Interview with Mikel Rouse

Mikel Rouse is a composer and performer from Missouri. He moved to New York in 1979 with his band, Tirez Tirez, and formed a contemporary ensemble, Broken Consort. He became a staple of the New York Downtown scene in the 80s. In 1995, the first of his trilogy of electronic operas, Failing Kansas, premiered. This was a single-performer, “suitcase” opera, based on Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Failing Kansas was followed by the talk-show opera Dennis Cleveland, and The End of Cinematics. He is known for his technique of counterpoetry, the layering of unpitched voices in counterpoint. Rouse’s extensive discography can be viewed here. For recordings and videos of many of his works, including his electronic operas, visit his YouTube channel.

This is a transcription of a phone interview with Mikel Rouse, carried out on 04/15/2022, edited for clarity.

Did you get into Electronics because you were interested or was it something that came naturally through necessity?

Probably a bit of both. I was doing the pop group and the chamber group, and I was doing a lot of live shows and a lot of recording. Around the early 90s it started to be possible to start building your own studio. The prices of equipment were coming down, and computers were starting to become an actual viable thing. Having spent so many years doing odd jobs to pay for studio time there was something really attractive about not having to do that, as much as I like working with musicians in the studio. So that was one thing, starting to build my own studio, and then the second thing was I studied music but I also studied painting and filmmaking at the Kansas City Art Institute, so I had a lot of friends who were visual artists. I guess there was always a part of me that was wondering “are you ever going to find a way to incorporate that into the work?” Up to that point [my work] was pretty much just stripped down music Ensembles. When I got the idea for the operas, and also for Living Inside Design, adding a visual component seemed to make sense. That led me further into my own Studio because I started building it as a media studio, not just a music studio. The final thing I would say is that especially with failing Kansas, I was coming out of the 1987 financial crisis, the Wall Street Crash, and I simply couldn’t afford to take ensembles on the road anymore, so I had to figure out a way to stay in the game and I started doing suitcase shows, shows where I could perform solo and have some type of electronic accompaniment. This lead to the larger opera also having an element of that because of the the necessity to have the visual component locked really tightly in with the music component.

How did you learn your production skills?

When I came to New York I worked in studios for the first 10 to 12 years. It was very hands-on with the engineers I worked with. I worked with James Mason on the first Tirez Tirez record, and I worked with a couple of engineers in Europe when I lived in Brussels. I then worked with Martin Bisi. I learned a lot from those guys and being in their presence, being on hand and producing my own records as well, and then I guess I really started doing a lot when I was building the studio, cause then I was responsible for the gear and I was responsible for maintaining the studio. And then I just sort of kept fine tuning my own studio.

What made you decide to go into opera?

With Failing Kansas I was very intrigued by writing something from the transcripts of the original trial material that Capote used for writing In Cold Blood. I had an idea for six singers who all play the same character at various times but I couldn’t afford to do that, similar to why I couldn’t afford to get my ensembles on the road. At that point I came up with a multi-tracking tape effect, and the counter poetry technique. So that made sense more from a poverty standpoint. When we got to the second Opera, Dennis Cleveland, I was like six months into writing the music for that piece and I had all sorts of drawings, all sorts of pop-culture references that were gonna be fantastic. I was walking through Central Park one day and I just stopped dead in my tracks and it hit me that this piece is not about television, it is television. From that point I decided that I would stage it as a television talk show. When I came up with Dennis Cleveland, I knew it was going to be staged as a television talk-show but still be a music forward piece. I felt like opera was the logical avenue for a piece like that. With the third opera, The End of Cinematics I consider it like a live film, but still with music as a central element.

Going back to Failing Kansas, what kind of tools and technologies were you using at that time?

