Top 6 Quotes & Sayings by Kurt Ralske

Expression is never considered a given, and it is in fact maybe not what's most interesting about making art. Making art, since 1960 or something, is many things: it's a way of doing philosophy, it's a way of opening a dialogue, it's a way of putting a fact or a question out into the world, or a way of drawing people into new relationships, or a way of interrogating history. It's all these other sorts of strategies or techniques or processes that are really interesting and really valuable.

I was a musician who began playing with computers, to see if they could make some tasks simpler. I developed some "tricks" or strategies for working with audio files, and then discovered that the same tricks could be applied to video files, or really, any type of data. Previously I made many different kinds of music. I did some work as a composer of film scores. In that role, my task was to create audio to match and deepen the visual. In my work now, the role is often reversed: I have to create images to match and deepen the audio.

I am a musician who stopped working with music. Now I work with visual music, or audio-visual music.

Yes, for me audio-visual performance has its roots in my experience working as an improvising musician and composer.

My attitude towards my time as a musician, is that I really wanted to completely reinvent myself and not be one of these people who, twenty, thirty years later, is trying to recreate something that happened. I'm glad that Neil Young still makes records, but I don't know that everybody needs to be frozen in time forever. I think it's good that pop music is ephemeral.

Some people who make music are instantly very savvy about how they can get their music to communicate in a larger way. For me, the music was always first, and I put a lot of time and effort and thought into making the recordings. But everything else around it, all the things that were necessary to have a career in pop music, I was completely ill equipped to handle.