John Bischoff
Aperture
23five006

REVIEWS:

Pitchfork Media
January 21,2008: Found Sound 2007, Staff List by Pitchfork staff

John Bischoff was a music student at Oakland's Mills College when personal computers first entered the marketplace in the mid-1970s. Almost immediately, the composers centered around Mills took to the machines, linking the rudimentary devices—"a board about the size of a sheet of paper with a tiny keyboard and a few chips," as George Lewis put it—into networks where one program running on one machine affected the operation and output of another program running on another machine. Bischoff became a founding member of both the League of Automatic Music Composers and the Hub, two of the world's earliest computer networking bands.

"Piano 7hz", the lead improvisation from Bischoff's 2003 album, "Aperture", reflects such interactions between man and machine. Triggered bells and staccato piano chords are the source material here, and they pass through programs that distend, chop, scramble, and smooth. Every new sound supplied by the man is a rock collapsing on a different wave of machinery, sinking at a different rate and returning to the surface whenever the current allows. Bischoff and his machines create a sonic symbiosis that teases with instability. He's almost 60 now, but with similar work by artists like Tim Hecker and David Daniell making inroads, Bischoff deserves more notice. - Grayson Currin


The Wire
Issue 241, March 2004

Another excellent release from West Coast sound art label 23five Incorporated, this time a compilation of Bischoff's soundworks from 1998 to 2002. The opening selection "Piano 7hz" creats great suspense from a repeated shiming chord progressively inflected with subtle treatments. It's refreshing to hear computer-processed composition of such stately slow-moving delicacy which, even at its most abstract and challenging shows Bischoff's absolute control over his resources. On the blased "Sealed Cantus" and "Gravitor," he sculpts searing whit enoice with the same rigorous judgement and care, employing fascinating and seductive strategies rather than the tiresomely confrontational tactics of so many digi-noisemongers. - Keith Moliné


Fakejazz
October 22, 2004

John Bischoff's electronic music inhabits a sterile, bleak environment. His synthesized sounds are unmistakably artificial and make few concessions to the world of the living. The influence of human touch, however, does play a part in Aperture's almost robotic expression. Each of the album's six tracks was composed and performed live, without overdubs, with Bischoff (and, in one case, Kenneth Atchley) improvising the shifts in sound as the piece progresses. This form of composition creates a music that's formed by endless possibilities, but also a strict series of controls. The level at which Bischoff's music is a product of the mind rather than the body makes it almost subliminal, in this sense.

The organic side of Bischoff's music isn't completely absent, but it's heavily subdued the few times it does arise. Sampled whispers represent part of the material with which "Override" was constructed, but the fleeting, ghostly fragments of the human voice are more like artificial reminders of respiration that products of the process. "Piano 7hz" builds heavily upon thick chords from what sounds like the stringed instrument, but their construction is of a cunningly synthesized nature. Bischoff's palette consists of basic electronic voicings: steady tones, slow swooshes, the skittish undulations of a rapid wave.

Aperture has a strong stylistic link to that of some of Bischoff's fellow electronic pioneers, mainly in its astutely uncluttered canvas, and the simple sounds that Bischoff utilizes. While his sounds are never plain, there's also never a sense that the music's become crowded. There's an almost polite interplay, due, most likely to both Bischoff's improvisatory preferences as well as the limitations of one-man, real time performance. This refined style of musical dialogue may not imbue Aperture with a great deal of vim, but that makes Bischoff's music no less fascinating. The volume and availability of Bischoff's discography are far from great, but Aperture is an adequate introduction to a man whose name is often left out of the history of electronic music.


Brainwashed
October 19, 2003 : Volume 06, Issue 41

John Bischoff is one of the best-known Bay-area electronic composers. For decades he has been producing electronic and computer-based music, and his newest release on 23five collects recent (1999-2002) works using the Max/MSP language. My limited knowledge prohibits me from understanding how this software allows a fuller realization of the theory Bischoff says links all seven pieces on Aperture. "Reflective intention" describes a situation in which sound structure is determined "not only through the predetermined elements which go into a piece, but also through the active process of listening to the music as it happens and responding accordingly." I cannot untangle all of Bischoff's heady liner notes; also, I cannot see how his "reflective intention" could not just as easily be called improvisation. I am comfortable to call this improvised computer music, and fine music at that. The variety of compositional structure alone makes Aperture a pleasant listen. The opening "Piano 7hz" features thick, chiming sound fragments spread sluggishly across intermittent clinks and low rumbles, at a lazy, decaying interval with pacing that recalls Morton Feldman. Earlier tracks like "Immaterial States" and "Graviton" are arranged around a latticework of extended sounds that evolve from low-level machine chugs to piercing whines, impressive in their ability to evoke movement or suggest visual correspondents without defining the nature or origin of the individual sounds. All six tracks on Aperture were recorded in real-time, producing a temptation, in the listener, to grant the most complex works a precedence relating to the assumed intensity or struggle of their birth. One of the most enjoyable pieces here, however, is probably the most simple. "Sealed Cantus" is a collaborative track created from two sound sources, the recorded sound of a water fountain sculpture by Kenneth Atchley and Bischoff's manipulation of static. The arresting density of the resulting track is treated to a subtle structuring, leading the rapt listener toward the piece's harrowing finale. Aperture's title track, one of the four recordings from 2002, provides neat closure to a disc that is both challenging and remarkable in its potential for repeated listening and accessibility as a cohesive statement. "Aperture" condenses much of the ideas represented in the previous six tracks into a simple rise-and-fall movement, emphasizing the collective statement made by these essentially "separate" works, and the seductive aura of Bischoff's music as a whole. - Andrew Culler