The film is by an artist named Cliff Baldwin. I’ve always admired Cliff’s work, in fact he also did the film for the previous record, Living by Design. I like collaborating with people, I like them to have as much free rein as possible. I knew that Cliff had collected a lot of 8 and 16mm film. We went to school together, I’ve known him since the late 70s. I basically said “here’s the thing, you can do whatever, use whatever forces you want, the only requirement is, I had a certain number of points where there needed to be an edit, so people wouldn’t think it was just random footage. It worked miraculously well, but it was because of those pivot points that tied the very non-narrative aspect. So that’s the film portion. For the music portion, I had a Mac computer and I had an MC-50 sequencer. Living Inside Design and Failing Kansas have a hodgepodge of technology. That MC-50, if I’m remembering correctly, had a sync tone, so that it’s driving the drum machine programming, it’s driving the sequencing sounds that are coming from various keyboard sequencers, and then it’s driving the sync tone on a tape machine. In three or four of the tracks on both Living Inside Design and Failing Kansas, one of those two machines is a 4-track cassette recorder, so it’s pretty crude technology. So the sync tone is driving track four of the cassette machine and that leaves me three tracks to record vocals or harmonica or something like. Failing Kansas took the longest of anything I’ve ever done except maybe for the new piece One More Day. It took about five years. Five years is a long time in terms of technology. At that point those ADAT tape machines came on the market. I started out with one, and then you could sync two, and then at that point you got 16 digital tracks. The MC-50 sequencer was still driving the sync tone on one of those tracks, but now I had access to digital tracks, and more tracks than just a 4-track cassette recorder. On Failing Kansas, for sure Corners is on the ADAT machine. I was still using the MC-50 sequencer on Dennis Cleaveland but it was in conjunction with Pro Tools and Digital Performer. By the end of the 90s I got rid of that sequencer and was mostly using drum programming, but I don’t even need to use a drum machine anymore cause at that point sampling technology was becoming pretty ubiquitous and you could grab all the sounds that you needed from other sources.

What was the live performance process of Failing Kansas like?

In terms of syncing the live performance aspect of Failing Kansas with the tape track and video, it was pretty dodgy for a while because the technology was really crude. I was doing that show in New York and then I did a small tour in the states, then I did in London. For the first couple of years I was running the audio on a stereo DAT machine. I think that there was some type of a junction box between the DAT machine and a VHS tape machine, and that would sync with the tape machine (when it worked!). It was a nightmare before every show to get it to work. I was doing the show in Cedar Rapids Iowa at a great performing arts venue called CPS. They were the first people who had enough money to put me in a television studio. I was able to dupe the DAT tape onto a digital tape, and also transfer the video to a digital format. So now for the first time the materials were all in one format. That format rapidly became CD and DVD. Had we gone a little bit longer [with touring Failing Kansas and Denis Cleveland] we probably would have just run it from a computer, but we weren’t quite there yet with that technology.

Do you think anyone else would be able to perform Failing Kansas and Denis Cleveland?

It’s a funny story, the actor Michael Cerverus — he did Hedwig and the Angry Inch and won a Tony for a show called Fun Home — came to the LA Performance of Dennis Cleveland and I remember saying to him “you know you’d be perfect for this role!” And he said “I can’t imagine anybody else doing it” and I said “imagine harder!” My agent and I were contemplating having both Dennis Cleveland and Failing Kansas on the road without me having to do it. I think it is possible to do, but I think the advantage of having me do it was that in the early days I couldn’t afford to pay somebody. You have to learn this very complicated music. It was easy for me to learn it because by the time you’re committing [the music] to record you kind of memorize it cuz you’ve heard it hundreds and hundreds of times as you’re mixing it, and that’s exactly what happened with Dennis Cleveland. I finished both of these recordings before I did them live so by the time they’re done, they’re already kind of memorized. I know the music better than anybody else so it’s easier for me to teach it.

