I am pleased to bring you a conversation with Alexandra Fierra, whose company Eternal Research has created the Demon Box in the pictures above. I’m completely enthralled with the creative possibilities this invention can unlock; I unabashedly covet the Demon Box, if anyone out there is listening. The device in and of itself is cool beyond measure, but that isn’t so surprising to me after having had the following conversation with Alexandra, which I hope you enjoy.
I imagine you’ll want to know more as you progress through the interview, so here are some useful links to the Eternal Research website and the Demon Box Kickstarter, which is still active as of this writing. All images and videos within this article were created and shared by Alexandra Fierra and Eternal Research.
CR: Alexandra, what is your origin story? When did you first fall in love with music and/or creating instruments?
AF: Hi! Thank you for thinking this project is worth your time, there’s a lot to delve into, but I will try.
So an origin story…I am from Pennsylvania, a small town called Emmaus where my family was in publishing around organics, Rodale Press (1939-2017).
I'm trying to think what my first inventive idea was, or why….I do have a photo of an excerpt from a notebook in maybe 1st grade where I wrote something to the effect: “I really like Thomas Edison, because without him we would be in the dark, and he got in a lot of trouble!” Many of my family remember me as someone who got into trouble, but usually the kind that came from experiments rather than run-ins with the law. However, I got a lot of detentions in high school for very dubious things, like forgetting to go back to a study hall because I was reading in the library (I got three detentions just for that once!! Can you imagine?).
Anyway, I did have some inventors in my family going way back. My great grandfather was JI Rodale who started an electrical devices company with his brother in the 1920’s. They made different adaptors for plugs and I believe made rather good money in that time. He used the money from it to start his publishing company to disseminate Knowledge about Organic agriculture and healthy living to the people of America and eventually the world. He founded Organic Gardening magazine as well as Prevention).
I bring this up because I thought that route of publishing would be my life. I was actually surprisingly a luddite for much of my life before I was 30. I wrote on a typewriter, refused to buy an iPhone or an iPod, eschewed elevators where possible, ate raw veggies, wrote pen and ink in a mountain of journals. I bought plain clothes and thought fashion was worthless.
He worked with, and his daughter married, Joel Spira, who invented the household dimmer and began the company Lutron based out of Pennsylvania. I knew about this as a kid and thought it amazing, without knowing the technology inside of it could ever be understood. I met him several times in my life and he had tremendous charisma and intelligence, but also a joie de vivre, he loved growing Asian pears and had orchards of them, but then also invented the dimmer. I think between him and JI Rodale I saw that inventors can be many things, and always should be learning.
When it comes to music I think my first memories were when I was before 6 and lived in this old house in Emmaus, PA in the same house with my cousin's family. My cousin was a few years older than me, but she loved music. She would play Madonna and dress up and dance and sing all around the house. She would play Michael Jackson and we would dance around like feral children to this exciting new music. This was in the 80’s when it was coming through the radio and on cassette, the sound was rich and magical and exciting. I still love this music immensely.
I also remember crying a lot to music when I was a very small child, all the movies I cried in, the Jungle Book, An American Tail, A League of Their Own, The Lion King. I love how music and images filled me with intense emotions inside that tiny Emmaus movie theater next to a freight train line that would come by twice at least every movie. I think that was a pretty amazing sonic experience, hearing these soundtracks and the wild thunderous train sound that shook your being. So many people hated it and it was rarely full there, but I began to love it, the train was a reminder the world is always bigger than your perception of it, there's always things entering and leaving your purview. And those deep rumbling sounds were as beautiful as a sky full of thunder.
I think the most heartbreaking moments of my early life were around music. I remember in 4th grade wanting to play the cello, and I loved it. It was the most beautiful thing I ever thought I could hold in my hands. I remember trying to make music, and practicing, and my father really not being supportive. After a month he said I had to stop because he was tired of driving me to school and the cello was the only instrument that couldn’t go on the bus.
