First originally encountered recording and audio-related technology through his family during his childhood in Philadelphia. "My grandmother was an opera singer, so she always had tape recorders in her home, which I think was kind of exotic back in the early '60s when I was a little kid." His father was "an electrical engineer, he's retired now. He always had interesting devices around, like audio oscillators and electronic test equipment. He used to show me little tricks like how to record things and play them backwards, or how to speed things up, the whole Chipmunks thing, or slow them down, the Darth Vader thing. That was pretty mind- blowing at the time. He told me what a Theremin was, and we built one for an 8th grade science project. My dad was also the first to explain certain acoustical phenomena to me. I remember once I was playing around with recording an oscillator and then sweeping another oscillator against it, and it was like, 'What is going on here?' I would hear this third tone that was occurring when I would get these oscillators' tones near each other, and he told me it was called heterodyning — two tones subtracting from each other to create a third."
Having played guitar much of his life, First's early influences were guitar players, such as Sandy Bull and John Fahey, and guitar-oriented rock bands such as the Grateful Dead and the Yardbirds. "There's a couple of tapes around of my high school band. Somebody always had some sort of reel-to-reel tape recorder. At some point in the early '70s I acquired an Akai M-9 sound on sound 2-track. I traded an old guitar amp for it. I used it for a lot of my first experiments with sound, as opposed to whatever you want to call writing songs, and also to develop the Notekillers material later on. I still have the carcass around here, though it ceased to work years ago. It slid off of a car- hood one sad, drunken Winter evening many years ago."
Gradually, First's interest in rock music diminished, as he felt the music had grown less vital, and he grew interested in experimental jazz and avant-garde composers. "In the mid-'70s, I took some courses at Princeton University in analog electronic music techniques and also in digital computer music. At that time, computer music meant the IBM 360, which took up a whole floor of a building. Once you punched out all your cards and fed them into the computer, you had to go to another building, half a mile down the road, and hang out for a half-hour or so for your D/A conversion to finish, and that was if nobody else was using the computer. Sometimes you had to come back the next day — it was crazy. And that whole computer wasn't nearly as powerful as today's laptop. The teacher I had at the time, a graduate student named Michael Dellaira, told me, 'Someday you're going to have a computer on your desk,' and I just looked at him like, 'Yeah, right'. We became friends, and he arranged it so I could use the analog studio. The graduate students there were all deeply into the IBM 360, the whole digital thing. At that point analog was like the dark ages. 'We don't want to deal with tape and cutting and splicing and patch cords.'"
"I was fascinated by analog because it was really hands-on. They had a Buchla [synthesizer] there with metal touch-sensitive plates. I found it more liberating than the piano-keyboard style synthesizers, which everybody in the pop music world was using to do Emerson Lake & Palmer licks. The Buchla wasn't oriented towards that. I just took every patch cord you could plug into it and did these free improvisations. I have A LOT of tapes of that. You HAD to record everything, because you were never gonna be able to repeat anything later. They had two Ampex reel to reels there — a 4-track and a 2- track. I would go there at night when nobody was around. I brought my guitar sometimes and plugged it into the patch-bay and used that to trigger voltages. I was always a little paranoid that Milton Babbitt, who I used to run into in the hallway, was going to walk in and see me jamming. It was still a pretty uptight place at that time, but I guess I got away with it."
By 1977, First's renewed interest in rock led him to assemble a new trio, the Notekillers, in which he played guitar. While the Notekillers clearly reflected his long- standing love of psychedelic music and his awareness of "the whole CBGB's scene," they also assimilated First's influences from free jazz and minimalist composition. Their music loosely resembles the New York no wave bands that existed at the same time, but with a more direct and less fragmented rhythmic sensibility.
