I first met Xopher Davidson in the late nineties at the Bloody Angle Compound studio, located in a corner of San Francisco that feels like nowhere. It is, literally, where the sidewalk ends, and, like in the Shel Silverstein poem, a place where the unknown is imagined. In this cold warehouse on the edge of the city (named for a Civil War battlefield that was the scene of the bloodiest hand-to-hand combat), I worked on programming computers for synchronized playback of multi-screen video, and Xopher worked on tracking, mixing, and mastering albums that were well ahead of their time with artists such as We, MixMaster Mike, Christian Marclay & Otomo Yoshihide, Iannis Xenakis, Mark Eitzel, Diamanda Galas, Tipsy, his own record vs. antimatter, and many other projects, mostly for release on the Asphodel imprint.
But what did he do outside of the cramped control room in the Compound? There is no way an engineer could work with all this gear and talent and not be inspired for his own work. As I expected, there was, and is, much more.
Amidst these hyperkinetic, cutting-edge productions, Davidson's own music, under the moniker "antimatter," seems almost unaffected by this activity, reflecting his quiet intensity, providing a soundtrack for his paintings and sketches. "This might seem odd," he comments on his listening habits, "but I don't really listen to much new stuff unless I'm working on it. I listen a lot to old vinyl and CD-Rs people hand me, so I always feel out of it when there's some new band I'm reading about in [a] magazine." A recent job mastering a local Mexican/Cuban synth-pop duo from San Francisco may mix what is hip and what is in front. "I think Pepito's new record, Everything Changes, is very fine and should be taking the world 'by storm' right now."
This listening vacuum is understood with a deep look in his personal "treatment center", littered with his paintings and photographs, modified thrift store masterpieces, Casios, semi-classic analog synthesizers and drum machines, toy noisemakers, military surplus, scientific castoffs, and music studio detritus that form the heart of his garage studio. The loose organizational principle behind most of the gear is the control voltage. Ranging from zero to five volts, this current is connected from one machine to another, warping signals into organic, living sounds, finally captured to a laptop. Such an open-ended process can be challenging to condense and finish. "When everything is possible and available it certainly becomes a question of what to exclude and when to end. I think it is instinct that says 'enough' or, I guess, when it stops gnawing away at you. Then the final master is burned and you are met with a rosy glow and a sort of slight depression at the same time. Ultimately, nothing but heartache."
Visually striking, the old military and scientific instruments stand out in the clutter of the treatment center. Large knobs in large boxes move actual gears and metal to translate a turn of the wrist into a frequency shift. "Mass is good. Weight, I think, comes across in the sound. Instability and drift, perhaps the last thing you want in your mastering chain, are assets to some electronic instruments. So, I'm quite happy when I can hear the electronics, and the artifacts of their design, as movement within a sound, like electrons washing along the banks of the river."
The CD Function Generator acts as the silent boatman on this river. Xopher teams with noise musician Zbigniew Karkowski (whose music once cracked the toilet in the Bloody Angle Compound studio when mixing for the 12-channel, five-subwoofer sound system), all fundamentals fall below 100 Hz. A recording felt as much as heard, only the occasional distortions provide a reason for your tweeters. It was "a record waiting to happen," he says. "Once you get hooked on low end, there's no turning back." The addiction started when his friend Steve Smith turned him on to dub "some 15 years back, driving around in his dub truck" followed by an opportunity "to spend long hours with a Moog Series III some nine or ten years ago, swimming in subsonic, infrasonic, sound."
Mixing engineers are often bouncing among monitors, portable stereos, home stereos, and car stereos for the proper balance of sound, but Function Generator presents a new challenge: most sound systems on earth would be incapable of producing much sound at all. "On a typical shit system, you might get a faint murmur at low volume. Then if you turn it up, it's the great reducer; it will shred an inferior stereo. One down, ten million to go!" To mix, he relied on Dynaudio nearfield monitors and Grado headphones. "Neither of these really shake it up, but are closer to what a typical playback system might be able to do. [We] intentionally [gave] up control, knowing it will sound different in every room." Indeed, in my cluttered room at home, Function Generator creates its own percussion section, subtly rattling closet doors and loose cabinets.