Two school years later this flier went around for a school chorus. I thought that would be fun, and I wanted to sing like Madonna or Michael Jackson, but there was this form that a parent had to sign, and my father refused, “why would you ever want to do that??” I think the worst part was when the chorus lessons were going on, I would have to sit alone in our classroom, with the lights off, while everyone was off singing down the hall in the auditorium. I was the only one whose parents wouldn’t sign their form. It was very lonely. But I soon learned how to perfectly mimic my parents' handwriting. And the juxtaposition of a group singing down a hall mixed with the silence and sounds of a rattling window AC, it's a kind of music I guess.
From these travails the intense and somber seed of music was planted in my heart. When I was sitting in that classroom alone in the dark, hearing everyone singing down the hall. I made an emotional symphony in myself, something close to Mahler’s 5th or Debussy’s Claire de lune. I created music I could never share, and as sad as that was, I still felt one day I would make music.
CR: That is quite a family lineage~ honestly, your family name is familiar to me through their publishing, though mostly in passing. I certainly remember Prevention Magazine and the like. I imagine your childhood was quite interesting! What happened when you turned thirty that broke you from your luddite path? Is it connected to why you didn’t go into publishing like you had expected?
AF: What broke me from the Luddite path, I think it was a cataclysm. I’ve had a few nervous breakdowns in my life, for various reasons. When I was 17 it was from the effects of an insanely pernicious eating disorder. When I was 30 it was because I wanted to come out and nearly ended my life. There's so much context to these situations I don't want to reduce them to the horrible days that marked the turning points. I am a transgender woman, And I remember since I was 6 wanting to be different than I was and then I was allowed to be. When I was in highschool, I dreamt about running away and living the life I wanted for myself. It was very hard times, and there wasn't the support systems you find today. It felt impossible and I would have to live a double life forever. But at a certain point I just couldn't really bear it, my personhood could no longer go on in a state of suspended animation, writing only death poems that some future person would read. I realize now that I was the way I was because I was afraid of existing in the world, I couldn't be me, and I was afraid of ambition or achieving anything because I felt if I ever did transition I would lose everything and have to start all over. For years before i was 30 this was a terror of mine. And At a certain point I couldn't keep up the mask. It fell on my thirtieth birthday, and as I write this it's two days shy of ten years later.
On the other side of 30 I had to begin again. It just so happened I was subletting an art studio for 4 months and I ended up pretty much living there in Bushwick. I started painting and spent every hour I could in there, it was not easy and I wasn't sleeping much and became severely allergic to nickel metal then from sleeping on a floor of a former machinists shop for a week. It was a crazy time, and I haven't met yet any of the people who would change the course of my life for the better.
CR: Thank you for sharing these experiences. I’m sure that many people can relate to parts of your story so far. You are certainly right, those were different times and I am so very grateful you made it through them. Can you tell me some about your paintings? I’d also love to hear about the people who changed the course of your life, that seems intensely important.
AF: Painting was my first instrument. There is something innately analogous between music and painting, the same connection that made painters paint Jazz, the same streets that inspired Mondrian and Stuart Davies. I'm sure in all quarters of the earth there is a connection between music and painting, and many musicians who call themselves painters in sound and many painters who call themselves musicians with color.
My mother was a painter and I grew up around her studio and supplies. I loved opening her oil paint box and inhaling that smell of linseed oil and dust. She showed me her paintings and kept a few around the house. She loved Monet and felt his orangerie cyclorama of water lilies in Paris to be the triumph of all western art. All the paintings I saw of hers were all painted before I was born, and she didn’t really paint much during her life until near the end of it. But she loved art. I think what I learned very early from her which would benefit me immensely is that art doesn’t need to have lines, it can be seemingly out of focus and constantly blending and transitioning between textures and space. I think this prepared me in a way to accept and appreciate what noise was, and see it more as a field of wildflowers than a crop of weeds.
I remember my favorite paintings when i was a kid, The Rower by Winslow Homer, The Musicians by Picasso (I really don't like Picasso now though, but before I knew more this was what was in front of my eyes), and The Lion Sleeping on the Desert by Rouault, they were at the local Philadelphia Art Museum and they impacted me immensely. I felt I could hear their music, and feel the great desert and the lion's heart close upon the day-warmed dunes in a new and cool night. And I felt the loneliness and fear of the rower, the impossible task, the perils, yet the persistence.