During the pandemic I posted a performance of Failing Kansas on YouTube. That’s an interesting story. It was recorded over 20 years ago in New Zealand in Wellington, and I was doing a little bit better financially. I decided I’d like to film it. I wanted to do a four camera shoot over four nights, but I couldn’t afford it, so I decided to hire one cameraman and each night he shot from a different angle, but that was a different performance each night. We recorded the audio on the DAT. It’s been in the box for 20 years. During the pandemic I thought Oh God, I have to do it. I had all the DBCAM tapes but I have not turned on my DBCAM in over 20 years and I had all the DAT tapes for each of the four live performances and I hadn’t turned on that DAT machine in 20 years and miraculously I was able to get them both to work. I transferred all the stuff into Final Cut Pro. It was my logic back in 2001 when I did those performances that since I’d been Touring that piece for 7 years, I’d gotten it down to a science. I had this feeling that I would be able to cut this thing and you would not be able to notice it wasn’t one performance. Every time you see a cut, you know that means I’m cutting to a different performance. I would defy almost anyone to know that that wasn’t one performance.

Yeah it certainly comes across as one performance, that’s pretty impressive!

It was a little mind-blowing to me that it worked. I did so many performances of Failing Kansas Most venues do a rudimentary backup video but for some reason I never thought to ask for one. I’m sure that they exist but as far as I know that’s the only live performance of Failing Kansas that exists on film so I was particularly thrilled that I could have the gumption to edit and post it.

It’s great to have it up on YouTube so easily accessible! Can you talk me through the live performance setup for The End of Cinematics?

I shot a film using the Merce Cunningham dancers in Paris and he used recorded music from the album. When we were going to perform this, I had to figure out how to do it. I went to the National Center for Supercomputing in Urbana, Illinois and we used PVIs to take out people from the original film so that the original film could be used as backdrop for live performance. For the live performance, you have six rear-projected screens and then you have a front screen that functions as the actual movie screen. I’d worked with my lighting designer, Hideaki Tsutsui for about 12 years and I had this idea that the lighting designer would be used as a film editor. When all the lights go out you got an opaque screen, as if you walk into a movie house, but when the lights go back on and the rear protector videos go back on, you can see images projected, but now it’s three dimensional because the lighting temperature has risen enough so that you can also see the performers between the scrim and rear projectors screens. There’s a full-length film of that on YouTube that I posted during covid. The other thing we did was we ran 15 minutes of trailers on the opening screen before the piece starts, just to kind of throw people off. This doesn’t sound like much now because now you can go to a Broadway theater and have food and drinks and snacks, but back in the day you couldn’t do that, so in every single City that we toured, we had to fight and beg to let us have a popcorn machine and sell candy and coke. I wanted the experience to feel like going to the movies. It worked miraculously well. People would go in, and now they see the new Spider-Man trailer, now they see the new Batman trailer and they’d eat their popcorn and they’d think: “I thought I was going to see an opera but I guess I don’t care because now I’m eating popcorn,” and then this thing just opens up and it’s this great three-dimensional thing. With the Failing Kansas video that I edited, it gives you a sense of the solo performance. Because Dennis Cleveland is filmed like a television talk, I didn’t need to edit performances I have on YouTube. The unfortunate part with The End of Cinematics is that you really cannot imagine what this piece looks like live from that rear house video. Just before we stopped touring again we were contemplating getting two HD cameras and recording it in stereo HD. The timing didn’t work so unfortunately. When some of these effects between the front and the rear projector happened you would think the stage was expanding. The distance between the rear projected screen and the front scrim was 12 ft. There where moments where you’d swear it was expanding to 40 ft. The visual effect was astounding and it’s just not captured in the video.

Between earlier works like Failing Kansas and Dennis Cleveland and later works, what were some of the things you learned and applied forward?

