I have been working for the state of California as a "KEY DATA OPERATOR" for, as of this writing, more than 6 years [and this was written in 2001!]. This is a fancy, government-manufactured term for sitting in a chair and typing for 40 hours a week.

First off, I will never claim to be a "Computer Guy" (and the first to claim that I'm lousy at math). But when our office in downtown Sacramento moved to a brand-new office park about a half an hour out of town, our antiquated computer system was updated to Windows NT 4.0. After having worked on such criminally outdated computers for so long, this was a godsend. We had our own e-mail accounts, we could listen to CDs in the CD-ROM drive (as opposed to battery-powered Discmans [this predates mp3 players, can you believe that?]), and we even had access to the Internet. (This last little privilege didn't last long--which I still believe I'm solely to blame for. It's not that I was the only one spending more time on the web than working, it's just that I got caught.)

Yet, despite all these cushy new perks, I eventually got bored again, and spent more time looking for something to do. Besides work, of course. And that's when I discovered the SOUND RECORDER program.

I had used WAV-based recording programs before (around the time of Windows 3.0), so I knew enough to know that SOUND RECORDER was (and still is) a cheap little program. But, having nothing else to do (ahem), I began playing around with the only WAV files I could find, the Windows System Sounds. In about a month I was creating my own little noise pieces using only the dings and chimes and gunshots and clicks and all the other cheesy sound effects provided with Windows, and effecting them by looping, reversing, adjusting the pitch and frequency, increasing the volume to the point of hard-clipping distortion, etc.

Then I had a revelation (or as close to one as I'd find at my job, anyway): I could modify two of the sounds to resemble KICK DRUM and SNARE DRUM sounds, then mix them in at strategic points in the piece to create a "BEAT". I had no idea yet how far this primitive "step-recording" process could go, and this is as far as I went; six short noise pieces and a trip-hop version of "The Microsoft Sound" (the default "Start Windows" sound).

Eventually I tired of listening to my little noise "suite" over and over, and went back to just listening to CDs. And then one day (why hadn't I thought of this before?) I figured out how to adjust the recording input to CD AUDIO, and record sounds from CDs. This, as they say, was the turning point.

Bringing in five or six different CDs a day (from a collection that, at the time, numbered around 800), I had a vast library of sounds to sample from. And I did—I sampled many little bits of audio that I found interesting. The original compositions were nothing more than rapid-fire, linear collages with no sense of structure, theme, or traditional composition--sort of like randomly changing TV channels. But, art for art's sake, I just liked the way they sounded.

Then, after sampling a bass drum sound (from Primus' version of "The Family and the Fishing Net"), I remembered my earlier excursion into the process of MATHEMATICALLY CONSTRUCTED RHYTHMS. I then sampled my own snare drum (from my band, Las Pesadillas [defunct]), and figured out how to make a "beat".

A look at the list of individuals I've sampled reveals Negativland, one the most visible sample-driven groups, whose careers have become centered around the battle of found-sound appropriation vs. entertainment big business. Their book FAIR USE: THE STORY OF THE LETTER U AND THE NUMERAL 2 is THE place to go for sampler's rights and copyright-infringement paranoia gone berserk.

So where do I stand on the issue? Well, reading more from the copyright law, "the amount of substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole" is a major factor in whether a sample is covered under fair use or not. And since almost all of the samples contained here are extremely fragmentary (and because the songs are so short), I think the SOUND RECORDER project is 99.9% legal. I come to this figure because of some of the drum/rhythm loops, where an entire measure (or the point where the rhythm "loops") has been sampled... but because of the "looped" nature of the original, it might seem very similar, when only a small portion has been sampled. It will be up to industry lawyers to determine which samples I'm talking about... god forbid.

Or is it 99.9% illegal? Even considering that some samples have been distorted beyond recognition (and not just in the overloaded signal sense; I refer to the changes in pitch, reversal, extreme fragmentation, etc.), all of the material has been copyrighted by someone else, with only four exceptions: samples from Las Pesadillas, Old Man Homo, Knifethruhead, and Show Us Your Karate--four bands in which I have partial copyright ownership. So if the SOUND RECORDER project is NOT covered under "criticism" and "comment" as defined by the Copyright Act, this project is 99.9 % ILLEGAL. But if anyone's paying attention, I'll state here that the whole thing is a "criticism" on the nature of commercial music, and I'm "commenting" on its redundancy. Got that? Good.

