The Unofficious Joseph Tepperman Web SIGHT
Doing Discredited Dentistry again, this time at Human Resources on Feb 25th. That same night and place, David Dominique will be debuting a lot of new compositions, with a lot of virtuoso maniacs.
Also, the special session Emily Nava and I proposed for Interspeech 2012 got accepted. It's called Beyond timing: New directions in speech rhythm analysis. That is the polite title. I wanted to call it "somebody figure out speech rhythm already" but Emily was wise enough to veto.
I found a grip of history: hours and hours of air-to-ground audio from NASA mission STS-121. Yes yes - that was Lisa Nowak's flight.
Just finished my first week teaching Speech Recognition and Synthesis at CU Boulder.
And they put me in a Corean Commercial. Turned out almost exactly how you'd imagine these things...
The Stockholm Fringe Fest programs are out:
(That photo credit should actually be to an anonymous CalArts person! And it's more like 30 mins...)
Two European upcomings:
August 22-26 I'll be in Sweden to perform at the Stockholm Fringe Fest. A phonetic theater piece I wrote called Discredited Dentistry. Very loosely inspired by Painless Parker.
And then the following week I'm presenting two papers at Interspeech. One about a new speech rhythm measure, another about predicting intonation from syntax. That's in Firenze.
Larry Fischer (better known as Wild Man Fischer) died last week at age 66. He was a huge inspiration to me, both musically and, in a certain way, personally. He lived a very hard but not entirely tragic life. There is not much I can say about him that hasn't already been said elsewhere. We were friends for only a few years, but he left a very permanent mark on my life.
I first met Larry in 2001, through Blair Sterrett and Jason Polland. I was 20 and I realize now that I was looking for danger, horror, misery, but most of all I was looking for unimaginable music, and Larry possessed all of these in abundance. He owned maybe one change of clothes, and lived off his Social Security checks in a dystopic Sunset Boulevard motel that was infested with bees and would be demolished not long after we met. In the beginning, he called me almost daily from a payphone next to the liquor store across the street. Most of our conversations began with traffic noise and the same bellowing voice I knew from his records.
"Hello? Joe?"
"Larry. It's six a.m."
"Aw, Joe. I'm so lonely."
I'd be lying if I were to pretend that being friends with Larry was easy, but the same can be said about many friendships with people who aren't schizophrenic. Larry at least knew his limits and his weaknesses, maybe a little too well. Connoisseurs of "outsider" music take note: Wild Man Fischer, author of "Monkeys Versus Donkeys," possessed a surprisingly profound amount of self-awareness, though it was often overblown by his relentless clinical paranoia. He imagined a huge rivalry between himself and that pillar of outsider pop, Daniel Johnston ("But my songs make you feel happier than his, right Joe?"). He took a lot of pride in knowing that David Bowie was a fan, but the fact that Bill Cosby once put him down on national TV bothered him to no end. Larry's well-documented rift with the Zappa family still haunted him 30 years later. Even after a couple years of six a.m. phone calls, he would occasionally accuse me of secretly recording our conversations, or otherwise trying to make a buck off him somehow. But I should probably mention that Larry was essentially a very gentle guy - he was always quick to apologize for himself, and I never once saw him get violent. In fact, he was initially spooked by my energy ("Why is Joe always jumping like that?" he asked Blair Sterrett after meeting me). He often spoke with detachment about losing his father at a young age, and maybe there was a clue to his neuroses in that.
A lot has been written about Wild Man Fischer's mental health, his connection to Frank Zappa and Rhino Records, and his strange, sad way of life. What isn't emphasized nearly enough is the brilliant way he could improvize nonverbal vocal noises into casually complex rhythmic phrases, predating beatboxing by some 15 years. His songs, though bumblegummy, had this intentionally primitive incantation quality that was only a stone's throw from the well-controlled howls of the Dada sound poets - pioneer madmen like Kurt Schwitters, Hugo Ball, and Raoul Hausmann. Through some improbable cultural vortex, Wild Man Fischer may be the missing link between those guys and the popular psychedelic vocal experiments of the Beach Boys and the Beatles. His documented influence extends to the bizarrest barbaric yawps of the L.A.F.M.S. scene and noise bands like Smegma (who actually recorded with Larry in the mid seventies), and of course into the vocal ferocity of punk - Larry liked to talk about how Henry Rollins once encouraged him to keep making records. I still find many endlessly fascinating shamanistic revelations whenever I listen to Larry's music, and it's these that I think I'll remember the best.
