Copying Machine Music Can Be Downloaded in Its Entirety at (Slight Return)
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STEFAN HELMREICH has elsewhere asked scholars to reflect on INTERVIEWED BY WALKER DOWNEY past projects, my below interview with REVISITATIONS Helmreich dives back into the finely textured world of Xerophonics and its myriad influences. Xerophonics: Copying Please Xerox and share it. Machine Music Xerophonics: Copying Machine Music can be downloaded in its entirety at (Slight Return) https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00686 The ubiquitous workplace photocopier, with WALKER DOWNEY: Let’s discuss the its rat-a-tat clacks and circular whirs, almost conceptual genesis of the project. As I dares the sleep-deprived graduate student understand it, the idea first came to mind or nine-to-five office worker to find something while you were hunched over a Panasonic like a groove in its alien drone. Anthropologist photocopier in the offices of NYU. Stefan Helmreich’s Xerophonics project, released STEFAN HELMREICH: More or on CD in 2003, through independent label less—though there were earlier data Seeland Records, calls the photocopier’s points, no question. I’d been fascinated bluff and actually makes music of its sounds, by photocopiers since I was a kid, running stitching together richly rhythmic (and off homemade comic books for friends, sometimes perversely danceable) compositions and, along the way, discovering all from the sonic profiles of common models. the weird mistakes these devices could Helmreich employed a modest arsenal of tools help me make. When I got to graduate in his construction of the thirteen tracks school and found myself spinning on Xerophonics—copying machine sounds off rafts of copies of grant proposals, were captured in situ with a Realistic Minisette- class readings, and other stuff, I 20 recorder, and these recordings were rediscovered some of those odd effects. processed and manipulated with an Ensoniq More than that, though, because I was EPS sampler—but these pieces unfold now often photocopying really long with a seductive intricacy. Xerophonics discloses documents, I began to tune into the a rich sonic microcosm at work in the range of rhythms these machines could photocopier: one usually left to warble on the generate. I became fascinated by the periphery of awareness. Never has a Xerox repeating sonic effects of processes such DocuColor 12 sounded this funky; never as staple sorting, auto-tray switching, has a Panasonic FP-7742 so convincingly rivaled double-sided copying, and more. Then, early industrial music. yes, one day at NYU—where I held Xerophonics has been rattling around in my a postdoc position before coming ears for several years now, and during the to MIT—I found myself considering conception of Thresholds 47, it loomed large in these sounds as possible compositional my mind; here was a project dedicated to the elements. Some of reviews of the sampling of the punishingly repetitive sounds Xerophonics CD tagged the results as of copying machines: an effective infinite regress “dance music for the disaffected office of repetition. In the spirit of our issue, which drone,” “grindcore for fanzine formatters,” STEFAN HELMREICH is Professor of 1. Selena Hsu, “Review of Xerophonics,” 13; Ethan Smith, “Is It Live, or Is It Anthropology at MIT. He is the author of Splendid Zine, 2003, last accessed April 1, CopyMax?” WIRED, March 2003, 61. Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in 2003, http://ww3.splendidzine.com/review. 2. Hillel Schwartz, “De-Signing,” Critical Microbial Seas (University of California Press, html?reviewid=32573443113111984; Quarterly 43, no. 2 (2001): 57–59. 2009) and, most recently, of Sounding the Magazine staff, “Review of Xerophonics,” 3. Kenneth Goldsmith, “Sounds for the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology Careless Talk Costs Lives, March/April 2003, Future Present: Not All Glitches Are of Biology and Beyond (Princeton University 37; Christopher Weingarten, “Weird Accidents,” New York Press, June 18–24, Press, 2016). His essays have appeared in Record: He Watches Channel Xerox; 2003, 46. Critical Inquiry, Representations, and The Wire. review of Xerophonics,” CMJ, March 2003, PART V Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00686 by guest on 24 September 2021 “surprisingly danceable coffee-break suggests?). The photocopier’s status as disco,” and “motorized cacophony.”1 a living relic appealed to me (fig. 1). Those all seem right to me, since I was I also, as I got deeper into the project, seeking, in part, to work with and became interested in the wider amplify some of the repetitive rhythms archaeology of photocopiers. Gathering of everyday office and academic life. the sounds of machines to sample— WD: It’s a great “origin story,” because that which I did using a tape recorder, another experience—of rote copying, stapling, and living fossil—I undertook a kind of field printing—has been universal to most academic survey of machines around Manhattan. and professional spheres for, what, the