For Berkeley inventor, music comes in many odd, homemade packages.
He carries creative sound to S.F. festival

by Rick DelVecchio, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, February 25, 2005
 


Sudhu Tewari is a young audio gadgeteer with a simple motto: If it makes noise, it can make music.

The 28-year-old Berkeley musician and instrument inventor brings his curious system to the 11th Other Minds Music Festival in San Francisco tonight. He pairs up with experimental guitar pioneer Fred Frith, his former music teacher at Mills College in Oakland, in the duo Normal.

The event is billed as a world premiere of new works, which is a description Tewari puzzled over earlier this month in an interview at his house overlooking San Pablo Park. The musicians aren't preparing any new material. They'll improvise without any structure at all, which means the new work they'll create on the spot will be news to them and to the audience at the same time.

"It works with the ear," Tewari said. "It's like a having a dialogue with someone. You start playing and if you get an answer back, you've got something going."

Tewari, who dismantled coffeemakers and alarm clocks as a kid, makes crude electronic sound devices. His raw materials are trash: old springs, speakers from broken toys, the shells of discarded VCRs and stereo receivers. He uses the homemade items as musical instruments, but to call them instruments is a stretch.

A regulation instrument is made to be controlled to a fine degree by trained hands. A Tewari piece is made to create interesting noises, with no training and minimal effort required on the player's part.

Tewari belongs to a community of young musicians who follow the model of total freedom pioneered by John Cage. They're bringing it up to date with tech know-how, fluency with world music and humor.

"It's all about freedom," Tewari said.

Many electronic musicians use software to shape their creations, but for Tewari computers are confining. By using analog technology instead, he can take any sound from the physical world and bend it to his purposes.

He's equally open-ended about where his musical ideas come from. He gathers bits from sources ranging from the North Indian classical tradition of his father, Sonoma State University music instructor L.G. Tewari, to such pop relics as "Tubular Bells," Mike Oldfield's early-'70s multilayered solo soundscape. He'll stop in his tracks to listen to the rhythm of construction- site pile drivers and other such ambient sounds of his urban environment.

In Tewari's system, even accidents are creative cues. He recalled with delight how a cell phone rang at just the right moment during a cello solo at a recent concert he attended.

"When the birds are interacting with the crosswalk signal, that's musical, " he said.

Tewari's main performance instrument is a modified stereo receiver. It's the skeleton of a Harman Kardon home hi-fi unit outfitted with springs of various sizes. Some of the springs are garage door opener-gauge, others look small enough to have come from the inside of ballpoint pens. (See photos of the instrument online at members.ispwest.com/dmichael/CMAU/Instruments.html.)

"I may or may not decide to bring my big springs," Tewari said, lifting two automotive-sized coils off his studio floor as if to test their weight.

Hidden inside the receiver is an array of stethoscope-like contact microphones. Plucking, brushing or flicking the springs creates a variety of tones and pitches, which are picked up by the mikes and amplified. A set of pedals enables Tewari to bend, loop and layer the sounds.

Tewari plays the modified receiver in the quartet CMAU, which stands for Contact Microphone Arts Union. The name is both an homage to, and a playful poke at, the free-improvisational combos of the 1960s and '70s.

"We're just into having a good time and playing music, being able to freely explore anything and not stick to any kind of norm -- not trying to play improv the way it's supposed to be," said Tewari, who also performs in a modern dance unit called Group A.

In a project they call Whisper Culture, Tewari and his musical friends are trying to reach a wider audience with a more pop-oriented brand of free improv. They're looking to open a venue in San Francisco.

"We're tired of that really austere, academic environment," Tewari said, "and we don't want to play in that environment. We don't want this kind of music just to play in colleges and cold concert halls but to be part of people's lives."

Dozens of other homemade instruments, playable or under construction, fill Tewari's studio. Tewari works as an audio assistant for LeapFrog Toys in Emeryville, and many of his creations are made of parts from talking books, karaoke machines, dolls and other children's educational toys.

The heart of one of his recent creations is a small speaker from a toy doll. It's modeled on the Crackle Box, a 1970s electronic instrument that makes noise when it's touched.

Another instrument in Tewari's collection, a palm-sized plastic box with an amplifier in it, provides controlled feedback. Squealing erupts when a contact mike is rubbed against the speaker's diaphragm. "Comic relief," Tewari said.

"(Tewari) likes rhythm, and recently it seems he's been liking kind of tough and noisy-sounding stuff," said Eric Glick Rieman of Berkeley, who plays prepared Rhodes electric piano in CMAU. "You go to a rehearsal and he's constantly talking about the next thing he's going to make."

Tewari develops an instrument by experimenting with analog circuits that create promising noises, then building the works into a recycled object that serves as a chassis. One of his frames is an old VCR, another a cookie tin.

"I'm a collector of junk," he said. "I let my friends know if they have a broken piece of electronic equipment they can bring it me. If I can't fix it, I turn it into something else."

Tewari won't decide until he's ready to leave the house tonight which of his gadgets he'll pack up for the concert with Frith. "Whatever I can fit in my box as I'm walking out," he said.
Live tonight

11th Other Minds Music Festival, today and Saturday, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard St. (at Third Street), San Francisco. Sudhu Tewari performs on homemade instruments with Fred Frith on guitar in the duo Normal, 8 tonight. Frith also performs solo. Tewari and Frith are one act in a three- act concert that includes the San Francisco premiere of "Son of Metropolis San Francisco" by Charles Amirkhanian and new work by Maria de Alvear. A talk with the composers takes place at 7 p.m.. $18-$40. (415) 978-2787; www.ybca.org.