A Degree of Randomness: A Conversation With Joseph Branciforte

Joseph Branciforte pops up on my computer monitor as we begin our chat. He’s in an austere studio chamber, pristine and wooden, with racks of audio gear and a familiar Juno-60 behind him, all by its lonesome. Are those a pair of Grammy awards I see on the shelf? It’s not the typical studio I encounter when chatting with a musician making electronic or experimental music. Besides the Juno, it doesn’t look like any studio I’ve recorded in. Mine are always a mess.

Have you ever noticed that graphic artists, especially those with a refined aesthetic, have the nicest workspaces? The idea must extend to mastering and mixing engineers of Jospeph’s caliber and scrupulous dedication. Glance over his client list, and you’ll see names that I’m sure have requirements: the ECM label, known for its consistently polished palette, figures in as a patron of services. This makes Joseph’s Greyfade imprint, established in 2019, an exciting development. We expect a bending of sonic expectations, a lack of preference for electronic and organic, music redefining its terms, all immaculately recorded and presented.

I’ve got Joseph and his studio on my monitor as we’re discussing LP2, a collaborative album with storied vocalist Theo Bleckmann. Joseph is warm, engaged, and obviously proud of his work on this record. He should be—featuring Theo’s wordless melodies and Joseph’s electronics, the album bends all expectations, blurs the electronic and the organic, and redefines plenty. As for how it’s recorded and presented, the sound of it is as stunning as the record’s stark design and packaging is remarkable. Released at the tail end of 2023, on the eighth of December, LP2 made it just in time to become my album of the year.

I should briefly explain Theo Bleckmann. He’s a vocalist and composer of incredible range (“both his pitch and emotional range,” says Joseph in our conversation) and an epically diverse repertoire. He’s a human instrument, as you’ll hear on LP2. and has worked with the likes of Laurie Anderson, John Zorn, Meredith Monk, Philip Glass, so many others. Curiously, and possibly impressively, Theo is credited with an alien language in Men In Black.

As an electronic manipulator himself—Theo submits his instrument to his own rack of effects—the voice is game for dipping in and out of familiarity. Joseph enhances and de-hances, both within live improvisation and in a post-production setting, and the results are magical. I almost wish I didn’t know anything about the who and why of LP2, as that would make its songs so immediately mysterious. What’s the voice? What’s synthesized? Are we outside? What’s electronically rejiggered? Is that a vibraphone?

The instruments on LP2 insist on being listened to as a whole rather than picked apart. This makes discernment fuzzy, especially if experiencing with mystery, but satisfying for those of us seeking something secure yet impressionistic. What Theo and Joseph have created floats around—a warm mist that’s neither comforting nor ominous but holds gentle touches of both.

My conversation with Joseph was heady and sometimes technical. We delve into his process and dig into the creation of specific tracks on LP2. In contrast to my vague, descriptive flowers above, Joseph delivered a pleasantly straightforward overview of what makes the album something special. We also chatted more than I’m letting on here, and I’m saving our short discussion about a much-anticipated future album until its release. Joseph also teased me at the end by saying, “We could talk about Master Of Puppets for an hour.” Bring it on.

I had aspirations in film and went to film school for a minute. The thing I really got into was editing and cutting, as a part of the last generation of film students to cut film with a razor. So, I’m drawn to what you do, especially with LP1 and LP2, as it strikes me as edit-intensive.

It’s interesting you mention that because it’s something that I have a love-hate relationship with—this notion of being in the moment versus editing something after the fact. And the two records you mentioned had slightly different approaches to this question.

LP1, the first record I recorded with Theo Bleckmann, was improvised and not edited on a multi-track level. It was more about selecting the cuts that were needed to make the record. There’s little in the way of post-production.

I’ve been interested in the idea of real-time editing—editing while performing. And it actually gets into the structure of how these records are built.

Inherent in the notion of looping is this concept of selecting material and having it repeated. So, even in that selection process, there’s a built-in editing function. I want to connect that to live performance and have it be part of an instant feedback loop. So, on both records, that’s happening. However, on LP2, there’s more post-production involved as well because we approached the recording process in a slightly different way.

Does live editing require more compositional structure?

The structure can be generated by the processes that you’re using. There are lots of ways to loop audio and do real-time editing. I’ve built a system using software called MaxMSP, which allows me to customize and set up the parameters of how everything operates.

The structure—loop length, the way the loops overlap, and the way I can manipulate each loop—is built into the way the looping system is programmed. So, musically speaking, it’s not necessarily a pre-thought-out structure. Theo and I never really discuss anything beforehand. We just listen to one another. But there’s a lot of structure generated by the technical processes going on with the looping.

