Electronic playground

[Times photos: Jamie Francis] Henry Hsiao, 25, of the group Trace Elements works his computer last month at the Avant-a-Thon at Central Stage in St. Petersburg. The Tampa Bay area has become a regional center in the electronic music scene.

By TONY GREEN
© St. Petersburg Times
published March 3, 2002

Detroit had Motown. Seattle had grunge. The Tampa Bay area has the electro scene: Local artists are creating cutting-edge electronic music on campuses and in clubs.

ST. PETERSBURG -- It isn't the usual Tampa Bay area concert crowd this Saturday evening, what with the mix of musicians, intellectuals and students milling around Central Stage. But avant-electronic band Trace Elements isn't your average act.

A sax player spills out post-Coltrane sheets of sound. A violinist keens an atonal melody. Leader Henry Hsiao, a 25-year-old native of Taiwan, underpins it all with layers of sound conjured from his instruments: a laptop computer and a mixer. In a tough market for live music, getting an audience for what some call "antimusic" is not as difficult as it might seem. Unknown to just about everyone who's not involved in the electronic music scene, St. Petersburg and Tampa are a haven for some of the most cutting-edge music around.

"There is a bit of a scene happening in Atlanta and a small one in Miami," said David Manson, director of St Petersburg College's computer music program and founder of the EMIT series. "But Tampa (Bay) is the most cohesive community I've seen in this region. Electronic music in all its various incarnations has, in fact, taken over popular culture."

Consider the huge popularity of hip-hop and electronic dance music. Computer-based music production and recording software are almost as user friendly as a set of bongos. Even musical purists, who profess disdain for sequencers, samplers and other digital goodies, have joined the digital revolution, often using computers and software to record their music or to control the sound systems at their concerts.

Evidence of the bay area's electro scene is both obvious -- the electronic serenades that pulse from dance clubs -- and subtle. The area is home to a number of DJs-producers-electronic musicians, from high-profile national artists such as Rabbit in the Moon to local stalwarts such as Jim Beckwith. Tampa expatriates -- trumpeter-electronic musician Jonathan Powell and former Magadog bassist Dub Gabriel -- have made their mark on the hip New York scene.

"A lot of people are here already, and people don't realize it," said Hsiao, who was raised in Baton Rouge, La. "Someone like Jonathan Powell, when he came back here to play, everybody was treating it like it was a big deal. The truth is, they are from here, they were just coming back."

Local experimental music showcases such as EMIT and the yearly BONK festival help foster interest in the music, as does WMNF-FM's Step Outside experimental music show. So do the music technology-oriented courses at the University of Tampa and St. Petersburg College.

But the strongest influence on the local electronic scene is the University of South Florida's Systems Complex for the Recording and Performing Arts. Hsiao went from assisting SYCOM director Paul Reller to running his own Tampa studio, Puretone Productions, recently featured in Keyboard magazine. Ray Villadonga, another SYCOM alum, and Dali Museum education director Peter Tush created Step Outside, formerly called Sonic Irritations.

"If SYCOM hadn't existed, the music scene here in Tampa would be very, very different right now," said SYCOM alum Rob Constable, leader of experimental combo Handshake Squad. "There are a lot of people walking around and producing music that we hear in Tampa Bay right now, with knowledge of acoustics and analog and digital sound because of time spent there."

Created in the early 1970s by USF composition professor Hilton Jones (he was the music director for the pregame show at the past 10 Super Bowls), SYCOM was a facility on a par with some of the best in the country. When Villadonga entered USF in 1973, the program had equipment that only top universities had, including then-futuristic gear like tape machines with quadraphonic sound and a computer.

SYCOM's original staff included some of the most prestigious names in electronic music. Larry Austin and John Mizelle, for example, were founders of the now defunct Source magazine, the pre-eminent journal of avant garde and electronic music. When Austin and Mizelle left in the latter part of the '70s, the program fell into decline until USF professor Bob Helps, another renowned composer, recruited Paul Reller to be SYCOM's director in 1990.

Hsiao, left, works on the electronics and Jim Beckwith plays percussion during the Avant-a-Thon. Hsiao runs a Tampa studio, Puretone Productions, which was featured recently in Keyboard magazine.

Reller started by updating the equipment and bringing in new talent. With a list of past teachers and associates that ranges from Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Joseph Schwantner to Tiny Tim and late punk wild man G.G. Allin, and musical outlets from opera to avant-pop, Reller is a living example of electronic music's diversity.

"I was at the University of Illinois, where they built the first electronic music studio on an American college campus," said University of Tampa professor Terry Mohn. "When I started, people thought I was a geek. Now it's cool."

One of the first milestones in electronic music happened in 1920, when Leo Theremin invented the instrument that bears his name. The theremin is played by waving your hand around an electronically charged metal pole. You can hear its eerie whine in the Beach Boys' Good Vibrations.

But electronic music draws inspiration from many different places and times -- some would include Benjamin Franklin's Glass Armonica (glass bowls mounted on a rod, played by running a wet finger along the bowl rim). Others would include familiar instruments such as player pianos -- the precursor of today's sequencing programs. Les Paul, who invented the electric guitar and multitrack recording, is considered an important figure in electronic music. So is Laurens Hammond, who introduced an organ in 1929 that was one of the first truly playable electronic instruments.

That rich heritage is easily forgotten by young students overly fascinated with software. USF's Reller says that one of his tasks is convincing his students that there is more to electronic music than the latest MJ Cole single.

"A lot of my students don't believe that a sound, without rhythm or melody, but just a sound by itself, is music," he said. "So many of the kids are into electronic music as a dance medium that they get locked into the notion of a beat. There is a lot more to electronic music than that."

Timbre, or quality of sound, is one consideration that's often overlooked, he says. Timbre is what allows you to hear the difference between a saxophone and a trumpet, a guitar and a violin, a tabla and a kettledrum. Modern technology gives musicians the ability, through timbral manipulation, to create sounds that exist nowhere but in the musician's imagination.

But electronic music's greatest challenge, said UT's Mohn, is coming up with sounds as rich as those that already exist, such as the notes of a high-quality acoustic piano played in a well-constructed concert hall.

"That's a richness of sound and complexity that takes a lot of computing hours to duplicate, because, unlike electronic music, the waveforms aren't uniformly perfect," Mohn said.

"But that's what makes the field so fascinating -- not that electronic music will replace acoustic instruments, but act as a complement to them. When you look at a synthesis of the two, you are dealing with a field that's wide open."

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