Text by Julia Masi / FFanzeen, 1983
Intro by Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 2015
Images from the Internet
www.waltersteding.com
Intro by Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 2015
Images from the Internet
www.waltersteding.com
This article was originally published in FFanzeen, issue #10, dated 1983. It was written by Julia Masi.
Currently, Walter Steding is a painter and actor who writes film scores
and is in the group Crazy Mary, based in New York City where he resides. – RBF,
2015
On the cover of his new album, Dancing in Heaven, on Animal Records,
Walter Steding, in an oversized pair of rolled-up bluejeans with his violin in
hand, is suspended in an extracted hop, like the Pied Piper ready to dance off
a cliff, or Peter Pan flying back to Never Never Land. A confusing change of
image for those of us who think of him as the black-clad figure of the concert
stage.
Dancing in Heaven is light-years away from the Walter we once knew “wheezing and wailing”
to home-made bio feedback machines. He’s still inviting us to experience his
different reveries, but now with 11 simple, lighthearted, commercial songs, his
daydreams have become danceable.
“To me, the cover would have been
this hat,” he points to his large, black felt fedora that looks like it was designed
for a Pilgrim, “the darkest glasses you could find, and just skulls and daggers
all over the place. He holds up the cover for careful inspection. “At first I
didn’t like it; but now I do, now that everybody is telling me that they like
it. The back is the history,” he flips over the cover. ”I never have to talk
about my past again. It’s done. It’s documented,” he says of the black and
white montage that traces his career. Although he’s only been performing since
he came to new York in 1976, the photos on the back of the album read like a
Who’s Who of rock‘n’roll. He points to the center picture of himself and his manager,
artist Andy Warhol. “Andy was posing, and I said to him, ‘Well, we have to do
something. Why don’t you put your hands by your ears?’ Did he go for that in a
hurry! It looks derogatory, like, ‘Why is he doing that to Walter?’, but it was
my idea. He rests to skip over the pictures of himself in his early days as a
one-man-band, wearing electronic gadgets around his waist that looked like
Batman’s utility belt, but his past is too interesting to ignore. Even as a kid
growing up in Harmony, Pennsylvania, his background was always art. “Remember
the kid in high school who always went around and painted the twelve days of
Christmas on his windows? Well, that was me.” He temporarily put down his paint
brushes in the late ‘70s to try his hand at performance art. “Just ‘cause I saw
something happening.
“It was an era when new technologies
were being introduced to the masses, and it was a time when bio-feedback and Rolfing,
and any kind of New Age idea was really out there. But I just didn’t see any
aesthetic in it. I saw that the more that we define existence by finite terms,
the less we really see it. You can use any kind of formula you want to start defining
existence, but all you’re doing is making it real; making it physical. Unless
you put those physical symbols in some sort of aesthetic means, you’re not
really describing what’s there.”
At this time, Walter had been working
with the Mankind Research Center in Washington, D.C., and was in close contact
with the Menninger Foundation, so he knew a lot about bio-feedback. “As people
were going on and really thinking they were discovering something new, it just
was the phoniness, the unreality of it. It was new at the time as far as the
masses were concerned. I was using it as a means of expression. So instead of
working with bio-feedback as though it were something real and tangible, I
needed something to play against, so I took the bio-feedback and made it into
sound, and then used the violin on top of that.
“Working with color and working with
animal sounds, I learned a lot about how the sound would affect your brainwave
output. Not only brainwaves, but EKG, too. And Galvanic skin response. Any kind
of monitored bodily functions. I took a generator to a lake in Pennsylvania
where these spring peepers were coming up, and played a concert along with
them. That’s another reason why the violin was a good instrument, because it
didn’t have frets or finite points. So I could really deal with sounds and
sound like the noises that animals make; wolves and whales. You’ve head those whale
records and things? So I was playing along with those, but I knew what kind of
range those kinds of sound existed in. They’re all over the place. They’re not
necessarily concerned with stops and finite points. But it does develop into
patterns from that.
“And then, from that, I kind of go
into – holistic is the word – where you don’t have the stops. I could transfer
that into music because I knew a certain pattern that I’d be playing that would
follow along with the noises that the whales would make. And then I knew
instead of sliding my finger and going from one step to the other step, I could
break that into steps, so I could play a song very similar to the noises a
whale would make without actually trying to make it sound like a whale.