Do you have a programming background? I’m fascinated by this process that blurs the line between artist and programmer.

Yeah, me too. I love this idea of composition extending to the notion of coding: algorithmic processes as a compositional parameter as well as a live performance tool. There’s this performer-programmer niche that’s developed over the last few decades with the advent of software environments like MaxMSP and the introduction of Max for Live in Ableton. A hybrid thing is happening.

I actually came to it rather late. I started learning about programming through Max, which I was introduced to in college. I studied philosophy as an undergrad in Chicago and saw this poster for a graduate seminar on computer music. Once I went to that class, I was all in. I transferred schools to study full-time at Berklee in Boston. They offered a program that allowed me, as an undergrad, to delve into this stuff.

But I don’t consider myself a coder. I know some JavaScript C and C++ and use them from time to time, but I’m not a professional coder. I know enough to be dangerous, and I can generally get where I need to go.

Before computers, was there a musical tradition that would be comparable to programming and artistic creation working together?

There’s a long tradition of it. You might not call it programming, but there is this notion of structure and freedom existing in certain canons of music. There is an algorithmic sense where it’s parameterized, and you can reach an aesthetic result, but the processes that are in play are strictly defined.

A lot of music that I’m drawn to straddles the divide between the hyper-planned and the more artistic, creative side of things. In my own day-to-day life, those two things are constantly in dialogue with one another, and they are important parts of the way I approach music and life.

It’s a cliche to say “music is math,” but only a few musicians are cognizant of that as they’re creating their art. But artists like yourself shine a light on that as a part of the process.

Another big influence on my thinking is the visual artist Sol LeWitt. I would call him a proto-coder. Other artists serve in this domain; you could call it conceptual art, but it’s this idea of permutations of different numerical sequences that can then generate art. A lot of his visual art consists of sets of instructions. He presented instructions to the gallery or the team at a gallery, and they executed the pieces based on his explicit, mathematical instructions.

At times, I’ve tried to explore those ideas musically. Some of my work, like what we’re talking about with Theo, is less top-down. Rather, there are processes in play and we improvise with them. That interplay is satisfying—you hear structure and musical elements recurring. There’s a compositional sense to things, but if you see how it was made, a lot of it is just a process. It’s a combination of listening and changing things on the fly and lies in this middle ground between structure and complete free improvisation.

The remarkable thing is that it doesn’t end up sounding like process music. That makes me wonder how important the process is versus the result. Some process-oriented musicians I’ve spoken to are all about the process. But, for others, it’s more important how the music ends up sounding to other people, whether they’re aware of the process or not.

I’m in the latter camp. I’m interested in the aural results. Having a very strong, clear process in play often leads to a coherence that I crave as a listener without needing to understand what’s going on at an intellectual level. The ear perceives structure and gives the music coherence. If that’s not the case, then that process wasn’t successful. That’s the way I look at it.

I implement a process that I think is going to work and sound great, and then I listen to the result. Sometimes it’s awful, and I have to discard it and move to something else. Other times, it’s close, but I realize there’s something in the coding that needs to be rejiggered to produce what I want. So it’s this iterative process where I try something, listen to the result, and then iterate through that to change the structure. It has to sound good.

How much does randomness play in that?

It’s project-specific. If we’re talking about these records I made with Theo, the process is very defined, but the input material is not. The first record, LP1, was completely improvised with no pre-recorded materials. When we play live, there’s no backing track, and all the sound is generated live. I don’t know what’s going to happen in advance. There’s a degree of randomness; it’s not pre-planned.

On LP2, we expanded to pre-composed materials, but we always improvised over them. It’s like painting and then removing stuff and then painting over it again. But when I improvise, I enjoy it the most when I don’t have any preexisting sounds. Then I’m really in the moment, and I’m able to hear something and say, “I like that. Let me loop it.” And then it loops, and then I hear something else and loop that. So, I’m in the moment rather than pre-planning a bunch of loops or sequences. That doesn’t interest me very much.

Let’s explore LP2 further. The press release states that the album was inspired by a previously discarded recording. Can you explain that?

So, I think of these two albums as one larger statement. We stumbled upon the idea of doing back-to-back albums after the first was almost completed. I spend a lot of time sequencing records and thinking through track order. I consider which tracks make it on and which ones are discarded. Often, the sequence will dictate discarding an individual piece that I love musically.

That’s an editor’s mindset. I love track sequencing, and I know that goes back to my love of editing.

Totally. I need the whole record to work as a sonic unit. I’m not a big playlist guy. I like records. I like sitting down, bringing the needle down, and listening from front to back. That’s how I’ll sequence things—like I know I want the record to open with this piece and side B to open with another one. I have a sense of shape, but it takes an immense amount of time to sequence records of my own stuff. I spend a lot of time listening to what comes first and how sounds refer back to something that happened earlier.

