Greg Bruce cuts a bold figure in the pixelated relief of the Zoom call. I’m sitting down with the multi-instrumentalist on this sunny Saturday afternoon as the 2:00 PM light washes my face out on camera to talk about his upcoming show at Sadleir House’s performance space, The John. A plume of hair runs down the centre of his skull, framed by high-fidelity headphones strapped atop either ear. He grins and nods as I tell him I’m just getting my notes in order, bearing with the several seconds of technical fumbling which accompany the beginning of every such virtual interview.

Within a few moments I hit “Record,” and we’re off. 

I’ve been, for the past several hours and days prior, perusing Greg’s publications on his website. Sadleir’s own Matt Jarvis put me onto him, stopping me Monday morning for a good twenty-minute chat over coffee about “this guy who does crazy things with the saxophone.” Greg’s written work is deliciously verbose, relishing in terms the like of “electroacoustics,” “exegesis,” and “post-digitalism.” I find his performance work, conversely, both fascinating and alien. 

Greg is a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto. His research delves into acoustic feedback using the saxophone—a technique he’ll be demonstrating at his June 17^th Sadleir House show. Naturally, then, that’s where we begin.

“For someone hearing ‘feedback saxophone,’ that might not know what that means, how would you describe it?” I ask.

He considers the question for a moment.

“Feedback saxophone is an original system that I developed, whereby I'm using the tenor saxophone to induce and control acoustic feedback,” he replies at last. To better illustrate just how this system works he offers an example. “We're all familiar with the threat of acoustic feedback when someone with a microphone walks in front of a speaker. Generally we don't want that—it's very high-pitched and piercing—it's something that we normally like to avoid. But in my system, I have tamed it a little bit, and I can control its use."

Greg specifically uses the Tenor sax to meet the needs of his project, having experimented previously with the Alto to lesser success. “My system actually uses the saxophone as the resonance chamber,” he explains. This is done by feeding the recording of the saxophone into an amplifier, the output of which resonates with the metallic body of the saxophone, effectively creating a loop.

“Normally when feedback happens—like if you just have a microphone and you point the microphone towards a speaker—what happens is the resonant frequencies of the system are amplified." He explains that this is because “when you're just holding a microphone and a speaker in a room, it finds the frequencies in the room, and that's why it finds these really high-pitched ones,” thereby producing the screech with which many of us having attended keynotes and high school commencement ceremonies are likely all-too familiar. Greg’s feedback saxophone system relies on the same basic principle to work. However, the principal difference between this and a mic placed in front of a speaker is his ability to control the tones it produces. “For my system when the microphone is right in the bell of the saxophone, it basically is using the saxophone as the room rather than the room itself. When I'm playing, I'm using the saxophone keys—when they open and close, it's changing the inner dimensions of the saxophone and where the sound can escape or not—so it changes the resonant properties inside the saxophone.”

There’s not a word of exaggeration to Greg’s claim that he can “tame” this sound. Though not analogous to the tones conventionally produced by a saxophone, Greg is able to play distinct notes with his experimental technique. Beyond the simple novelty of that, however, the system affords some unique technical opportunities as well. “I can control the volume and the pitch, so I'm creating feedback—like scales and triads and very typical musical things—that I then also pair with saxophone playing so I can harmonize with myself,” he says. “Or, I can play feedback alone and play entire pieces with that feedback. It sounds like a kind of synth tone.”

I invoke a comparison to his technique to an extremely famous pop-cultural implementation of the howlround (the technical term for the aforementioned screech produced by untamed feedback)—which was used in the 1960s to create the first iteration of the Doctor Who opening titles by setting a camera to film its own output monitor, creating a feedback loop which produced the mesmerizing, pulsating visual flairs for which the series’ opening was iconic in its early years.

“Yeah, feedback, whether visual or audio, all kind of operates under the same principle,” he nods. “I guess you could refer to this as like a positive feedback loop. It's additive, so what happens is that in the kind of feedback we're talking about—audio feedback—a sound is captured by a microphone, then put out through a speaker. Then that same sound is put through the same microphone, and then the same speaker, and that's why in typical situations when feedback kind of goes out of control, it goes really loud and really high.”

He ventures to make another comparison for the sake of my illustration, calling on a name whom I myself have seen on many Cultural Studies syllabi. “Jimi Hendrix famously used feedback of a slightly different kind, but essentially used the very loud sound of his own guitar coming out of his amplifier to then resonate the strings on the guitar again.” Any Trent student having taken Martin Arnold’s Music and Society class is no doubt familiar with Hendrix’s cover of “The Star Spangled Banner,” itself a fair demonstration of this technique. “It’s not quite like that,” Greg admits, “but it is a positive feedback loop that is mediated by a traditional or a normal musical instrument. In Hendrix's case it was the electric guitar. In my case it's the saxophone.”

