Part 1

Name: Alex Keller
Nationality: American
Occupation: Audio artist, sound designer, curator, teacher
Current release: Alex Keller's 2022.0914 Untitled performance is out via his own bandcamp page.
Recommended books as a starting point into the topic of sound:
R. Murray Schafer - The Tuning of the World
Barry Truax, ed. - Handbook for Acoustic Ecology
Robert Snyder - Music and Memory
You Nakai - Reminded by the Instruments
Douglas Kahn - Earth Sound Earth Signal
Dan Lander and Micah Lexier, eds. - Sound by Artists
Iannis Xenakis - Formalized Music
Mirna Belina, ed. - Living Earth
Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, eds. - Wireless Imagination
Barbara Ellison and Thomas Bey William Bailey - Sonic Phantoms
Cathy Lane and Angus Carlyle - In the Field
Bernie Krause - Wild Soundscapes

If you enjoyed this Alex Keller interview and would like to hear more of his music, visit his bandcamp page. He is also on Instagram. 



Can you talk a bit about your interest in or fascination for sound and what sparked it?

One of my earliest memories is of laying under a rickety piano and pressing the damper and sostenuto pedals, exciting the harp so slightly and feeling the mechanical resonance through the instrument. I also recall nights of insomnia when I’d hear the horns of distant freight trains sounding like they were in immense canyons - this in a flat gulf coast suburb of the US.

As a child I listened to music on the radio obsessively, and imagined in detail the kinds of vast spaces the artists must have been in to create the lush reverberation I heard. The conventional bands I played in as a teenager ended up becoming noisier and noisier, and the feedback bits at the end of the songs crept forward and eventually consumed the idea of the song itself.

I felt empowered that a unique space and time could be created from inexpensive and misused tools, and still enjoy that approach today.

There can be very deep/high/loud/quiet/grating/delicate sounds and many more. Are there extremes in sound you are particularly interested in - and what response do they elicit in you?

The sounds I am attracted to seem to be on the extreme ends - the delicate magnification of nearly silent sources, and the physicality of extremely loud sources. I love trying to associate a recorded sound with its imaginary source, and imagining what it would be like to be in the room with it.

In 2015 Sean O’Neill and I were brought in by the Fusebox Festival and Church of the Friendly Ghost to handle sound reinforcement for Christine Sun Kim’s Bounce House, a two day continuous series of pieces created with no sounds over 20 Hz. I contributed a piece as well. I really enjoyed the visceral nature of the piece, feeling it through my whole body, but wore hearing protection diligently.

Eventually I took the hearing protection out and discovered that the frequencies were so low that they were felt, not heard.

[Read our Christine Sun Kim interview]

That sort of exploration - finding the edges of what can be heard through the ears and what has a greater physical reach than that, and experiencing an unique sound environment in an unique way - really compels me both sensually and intellectually, and informs the way that I work.

Deep listening, audiowalks, meditation, listening with both eyes closed, and the like can sharpen our sense of hearing – which techniques or experiences have worked for you to create a greater awareness of the sound aspects of music and our environment?

R. Murray Schafer’s work introduced the idea of an ear cleaning exercise to me, as an opportunity to become more aware of the listening process, and to learn to listen, not just hear.

The most effective one I’ve found is plugging my ears thoroughly - not easy - for five minutes or more, ideally with no other sensory stimuli. The sensory deprivation achieved gives me the opportunity to, for a while, hear the world with fresh ears.

In general I try to create time to not listen to anything, and find my concentration and attention span refreshed as a result. Soundwalks can be very valuable in learning about the soundscape of a particular place, but they are intentional listening and require a lot of concentration. Again, an ear cleaning exercise can help sharpen that attention.

Where do you find the sounds you're working with? How do you collect, and organise them?  

The work I make these days usually involves field recordings of both near and far sources, studio recordings of very small sounds, or electromagnetic recordings using consumer and handmade pickups - often mounted onto gloves.

I’m daunted by media management at the moment so I am currently flying by the seat of my pants as far as organizing files. I still use this standard for file naming; when I get back to better archive management it will have come in handy:

[yyyy]_[mmdd]_[location]_[general source]_[specific source]_[any other notes]

This helps with sequence when sorting by filename. Software that tags media assets can be very useful but can also become a pastime in and of itself.

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools?

On a gut level I am compelled to avoid using professional or semi-pro music equipment to generate sounds, though I use high-quality pro gear to mic, record, and edit. I’m driven to harken back to Xenakis and Tudor - the absence of the kind of tech we take for granted challenged them to strive and innovate with what materials they had on hand.

And I like the egalitarian aspect of working with mispurposed and handmade equipment. Also, I am weary of gear trainspotters during performances. To me discussion of commercial equipment is a distraction from concept and technique.

As of right now I’d say transducers are the most important thing to me. Microphones to capture acoustic sound, and various devices like guitar pickups, transformers, and simple copper coils for translating the electromagnetic spectrum to audible voltage, all present exciting ways to contain sounds based on what source I select and how I approach it.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of one of your sounds, pieces, or live performances that's particularly dear to you, please?

In 2015 I released Black out. The piece fulfilled my desire to hear what happened when I pushed elaborate, monotonous studio recordings into a large, reverberant space and did a high quality stereo recording of the space.



At the time I was averse to the idea of releasing recordings with sounds that had not existed in the world before the release; I wanted the inconsistency and life of sounds that had actually pushed air around.

Black out was divided into a few sections, punctuated by recordings of gasps. I played the piece back (diffused, in the language of acousmatic composers) and recorded it at the former Salvage Vanguard Theater on an off day.

Once the recording was done I tried to approach mastering it. The recording was murky, dark and weird, causing speakers to belch and jump with the low frequencies that built up in the room. After some frustration in trying to tame the sound I realized that the weirdness was not a problem but instead the salient point of the piece.

Sound is unruly and a very powerful force, low frequency sounds are extremely hard to control, and sometimes the verite approach of just capturing what it is that happened is the best possible version of a piece. I think I cut one channel by .5 dB; other than that the finished recording is exactly as recorded.

In relation to sound, one often reads words like “material”, “sculpting”, and “design”. Do you feel these terms have a relationship to your own work of and approach towards sound? What are the “material” qualities of sound?

I try to find non-visual metaphors to describe individual sounds and resulting works, both to be pedantic and because visual metaphors don’t take the passage of time into account. They can be effective for describing sound vertically, as in a specific instant.

A lot of my sound work is not so intentional (the resulting sounds are the result of a process such as electromagnetic transduction, or incidental field recording) so I don’t usually set out to create something with specific aesthetic qualities, at least in any given vertical moment. I focus more on how they occur over time. Performances tend to be loosely scored but largely improvised between important moments.

The phrase "riding a fader" comes from live sound reinforcement, where an engineer uses an analog mixer to carefully manage a very dynamic signal. Performing with sound feels more like riding in real time than sculpting a fixed thing.

I support myself as a professional sound designer for video games, and I suppose sound designer is as good a word as any for that work. At any rate I keep that very separate from my creative sound work. A lot of my work in that field is describing the technical and aesthetic properties of digital audio to colleagues in other disciplines. I try to use as accurate terms as possible rather than metaphors, as (for example) the word compression can be used to describe dynamic compression or data compression.