I also met a young composer, Billy Goldenberg, who composed the soundtracks for Kojack and Columbo. Thanks to Billy, I met one of my idols of science-fiction literature, Ray Bradbury, for whom we created the musical decor for the theater version of Dandelion Wine which played at Lincoln Center, New York. With Andy Badale (now known as Angelo Badalamenti), who did the soundtrack for David Lynch's Blue Velvet, Billy and I composed an instrumental called, "Visa to the Stars," which later became the generic theme for an Esso TV commercial. As a team we produced many TV and radio jingles for ad agencies.

In 1961 my little demon of music imposed himself once again, saying, "You must go even further. You must create a style which is particular to yourself- very personal- and which will make you known beyond that which you have already achieved." Once again I followed his advice. One night, in my alchemical laboratoratory of sounds, I invented a new process for generating rhythms utilizing musique concrete sounds such as noises of machines, animal cries, insects buzzing, etc. Once the sound were recorded I would knead them, chop them, run them through filters backward at twice the speed (or half the speed), and in this way they would become practically unidentifiable. Little by little I created a "library" of sounds. I would isolate each of those sounds according to various parameters (frequency, attack, envelope, tonality, etc), and then associating these sounds rhythmically according to well-determined, calculated patterns using repetitve loops and sequences. The result was astonishing. I had discovered an incredible goldmine, until then unexplored.

I would spend hours, days, nights gluing these little bits of magic magnetic tape which were sometimes no bigger than a half inch. Thus I was able to create a new style of rhytmic sequences. Finally I had found an original niche, my own style, humoristic and unusual. While we're on the subject I want to say that I never had any preconceived notions as to selection- that is, preferring one sound over another; I was as if possessed by bulimia! I was recording everything I possibly could, and thus accumulated more than 3000 basic sounds, heteroclite and varied, knowing that one day or another I could incorporate them within a rhythmic sequence.

In a beehive in Switzerland I recorded kilometers of magnetic tape on my Nagra recorder. When I returned to New York, I was able to produce the melody of Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumble Bee" using my recordings of live bees. It took a titanic amount of labor: 46 hours of cutting and gluing itsy-bitsy pieces of magnetic tape (1.03 centimeters long) together for the final result-2 minutes of music. When I recall this episode, I think I was a little crazy back then-but the result was so gratifying! At that time only 4-track tape recorders existed, so to complete this piece Carroll obtained for me a Scully 4-track machine; I recorded the melody (obtained from the bees) on one track, and the accompaniment on the remaining three. What a job!

As far as random chance goes, in my musical creation it never played a predominant role. Surely chance exists at a certain level of inspiration in artistic creation, but a true creator must know how to use it without being dominated by it. It's the job of the creator to master chance. An artistic creation, whatever it is, is too important to be left entirely to pure randomness. As a source of inspiration, the artist must take into account but learn how to master it...and consider it as a wink of the eye from destiny.