Coming to New York as a musician, creating a couple of different ensembles, and having the wonderful experience of playing with great musicians, I was nervous going down the road of Failing Kansas as a solo performer. But I needed to have a suitcase tour that was affordable, and then I was excited about both Dennis Cleveland and The End of Cinematics in terms of having some of the tracks pre-recorded because there was such an explosion that was happening in New York, not only modern operas but especially hip-hop. There’s an element of hip-hop thats having a large part of the performance pre-recorded, and I found it really exciting that I was kind of doing that in my own way. I learned a lot from that, and I learned a lot about being self-contained. With Dennis Cleveland, I went to all these talk shows. It would have just felt too artsy if I’d had live music. The way those shows ran was out of loudspeakers and I knew that wouldn’t be believability unless I did it that way. That being said, as happy as I was, by the time I was done with that, the next big piece was Gravity Radio, and I was really excited to be back working with musicians again. I don’t think I could have taken the pre-recorded thing any further. From then on everything I was doing, even if it was solo, was usually live. The main difference in technology between now and then is how affordable it’s all become. I went through so many video cameras in my lifetime, and if you could tell me that I could shoot HD on my iPhone that looks better than any of those cameras, I wouldn’t believe it. Similar to audio recording. I’m contemplating another upgrade to my production computer system and I’ve lived long enough to see these modeling plugins become really good. I have a lot of analog gear in my studio. It’s really fascinating to me how this stuff has gotten scaled down.

Going back to Robert Ashley did you hear any of his work before you wrote Failing Kansas?

When I was in college I got a record in the music library. I think the record was called Extended Voices. It was four or five different composers. There was a piece by someone I’d never heard of named Robert Ashley called The Visitor, fantastic. I probably forgot about it and then I moved to New York with my band and I started going to clubs. Fortunately I got to see Rob do Perfect Lives a number of times. I loved his work but I wouldn’t have known that he was such an influence. It kind of seeped in. I don’t know if it was the Midwest background, or if we were both interested in American vernacular speech. He came to see Failing Kansas and was blown away. Then I got to start hanging out with him and getting to know him. I remember we were talking one night — he loves to drink vodka, I would go to this famous cigar store in the West Village cause he liked these Italian stinky cigars, so I’d go get him a pack and then I would go to his place. I remember after Failing Kansas he said “how did you figure it out?” Meaning the problem of setting American vernacular speech. I explained to him my technique of counterpoetry and how I came up with writing Counterpoint but with layered voices, and he just had this wonderful look on his face like “oh that’s one solution, that makes sense.” Then he said to me “what are you working on now?” and I was working on Dennis Cleveland, and he said “that’s a good title.” I got to see his Ensemble do Improvements which was fantastic. It might have come out in ’92 but I didn’t Discover it until ’95 or something. I’d become friends with Kyle Gann. I went to Bucknell where he was teaching, and he was playing Improvements. I was so blown away all I could say to him was “I’m so glad I didn’t hear this before Failing Kansas because I would have been too embarrassed to even try.” I really think it was true. Improvements is maybe one of the greatest pieces I’ve heard in my entire life. I’m so grateful I didn’t hear it before ‘95.

The last time I got to hang out with Rob, I think Kyle had just finished the book that he wrote on Rob, and we went over to his place. He was playing me this modern country western song — I’m not a big fan of modern country. I love country music but I just don’t like that really ridiculous pop country. But Rob was blown away by the technical style of the recording. I don’t know if he wasn’t as experienced with multitrack recording as I had been over the years, but he was blown away by the sounds in this song. It was always interesting to me, I never got the impression that he was defined by genre. He was defined by what interested him, and in that particular moment it was how did they get that sound? It was pretty refreshing to hear a guy his age thinking that way.

This has been fantastic. So, last question, what are you working on now?

I did some archival work for my friend Ellery Eskelin who was one of the many people that was in Broken Consort. I went over to his house. He had this old maestro drum machine from the early 70s. It’s a pretty crude box. It’s not programmable or anything, you’re stuck with the sounds that are in the box. He said I could borrow it, but I said I’m gonna do some research first. It was used as a crude accompaniment for keyboard players. The tempo is controlled by a knob. You can kind of slowly slow it down or speed it up. I’m really intrigued by that. I’m going through all the samples he gave me, and these sounds are not very interesting, but there’s something about that tempo knob that makes me think I could make something interesting about it.