Being around this art did have its limits, I think the artists I knew about fell into a pretty narrow gamut, but nonetheless I squeezed from whatever art I could I could find whatever knowledge I could glean. This was very much before the internet was everywhere, and the art I could find was in books and the occasional museum experience.
Despite loving painting, I had such issues with the structure of a classroom that I did it all alone, it was something I would do late into the night while listening to the same great song on repeat. I’ve never been good at staying in a classroom long, my mind wanders and I start drawing and journaling.
It took me many years to become my own painter, it was only after I was thirty, I happened to have the art studio during this time, and in 4 months I began painting entirely different, and it happened one night with one paint-til-morning marathon.
I always loved messages, and languages, even when I couldn't understand what they said. I think we can all agree there are languages, bird languages included, that although we have no way of knowing what they’re saying, they’re still immensely beautiful.
I felt an impulse late one night to just mask across a large black-inked sheet of paper covering a wall. I masked out long strips about 2 inches apart, and kept doing this across the paper. I then put down a large area of Paint and after it dried a little ripped off the masking tape. What was there after removing the tape made me feel an immense rush. No matter how hard I had tried to make perfect lines, perfectly spaced apart, when i stood back from the work i could see all these little variances, vary widths and alignments, and when i looked from left to right at the whole swath of it, I could see patterns emerge i hadn’t intended.
The same was when a highway cuts through a hill and they cut down into the rocks on either side, and although this exposure shows millions of years, there’s still patterns in the strata, bands of darkness or lightness distances apart that seem almost uncanny or composed.
Once I saw these patterns I felt stricken by a new impetus to paint. I wanted to try and visualize and conceptualize how patterns emerge even when they are not intended. To prove this theory I made a composition 4 feet by 8 feet that was nothing but nearly 1,000 almost equal size triangles. Although I didn’t actively intend it, I couldn’t help but see when it was done, an air of patterning that was there nonetheless.
All these things were preparing my brain to accept a wild proposition: That noise is music, that there are actually patterns in noise, that there is no new music without new listening.
Now as for the people that were as yet to change my life, I think the first I met was Bryn, who I’d eventually start Eternal Research with. We both met at very rough times in our lives and threw ourselves into intellectual and creative ferment. We spent a lot of time philosophizing and talking about politics, music, recording, technological phenomena and messing around with sounds. We also had a band for a bit, a sort of Industrial music project called Vyy and released an album Ardorous Gyre. I think the years we did all that were sort of sharpening our teeth and getting our minds prepared for what would come next, taking the Demon Box, from a little wooden contraption I made in my Bushwick apartment, into something that did something worthy enough to become an instrument. We couldn't start that process just yet, we had to learn a lot to even begin. We bought build your own guitar pedal kits that Bryn would solder together and then we’d reflect on the process. I spent a lot of time reading about electrical phenomena and magnetism while experimenting with photography too. Bryn went to work at Makerbot and understood how to build things from an engineer's perspective. The closest experience I had to building a commercial instrument was publishing a book, which I did once before.
Jordan and I met a little later, we were both in this one band and I think trauma bonded over how difficult the bandleader was, and then we started doing small collabs on music. Jordan brought a side of the mind I never really had access to, he knew how to code and understood that once things enter into the digital realm all aspects of the media become data that can be used or be influenced by an input of other data. He would do these amazing life mixes of video games and their music from corrupted video games. It was wonderful to see beauty come from the breaking of things, the inversion of concepts of usage.
This famous topiary gardener Pearl I met years ago once told me “if you’re the smartest person in your circle of friends, you need to find a new group of friends, to challenge yourself.” and I think it was through Bryn and Jordan, and many people that surrounded the orbits and others that I began to be humbled by the plethora of musics that can exist, that none was greater than the other, that the key was that a music is a personal expression, and behind each music is a person who felt that words alone was not enough to express themself. I felt the people around me were all experts in their fields and the authorities over their perspectives in life. Everyone was learning constantly, and reflecting and sharing.
I’ve always loved being around people who challenge my perception of the world, from my partner Mina to anyone I work with. It's always when people are trying to understand something that they don’t fully yet that they enter one of the realms of human beauty. I grew up around the most stubborn people, not to say everyone was, but a few select people who made it their mission to try and get me to believe the world was the way they envisioned it, and to accept their morals and ethics as doctrine. In retrospect I feel intense nausea at the thought of their attempts to sway me into a mindless co-existence with their reasonable way of life.