His latest release, vs. antimatter, vacillates between minimal soundscapes and loop-based frenzies, perfect bliss and corrupted errata. There is an unmistakably painterly approach to the music and composition. Sounds unfold, obscure, then reveal something new, like a brush dipped in many colors and slowly drawn across a canvas. Sound sources range from piano, guitar, radio, records, and surplus military oscillators, treated with a variety of analog and digital effects, mixed and matched in Pro Tools.
In an upcoming follow-up to vs. antimatter, Davidson comments, "I was looking for a way to re-release the cassette-only trilogy reflector, primer, number, and, at the same time, construct an introduction to the sound world of antimatter," for which he has a term, "the sound system beyond."
"What started as an exercise to integrate these 2- and 4-track compositions with the sounds I was working on at the turn of the century then really became its own entity somewhere in the process. Some of it sounds like my 15-year old recordings, which I think only proves that you never really learn anything. There are also more sounds from the treatment center's signal generators as well."
His live performance, engineering, mixing, and mastering credits complement and diverge from the complex tangle of the treatment center. Onstage with RAJAR, Xopher plucks one piece of equipment from his studio and joins five other musicians onstage to sonically condense the ether of radio waves that constantly surrounds all of us. An improvised realization of John Cage's ideas for composing with radios, "it's sort of a free for all — it can be very good or very bad." It is not entirely without a plan, however, as a performance is usually guided by a structure of "moving from the real into the abstract and from the FM band into the short, medium, and long wave band." Patience is rewarded at a RAJAR performance. "I think it can be really great sounding when it comes together, and the performers and the audience seem to all know when it is there." It is not unlike an expanded conceptual version of many people's experience with the radio: first, the dial is examined until you find something you like, and stasis is reached when you find a sound you like. Their Oakland Bay Area performances have yielded hours of material for whittling down into CD, documenting all of the "good parts."
In his most complete example of merging visual and audio interests, Davidson and longtime collaborator David Kwan created the Peripheral DVD. Not your everyday rock video or imagery set to music, Peripheral explores both material and conceptual crossover approaches to sound and vision. Kwan explains, "Since both Xopher and I come from a visual arts background and training, we're inclined to approach sound with painterly concerns and to incorporate broader artistic traditions such as film and installation." The project started when Kwan and Davidson were invited to perform in the Mills College concert series with a ten-month lead. Instead of spending this time overworking a new piece, they decided to let nature take its course. "I started the purposefully slow compositional process by burying some 16mm stock and educational films in my backyard," says Kwan, "specifically in a spot where all of the neighborhood cats seem to enjoy pissing".
In the meantime, their respective sets of wartime-era oscillators were employed not just for audio, but recorded as a video signal through a time-base corrector, providing an inexact but direct link between audio and video. This signal translation "can provide the basis for an entire evolving landscape, unfolding slowly over time but still with an indelible presence." After about eight months, "the film was unearthed and transformation was breathtaking," explains Kwan, and finishing work began, editing all of the various audio and video material, mixing and transforming it in After Effects and Pro Tools. The result is a stunning mix of abstract material that is irrefutably linked to the audio, coordinated with highly evident timbral and impulse cues.
Mastering presents a more subtle challenge, with less room for "equipment malfunction" than Davidson's own productions. His mastered audio seems to have a characteristic, clean midrange that gives an intimacy to the sounds. His focus is on "the inherent qualities of a recording, so what matters is the material itself, the quality of the recording and what the work has to say. So, a bad record is still a bad record, but thankfully, I don't run into too many of these. I work on a lot of somewhat experimental electronic projects where the sound is sort of malleable, and I usually find something cool to bring forward by a small amount, which is maybe all it takes."
In exploring the diversity of projects that Xopher Davidson has been involved in and created, it can start to feel like the colorful tangle of patch cords on a modular analog synth. The connections and diversions of his work, collaborations, and approach to music may seem confusing on first look, but become immaterial once you hear the sound that comes out.
