One of my favorite “electronic music� pieces wasn’t really created with electronic instruments. In fact, you’d never guess the source of the sounds from just listening to the track. And once you do learn its origin, it’s hard to believe it. My friend Wobbly shares this view. Allow me to explain.

A Warm Buzz
Sitting outside Eyedrum, a performance space in Atlanta, while waiting to play a show on a hot summer evening, I was treated to the incredible song of the region’s cicadas. The cycling hum resembled filtered, rhythmic sequences from a synthesizer, and they were astonishingly loud considering their acoustical origin.

On this particular night there seemed to be a single critter in several trees, which were about 50 yards apart from each other. Consequently, I was hearing a cicada symphony in surround, each phrase swelling in and out of silence like the ebb and flow of a tide. It’s a sound you don’t hear in Northern California, where I live.

Although it occurred to me that I should be recording the event, I didn’t want to miss a single minute by dashing inside the hall and digging through my bag for my gear. Instead, I allowed myself to sit back and enjoy the waves of sound that made the balmy sunset more tolerable. Sometimes you just have to live in the present.

Two months later, I’m sitting on a porch in the Bay Area listening to a field of crickets. There are so many, in fact, that it sounds like rhythmic sleigh bells in the distance. Soon, an owl adds its voice, as if punctuating the beginning of each verse of a song.

Again, to get up and find my recorder meant I’d miss something special, so I stayed put. (I’ll have to start carry the Sony at all times, I guess.)

Nature vs. Machine
This week, I was the one generating the noise during a festival performance in Oakland with composer/performer Alessandro Cortini. He was premiering the new instrument he developed with Scott Jaeger/Harvestman called the SuONOIO, while I was using the Blippoo Box, a portable analog synth.

Afterward, several in the audience noted that our music sounded as if it was natural in origin. As Cortini bit-reduced his samples, and I worked with my oscillators and filters, the results were definitely crepuscular. Not intentionally, of course, but the idea that there can be a resemblance between natural and synthetic sounds seems to be in the air again.

You can easily find examples of this idea in the works of some of electronic music’s pioneers. Certainly, David Tudor’s classic work “Rainforest� is an example of how the idea can be used for inspiration, not to mention the early recordings of Pauline Oliveros, such as “Beautiful Soop� and “Alien Bog�, which were inspired by the nightly action happening in the frog pond next to her Mills College studio.

After my performance, as Wobbly did his DJ mash-up of classic electronic-music recordings, I followed up on this train of thought with Swiss musician Simon Berz. He, too, heard the sound of insects in that evening’s performance, but related his own cicada story: During a visit to Japan a few weeks earlier, he was amazed to hear how intense (as he described it) the cicadas near Tokyo sounded. He explained that, in the stifling Japanese summer heat, the frequencies were so loud and so high pitched that it felt as if the heterodyning frequencies he was hearing were beating inside his head. Berz noted that this experience, and others like it, have inspired him to perform his electronic music outside so that it would resonate within a richer environment than the sterile concert hall provides.

Under the Ice
As I chatted with Berz during Wobbly’s DJ set, I noticed the sounds of my favorite recording coming over the speakers. It’s a track off the album Antarctica (Miramar, 1998), a collection of recordings by Douglas Quin from the icy continent. During his visit, Quin used a stereo pair of hydrophones to record the vocalizations of Weddell seals underwater. The results are astounding. Sweeping waves of sound—both high and low frequencies—articulated with all manner of whistles, bleeps, and chirps. It sounds like a clever remix of several ‘50s sci-fi soundtracks, with a few video-game effects added in for good measure. You can hear a bit of it in the background of this Pulse of the Planet episode.

When I tell people that the source of the sounds are Weddell seals, their ears immediately perk up. Until that moment, they took for granted that these sounds were easily generated on a computer or synth, perhaps with a bit of stereo reverb added. Suddenly, the sounds have mystery: How and why do the seals make those sounds? How were they recorded? You mean those sounds have been around for millions of years?

Yes, those sounds have existed longer than we have. And only recently did we figure out how to mimic them, not to mention accurately document them.

Variations
What I find particularly fascinating is how broad (I initially wrote “trivial�) the concept of “electronic music� is to the average listener these days. For those of us who were around when there were major commercial boundaries imposed between so-called experimental new music and popular music, it’s surprising, yet increasingly common, to see an iPod playlist of a non-musician that includes works by the likes of Pierre Henry and Karlheinz Stockhausen next to Boards of Canada, Merzbow, the Beatles, and Miles Davis. It’s easy to take it for granted, even though Internet music delivery and the ubiquity of portable music players has accelerated the expansion of people’s listening tastes.

Authoritative books by all manner of “specialists� continue to be published about the issues surrounding electronic music. Yet, in reality, the history and aesthetics are of a much wider scope than either the professors or hipsters writing these books really acknowledge (or can even articulate). Of course, one could argue that the instant you record something electrically it becomes electronic music—a feeling that I subscribe to, which makes me reluctant to take many of the current books about the subject seriously.

That’s where Wobbly (aka Jon Leidecker) comes in. Leidecker is a internationally acclaimed sound-artist who has a uniquely satisfying perspective on recorded music. His list of collaborators reads like a Who’s Who of genre-defying artists—Matmos, Negativland, Otomo Yoshihide, Thomas Dimuzio, People Like Us, the Tape-beatles, Blevin Blectum, Zeena Parkins, and Huun-Huur-Tu. Leidecker’s Web-based audio series Variations is a forum for his perspectives on music, appropriation, and collage. But it quickly becomes clear from the presentation that what many people think of as experimental sound is in fact part of the larger world of popular music for listeners in the 21st century.

I recently asked Leidecker by email about the origins of Variations and what he hopes it will achieve. “The whole series is the result of a commission from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona,â€? he writes. “My friend Anna Ramos manages their Website’s podcasts. I had mentioned to her that I’d wanted to put together a casual overview, but she gave me the opportunity to really take it to the next level as a series.

“There have certainly been other documentaries about this, but most of them are from one or the other side of the fence that divides art and popular music. So there was still a need for a chronological history that threaded together the formal classical experiments by Charles Ives and John Cage with the novelty collages of the Happiness Boys and Buchanan & Goodman, and then followed the same threads over to the Hip Hop and Industrial musicians who found a home for those concepts in pop music—a history from someone who’d given all these things equal amounts of listening time.

“I grew up buying those Hip Hop Scratch Mix bootlegs and then discovered Negativland’s radio show in 1985 as a channel-surfing teenager, so I was in a position to follow the genre right as it went pop, as well as follow it backwards as the early works started getting reissued. The collage genre inherently demolishes those high-art/low-art distinctions, once you realize that what you’re searching for in music is a space where seemingly irresolvable states can be connected: The distance between Ives and Public Enemy just vanishes.

“The early episodes were the most fun—so many quiet pioneers, we get four hours into the program before we even get to the invention of the digital sampler. It’s trickier now; the myopia of being a practitioner myself and having many of these people as friends automatically pulls this towards a subjective account—never trust a history that takes you all the way up to the present moment. That being said, the aesthetic is now so commonplace, 2010 does seem like a good place to land things. The last episode is going to be more about politics than music.�

Considering the current state of affairs in the world, that is an episode you won’t want to miss.

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