I will inevitably miss a few important people, but I will make sure to add them in the future chronicle of this tale. But I cannot forget my life partner Mina, who has been such a force of love in my life. I don't think I could be who I am now without her, we’ve both helped each other heal and understand the world so much. In regards to the present story, I'd say she’s helped me appreciate the importance of aesthetics. I grew up around people who felt that aesthetics were flouncy and egregious and a waste of money, or antiquated. I think once I began to appreciate the nuances of all aesthetic movements, I was able to move forward and engage with the problem of what would a Demon Box even look like?
I had to listen to the aethers, and spend years musing on a multitude of subjects before feeling it was time to give it a more permanent face.
CR: That is an amazing list of people and I feel honored that you have shared them with me. Pearl gave you great advice. I'm starting to see the threads start to come together to the present. Can you tell me about the early development of the Demon Box? I'd like to know some about your history of tinkering with sound and instrument experimentation. I'm also really enjoying your musings about art and creativity in general.
AF: The development of the Demon Box:
There is this wild film I remember watching in theatres as a child. It was called Young Einstein and was the story of this fortuitously naive inventor on the island of Tasmania who discovers how to split an atom and heads to France to patent the idea. Along the way he meets Marie Curie and they become admiring acquaintances, but there is a jealous man who tries to ruin Alberts life and gets him locked up in an Asylum while stealing his invention. There is so much about this movie that if you pull away from it it seems to not make any sense, but for me as a kid it blended a few things I always loved: music, (it has an amazing fun soundtrack), a romantic attraction to knowledge, and theoretical physics. In the end he makes a wild electric violin that he uses to stop an atomic bomb from blowing up paris. The movie doesn’t make traditional sense, but I loved how wildly connecting it all was. I think it sent in my mind that the inventions we really need are the ones that stop the bombs from blowing up the world.
I think that movie plus the stories my mother told me about how her grandfather had an electrical parts company and my great uncle the dimmer inventor, I was awash in a magical potion of aspirational and magical thinking.
The issue that arose here is that no one else in my life saw things this way. I was very dyslexic as a child, and I read my first book ,Stuart Little, when I was maybe 12. I remember being so proud of doing it and telling my teacher I read it, and he was so patronizing and not impressed. I also had bad vision and didn’t know it. I would get intense headaches from squinting all the time. I couldn’t see the board, and I didnt know what to do. It was years before I finally got glasses, and my grades were very bad because I couldn't see. There is one aspect of this that I do think helped me think though. I remember having to compensate for my lack of seeing by “guessing” what people wrote on the board based on their hand movements while writing and piecing together the pieces of what I could read on the board from squinting. I wasn’t always correct but in the attempt at transcribing I ended up writing down wild mistranscription. “Four Score and Seven Years Ago…” though my vision looked like “Forced and Severed years Ago…” I knew it couldn’t be that, but I found some joy in mistranscribing, including the revelation of a type of poetry within the misheard.
I’m bringing this up because I don't think knowledge is linear or something we can simply aspire to, it comes from a combination of what we learn, who and what we’re exposed to, how that makes us dream, and how we interpret our conclusions. Our traumas become a very personal knowledge, some of them giving us access to unique points of view that sometimes we wish we didn’t have. At this point I can only see the pains as windows that opened my eyes. In another life, with a different family, perhaps I could have come to these conclusions in other ways.
But alas, my mind was primed for furious invention. I remember wanting to know what the universe looked like from a very young age. Everyone said it was infinite, and I was like, but what does that mean? “It goes on forever.” And I would be “But what does that mean?” and I think that this annoyed people, but I was very earnest in my questioning and i would sketch out ideas I had of the universe’s shape, and wherever I learned about a new physical property I would create a new drawing to add that bit of new knowledge.
