Mark Dresser has been a UCSD music faculty member since the fall of 2004 and has wowed audiences in the San Diego community ever since. It is no wonder, having toured and worked with such important figures as Anthony Braxton, John Zorn and countless others, that Dresser produces such crushing sounds. The concert repertoire of the last academic year was best highlighted by the duo of teacher and world master Bert Turetzky and Mark Dresser as the two accomplished bassists played a 40-plus minute set.
This year’s slew of performances is just as promising. The UCSD music department starts the year with Dresser headlining the “UC Electro-Acoustic Improvisation Quartet” October 2 at 8 p.m. in Warren Lecture Hall Studio A.
Guardian: So what should audiences expect from a concert titled “UC Electro-Acoustic Improvisation Quartet”?
MD: Well, first of all, this quartet will consist of two musicians and two computer musicians. The computer musicians will be triggering sampled sounds from the computer.
Then there is a jazz pianist and composer who will be playing hyper piano. Hyper piano is a rather elaborate technique of the pianist not just playing the piano in the usual way but also hitting the strings of the piano and bowing the strings and throwing balls and various objects at the strings. It’s different from John Cage’s prepared piano stuff. The piano here is fairly unprepared.
As for me, I’ll be playing a bass. I’ll be having a kind of mutant bass actually, something that has custom-made pickups installed in it that will amplify frequencies you don’t normally hear.
G: I’ve noticed that you’ve been working with electronics and electronic musicians for a long time, since at least the early ’80s. For example, on the work “Invocation,” you worked with electronic musician and composer Lamont Wolfe. Of course, the digital age has greatly changed the way things are done over the years. How do you feel that your work has been impacted with the digital revolution?
MD: I really am still an acoustic musician. What I amplify on the bass are sounds I call microsounds. These are the sounds that I can hear when practicing but no one else can hear. I use microphones or various means to amplify and blow up these frequencies and make them have a real musical presence. That’s a road that I’ve been developing for over 20 years. I started out with microphones and then crude bass-guitar pickups. Now, I have magnetic pickups embedded into the neck and I can access a whole range of new sounds. So I’d like to say that one person’s noise is another person’s music. I find that parts of the sound that people used to consider defects have become a really rich part of the vocabulary and you can find meaning in them.