"We rehearsed six nights a week in the basement of a beauty parlor that was owned by the bass player's father. Every time I smell hairspray, I still think of that space. We didn't do anything to make it particularly recording-friendly. The one thing we did do, and we were paying for it every month, was we had a sound system made for us by Community Light and Sound. It had 2 pairs of horns and these monstrous bass cabinets. We had a full-time sound guy who was at every rehearsal — he was like our fourth member. Our feeling was that if we were going to be all instrumental, which was fairly unusual, we didn't want to be at the mercy of sound people that didn't know what we were doing. Most sound systems at the time were still built around vocals. Other bands would ask if they could use our set-up, and it wasn't really designed for vocals, it was designed for what we wanted to do. It sounded beautiful for us, but they would end up thinking we were sabotaging them, because it didn't sound like a typical system."
"We all lived together in a big house, and one of the guys who lived with us talked his brother, who was a lawyer, into buying us a Teac 3340 4-track. That was what the Notekillers single was recorded on. Our sound guy became our recording engineer. There were some subtle overdubs on the A side, 'The Zipper', but the song was basically done [live], with one track for each instrument. There was a solo in the middle and an extra guitar part at the end. There are also some maracas and some clusterous saw-tooth waves I mixed down separately that sneak out of the mix near the end. The B side, 'Clockwise', was a totally live recording with no overdubs."
"The Notekillers made an aborted attempt at a second single, where we tried to do something a little bit more ambitious, not sticking to our usual way of working. We thought we should get more elaborate and sophisticated for our second release, so we tried to do some things with overdubbing and processing. We thought it was a step up. We didn't use our regular engineer who knew our sound. We still did it in the basement, but we brought in somebody who had an 8-track Tascam 80-8, which was too much for us. The guy was a friend, and it wasn't really anything that was his fault. We just jumped all over the idea that, 'Oh my God, you don't have to do everything at once.' It was kind of a disaster. It didn't have our energy, and it wasn't the greatest performance." The Notekillers broke up, and First moved on to northern New Jersey and then New York, where he has lived since 1984.
A recent article in Mojo Collections magazine brought First in touch with long-time Notekillers fan Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, whose Ecstatic Peace label will soon release a CD compilation of their material. "We're going to include the two singles, but the best thing I've found for the rest of it is a live concert that was recorded on an 8-track cartridge recorder that our sound guy owned. I found it at the bottom of a box of cassettes that I've been lugging around New York for almost twenty years now."
After moving to New York, First played briefly in Richard Lloyd's band, then wrote a set of new wave pop songs. He recorded them "on a 1" Fostex 16-track at Moogy Klingman's studio. I chose it because Moogy was involved with Todd Rundgren, and I've always loved Todd Rundgren's songs. It was a typical one or two day thing. I went in there with a band of musicians I had been rehearsing on the Lower East Side. We did a 4 song demo. Nothing much came of it. It was another in a series of frustrating experiences. As I was finishing the demo, the band I had put together, which was a crack band, was breaking up. I had pretty much had it with that round of the singer-songwriter thing anyway."
"I was living on Canal Street at the time, right near the Holland Tunnel, my first place when I finally moved to New York. Every day, especially at rush hour in the morning and at night, there was this incredible sustained symphony of car horns outside my window. It didn't just make writing these semi-delicate pop songs difficult, it totally blew them out of my head. It just really was impossible to compete with it, and at the same time, it was a really beautiful sound influence. You'd hear these people, dozens of them, and you could almost swear they were playing with each other, although it was probably more like 'Fuck You' to each other. It wasn't really trading off melodies — it was trading off insults and cursing, although I suppose that's a type of musical communication."
