The album Grains by Oakland, California-based musician Kristin Miltner is full of fidgety algorithmic chaos and patches of soft noise. The five succinct tracks that comprise the set manage to be rambunctious and sedate at the same time — for all that activity, when taken in stride, becomes a highly textured flow.
The ease inherent in Grains (released on the San Francisco label Praemedia) is due in no small part to Miltner’s voice, which informs several of the tracks. She sings tones that, for all the digital processing, maintain a loveliness that never gets too far from being recognizable as human.
Miltner studied music at Mills, but that was only the latest educational experience in lifelong studies that began with violin training and proceeded through two BFAs. Prior to recording Grains, Miltner teamed with musician Mark Bartscher; together, as Miba, they recorded an album, The Corplate Porblem, which, much like Grains, emphasized granular synthesis that located within samples tiny fractures of sound.
Miltner recently took time to discuss the differences between recording solo and as part of a duo, the ongoing effort involved in developing audio software patches, how her visual arts background informs her composing, and her day job designing sound for video games.
Marc Weidenbaum: The use of voice on the first song on Grains, “Grains Need Water and Sunlight,” is especially distinctive. In the course of recording that piece, did you alter the way you sang to fit the digital processing that you were applying to your voice?
Kristin Miltner: For all of Grains, I was using the software I built in Max/MSP. I know that I have set the buffers in my patch to record for 10 seconds, so if I’m singing into the patch, I try to time it so I sing a few notes or say a few words or whatever, and the whole improv lasts about 10 seconds.
Weidenbaum: Are the sounds on Grains ones you heard in your head and pursued, or ones that arose through experimentation and discovery?
Miltner: Both happen, and to answer that question specifically I feel like I should tell you about how I work. I use a specific piece of software that I wrote and am writing in Max/MSP that very much dictates, for better or for worse, the way I sound. I have been working on the same patch for at least five years and keep adding to it. I developed it to be very good at sounding a certain way — the stuttery, rhythmic theme that you hear on Grains. I like to think of it as something that cuts lacy patterns into samples and live input. There’s another abstract description of how it works by Jorge Boehringer — he describes it an an octopus opening and closing multiple doors in a very long hallway.
Anyway, inevitably, as a result of building it that way, as a result of choosing and eliminating, that’s the way I sound. We mutate each other as we grow symbiotically. I hear sounds out in the field in terms of what my patch will do to them. If another musician is playing an instrument or playing me a recording they made, or I am out in the world listening to a sound, I think about what it would sound like if I brought it into the patch. Continue reading “Patchwork”