I was also obsessed with mountain climbing, I think because I wanted to get as far away from where I lived and breathe some thin air in solitude. But I did spend time sketching out ideas for climbing devices, like a very sleek anchor that would allow you to get a fix on a certain type of crack in a wall. I actually didn't do much actual climbing, but I loved reading about it and read all the old lore of the Eiger north face and the golden eras of it,
I also came up with a product, an edible nutrient toothpaste that you would wash your teeth with and then swallow with water to both wash your teeth and get your daily dose of vitamins.
And I drew up a levitating electric car that used the forces of magnets embedded in streets to levitate. The system would be powered by solar panels on the roof that would supply the electricity to operate the actuators to move the magnets on the bottom of the car into positions that would cause the car to move in whatever direction it needed.
I would tell my father of these inventions and he would listen and then turn back to whatever he was doing. I would then press him for his thoughts and his near eternal reply was a wry half smile like he thought I was cuckoo.
I remember asking him why cars aren’t electric and he said it's impractical, but I knew it could be done, I just wasn’t sure it would be or in my lifetime.
Again, as with the cello, my forays into inventing were stifled by his presence. He saw my dyslexia and poor grades as me being “lazy” and around the age of 12 he wanted me to go to a special school for kids with learning disabilities. When they did the entrance test tho, it came back. I actually had a rather high IQ and I wasn’t sent there. In retrospect It may have been good to have gone because I could have learned a lot to help me handle my dyslexia and autism. Instead I was sent back to the threshing floors of high school, there honestly is no ideal path, but possible ones in retrospect.
It would be about 15 years later when the Demon Box first took hold, the first rendition I made out of wood cut and glued together from materials at a craft store. In the interim I tried a myriad of things, I worked in a mailroom, tried graphic design, did photo assisting, was a rooftop gardener in NYC, had a moving company for artists, did some event organizing, tried publishing, making merchandise for bands, journalism, music photography….and I learned from each foray something that grew my perspective if nothing else.
But the Demon Box, it came from a revelation about electric guitars. I felt that once a guitar is electrified it is no longer a guitar, but something else, and only language holds us back from more understanding. Because I had been exposed to so much music before I started playing any, I was really inquisitive as to how a certain sound would even be made, such as putting a delay or a phaser, or distortion on it. Whenever anyone told me how something was done, I would secretly take a mental note to try and understand more of how it actually worked, what made the effect on an electrical level, and just reflect on all the information for hours and hours. The first Demon Box was very simple, and was a way for me to simply amplify metallic resonance from a bass string I put over a pickup. It was a box that I could move along the length of the string as it was resonating and I could hear all the changes in its sound along the length of the string. I knew then that the water was much deeper than it seemed, and I threw myself into furious experimentation. I’ve had this one mental tactic I think has helped me. In all the jobs I’ve had~ that seem so far from what I wanted to do~ if I had any spare moment I would add to an invention I had in my mind, adding a new aspect, a new curve, an inductor here, a curve there, try out a color. After a few weeks of malicious work, I had a new invention in my head and set to drawing it down. In my mind there was always a buffered safe place to invent and create, to allow poetry to swarm despite what felt like the world’s adamant insistence on its futility.
After the first wooden prototype of the demon box I made 8 more, each rendition trying a new aspect, a new type of pickup, and new applications. Some of those prototypes are going to become new Eternal Research instruments in the future, others are going to stay on a shelf. One of the most important things I discovered was that in order to apply for a patent you didn't need a physical prototype, it could be drawings, and that liberated me from being limited by my carpentry and electrical engineering skills. There's always someone out there who can help get the circuitry right if the concept is there, and during the actual implementation of a circuitry you may find other aspects to exploit. These understandings threw gasoline onto the fire of my mind and I think I really began to see that what the demon box became could be something so much more complex than I’d originally conceived it.
Additionally, many paths of theoretical research helped me take this box from a clever thing to what it is now: trying to understand Relativity and apply it to the world and our perception of it, researching materials, studying scientific instruments from the past, seeing visualizations of magnetic fields, watching waves crash along the shore, and learning to visualize in real time the “invisible,” reading lots of poetry, learning about languages, learning history, seeing what others are doing and not doing.
