T.J.: And what music were you listening to during those years. Wyoming radio is strictly country and western, isn't it?

J.B.: No, Wyoming radio isn't strictly country and western, though it's certainly predominant. Quite frankly, once you have put new music out of your conscious mind, there is not a great urge to continue listening to it. I listened to some country music but only stuff that I thought had some poetry, but not as art per se. Rock almost never interested me except for a few groups like the Beatles.

Somewhere around '84 I acquired my first computer-a Commodore 64. I got it to help me with my bookkeeping, but of course, I like gadgets too. Eventually I started programming sounds in the BASIC language and discovered I had a little synthesizer to work with. Writing directly to the sound registers was a lot of fun. So I produced several floppies-5 and a quarter inch size-with little pieces and graphics too, with animated sprites and what not. But I didn't think to present these things to anyone as art, partly because they seemed a little thin compared to my previous experiments with synthesizers. Besides, who would I show them to?

T.J.: Were there any musicians or artists that you talked to? Did you order books or records related to things you had been doing in SoHo?

J.B.: During this whole Wyoming period, I had no contact with the art world. Unfortunately, life outside the city doesn't usually include an interest in the latest cultural offerings. I once played a tape of Christian Wolff's "Exercises and Songs" for a college music professor. After a minute he said, "Are they supposed to be out of synch?"

T.J.: Was it like living in some completely different side of your personality. A Mr. Hyde who went back to his Dr. Jekyll self?

J.B.: Except it wasn't me who had changed, but rather the world. I couldn't relate my experiences in New York to my then current world of work and eking out a living. It became rather painful to think of doing anything like what I used to do in the Seventies, because of the memories and a certain despair about not having the means to continue with art. I felt I was wrenched away from my career and first love.

It wasn't until around 1990 that I got my first PC, quite a step up from the Commodore. Still, I was embroiled in Real World work (i.e. construction) so I had little creative energy for composing. It's a kind of irony that getting injured and unable to work construction anymore finally caused me to realize that I was free. I took early social security retirement, and that modest income meant that suddenly I didn't have to wake up in the middle of the night worrying whether my equipment and crew were ready for the day's work.

Still, I think the most profound moment came about two years ago, when I decided to resurrect my old tape recordings from the 70's. It was the first thing I thought of doing with my newfound freedom. I had to borrow a tape deck, but I had a decent sound system and, of course, my computer. I like to tell the story about the trepidations I had before I finally listened to the first tape.

First of all, I had moved around quite a bit since returning to the West, so these cardboard boxes full of tapes were just baggage much of time. Yet for some reason I couldn't let go of them. They'd reached a kind of final resting place in an old tin shed where they gathered cobwebs and mouse shit for maybe 14 years. I wondered what all that old music would sound like-would I even like it today? I worried that maybe the tapes were all printed through and unintelligible, or that the emulsion had fallen off, or that the signals would be too weak to read.