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If you heard the tape at the drive-in movie theater, you'd know some foolish teen-agers were about to get the knife.
The first question that occurs to a visitor upon entering the home of Thomas Dimuzio -- a hulking, long-haired, pallid man who shares an Inner Sunset two-level house with his wife and $150,000 worth of audio equipment -- might be, "Do you, perchance, have a job in the computer software industry?"
The answer, of course, is yes. Dimuzio aids in program design for Headspace Inc., a start-up company that produces audio software for the World Wide Web. He's also a rising star on the Bay Area noise scene; his sound performances are drawing middling noise crowds to venues around the city.
He has achieved this version of better living through technology.
"Believe it or not, I use all this shit," he says, waving to the three Macintosh computers, hay bale-size racks of synthesizers, a half-acre of sound-mixing board, dual programmable keyboards, and a pumpkin patch's worth of special-effects pedals, cables, and other equipment. "I really just love to capture sound, mainly process sound, manipulate sound, using processors, bridging processors with oscillators and tone generators and using them in ways they probably weren't designed to be used."
Dimuzio has been a sound junkie for nearly two decades, and has been making recordings since 1987. His break into the high-tech yuppie scene came a couple of years ago when he was hired by the audio software producer OSC, which, in the irreverent tradition of the Silicon Valley young, stood for "Our Shitty Corporation." Dimuzio was hired to test the company's new Deck sound processing software. More than a great career move, the job gave him the opportunity to obtain the kind of expensive audio equipment he needed to make his noise.
Dimuzio moved from Boston to San Francisco not long before the software firm Macromedia bought OSC. He lost his job earlier this year when Macromedia laid off its OSC employees as part of a restructuring, but was soon hired on as a software tester at Headspace.
"Next, I'm going to buy a faster computer," he says, motioning to the audio-software-packed Macintoshes humming in a sealed-off corner of his garage.
Like most denizens of Silicon Valley's northern reaches, Dimuzio's preoccupations deal mostly with the limits of technology. He records or digitally produces sounds, distorts them through audio processors, mixes them via audio software, then blends them into compositions with his keyboard. In the future, he says, he'd like to be able to do all these things with the stroke of a single key.
"The current level of technology is unbelievably limiting," he says.
Dimuzio would like to be able to create his compositions on the fly on a concert stage, rather than piecing digital sounds together one at a time. The idea, he says, is to play the ambient sounds of a concert hall through his equipment -- in real time -- and thereby turn the world itself into a digital instrument.
While it is the subject of his frustrations, Dimuzio's audio equipment obviously brings him joy. And if you let him, he'll talk about the capabilities of his roomful of audio gadgets for longer than a human would naturally seem to be able to speak without taking a breath.
"This is one of my most touched pieces of gear. It's simply a digital switching matrix. I have all my digital gear plugged into there, anything with a digital input or output. My computer, which is plugged into this. The DAT machine. Pro Tools is in there, my Eventide DSP 4000; a couple of Lexicon things; two DAT machines; the sampler that I just booted up. This is an analog-digital converter, which is hard-wired to these analog pieces, which is also routed into here. So I can basically call up a signal chain and make a very elaborate signal chain. I can say, 'All right, I want my sound source to go through here, then here, then here, then into the computer.' All just by dialing this up and tapping in a few numbers -- so this is a beautiful piece of engineering," Dimuzio says.
"Now this is a noise gate, which I typically run four radios into and trigger the key inputs so that I can open up the gates and play the radios or other sound sources in real time. This is what is plugged into the computer, which allows me to play digital audio into the computer, and these are just patch bays that just sort of wire all the rest of the gear together," he explains, having only completed the first fourth of a seemingly endless list of equipment.
Dimuzio's status as a high prince of techno geekdom proves well-earned as his hands spread like melted butter over the knobs on his mixing board, spit like lightning across his computer keyboard, then whirl across the room to his synthesizer piano as he locks in a piece of sound.
The resulting noise compositions create the creeping, haunting sensation that nature itself has given way to bits and bytes -- computer wind, computer waves, computer echoes, and computer clarions calling from the computerized pearly gates.
On his new CD, Sonicism, Dimuzio blends the distorted sounds of guitars, a water spigot, trumpet, and other natural and unnatural noises into something like a digital nap at the beach. There are ocean sounds overlaid with what could be sea gulls and a foghorn or two, muted by a smoky wind -- just as sea gulls and foghorns would sound if they were created by $150,000 of looping delays, solid-state audio compressors, PCM-80 processors, Kurzweil K2000 digital samplers, MIDI interface units, and digital delays.