I think it was around 2020 when we had decided we were ready to bring the Demon Box to the market, but then the pandemic happened and it was an extremely hard time. Everything came to a stand still, and multiple times we almost became insolvent and unable to move forward. It really was not a certain thing by any means that we’ve arrived at this present moment. The delays were heartbreaking, and the financial strains made me feel like this was never going to happen. For the first year of it I kinda limped along, there was nothing we could do beyond sketching and more experimenting even though we really wanted to make it a product, I think because it maybe offered us a chance at an income that would have helped a lot then. But it wasn’t possible, many times I thought, oh i’ll just make 100 of these out of wood in my garage and that will help us make a bigger batch. These were stopgap ideas that kept us afloat but not going in any particular direction.
Out of a type of revelation and desperation I realized there must be companies out there that help people bring products to market, and I was in Portland Oregon and went to Control Voltage there and just asked someone at the counter who gave me the name of Electro-smith in San Clemente California.
This was one of a string of fortuitous events that lead to today. I’ve always had extreme swings in self-esteem and confidence. There are times when I feel what I'm doing is right and times when I feel obliterated. As much as I knew this was a cool thing, I still didn't think most people would think so until they understood its potentials, which I could never be sure people would even want to know. I was excited by the prospect of working with someone who could help us, and we met with them and they told us they could. From the heels of this I asked around and found someone who could help us build an enclosure, Spatial Dynamics out of Cambridge Mass.
From these two connections we had a team all the sudden who could help us make this real. For years I was beset by the ethos that everything has to be done by me, or by hand, or in a very self-reliant way. But this didn't really work for me, and I realize now it may be a rather ableist assumption that things should be handmade. Why should my limits be mine alone, why can’t our limits be that of a team of people? The tools we have now allow us to make things with our minds in ways that the past didn’t allow us. We can turn our dreams into realities in ways we couldn't before. And we can work with people who help us, we don't have to do this all alone. I was 38 years old when I realized this. I”ve always been neuro-atypical and a lot of things I don't understand on the same timeline as other people, it's just how my mind works. I feel this is something some people realize 20 years before me, I don't know. I'm glad I understood it finally because without this understanding nothing would have been possible. I would have made 100 of these wooden boxes and that would have been that.
CR: Language can be liberating but it can also be a stagnating force if we use it as such and allow it to limit and confine our ideas. Given that, can you tell us what the Demon Box is and how one would use it?
AF: It's an instrument that uses emf to output analogous signals in various types of outputs simultaneously. The goal of this is to allow a single sound source to have as many outputs as possible in as many formats as possible in order to give the user an almost infinite window into sound and its design. There are devices that can turn emf into sound, but that's kinda what they are, just devices. I wanted to take this phenomena and the tools that perceive it to the limits of my ability to design and engineer an instrument of great potential.
Alongside this instrument I developed this idea called “The inverted Pyramid” which serves as a framework for its use. The meaning of this is based on a thought experiment: You can have one microphone on a symphony, or a symphony of microphones on a single voice…which one would you choose if you wanted the most sonic potential? I would choose the latter, and this instrument is designed to work on that principle.
This principle already exists in other fields, for instance photography. Originally there would be one lens on a subject, now there is not just a lens but millions of pixels behind that lens turning light into data. That data is then turned into an image. The image, only because of habits of use usually ends there or with a filter on it. But because images now are all data you can apply filters on them, edit them, in a much more seamless way, because the data that makes up the image is what is being altered. With an older printed photo, the image is fixed, but now a digital image can become the groundwork of anything. The demon box will also have the ability to manipulate images with the sound data it outputs.
The name Demon Box came from the world of antique science, where a lot of newly discovered by not fully understood forces were ascribed the powers of a demon. When I first heard the sounds coming from the original prototype I felt like I was listening to the universe’s voice. It sent wild shivers across my body, maybe akin to when Howard Carter peered into Tutankhamun's tomb, or the first astronaut saw the unlimited expanses of space, or Jacques Cousteau breathed underwater making a whole new world accessible. But aside from these more magnanimous displays of that feeling, it also felt like that deeply expressive melody one hears from a saxophonist playing into the brick walls of an industrial Brooklyn alley late at night.
