Interview with David Rosenbloom

David Rosenbloom has been active as a musician, composer, and painter in New York since the late 70′s no wave period. His projects have included the Electric Chorus & Orchestra, Chinese Puzzle, The Experimental Chorus, and the Outlanders; he performed, toured and recorded with Glenn Branca, and was a member of Rhys Chatham’s early band Meltdown. His work tends to focus on sonic and structural experimentation with an emphasis on dense, melodic textures. He has worked with bassist David Hofstra for over two decades, and has in recent years worked with Stephen Moses in multiple scenarios.

On Saturday, May 30th at  8:30PM, Rosenbloom will present Sound and Light I, an integration of sound and light: live music and recorded video. The core ensemble consists of: David Rosenbloom, guitar; David Hofstra, bass; and Stephen Moses, drums.

Roulette: Do you consider yourself more a composer or a performer?

David Rosenbloom: Probably a composer, although it’s more like an artist working with sound as well as with image, color, shape, words, form and disintegration. But I do play the guitar.

R: How did you get into music?

DR: Music was an entry into other worlds – that was clear from listening to the radio as a boy. Then I noticed how words painted images particularly powerfully with music. But the killer was probably when I realized that a melody could go anywhere – and where it went made a difference. And that the making of music was, like Rahsaan Roland Kirk said, transportation.

R: What genre of music (pre-defined or newly defined) would you fit your work into?

DR: That’s a problem I have never solved. If it is a problem.

R: Tell us as about the work you’ll be doing at Roulette.

DR: It’s kind of a poem of the moment. Its impulse is definitely influenced by living in wartime and the moral choices that must be dealt with. Also, the current parallel between the availability of lots of technology and lots of information, not all of it “good”.

Technically, it’s the first piece I have undertaken using Jitter, and combining live music and video. The manipulation of the video in realtime forms some elements of the musicians’ score. I’m happily working with David Hofstra and Stephen Moses in this performance.

R: Who are your major influences?

DR: Beckmann, Beethoven, Bartok, Branca, Baudelaire – I seem to be partial to the B’s. Munch, Hank Williams, Penderecki, Messiaen, Ligeti, Reich, Neil Young, Stockhausen, Dylan of course, Robert Johnson, Hendrix, Philip Dick, Blake, Yeats, Keats, Francis Bacon, David Lindsay, Plath. And Joan of Arc. At least today. But who can not sing Iggy’s “Success” on the way to work each morning?

R: Describe, if you can, the cloud of ideas that you’re making work under these days – in terms of music, current events, new technologies, personal.

DR: War, transformation, misinformation, neuroscience, robotics, suicide bombers, plastic surgery, cartoons, celebrity culture, death/transfiguration, the crisis of personal ethics, religious lies, sex, hatred, love, brutality, caritas – and, as always, electro-magnetism.