When I was sequencing LP1, I discovered this discarded piece, and I was like, “Man, this is great. I really wish we could cram this in.” I kept trying to do that, and it just wasn’t working. “Man, I’m going to have to lose this.” And then, at that moment, I thought, “Well, what if this one is the beginning of something else?” That was the structural device I used to let go.

I held onto that idea and had this piece tucked away after the release of LP1 in 2019. I played it for Theo a year later and was like, “I feel like we have to do a second record now ’cause this is cool.” He agreed. Then, COVID happened; that was 2020, and we couldn’t do anything. It sat on the back burner, but I always knew that the second record would be called LP2. And I knew that we had this first piece. Beyond that, it’s all new material. But there’s this bridge that begins with the first track on this new one because it was actually recorded at the time of LP1.

Was the first track used as a reference going forward? That is, did it directly inspire what came after it in the sequence?

Not explicitly. It is one of the most traditional ambient tracks on the album. It’s very tonal, beautiful, and immersive. But I wanted LP2 to be more than a rehash of the first album, so it needed to go somewhere new. We knew that track would be a starting point, but from there, we explored outward. We weren’t constrained by it.

One track on LP2 I want to talk about is “11.15,” which is a beautiful track. It’s remarkable how you’re working with Theo’s vocals there and throughout the whole record. I get the impression from listening to “11.15” that he may have come up with the vocal part first, which brings me to another thought. I would like to know about working with a vocalist in your music. Have you done anything like this before with a vocalist besides Theo? If not, were there challenges when you started working with a vocalist?

That’s a great question. I’ve known Theo’s music since I was a kid—in high school, I first discovered his records. So I’ve known about him for a while. It’s not in any sense this generic, “I wanna work with a vocalist; who can I find?” It’s always been Theo.

One can tell by listening to him. He is a singular talent.

Yeah. The project wouldn’t be anything without what he brings to it. But, to answer your question, I have experience working with other instrumentalists but not with vocalists in anything like this. And Theo, although he is a vocalist, approaches his voice more like an instrument than other vocalists. He’s thinking about timbre and tone. And his range is insane, both his pitch range and emotional range. I love working with him.

You asked before what role randomness plays. Theo gives me a kind of randomness. He’s so in the moment. I’m often dealing with a lot of technology on stage, and things can go wrong. There’s this fear of like, “What if my computer dies?” But with Theo on stage, no matter what happens, this guy’s such a great performer that he’d still put on a show. He’s just so hypnotic and talented.

The way I think about these two records is that I’m augmenting what’s already there, if that makes any sense. My electronics are filling out things that complement the voice. It starts from his palette and it wouldn’t work with anyone else.

In the recordings, how much are you manipulating his voice, and how much is he manipulating his voice?

It’s probably 50/50. When we play live, I don’t really manipulate him; he manipulates himself. But on the records, there’s more production: chopping stuff up or sending him through a filter, recording his voice onto a cassette tape, and playing that back in. I have a role as a producer, but he uses loopers and effects, so he’s not just up there singing and I’m doing everything else. Theo’s a big part of the electronics that are going on.

The coolly functional album titles strike me as a dichotomy to the music, which I find pretty warm and inviting. Not that the titles aren’t inviting, but you know what I’m getting at.

They’re not inviting. (laughter)

Is there anything to that?

I think so. The way you frame music influences things. And, like you say, the music is warm; it has an organic element to it. There’s something I liked about not really leaning into that with the titling or with the cover art. It’s just very stark and informational rather than naming a piece “Green Pasture.” That detracts from the abstraction of what one experiences as a listener. So, I’d rather leave this blankness in the naming so as not to impose anything on the listener.

The titles are just the markers that I used in my Pro Tools session—the version numbers. So, 1.x refers to the first improv that we recorded, and then the next number refers to the mix or edit revision number. That’s how I labeled them when I would listen to them in the car. When it came time to title the songs, I was just like, “That works. We don’t need any more information than that.”

Even though there was an intention not to create any presumptions, when I saw the song titles, I immediately thought, “Okay, this is a process record.”

That’s fair. I think of it In terms of counterpoint, like with the cover art and album packaging, it doesn’t necessarily need to be in parallel with the sound. It can move against it.

Another track I’d like to mention is “9.23,” which closes the album. Since you deliberately placed the older track first on LP2, what made this the last one in the sequence?

I struggled with this and whether or not to include it. That song almost became a casualty. It’s the most removed, aesthetically or compositionally, from the rest of the music.