The last time I saw Larry was probably in 2006, when we drove from L.A. to Phoenix to play at a party for Ryan Avery. Larry's final few public performances were like the spasms we all sometimes have as we're falling asleep: each forgotten song a short seizure, never longer than 30 seconds, and instantly dissipating back into silence. Despite his lasting bitterness about the entertainment industry, he had in fact accidentally written several new tunes since the last distant time that anyone managed to bring him into a studio. The most memorable was one called "Corner of Faith", inspired by some evangelical Christians he'd met:
Right around the corner
Just around the corner
Stands the Corner of Faith
God is speaking to me
He's a-speaking through me
Right around the corner
Just around the corner
Stands the Corner of Faith
Yes, Larry had found Jesus, and he intoned these words with the same manic energy and pathos as always.
Around the time of that Phoenix gig, Larry moved into a group home in the Valley. He started to take medication for the first time in many years. The symptoms of his schizophrenia disappeared, but so did his eagerness to talk on the phone or make music. We gradually drifted apart in the usual way that friends will.
I'm sure that my friendship was typical for Larry. I was just another fan kid who came into his life and sometimes bought him dinner at Sizzler - one of many he must have met over the years. But I have never known and will never again know anyone like Larry Fischer. I don't know if there's anything to learn from his life. Maybe just that no man, even the most lucid among us, can ever really know his own worth.
Just performed the Ursonate for the first time last weekend as part of Signify, Sanctify, Believe - Geneva Skeen and Mathew Timmons arranged it for five voices, pretty grandiose. Gave me a new appreciation for a work I'd only loved through recordings.
Also Dorian Wood's video for "Pearline" just came out, that's me on trombone. He's using it to raise yankee dollars to make a giant and terrifying new record called Rattle Rattle:
Three or four videos videos --
A couple weeks ago Killsonic and I shot a short film excerpt of Tongues Bloody Tongues, directed by Isis Saratial Misdary and Luis Guizar. It won't be edited for a while, but Andy Hunter posted these two behind-the-scenes clips:
And Chip Yamada just finished editing this condensed version of the Tongues Bloody Tongues production we did at REDCAT last July:
A feature DVD of the full show is ready now too.
And the third or fourth video is this: my pals in Eagle and Talon put together a series of videos of people covering one of their new songs. Here is mine:
Last week Eddie Rivas mixed two new Mooey Moobau songs that I recorded a whole year ago and had forgotten almost all about. They are with a full band - Alice Lin, Clint Heidorn, Leah Harmon, Dominique Rodriguez, Andrew Duncan, Heather Lockie, and Devin McNulty - and done mostly live to tape. But I still need to cut this stuff up.
Sort of similarly: Chip Yamada is very close to finishing editing the Tongues Bloody Tongues DVD. Until soon, here is some of the raw footage that he's been working with...
This week Emily Nava is presenting some research work we did with Louis Goldstein for VLSP (this stands for Very-Large-Scale Phonetics). We're also writing a bunch of papers for Interspeech this year - more soon on that.
In other news, a few weeks ago in Iraq they found a dagger that used to belong to Hulagu Khan. Some smugglers were trying to sell it in Kirkuk.
A Mooey Moobau show is soon in coming: Jan 14 at the American Legion Hall in Highland Park. This is with my friends Falsetto Teeth and Crater Farmer.
I'm collaborating with Alan Hiroshi Nakagawa on a kamishibai piece called "First In Space", for his Ear Meal webcast.
And preparing for two vaudeville Mooey Moobau gigs: at the Sugar Bowl and the Petting Pantry.
I'm writing Part 3 of Tongues Bloody Tongues, where the Caliph gets rolled up in a carpet and trampled by horses.