last half The NYU machines turned out all century? There’s a quiet, quotidian relatability to come from one company, Kinko’s there, but of course, the project works to blast machines from another. One could map that open: the sounds that usually slide beneath regions of the city—I became particularly the register of attention are made strange fixated on Chinatown, Midtown, and through “displacement” and “amplification” (to Harlem—by cataloging their populations use Hillel Schwartz’s terms).2 of copying machines. So, if there’s SH: Yes, what are photocopying sounds? a culture of the copying machine—to What do they make us think about adapt Schwartz’s “culture of the copy” as we distractedly take them in? And how phrase—there’s also an institutional might displacing and amplifying them— sociology that shapes which machines putting them on an album like end up where and when.4 Xerophonics—help us learn about them? WD: I invoked Schwartz’s work earlier because One of the early reviewers of the album, you included a quote of his from The Culture Kenneth Goldsmith, writing in the of the Copy, which you just mentioned, in pages of the New York Press, read the the original liner notes to Xerophonics (fig. 2). project—alongside [The User]’s Symphony You’ve also, though, turned to his work on #2 for Dot Matrix Printers (2002)—as or around authenticity elsewhere, dialoguing a sign of nostalgia for a time before the with his 2001 “De-Signing” essay in your clickety-click quiet of laptop typing 2006 Grey Room article “The Signature of and laser printing. He heard Xerophonics Life.” Can you speak to how your academic as an historical “commentary on the work might have informed this project? phenomenon of writing made audible,” Were there threads in your scholarship in suggesting that it harkened back to the early two-thousands—on simulation and Erik Satie’s use of a typewriter in his 1917 Artificial Life, for example—that fed into “Parade,” or Leroy Anderson’s 1950 its development?5 “The Typewriter.”3 I think that’s right, SH: Maybe. But I didn’t immediately that the project was about the weird think of Xerophonics as having any displacement in time and history that connection to the anthropological work many of us feel at photocopiers these I was finishing up at the time on Artificial days, when so much of the rest of Life and the computer simulation of our document lives are about soundless biological systems, though it wouldn’t be PDFs or emails that depart from difficult to say that both projects were our virtual mailboxes with those weird about cultures of machinic replication— simulated whooshing sounds (are we of documents, of theories about vitality. supposed to be hearing paper airplanes, Still, other intellectual curiosities— as the accompanying “send” icon mostly about music, sound, noise, fig. 1 Above, Photograph demonstrating an early Below, Joseph C. Wilson with the Xerox 914, the xerographic printer, showing Chester Carlson first automatic office copier to make copies on 4. See Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of 5. “Whereas Artificial Intelligence attempted such things as minds.” Stefan Helmreich, the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable to model the mind, Artificial Life workers Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial (center), inventor of xerography, and Joseph C. plain paper, at a rate of seven copies per minute. Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, hope[d] to simulate the life processes that Life in a Digital World (Berkeley: Wilson, Xerox CEO from 1946 to 1966. Courtesy Courtesy of the Xerox Corporation. 1996). support the development and evolution of University of California Press, 1998), 8. of the Xerox Corporation. 182 183 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00686 by guest on 24 September 2021 “surprisingly danceable coffee-break suggests?). The photocopier’s status as disco,” and “motorized cacophony.”1 a living relic appealed to me (fig. 1). Those all seem right to me, since I was I also, as I got deeper into the project, seeking, in part, to work with and became interested in the wider amplify some of the repetitive rhythms archaeology of photocopiers. Gathering of everyday office and academic life. the sounds of machines to sample— WD: It’s a great “origin story,” because that which I did using a tape recorder, another experience—of rote copying, stapling, and living fossil—I undertook a kind of field printing—has been universal to most academic survey of machines around Manhattan. and professional spheres for, what, the last half The NYU machines turned out all century? There’s a quiet, quotidian relatability to come from one company, Kinko’s there, but of course, the project works to blast machines from another. One could map that open: the sounds that usually slide beneath regions of the city—I became particularly the register of attention are made strange fixated on Chinatown, Midtown, and through “displacement” and “amplification” (to Harlem—by cataloging their populations use Hillel Schwartz’s terms).2 of copying machines.