The uses of this instrument will be wild. It is meant to work and interface with many types of instruments. It can output midi data, so you can turn the EMF into piano or strings, any soft synth or many old synth hardware voices. It also will have three CV outputs so you can interface with modular synths. And it will have three mono ¼ signal outputs you can run through all the pedals you’d ever want to. Additionally, you can create feedback loops by plugging the outputs back into the demon box, and you can plug demon boxes into other demon boxes and use them in ever more complex ways. I’m incredibly excited to see all the ways people will use it and the music they make. This instrument was designed to have nearly exponentially limitless uses, and because of that its true potential can only be achieved through the experiments of everyone using it.
CR: I can think of so many crazy things to do with such a device. Especially as I've been incorporating more soft synths into my productions. For instance, the idea of running the Demon Box into a soft synth while sending the same signal through my analog synth and also through an array of pedals all at the same time sends my mind spinning. I come from a background playing in a sextet and, due to life circumstances and personal dynamics that shifted to trio and duo work and now I work almost exclusively solo. Your device sounds like it has so much capability for creating music that has so much crazy depth to it. Let alone the ideas for sourcing EMF, using variable speed motors or that weird pile of tuning forks I have in my desk or so on.
AF: It's interesting you say this, about finding yourself making solo music when you used to do more in groups.
I’ve always wanted to make music in a band or group, and while I’ve had tiny forays into it, I dreamt of making an instrument that has built into it enough of both autonomy and numerical chaos to allow a single person or a few to make the most dynamic music by harnessing the unpredictable to symphonic affect. We look at a flower, and it is beautiful, but there is no conductor, there is only chaos held in balance by the frame of a rose.
CR: This is fascinating and inspiring just to read and dream about. I could read your writing about just about anything, but especially your thoughts on creativity and art and technology indefinitely.
AF: Thank you, I don’t know why I do it, but I think it's because I learned from JI Rodale’s life that you have to always been learning and reflecting and meditating on things and trying to bring them into an idea you have of the world, of what its been, what it is and what it could be. I also journal constantly, and love to think and reflect and challenge my mind.
CR: What are your next moves? I'm sure you cannot disclose much about further inventions, but are you going to continue to create in other ways (making music writing, visual art)? Are you still working with the same team for future projects?
AF: I do have a couple new instruments I’m working on, but currently searching for some additional team members to make them happen. I spend most of my time researching phenomena, sensors, architecture, past design styles, and then just meditating on it all for as long as necessary. Many years ago now I found out that in order to patent something you don’t need a physical prototype, it can be drawings and schematics as long as you can describe how it works. When I found that out it greatly energized my inventing as before that I thought I was confined by what I thought I personally could build, not what I would with all my conceive and convey. The thing with me is I understand a lot more than I can physically do; I think this is because I’ve let my interests get the best of me and I’ve taken the journey they’ve encouraged me on, and thats been towards ways of feeling that give us insight into the nature of the most complex and elegant of things.
CR: Could you close by talking about some creators you find inspiring, particularly those who have not gotten enough attention in your estimation? And as always, feel free to follow your tangents organically. I find them to be fascinating and all part of the whole.
AF: I think the edge of that coin you just flipped into the air says there are also more known people who have been misinterpreted, and their ideas taken to pernicious extremes.
And the one side of the coin are the inventors who we esteem but who we can learn more from the negative consequences of their contributions.
And the other side are the people you should really know about, who can be popular or obscure, but should challenge you whoever they are. On that side of the coin there are so many poets that to me raise the bar for what a musical instrument should aspire to.
I love Rilke, Keats, Rene Vivian,
Nietsche, Tesla, Turing, Carrington, Steichen,
Mary Shelly, Marie Curie, Demosthenes, Modotti
Salvatore Quaismodo, Francesca Woodman, Guillivic, Baudelaire,
Emily Dickinson, Buckminster Fuller, Sappho, Man Ray, and all the as yet nameless poets
And the lost poets who perhaps all we have of them is some letters they scrawled into stone somewhere.
And currently I love reading the books of Jimena Canales, who wrote this amazing book called Bedeviled: a shadow history of Demons in Science. Her book has been so inspiring to me. Strangely I called our instrument the Demon Box years before I read this book, and I had somewhat thought it was both a great name but also ludicrous, but once I read her book I realized the ethos we partake in our endeavors here at Eternal Research fits very much in line with blending humanities and science into a energetic and wild vision of the universe.