First of all, you might be wondering why most of the tracks here hover around the 1-minute mark in length. The reason for this is very simple: just as an increased sample length effects the ratio of how far the slider moves (didn't I mention that?), the longer a sample becomes, the bigger the file size, and therefore the more of our computers' resources it sucks up. Working with (or even OPENING) a file takes longer, the longer the file is. Eventually, my slow work computer will just refuse to complete the action, and state that there's not enough memory. So brevity is important here... and besides, one minute is a good length for something created from 99.9% of other's work.

Another reason for brevity is the bit rate and frequency of the files—at 44,100 Hz, 16 Bit Stereo, WAV files are pretty huge. to transfer the sounds from CD and still keep the highest sound quality available has been very important to me, but at such a rate, the files become VERY big, VERY fast. So anything beyond two minutes is just too large to keep on the system (this is my WORK computer, after all).

One of the only "rules" for the SOUND RECORDER PROJECT is that I purposefully decided not to use any sounds that I created myself. The only possible exceptions to this are samples from the aforementioned bands I'm in, but those don't count because I wasn't creating those sounds for this project.

Additionally, a lot of the material here is backwards. This evolved from my fascination with backward sound and "back masking", and the fun I've had uncovering "hidden messages" in records since I was young. A lot of the time it's something redundant, but for every time it was something cool (an actual "hidden" message, however silly), it was all worth it. So I've included a lot of backward samples, in almost all of the songs... this compilation was designed to be just as enjoyable when played backwards. No fair letting all the forwards people have ALL the fun.

And here's the Big Question: "why?" If I was going to create an all-sample project, why not just wait until I got home to use a far superior editing program?

First of all, something created using such minimal tools (all of which come from Microsoft—the Sound Recorder, the Windows Calculator, the Windows Media Player, etc.) derives a kind of purity, an exclusive technique. The drum "sound", especially--samples from many different artists, combined, creating a very unique sounding "drum set" (with about 10 bass drums, 15 snares, etc.).

And, of course, most were just created for my own amusement. I've always been a creation-junkie, and this provides my fix at work. But as time went on, and the songs got better, I realized that all this work could be erased, instantly, by my various superiors (who, as yet, don't know that I've been doing this the whole time). I would have no record of all the tedious, obsessive work I had created. The devastation I would've suffered in that event would be tremendous--I still maintain that I would have quit my job on the spot, had it happened. Really.

So I borrowed a portable mini-disc recorder (from my friend Alex, always supportive of these kinds of personal obsessions), plugged it into the sound card, and began to "bring my work home". Only when multiple copies of each song existed in various places did I delete them from the office computer (I was quickly running out of room on the hard drive). The reason for this "manual evacuation" was simple--there was no other way to do it. E-mailing the files home was impossible, since the frequency and bit rate are so high and therefore the files so large, that no server would process them. (I did calculate "splitting up" the files, but the maximum size I could send through e-mail resulted in 17-second fragments.) And it would have been equally impossible to install some kind of CD-burner at work... so an easily hidden mini-disc recorder did just fine.

[NOTE: I have since discovered an even better, easier way to get the files home with NO sound degradation: I simply signed on to AOL Instant Messenger at home, and then again at work, and sent them through the Direct Connect feature.] [This essay also predates flash drives; and although I did have a rather large portable hard drive at the time, my job did not see fit to equip me with a Firewire card.]

Not originally intended for any audience outside of myself, I feel it is a work that deserves at least one cursory listen, if not regard for the amount of craftwork involved. True, you could re-create these compositions on more advanced equipment, but the attempt at creating beyond the limits of the means given…therein lies the charm of the SOUND RECORDER PROJECT. I could do more with more…but I've made so much with less. And besides, wouldn't you rather have your tax dollars going to the arts?