Even having played the saxophone myself for a couple of years (Alto, Tenor, AND Baritone, I’ll have you know), Greg’s experimental, feedback-based analog performance is mesmerizing, and quite unlike anything you’re likely to hear in most saxophone performances. “Of course, when we hear today, it's often through a recorded medium,” Greg concedes. “So the saxophone is electronically recorded and then we hear it back. But the saxophone itself is not, not necessarily an electro-acoustic instrument.”

He professes to have stumbled upon his feedback technique as the result of a sort of methodical accident. “I discovered it at a free improv jam many years ago, and when I began my doctoral studies at the University of Toronto, after thinking about different topics, I was like, ‘No, I think I want to explore what's going on with this’.” 

I asked him how one even goes about producing music in this way, seeing as for the most part, Greg is the one left to chart new and unprecedented techniques with little in the way of a rulebook.

“Improvisation played a huge role,” he admits. “But improvisation done in a very systematic way. I of course experiment with different microphones and different amplifiers and different settings, but I wanted to explore those things using my kind of existing knowledge of the saxophone—which is a lot—and see what feels good under the hands, and doing that, go ‘Okay, what sounds does this make?’. Sometimes I didn’t mean to put down this key, and I would hear a new note and go ‘Oh, okay, how do I do that? How did I do that?’.”

In the same way as a paleontologist might piece together the skeleton of an eons-extinct creature from a handful of vertebrae, or video game players before the advent of GameFAQs might be forced to make physical notes to memorize the mechanics of particularly tricky Roleplaying Game, Greg was effectively writing the user’s guide to his own technique. 

“You kind of systematically figure out, ‘Okay, I made this note this way, I’m going to write this down,’” he explains. “Rather than having the sounds in my head at first—because I had no idea what sounds this system could make—I actually had to, you know, discover them. The instrument was first, and the sounds were second.”

“It's really about trying to expand the expressive capabilities of the saxophone using analog technology,” he adds. “There's no fancy computer work going on. I don't play with a laptop on stage. It's really just a really inexpensive amplifier, a somewhat specialized microphone and then some guitar pedals.”

As a performer, he naturally gravitates towards this analog practice for its physicality, in spite of the limitations such a method might impose. “I enjoy physical things. I enjoy things with immediate response. When you're working with a laptop, often I feel like there's almost a barrier between my instrument and the sounds it's producing.”

In many ways, I understand where he’s coming from. While much of the work I’ve done in the past several years—for Arthur, for my degree, or as an artist, aspiring filmmaker, (incompetent) DJ and so on—has either embraced or sought out tactility wherever possible. A considerable amount of a recent article of mine concerned the tension I felt between the novelty of video games played on their original hardware, and the accessibility of modern ports and emulation.

This tension is evidently something to which Greg has dedicated considerable thought. 

“A couple of years ago, I started to ask myself, ‘Well, what is at the core, philosophically, of using this analog technology?’ and a big part of it is limitation, and the physical, material and electrical properties of the media themselves.”

Despite the accessibility of digital technology, it doesn’t afford the same quirks which Greg employs in his novel instrumentation technique. “These qualities aren't replicated or being produced in the digital realm,” he explains. “In digital media, there’s this idea that we’re trying to remove all the friction. We’re trying to replicate our musical experiences, but also our social experiences and our economic experiences. We're just trying to digitize everything.”

Greg stresses the physicality of his setup, the analog nature of the tones he is producing, and the spatial presence of his performance as all essential to his practice. “We know of all the negative implications of social media and whatnot,” he says. “In removing the friction of physical and face-to-face—or face to instruments in this case—interactions something is lost. My feedback system shows that we haven't explored everything yet. Some people say, ‘Oh, it's all been done,’—that is simply not true.”

“I felt there was a great connection between the intimacy that I have with my saxophone to also the intimacy of what is happening with just basic amplification,” he continues. “There's a similarity there. So I'm thinking about that like, ‘Well, okay is there a movement or way of thinking that kind of encapsulates this?’ and I narrowed down to the idea of post-digitalism.”