I don’t really want to end on a low note, but I think this is an important note, even if perhaps it disturbs the tonality of all my writing and what anyone reading this may have thought would be revealed. This section could go anywhere in this journey, perhaps earlier would be better, as it was there when I started too….
When I use demons, I also think of a certain demon, the demon that drives addiction, that impels us towards self destruction, that undermines us, and that those who have had this demon know all too well: makes us the focus of the wrath of those who seek to blame us for even having this demon. But the demon is as much a part of humanity as viruses are, and without them our bodies would not have been challenged to adapt and survive, just as with demons, they challenge our presumptions and prerogatives.
The very same demon that almost killed me ten years ago this past winter took my mothers life. This was a demon I knew existed in her for 30 years, and I don’t know totally what inspired it, but I have my suspicions and am looking into why it would affect her. Ten years ago I came face to face with that very same demon, and in retrospect I don’t know how I made it through, maybe solely because I was young my body was able to persist. I’m bringing this up, because behind all the excitement of a new instrument, and a new way to make complex and elegant music, is an intense pain that I don’t think can ever be resolved. It’s the pain of looking at the past for roads that could have been different, that could have kept people in this world longer to see the days that are ahead and all the beauty. But it's also a pain, that all the beauty that is to come will be ours alone and not be heard by those we could have shared it with.
But there is another demon in me that can only see in darkness, that cannot see in light, and this demon has a message to tell us; its saying listen to the caves, to the bottomless wells, listen to the space between the stars, hear the shadows, listen to the dark things, the darkness is just light you haven’t learned to see yet.
I think where technological determinism comes into play, there is a great responsibility in bringing new things into the world. I hope that the Demon Box allows people to hear the world differently and reposition users in the universe as listeners to a great and wildly infinite orchestra.
What an honor it was to talk with Alexandra. Hopefully we will have to opportunity to continue the conversation as Eternal Research continues its explorations into creative possibility.
Here is my plan for the website and my own work, such as it is. I’ve been pretty overwhelmed this fall~ it is one of the busiest times of year for me and the website seems to fall back in priority, which I am coming to terms with. It seems I generate content in batches, which is all good. I’ve also got some family stuff going on, a dear uncle of mine is in hospice and I am literally the only person he talks too outside of his medical staff. To be there for him is an honor, but it is also time consuming and emotional. Probably oversharing, but I think we don’t talk about loss and death enough in our culture. In fact, those themes are a natural transition to my next talking point.
Coming relatively soon is a long overdue publication of an interview that finished at the start of the year with The Nameless Astronaut, the musician behind Thanapos. All I can really say is that I ran out of steam after the publication of my last interviews and rather than push that out in a messy fashion, I opted to hold onto it. I can tell you that I was inspired quite a bit by the interview and I look forward to sharing.
I am still fumbling towards releasing a little compilation album that people have graciously contributed to. That will eventually see the light. I also have three albums completed. One a musing on the necessity of conflict through the viewpoint of a shamanic figure. Another a dreamlike meditation on domestic life as a kind of spiritual path. Lastly, an album of jazz inspired synth which is a tribute to the inluences of my friend Bruce on my life. The trick is getting all of this stuff out the door; ironically, I can’t help myself from making music, it is definitely my main means of expression and coping with the world, and it gets in the way of actually putting the music out. Self promotion does not come naturally to me and I am a horrid capitalist.
So, a month or so and I’ll get that Thanapos interview out. Then I have one of the most amazing correspondences I’ve ever engaged in, a long form interview with my friend Amanda, which will finish when it does. I expect I’ll go quiet for a little bit after that, as I’ll start a new batch of interviews that I’ve got lined up and those take a bit to manifest. Maybe I’ll rekindle my work on the Bruce’s Couch blog at that point (here on this website of course)~ I certainly have all sorts of stuff to babble about in there.
Then I have a list of people beyond that whom I would love to talk with. We shall see, I’m not going to force it or let it stress me out. It has occurred to me that there is something sacred in sharing the creative work of people who inspire me, that there is an inherent value in my own slow fumbling process, and I am good with that. Anyhow, that is where I’m at these days.