.
HM: And that gets back into that whole accessibility thing again too. And what is going through people's minds if they think... If this is not produced by a record company, can it really be any good? Y'know, that idea that something is good because a record company invested capital in it.
AI: But I don't think it's even just that. I know a lot of artists that, because it's relatively affordable, do pay to have a run of 500 or so CD's made up themselves. So now they do have a manufactured CD.
HM: And I've done that on three of mine. And those, quite frankly, a lot of times sell better on Ebay than the CDR's. It's not that strong a division. But I sold quite a lot of those Ancient Astronauts. The one with Chris [Phinney] and the comic book. People have just been gobbling that up. But I've sold a fair amount of CDR's too. About 54 so far this year.
AI: That's good.
HM: Yeah. I'm breaking even... maybe.
AI: And finding listeners you might not otherwise have found. I guess that's probably the best thing about it.
HM: Or maybe they're finding me. Once you get the Ebay thing going it's people finding you. And trying to find ways for them to find me. But I kind of like that. Because like I said earlier, that means they're looking for something. They're exploring and wanting to find something different. So that's good. I'm not interested in selling large amounts of CD's. And I don't ever care really about more than breaking even. I just want to get those sounds out there. It's what I do. It's what I live for. It's kind of like my legacy that I can leave behind.
AI: Let's talk about Electronic Cottage. In issue #2 you mentioned how only a handful of the 1,000 copies of issue #1 printed were left. As someone who started off doing a printed zine I was pretty envious of you. So was it just like the Cause and Effect catalog where you got the word out and were able to sell that many based on ads in the indie magazines?
HM: What I did before I published the first issue is I made up these flyers that said I'm going to be printing this magazine dedicated to homemade experimental electronic music. And I printed up about 5,000 of those leaflets and just distributed them in my mail. To my contacts, and they passed them on. And I was still getting mail based on those leaflets two or three years after I stopped publishing that magazine.
AI: And that makes sense because by the time you started publishing the magazine you had a huge contact list built up.
HM: Oh yeah. I basically started out with the contact list I had from Cause and Effect, and just started out sending these leaflets to all those people. Those were the snail mail days. You passed along a lot of information about your label or your recordings by just little leaflets that you put in the envelopes and mailed to other people. And that's where I got all the contacts from.
AI: You discontinued it after six issues. Did it get cumbersome or was it just expense?
HM: There just became so much of it that I couldn't possibly keep up with it. That was what we found out about Cause and Effect. These kinds of home grown efforts reach a point where if so many people become interested, usually one or two people can't keep up with the amount of work. And I think that Cause and Effect and Electronic Cottage served a good purpose in terms of spreading the word and promoting the idea of tape culture. The idea that there was a culture to it. But ultimately centralization... that was the downside of both those things. Centralization to a certain extent is contrary to the notion of individuals. In various little pockets, and their remote locales around the globe. So it kind of worked against itself after a while.
AI: I know that after nine issues I put Aural Innovations on the web. But in that case it was purely for economic reasons. And in my fifth year of doing this it's just grown so that my big struggle has just been getting people to help.
HM: I think that if I was doing Electronic Cottage now it would be a different story altogether. Because I could put it up on the web. But there was the money issue. The first four issues which were in that smaller format... the first issue paid for the second issue. It was when I got into the bigger format with issues 5 and 6 that I started having to take money out of my own pocket to get it out. I was selling quite a lot of advertising too. So it supported itself up to a point. So that was another issue that lead to the demise of Electronic Cottage is that it no longer supported itself. Numbers 1-5 were all sold out. But #6 all of a sudden didn't for some reason. It's like that effort reached a plateau where interest or the sustainability of the project had been met I think.
AI: You went on and did a HalZine too. What and when was that?
HM: I just did a few issues of that around ‘97. And that was a continuation of what I'd been working on with Electronic Cottage but from a more personal standpoint as a home taper artist. The Cause and Effect and Electronic Cottage things were international efforts that tried to cover the scene as a whole, whereas HalZine looked at it more as my personal experiences as a home taper interacting with these other home tapers and what those experiences meant as an artist and as someone living in that artistic subculture.
AI: So was it less reviews and more essays or something like that?
HM: Yeah. For instance one issue was pretty much about the trip I took to New York in 1997 where I visited Carl Howard, and Al Margolis, and Keith Nicolay, and recorded quite a lot of stuff with those people. And I went into detail about how we recorded it, and how we set it up, and the kinds of things we were trying to do, and the instrumentation and all those kinds of things. So it was talking about my recollections of those events, but also what those recording events meant to me. Or in the context of what I had done before, or what I learned from improvising, for instance, with Nicolay and those people in the Straphangers Art Ensemble recording that we did [see reviews].
AI: Did you get much response to the HalZine concept?
HM: Well it was on a much smaller scale too. I only did maybe 100 copies of each of those. And I really wasn't selling advertising per se. That was more of a personal vehicle. But I put every bit as much thought and effort into that as I did into Electronic Cottage.
AI: I sometimes get the feeling that Aural Innovations is a better tool for artists networking amongst each other than it is for getting the word out to listeners. Did you get a similar feeling with Electronic Cottage or did you feel like it really was getting people to check out new music?
HM: Yeah, to some extent I think Electronic Cottage was preaching to the converted. I know that one of the criticisms that some people had of it is that it did go into a lot of detail about the various artists and why they did what they did, and their personal backgrounds and how that affected the kinds of music they did. But some people complained that we're not reaching out to anybody else. This isn't going to convince anybody else. So to a certain extent you're right. It helped to bring a little bit more cohesion or a feeling of connectedness among the artists, and made them feel, I guess, through the context of the thing that what they were doing was connected in some way to something bigger maybe. And I think the audience for this kind of music is always going to be limited by its nature anyway.
AI: With 20 years hindsight, do you feel like you've met your dream of being an artist and living for your art? And what's kept you going after all these years?
HM: I always dreamed from an early age of living the life of the artist, and that's pretty much how I've forged my life I suppose. When I get up in the morning and have that first cup of coffee, I'm thinking about the creative things. Sound formation. When I go to work and I'm going through my 8 or 9 hours every day it's like... Yeah that's what I'm doing to put the bread on the table but I'm doing that so that I don't have to think about those material things. But always in the forefront there is the sound art.
AI: Can I ask what you do for a living?
HM: I work at a major hospital here in Gainesville. I make nutritional formulas... tube food. Liquid foods for people who are seriously ill. So that has quite a lot to do with the music making. Formulas... putting things together and whipping them up in all these strange concoctions. But before that I was a cook for 10 or 15 years. So once again I think cooking and making music are the same thing. A lot of my audio compositions have been big stews I think... soups [laughs].
AI: Any other projects we should know about?
HM: Well I'm continuing to do some collaborations. I've got another collaboration in the works, this time through the mail with Brian Noring. We've been working over the years quite a lot on mixing collage structures with improvisation. So we're working on a project along those same lines. And I'm also working on a collaboration through the mail with Chris Phinney where he is using a lot of samples that I sent him of Moog and Theremin, and he's running them through his computer programs and reprocessing them and coming up with some pretty darned interesting things.