This ethos of post-digitalism, a framework at which he arrived out of an interest in analog technology, is perhaps most responsible for shaping Greg’s work. “In wanting to figure out ‘Well, what else hasn't been done? What else may remain with these so-called obsolete technologies?’—that's what led me to kind of this idea of post-digitalism, and to harnessing the material qualities, the idiosyncrasies, the particularities of physical media and, and using them with the saxophone to come up with new ways of composing or new sounds, or new techniques on the saxophone itself.”

The way Greg describes this philosophy strikes me as an intriguing mélange of media archaeology and artistry, with a definite research focus to it. 

“It's really easy to, say, shoot with digital film, or to compose using the computer, but often with digital media, taking out the friction or the idiosyncrasies of physical media means that if you want a certain type of character, you kind of have to add it back in.” He stresses that the physical, and thus intrinsically fallible, nature of analog technology imbues it with certain sonic properties which don’t exist in digital recording by default. One can attempt to replicate them, though it becomes more of an aesthetic decision than an imposition of the medium itself. 

“This is the case with all kinds of digital music,” he adds. “It's one thing to hear a certain recording of a saxophone, and then it's another thing to, you know, hear and see it live when you might notice the breath or the sound of the keys—certain things that might be quantized away or considered noise in certain approaches in digital media—whereas live the noise of the system is actually part of the aesthetic, and why it’s art.” A lot of this “grunginess” becomes part of music’s charm. Even today artists who record primarily digitally will produce tape rips of their own songs, and CDs, vinyl records and cassette tapes have all seen major revivals within the hardcore, punk and other independent/DIY music scenes.

“I mean listening to records is a very, you know, post-digital experience because there's something about the aesthetic experience of picking up a record and putting it on—even if it's a full LP, you're going to have to flip it over every 20 minutes—there's something about that physical experience. I'm not one of these people that's gonna argue that analog records sound better than digital. I mean, it's not about how good it sounds. It's about how much you enjoy it. There's something about the physical connection that we have with media that is part of our aesthetic experience.”

Post-digitalism, then, “is an ethos that embraces the mistakes, limitations, noise and particularities of analog media,” Greg offers as summary.

This ethos is part and parcel of Greg’s work at the University of Toronto, where his research into this feedback-based saxophone technique comprises a major part of his doctoral research. While this might be a concept foreign to many more familiar with the traditional model of doctoral programs, in which a candidate produces an extensive written dissertation, it’s a vision of graduate research which is increasingly being explored in contemporary academia. 

“In Canada, this is referred to as research-creation,” Greg explains. “Other places, it's called artistic research or practice-based research. There's a lot of different names for it. research-creation positions creative practice as both a method of research, as well as a research finding or research result.”

How this looks in practice is a combination of conventional research and written work, with the added component of creative production. “My thesis, which I'm defending on Monday [June 12^th], lays out my methodology… and then it lays out the history of microphones and loudspeakers and how they were used to create new performance techniques.” This is where the “research” component is most obvious. Despite his creation process being largely born of a sort of methodical improvisation, Greg is extremely savvy as to what else is being done in his area of study. “There's background and contextualizing [in his thesis]—Well, what are these techniques that I'm using? Where are they coming from?—because even though I discovered it as kind of an accident, I'm not the only person to work with feedback, and not even the only person to work with feedback mediated through the saxophone. So, in that, it required a lot of digging and figuring out—justifying isn't the right word—but contextualizing why should anyone care about this thing that I'm doing.”

[Editor's Note: At 10:45 PM on Monday night I received an email from Greg which said "I'm a doctor now!" Congratulations, Dr. Bruce!]

“In academia it's not enough to say, ‘Oh well, this is interesting art,’ or ‘This is good art,’ or ‘It's good music,’ or whatever,” he adds. “You have to kind of show how you're adding to the artistic knowledge and the musical, aesthetic or philosophical traditions that inevitably any piece of art is a part of.”

I have many times stumbled upon the term “research-creation” thrown about somewhat haphazardly in academia myself. Many people in academic circles have confided to me that they feel the term is used as a buzzword in search of more grant money, and I’ve taken classes which run the gamut from extremely theoretical seminars in experimentation to more-or-less conventional workshops which have invariably been labelled as research-creation. For that reason, I wanted to glean insight into how Greg envisions and approaches said label as a practice. 

“You've really hit the nail on the head there,” he chuckles. “I have my first [dissertation] chapter being published as an article in a journal out of Lithuania this month. I'm asking two big questions that I think summarize some of your observations there. One is ‘What is creative practice research?’, and two is ‘What are the appropriate methods for carrying out creative practices research?’ One of the scholars I cite in this article is Sandeep Bhagwati, who's a composer and a professor at Concordia University here in Montréal, and one thing he says—a bit of a paraphrase—is that if all of creative practice is research, then none of it is.”

