The Supercomputer That Stole Helado Negro’s Heart

Gear Me is a column in which we ask some of our favorite musicians about the racks, stacks, and instruments they love best. 

Musicians can be obsessive about their instruments, but the right piece of gear can be more than just a tool; sometimes it opens up new avenues of thought, unlocking paths to creative expression that just weren’t possible before. For his Helado Negro project, Roberto Carlos Lange leverages all sorts of tools, weaving various percussive and electronic instruments and gadgets with samples and field recordings to create lush compositions, cosmic lullabies that straddle the line between digital and analog. 

While writing his latest LP Phasor, Lange found inspiration in a particularly curious instrument: the Sal-Mar Construction. Billed as “the first interactive composing machine with digital logic circuits,” the machine is a room-sized workstation built by the composer Salvatore Martirano in 1969 with the help of engineers and musicians at the University of Illinois, using parts from the pioneering ILLIAC II supercomputer. While much of its functionality as a compositional tool has since been streamlined by various synths and digital audio workstations, the Sal-Mar is essentially an installation in a museum. 

Using it is a unique experience: the performer mans a control panel of 291 lighted, touch-sensitive switches. The switches are used to dial sequences of numbers of various intervals and lengths, which can be driven both manually and by the computer—a collaboration of sorts between the artist and the machine.

The Sal-Mar Construction’s development grew out of necessity. Martirano’s art practice pressed against the boundaries of what was possible; the Sal-Mar was a tool to liberate him from the limitations of conventional composition. His most famous piece, “L’s GA,” offers a glimpse into his genius: a performance of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the work was presented using tapes with music he composed, two of Ronald Nameth’s films that played side by side, and a narrator who recited the address while wearing a mask and inhaling helium.

Decades later, Lange isn’t quite as limited by contemporary technology, but still shares Martirano’s curiosity and sense of exploration. Tipped off to the machine by a friend, he traveled to the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music at the University of Illinois last year in search of new sounds that would end up on Phasor. I recently spoke with him about the experience of using this one-of-a-kind machine to make music. 

The Sal-Mar is billed as the “first interactive composing machine with digital logic circuits.” What do you know of Martirano’s motivation to create this piece of gear?

I really love the concept. It seems like his intention was to find a way to compose that felt so liberating and so free and so unknown to conventional norms. As if he was like: What can we do to make a machine that makes it feel like you're navigating a boat in the water and you know where you're going but you can’t see? When I’m working with it, it’s set up in a specific way, and you can use it, but he set it up where you can continually manipulate it, if you have that knowledge. But it’s so oblique, it’s hard to know how, unless that’s what you do for the rest of your life.

What was the process of working with the Sal-Mar like? You can’t exactly take it home and bring it to your studio. 

It looks like a prop from some sci-fi movie. And it looks so handmade, which is part of the allure. There’s a couple speakers that are hooked up to it, but the system itself is meant to use more and have discrete sounds being shot to each speaker, so you're surrounded by these speakers. Once you kind of get the machine rolling, it feels like it’s just getting warmed up. You’re guided by the archivist there, who runs it, and he tells you what to do. I was like, “OK, I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” and I just kind of started pressing buttons. 

I brought my field recorder and sat there for, like, five hours messing with it. Sometimes if you mess with it too much, it just stops working, and you know you’ve gone too far. And then Scott [Schwartz, the Director and Archivist for Music and Fine Arts for the Sousa Archives] comes back and resets it.

Were you seeking tones, rhythms? What did you come away with from those sessions? 

I brought this little four-channel Zoom recorder, and I was able to jack into the headphone output of the amplifier. And then the Zoom itself has microphones built in, so I’m recording the speakers in the room. Doing that gave me more control of the setting… manipulating the perspective. 

You start to get an idea of what does what when you start pressing buttons to generate certain ideas. But in combination with other things, sometimes it can really throw things off, and you’re like, “Whoa, that was cool.” So it’s really fun to get to those places that don't sound like the standard thing that it spits out. 

It does have a very specific sound. It’s kind of bright and very tweaked-out electronics… not like beep and bloop like in a sci-fi movie, it almost feels like the end or the beginning of some kind of circuitry that’s just about to expire. All the sounds that it generates, it almost sounds like it’s about to explode, or implode.

So on which Phasor songs does the Sal-Mar appear?

On “LFO (Lupe Finds Oliveros)” there's definitely a lot of sounds. Nothing that's obvious, they're super buried. I used some rhythmic and textural aspects of it, and that was fun to lay it in there, conceptually. Another song is “Echo Tricks Me,” and that's actually a song in which you can hear it very prominently. All the wild noise bursts that happen at the beginning and transitionally throughout the song, that's the sound of the Sal-Mar. You can hear it around 2:52, there's a transitional moment where I use it in its raw form. The outro as well—that's in its raw form, not manipulated. Elsewhere, it’s more layered in.

Do you think you could recreate what you captured?

I'm sure there’s a way to get back to where you were, but I don’t remember [the settings]. It's like its own language, the way that machine’s designed. So every time I go there, I’m like, “Okay, which one do I press again?” It’s really not intuitive at all. Scott was saying that there's writing on it now that wasn’t originally on it—one of the engineers put it on there so they could remember where things were.

What does the interface look like? Are we talking knobs, dials, buttons, patch cables? What are you interacting with physically?

There’s a panel, and protruding from the panels, are these little silver dots. Then there's another panel, a piece of stainless steel running parallel to the unit, that has all these button interfaces on it, and you have to touch the panel to ground yourself, and then touch the other button to complete a circuit. So it’s essentially like a science experiment, you're holding down the panel with one hand then you have to press the other button with the other hand. And then these little old-school lights turn on, and that’s when you know that parameter has been activated.

So you physically become part of the instrument? 

Yeah, electricity passes through you. 

That’s fucking crazy. 

It’s really cool. 

It’s obviously such low voltage that you’re not necessarily feeling it, are you?

Yeah no, it's nothing like that. It's probably like the same idea of when you put your finger down on a touch screen. 

It’s fun to wax poetic about music physically passing through your body, but that is essentially baked into this device. You have to engage with it in this way—you are physically completing the circuit. Did you feel something, spiritually? Or is it just, mechanically, you understand how it’s working?

I think mechanically, for sure. But there is something poetic about it. Just being able to know that you're part of making that electrical connection happen.