He had discovered microtonal pioneer Harry Partch "when one of his albums got re-released on Columbia in the late- '60s." Influenced by everything from Partch to the car horns in his daily life, First incorporated microtones more prominently into his compositional approach. "The pitches of the overtone series diverge wildly from the scale that you'll hear on any tempered instrument such as a guitar or a piano, but these are some amazingly powerful, beautiful tones. As a guitarist, [there is] a lot of that you do intuitively, like harmonics and string bending in blues. When you're tuning the guitar, you learn to hear beating tones you're supposed to get rid of. I was already using these ideas, like purposely creating beating tones, as far back as the Notekillers. Systematically exploring them didn't come until the mid-'80s when I started using synthesizers again." "Once digital synthesizers became prevalent, I was able to isolate precise microtones and make compositions for them. My first systematic composition for synthesizers was for the Casio CZ1000. It was programmable, and it was affordable. When the whole CZ series came out, all of the sudden you could buy a digital synthesizer for two hundred fifty dollars. You didn't buy them at music stores — you bought them at camera and watch shops in midtown. They weren't even considered musical instruments — they were kind of toys. I had a group for awhile called the World Casio Quartet. We got a lot of mileage out of that [name]. We used to brag about how we had over a thousand dollars of equipment on stage!"
"According to Casio, the only microtuning possible on their instruments was to have the equal-tempered tone plus a second pitch that was slightly off by a globally programmable amount. I figured out a way to trick the synthesizer into bypassing the equal-tempered tone so you would only get the detuned pitch. I programmed all these different patches at different microtonal deviations. We would play one note on each keyboard and just keep changing programs. The piece would be about how virtuosic you could be about changing programs. We did some recording with that band at Gramavision, which was a nice studio in lower Manhattan. They had a deal where you could do an 8 hour session for four hundred dollars. We treated it as a live performance, direct to tape. Alex Noyes acted as my interface with [the technical parts of recording]. In those days, whenever I needed somebody to tell me whether something was possible technically or how to do something, Alex was the guy I would turn to. He arranged this session. He wasn't the actual engineer at this session, a guy named Tim Casey engineered the session, Alex was the translator."
"Live, I was really into exploiting flaws. If I discovered a loose heating duct or window that would resonate at a certain frequency, the people who set up the gig would be apologizing for it and I would make it the centerpiece of that evening's performance. If I could make something rattle, I would definitely go for it. We were really into beating tones and creating these sonic masses — trying to make a room explode. That was hard to capture in the studio. The one piece that was up to snuff out of the Gramavision session was the one that ended up on my first CD, Resolver. The rest of it was a little bit too pristine. You hear this from a lot of bands, I'm sure. They do this really great live thing, and then they go into the studio, and they're a little careful or they're a little ill at ease or the room doesn't give them what they're used to. I've had that experience a few times, where I didn't have enough recording experience or time to create the magic in the studio, which is a whole art in itself."
"Even before I was doing things with the Casios, I [used] an old Heathkit tone generator, the same one I used on 'The Zipper'. I bought a [Tascam] 244 PortaStudio when they first came out, and I used that for awhile. When I was doing the Casios. I didn't have a computer or anything that would trigger [MIDI], so I would record directly [to the Tascam]. I would record one pitch, and then I'd find another one that was cool, and I'd record that pitch. And then I'd record a third one, and then go back and record something for the fourth one that would supercede the first one, and build it up. That's how the Casio quartet pieces were built, just overdubbing on a PortaStudio."
"I avoided formalizing percussion in my music for a long time, because I couldn't figure out what to do with it. Coming from a rock/pop background, I didn't just want to do the microtonal thing on top of a pounding 4/4 beat. I felt like I was either going to do something analogous to what I was doing with pitch, or I wasn't going to deal with it at all. A lot of my early microtonal pieces were soundscapes, drifting sounds. Some of the Casio quartet pieces had rhythmic things going on, but not percussion instruments or sounds. My approach by the time of The Good Book's (Accurate) Jail of Escape Dust [First's second CD] was to use [percussion] in the free jazz kind of way, where I guided somebody to create some rhythmic heat underneath. It was more intuitive [and] still avoided the 4/4 thing." With Good Book, First incorporated his rock and avant-garde jazz influences into a more academic compositional structure. The piece starts quietly with subtle drones and the resulting interference patterns. These drones never disappear as the piece evolves, but they interact with less rigidly structured and often more aggressive playing. Good Book builds through an hour to a prominent climax.
