David Torn
The Effects of Long Term Peak UsageBy Sari Kimmelman
An engineer or musician using BIAS Peak since the program was first bundled with Vision in 1998 automatically qualifies for 'power user status,' right? If they've produced, engineered, mixed, mastered, programmed, looped, arranged, composed, sampled, sound designed, and played guitar, oud, keyboards, dobro, kotar, bass, harmonica, omnichord and loops for the likes of Jeff Beck, David Bowie, Ryuichi Sakamoto, David Sylvian, Tori Amos, Tony Levin and countless others, they should be writing their own tech column in Mix, right? And what if that person has recorded critically-acclaimed solo records, twice won Guitar Player's Experimental Guitarist of the Year award, composed the orchestral score for Theme: Murder and contributed to Traffic, Adaptation, The Big Lebowski, and The Velvet Goldmine and used Peak on nearly every project, that makes them a BIAS god, doesn't it?
Not if that person is David Torn.
"I'm not a power user. I'm just a regular Peak kind of guy," says Torn from his cozy Cell Labs studio space in the mountains north of Manhattan. "I use Peak for really hardcore edits and more pedestrian concerns like batch processing, ripping sounds from CD, and drawing out clicks and pops, but I also continue to use it as creatively as any other audio and music tool I own. Over the years I've just never lost the need for Peak."
Tripping Over God
Cell Labs, "where the clock never ticks," is where BIAS recently caught up with David during a rare break between projects. He's just wrapped up producing and co-writing three tracks for Jeff Beck's new CD jeff and working on David Bowie's new disc, expects another project with Tim Berne to be released in September, and is waiting for news about a new movie soundtrack offer and the release of his latest cinematic score, 20th Century Fox's The Order, on September 5th. Even regular Peak guys deserve a break now and then.
If you're into incredible guitar as a meridian line for textured loops and aural excursions, then you're already into David Torn. His evocative sound paintings are one of a kind in an overly categorized record industry, yet he somehow weaves said sonics into mainstream and eclectic recordings alike. If you're not already a big fan, listen to the just-released soundtrack from The Order or any of his solo projects, including splattercell ::: OAH and what means solid, traveller?, and you'll hear some of this humble Peak user's best work.
"None of the DAWs I use currently include truly detailed stereo editors, so I always go to Peak. It is stable, and I can see the waveform in all its hellish glory. Peak is made for that," David continues. "The multitrack programs, many of which started out as consumer-focused software, can't display the waveform finely enough for me to see what all is going on in order to 'fix' things. Peak has a depth of specificity that you just don't get in a multitrack program. It's easy enough to just set up multiple stereo pairs and do real basic edits and bounce and glue tracks together or whatever in a DAW, but if you want to look at a recorded sound and get a clue as to what is actually going on with the waveform, and then perhaps alter it at that level, you're never going to get handily there with a multi-purpose DAW's half-baked stereo editor."
Peak: Bread-and-Butter and Convolution
Considering Torn's uniquely layered and looped music and production values, perhaps Peak is an obvious choice. Or is it?
"Peak is pretty important to me if I'm in the throes of trying to get something perfect; well, perfect for me. I really need things to be specific," says Torn, who is about to upgrade his Mac to OSX and install Peak 4.0. "The folks at BIAS are making Peak sexier now and it looks better, it acts better, if that's possible, and it's gaining more new useful features all the time. Some of the new effects in version 4 are extremely cool and quite unique to Peak, too; what looks especially cool to me are the new convolution effects."
Torn perked right up when asked about his 'software effects use ratio' and whether he's ever employed Peak, in lieu of his trusty handheld microcassette, as a stereo 2-track recorder.
To the latter, "I never have, but your saying that reminded me that I can record directly into Peak!," laughs this affable New Yorker. "I've never thought of using Peak that way but that's not to say that I won't do so tonight when I get back to work. I do use the effects that are in Peak and I trust Peak's ability to change gain, sample rate convert, and remove DC offset. A sound has to be something that I totally, totally love already for me to not get into re-editing and further affecting it within Peak. Probably something like 30% of what I do stays the way it was, originally, and the other 70% is modified within Peak. There are certain effects I'll probably never stop doing with external, standalone equipment, but there's now this baby universe of new potentiality that we can explore within the computer using a stable and well-featured program like Peak. I once had to go without Peak for a short period of time; I found it very, very difficult to work due to the way I have my computer-working life structured around the program. Peak still fills a gap for me that is not filled by any other program."
What's New & What's Next
He's been making music since 1981, but it's difficult to think of David Torn as a 'legacy' kind of musician and sound maker. Perhaps it's categorical to not consider experimental music as 'old' in nature, but that's exactly why his music remains fresh, new, and always forward looking.
"There was quite an exciting time for the marriage of electronic and acoustic music a few years ago, with the output of artists like Yoshihiro Hanno, We, Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, DJ Spooky and DJ Shadow," he says. "Takemura, Oval, Ronnie Size, and Amon Tobin are great, too. But I haven't heard much lately from that marriage — besides André La Fosse, Centrozoon — that's caught my ear, but maybe I'm too busy writing! Perhaps, though, there's the added obstacle of the recording industry's remarkably monolithic and myopically maniacal need to standardize and package every musical expression to the point where fluid mass access to independent music is always in danger of becoming obscured."
Torn is currently considering releasing his own SPLaTTeRCeLL recordings through one of those record labels, though a decidedly more adventurous one than most. "I do like Radiohead and Sigur Ros. Like them, you'll always find parallels musically and sonically with artists who see everything that they're presenting as a passionate piece of sonic expression. Doing that, though, may be part of what gets one placed outside of those more apparently normal record company genres. There's amazing quasi jazz-rooted music around, too, where folks are playing around with the performances and manipulating their sounds so deeply. That's why I've been involved with Tim Berne's groups for so many years."
And the sonic parallels?
"WelI, I might be unstable, but I can very clearly draw lines between Radiohead and Spooky and Tim Berne's Big Satan or Science Friction bands, and I'm frequently mystified when regular listeners and the media don't seem to also mark these cross-references," concludes Torn. "Additionally, for example, there's this whole group of guitarists who are playing micro-fretted guitars with 17 notes to the octave and such which I find really, really interesting. It enriches what I hear. It makes bumps and curves rather than continuously offering flat sonic landscape. I feel an affinity with what those guitarists, Radiohead, Tim [Berne], Hanno, André, et al are doing. I can feel shared resonances in these sounds that have nothing to do with so-called idioms."