T.J.: Before we try to explain these 25 years of silence, and the reasons for coming back to music now, let me fill in some details of what I remember of your formidable career in SoHo in the early '70s. The first performance of your music that I still recall vividly was that Simple Cymbal Piece, which you premiered on October 17, 1972, and which I later wrote about (Village Voice ,October 26, 1972). This is certainly the funniest performance of new music that I have ever seen in my life, but at the same time it was a very serious, even puzzling, piece, something one remembers for a long time. You sneaked out on the stage of the Kitchen that night, whip in hand, all ready to tame the entire band of vicious suspended cymbals lurking there at the back of the stage, waiting for you and your violent whip lashes. Sometimes you missed, but sometimes the whip struck squarely on one of the poor cymbals, which resounded with terrible pain. It was an intense performance, and we could really imagine that these vicious cymbals might suddenly pounce on you, but of course, you emerged victorious, as cymbal tamers, like lion tamers, generally do.

On December 6, 1974, you made several musical revolutions all in one concert, billed as The Phisiks of Metaquavers. · Perhaps the most beautiful music of the evening was the String Quartet, where for the first time in music history, music was made with long amplified wires. The four wires were each 80 feet long, you and three collaborators walked slowly down them, resin on your fingers, drawing deep resonances never fully controllable.  This idea later served as the basis for whole musical careers for at least three other composers, though they probably didn't know that you had done it before. · The premier of your ReadyMade Rotosonorophone Concerto, with four musicians bowing four bicycle wheels, mounted on milk crates, marked the first time that musicians tried to make music with the famous Duchamp readymade. · The concert ended with the Phantom Organ, in which the four musicians blew into detached organ pipes, an idea that circulated much more widely when Heiner Goebbels did the same thing with the Frankfurt Ballet.

You invented many instruments during this short period of three or four years. Aside from the long amplified wires, the organ pipes, and the bicycle wheels, you found old music boxes, took them apart, put cranks on them, and made a piece where four performers could sit around a board and turn four music boxes according to a score. Perhaps the most remarkable sounding instrument, judging from the tape you restored, is the vinophone. Here you took pint sized glass wine flasks, half filled them with water, and suspended them on rubber bands, so that when they were struck, the resonances had to pass strangely through waves of moving water. Meanwhile, your personal instrument was the "springed instrument," which was a horizontal stand you stood behind. Using a variety of bows and mallets, you played on springs, wires, and metal scraps, amplified through guitar pick-ups.

J.B.: I used to call that my "twanger". It had a very distinct, microtonal quality that I liked to play against other more conventional instruments.

T.J.: All this time, from 1972 to 1974, you were not just doing your own music, but were very much a part of the community of young composers working in Lower Manhattan at the time. As music director of the Kitchen you produced the first New York performance of Eliane Radigue, Two Evenings of John Cage, celebrating his 60th birthday, the premier of an early piece by Robert Ashley, a performance of Alvin Lucier's Queen of the South, one of the first performances of Christian Wolff's Exercises and Songs, a piano concert of Charlemagne Palestine, the first performances of my own Lecture with Repetition, and quite a few other events that are now music history. 

You also organized several performing ensembles, in collaboration with musicians like bassist Jon Deak, flutist Rhys Chatham, and trombonist Garrett List. As an innovator with a visual arts background, you and your eccentric "springed instrument" provided an off-center focal point that stimulated well-trained classical musicians and helped them to find their own innovations. These ensemble concerts were mostly improvised, but there were also compositions written by one or more of you.