“You have different reveries in your
different states of consciousness. Like, if you go into the deep Delta region,
in this Delta it reverts to neuronal bursts per second. It’s actually (that)
you send out these signals, and they can really be monitored. You’re sort of
in-between Alpha and Beta, and you’re conscience and think about things, like
your motor actions, like moving your hands. That is more in the Alpha region,
and those (signals) are amplified. It’s a real minute signal. I built little
amplifiers so that I could convert the signals into sound. I did that by taking
the electrical impulse and putting it through an LED. The LED would charge a
photo-transistor, and that photo-transistor would change the rate and the pitch
of the synthesizer.
“I used a homemade synthesizer just
built for that.” He learned to make his musical equipment from scratch, “just
by reading schematics and things.” And by “working with chips,” he says
nonchalantly.
“The tools and things are out there.
You can go to an electronics store and just buy all these parts. You could buy
a clock – it’s called a clock (but) it’s not really a clock; it’s a little
chip, a timer. And they use it for everything. Not necessarily for music. Once
you understand the basic principles of how a chip works, you can apply it to anything.”
Walter chose to apply it to the violin because he felt that the “violin
epitomizes music.”
His first concerts were very short
and very avant-garde. “I thought it was art! I mean, I was doing it at art
galleries.” And even though he describes those performances as “wheezing and
wailing,” he did gain a certain respect for music, and command of his
instrument. “That’s how I started getting more and more musical, learning about
notation; different stops and points, with Western scales broken down into all
those finite points. The more I learned about that, the more I learned how I
could use it.
“I’m definitely trying to create a
mood with the notation. Certain things do create a mood. The sounds that whales
make do have an effect on the human body, even though it might not be aware of
how that sound is. Even without hearing whales, a person is still affected by
their sound. There is communication between all living things.
“I use the 4/4 beat. With the 4/4
beat, I try to find a more universal kind of sound, even though it’s relative
to the 4/4 timing. It’s kind of scaleless.
“I like to think of the violin
without any frets, and how it can transform that mood into a sound. And then I
like to transfer that into a progression. A real progression in the 4/4 format,
starting with the root note, and then going to the 4th and 5th – you know, real
traditional progressions. So it comes from a thought and I just keep working it
out until it becomes a tune.
“Right now, today, I got this line
that goes,” he sings, “Do, do, do, cha,
cha. I’ll take that line and I know how I want it to go, but I know that I
have to put it in a format where the bass can play along with it and the
keyboard player can play along with it. So, I’ll take the rhythm machine and
set it to a counter, where it counts off 4s. Then I’ll rearrange the idea that
I had in my head to fit that format. Then I’ll arrange it so that the bass can
play his full measures, do a turnaround, and come back in again. So it starts
with just an abstract idea, but then you keep going over it and over it, until
it becomes a song.
“The songs I write anyone can play. I
keep them simple. And I can make tapes where everything is separated. I don’t
even have to rehearse. I can give someone a tape of what it’s supposed to sound
like, and give them a tape of what their part is so they can listen to these
tapes and learn the part exactly. And never come to a rehearsal and (still)
play with the rest of the group. And then show up for a concert and know all their
lines. Like the bass player. I’ll give him a tape of the song, how it should
sound with everyone together, and then a separate tape of just his part. And
the same with the keyboard player and guitar. So there is no question then of
what they should do.”
Lenny Ferraro, drums; Paul Dugan,
bass; Karen Geniece, vocals and guitar; Mark Garvin, lead guitar; and Robert
Arron, sax, keyboard, vibratone and guitar, accompanied Walter on the album,
which he produced himself. “I wanted help. Really. I would have liked to have a
producer,” he says modestly as his big dark eyes widen. “At the time, Chris
(Stein, of Blondie) wasn’t feeling very well. I learned; I’m glad for the
experience. I learned ‘cause I had to. I really would have liked to have
someone professional come in and say, ‘This and that has to be done.’ It’s just
like, there are rules that you have to follow. The bass beat is on the one, and
the snare is on the two. Until I learned that, I didn’t write songs that way. I
put the snare wherever I felt like it. Someone could always tell something was
wrong with it. I could tell something was wrong, but I didn’t know what. So it
would be good to have a producer who could say, ‘Why don’t we write a harmonic
part that goes with the 4?’
“I don’t want to do something
deliberately wrong when I know it shouldn’t be that way, just because it’s been
done by so many other pioneers of electronic music and avant-garde musicians,
like Cage and Stockhausen; people who have designed instruments, like Bookla
and Moog, and all. That’s been done before.”
Right now, he can’t see himself
returning to the avant-garde, using music as an art form. “It doesn’t make much
sense for me to stay at one level and just deal with the emotion.
“The last concert I did, people liked
it. I’ll keep going in that direction.”
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