Impossible Music

Impossible Music is the name of the ensemble formed by David Weinstein and Tim Spelios to explore techniques and strategies for audio montage using only portable CD players as their instruments. From 1990 to 1995 the group performed in New York at the Kitchen, Roulette, the Alternative Museum, Symphony Space, Dance Theatre Workshop, Performing Garage, Greenwich House, the Ear Inn and many other spaces across the USA and in Europe.

Members of the group, all featured on the CD along with Weinstein and Spelios, included Nicolas Collins, Ted Greenwald, Ikue Mori and David Shea. The personnel varied from performance to performance-from as few as two to as many as five players. No commercial recordings of the group were ever released.

"Impossible Music grew out of a need and desire to create maximum audio imagery out of minimal technical means. The chosen musical instrument-the portable CD player-emerged as the ideal choice. It was new technology that appeared during the explosion of the CD format in the late eighties. Each player would use two or three at once.

Much like the concrete poets who limited themselves to a particular make and model of typewriter at one point, Impossible Music initially restricted itself to the original SONY D2, a bulbous and anti-intuitive yet portable device. Later the group branched out to the sleek, pricey and short-lived SONY D35. This unit featured a phenomenal range of programmable utilities including a selectable A-B looping function and location memory.

Using only these portable compact disc players as instruments, the Impossible Music performers scan, select, edit, loop and trigger pre-recorded material (found, composed or appropriated) from stacks of diverse discs. Some pieces are improvised while others are made by coordinating montage/arrangements of selected events or phrases using tracks on unrelated recordings. Players locate a series of pre-determined elements and place them, like pieces out of a moving puzzle, into the unfolding sequence. The merging of these diverse sources leads to the severe reconstruction of context, yet retains and even enhances the evocative and familiar qualities of the originals.

Eventually a variety of other experiments were also tried. Nicolas Collins opened up his portable player and hot-wired some of the functions. David Shea borrowed a fancy rack unit from Christian Marclay which was one of the first CD scratching units for DJs. The group added live musicians (one track features Joe Trump on sampled percussion and Virgil Moorefield on a vintage analog synth), played to silent movies, provided tracks for theatre and video and created ambient installation automats. At one point they even uncovered some of the original source material for the Beatles' surreal Revolution No. 9 and began performing that piece live.

Spelios and Weinstein still occasionally unpack the old units for an appearance here and there. The easy access to CD burners, digital editing and internet source material has made the impossible, once again, tantalizing."