“For me, this idea of research-creation is that there really has to be some kind of written or discursive element that lays out your question and lays out your results to try and contextualize that, because otherwise, that’s not research. I think you are right in that, the word just gets thrown around to try and get more funding, and to make it sound more legitimate or something like that, but I don't think we need to. I think it actually weakens the idea of art for art's sake. Art does not need to be research to be valuable. Research doesn't need to be artistic to be valuable either, right? They both have their merits, and their place in society—where I think their importance lies—is to show that creative practice is a vital part of discovering and adding to our artistic knowledge, and that goes beyond just skill development.”

By consequence of the pandemic, Greg has done the majority of his doctoral work from his Montréal studio. While able to complete his coursework in Toronto, the advent of the pandemic necessarily shook up the performance requirements of his degree. “I guess the pandemic is where I really got into recording and thinking about how audiovisual formats can help both document and communicate the creative,” he muses. His work is extensively documented in both audio and video formats on his personal website and YouTube channel, including many of the components of his doctoral thesis. 

“In all my videos that I'm putting up on YouTube, I try to do multiple angles to try and show what I'm doing, how. Of course, if you don't know how a saxophone works—and certainly no one really understands how my feedback system works—there’s still a level of abstraction. But going back to the research component, if you read my articles or my thesis (once it’s out there), then you see the video, you can make the connection of how it happens.”

In many ways, he credits the ability to work remotely as a boon to his practice. “I have studio space here in Montréal,” Greg explains. “Which, you know, would have been far more expensive in Toronto. I can have my cameras and my microphones set up—it’s part of my practice now. I’m happy to be in Montréal and be able to carry out some of that work because, as you know, at any university space is at a premium. Even though you might have access to an electronic music studio as part of a program, you might have it for a few hours at a time—you’ve got to set up all your gear, do your recording, do your practicing, do everything and tear it down. With your own studio space in a relatively affordable place, like Montréal, there's much less of a barrier to making that happen.”

When asked why he’s coming to Peterborough to play this weekend, Greg offers a surprising answer. “My partner, she's a circus artist—she does mainly aerial hoop—and she's leading a series of workshops at the circus studio in Peterborough. We just decided to make a trip of it. So she’s going to be doing circus in the daytime, and I’ll be giving a tape loop workshop in the afternoon at Sadleir House.”

That’s not, however, his sole reason for coming this weekend. “I mean, I’ve played in Peterborough before,” Greg admits. “Back when The Spill was still around. I’ve done tours with different Canadian bands and always really liked playing at The Spill, and Peterborough just has a great reputation and a good vibe.”

As for what people can expect of his act, he says “There'll be some noise, there'll be some beautiful melodies, and there'll be some groove. Is that something for everyone? I'm not sure. Some people don't like noisy music. When I try and build a set, I try and have a little bit of  all of that.”

Greg will be leading the aforementioned tape loop workshop in the afternoon before his show. 

“I'll be bringing some tape players with me, and I'll explain tape loops as post-digital media… and then move into showing people how to make a tape loop,” he says. “Really, once you have a machine—and the machines can be found through thrifting or you can buy them cheaply on Amazon or eBay or whatever—it’s easy. It’s a really rewarding practice because I like working with my hands.”

As our conversation begins to wind down, I ask Greg if there is anything he’d like to impart to people as part of his practice. 

After a moment’s thought, he puts forward a few words on technological hegemony, and cautionary advice against putting too much stock in progress.

“I'll borrow a term from the author Neil Postman,” he says. “He talks about Technopoly—that we're in this society that just embraces every single advancement in technology and considers it a positive. So very, globally, I want my music to show that's not necessarily true—that there are old technologies that still have a lot of life left in them, and just because they are maybe commercially no longer viable, that doesn't mean that music or art made with them is worse.”

“The advancement of technology and progress is a story we tell ourselves,” he argues. “There are lots of different directions that things could have gone in,” whether or not they did is another story entirely. This enthusiasm for things otherwise cast aside makes it easy to understand the broad appeal of post-digitalism, and of Greg’s practice more specifically. “We can look at the past and recontextualize these forgotten objects and forgotten technologies to create really gripping new experiences,” he says, cracking a wide smile.

Greg Bruce will be performing Live @ The John at Sadleir House on June 17^th.at 8:00 PM.

You can find him and his work on YouTube, Instagram or on his Website.

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