I like records that stay in one world. People sometimes have this idea that you need variety on an album, like there should be a slow track and then an uptempo thing. I have a built-in assumption that I don’t want to do that. I would rather things sit in a world, even if it doesn’t expose the full range. When Theo and I play live, our range goes all over the place, but these records are one narrow band of what we can do. This track was a bit on the fringe of that because, harmonically, it goes in a darker place, and it was more composed in terms of the sequencing. I ended up leaving it on the album because it references back to the last track of LP1; it does a similar thing. And with this idea of counterpoint, there’s a lot of beautiful music on the record, which leads you to a more ambiguous, darker place. I like that feeling of ending on an unexpected note.

This seems like a piece with a lot of overdubbing. It’s wonderful how the song builds alongside the vibraphone and glockenspiel. Also, towards the end—and I don’t know if Theo’s doing it on his own or if it’s sample manipulation—the vocal becomes these rhythmic hits, these note chords.

I actually wrote that out. We got into an explicitly composed thing, although it had an improvised origin. At home, I’ll have my Rhodes plugged in or some synths and make loops, and that’s how I created the two loops that are the basis of that piece. The first loop is a two-note counterpoint: a melody line and a bass line moving together. I think there’s some contrary motion. And then there are these harmonically dense chords that are looping, but they’re not looping at the same pace as the other one. So you constantly get bass and melody notes but with different harmonic colorations. Even though it is a process thing, and that process is more or less unchanging throughout the piece, it always feels like it’s changing because you hear different combinations.

So, when we recorded LP2 we mostly just improvised, but Theo and I each brought in seeds of things, too. And this was one of mine. At the very end of the session, I said, “Hey, I have this little thing; it’s a sketch with a bass line, a melody, and some chords.” So, by ear, he quickly learned it. Then we overdubbed where he’d do the melody in one octave, do the melody in another octave, then do the bass line, super low. None of that was processed. It’s just his voice nailing these subharmonic notes. Then, I went back and overdubbed vibraphone, wavetable synth, glockenspiel, and other stuff. But the core of why it works is that there is this process to it. You constantly hear the same melody, looping and looping, but there are slightly different harmonies to it.

Yeah, it’s stunning. I’m glad you left it on.

Thanks.

I want to ask about the label, Greyfade. In an email exchange some time ago, we discussed how you’re keeping it off streaming platforms. Are you still abiding by that?

None of the Greyfade catalog is on streaming platforms. The only places you can get it are the Greyfade website and Bandcamp. Digital download and vinyl are the formats for now. No streaming.

Are there reasons beyond keeping Greyfade out of the hands of corporate behemoths?

That’s not necessarily the largest part. What’s important is attention to music as art. These services encourage mindless listening. It’s not that I want to be didactic and tell people where they can and cannot listen to the records. It’s not my intention to keep anything from people. But when I started the label, I looked at the ecosystem out there. Artists are getting a less than a penny for each stream, and there’s no way to connect with those people who listen to it. If someone listens to my track on Spotify, maybe they’re going to look me up. But the majority aren’t. It feels like being used as a pawn in this game.

I produce and engineer records for a lot of people, and often we’ll get to the end of the mixing, and there’s this whole conversation about how to release stuff and whether or not to put it on the streaming platforms. Everyone agrees these things don’t pay artists fairly. And I just keep saying, “Well, just don’t put it on there. Why do you have to put it on there?” And they’re like, “Well, you know, because playlists, blah, blah, blah.” I don’t find any of the reasons compelling. And all the records on Greyfade are labored over for years. It feels gross to have them up there after all this labor.

The last thing I’ll say is that I’m kind of obsessive about quality, and I like hearing the masters of a record the way they sound in the studio. I don’t want to hear any compression, and I don’t want to listen to an ad in the middle of the album.

We do have technology that solves this problem. It’s called a digital download. And anyone can do this on their website. Bandcamp is also great for the more communal social aspect, but anyone can host a high-res file on their website. So, let’s do that. I have a statement on the Greyfade website that hopefully explains this, but the gist is that it’s not a sustainable way to go about making art music.

Do you feel this attitude is archaic or futuristic?

Well, I hope it’s futuristic.

Me too.

But I sadly don’t know if I believe that. It doesn’t seem like it’s going that way. I never thought of myself as a proselytizer, but if there’s anything that I want to proselytize about, it’s this. Your readers are probably really engaged with music. If they want those records to keep getting made, we need to support each other and have an ecosystem that allows us to do that.

❈ Joseph Branciforte & Theo Bleckmann’s LP2 can be listened to and downloaded directly from the Greyfade website and Bandcamp. ❈