David Lee Myers

David Lee Myers is a composer who finds himself in the awkward position of being unknown to the general public because he doesn't make "pop" music, and unknown to academics because his works don't fit into the "cultured" tradition. However, he is known to inveterate experimenters, to those who aren't content to simply rework ideas developed within a current, to those who are a little discontented and a little solitary and regularly undo what they've just done for the pleasure of starting over.

In 1988, he stated that

True electronic music does not imitate the classical orchestra or lend well worn melodies the cloak of unexpected timbres – it exists to evoke the hitherto unknown. And it comes from circuits and wires, though I do not believe that electronic sound is “unnatural”, as some people might.

Diaag Precisely these considerations led D. L. Myers to practice an extreme form of music, almost entirely devoid of input: no score, no keyboard, no sound to process, no synthesis system per se. A music in which both sounds and structures arise not from the pressing of a key or the playing of a chord, but from the spontaneous interaction of a series of circuits connected to each other in feedback that the human being merely controls.
At most, the input is used only as an excitation source for the feedback circuit.

What Myers was doing, already in 1987 with analog equipment, was feedback music.

Positive feedback in an electroacoustic chain has been experienced, with discomfort, by anyone who has used a microphone and inadvertently pointed it at the speakers. Soon, a piercing whistle is produced, while the engineers rush to the mixing desk to turn down the volume.

This problem, better known as the Larsen Effect, occurs because the microphone picks up sounds that are amplified and sent to the speaker. If the same sounds, coming out of the speaker, are picked up again by the microphone, amplified, and sent back to the speaker, a positive feedback loop is created, entering a closed loop in which they are continuously amplified until they trigger a continuous, high-volume signal.

As you can imagine, feedback is a bit of a terror for all sound engineers, but in certain circumstances it can be controlled, and if it can be controlled, it can also become a stimulus for an experimenter.

It should be noted that this isn't Myers' idea. In the days of analog electronic music, this effect was used in many contexts. I also used it in an installation in 1981 (it was called "Feedback Driver"), but I think everyone tried it in the 1980s, with mixed results. My first memories of this technique date back to the work of Tod Dockstader, a relatively little-known American researcher and musician, although some of his music ended up in Fellini's Satyricon.

What distinguishes Myers from the others, however, is that he has turned it into a true poetics. He doesn't use feedback to elaborate something, he doesn't start from synthesis algorithms, but he connects a series of devices (mainly mixers and multi-effects) in feedback and by varying the volumes on the mixer (which at this point becomes his "keyboard") and changing the type and depth of the effects he creates a series of evocative sounds, always balanced between the charm of a music that moves in an almost biological way and the total disaster of out-of-control machines.

Myers is undoubtedly a virtuoso, but unlike the traditionally understood virtuoso, he doesn't dominate his instrument. Rather, he indulges it, trying to push it in a certain direction. Here, composition consists of defining a network of connections between devices, and technique becomes aesthetic.

Furthermore, as seen in this short video, Myers also becomes a visual artist, developing a series of tracks created from his own music.

Reference website: pulsewidth.

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