An interesting and haunting use of delay comes from a series of Miles Davis outtakes, a "Willie Nelson" sequence from the Jack Johnson sessions Davis ran during 1970. Guitarists during this session engaged in a literal call and response, in an asignifying register of pure sound, using an analog delay pedal. This technique even

echoes in the repetitions sequenced as multiple "takes" of "Willie Nelson" in the Jack Johnson Sessions playlist of 2005. Davis was by this stage in his recording career always thinking proleptically ahead, as well, based on his previous experiments with postproduction. When these repetitions were finally made available, years later, in digital media, we find select/mix/render techniques of naming: "inserts" and "takes" and "remakes" as different renderings of "Willie Nelson." These sessions suggest a "process of sampling" and a solicits participation in an unfoldment of events in which each event is, like the individual instantiations of echo that accrete into reverberative space that is always undergoing transmation. How does one read this text? Perhaps in the same way a multitude would read this text—rhythmically. The stream of "Willie Nelson" cut by the fragmentary nature of its performance, which anticipates postproduction "delays" and, essentially, remixes offers the listener opportunities to cut this flow. Rhythmicity manifests itself in the reading of a continually varying text. Such practices of amplification and aggressive transformation of signal flow have always been fundamental to jazz performance, and resonance technologies make variations of these modes of reading and writing available for further experimentation in diverse cultures of work and play. In 1970, musicians assembled to record these proceedings, in 2005, the digital reissue market has conditioned their first "official release." For composition studies today, the "Willie Nelson" text's pedagogy hinges on the overtly technological aspect of the compositional/improvisational software of this particular Miles Davis assemblage. Both Sonny Sharrock and John McLaughlin were invited to this gathering, analog delay and amplified guitar (Sharrock and McLaughlin specializations) were selected and mixed

prominently into the overall signal flow diagram of this particular recording event, and as they were mixed into the "Willie Nelson" ecology in this manner, they ushered in a particular rhythmicity that I would describe as a set of connections forging a rhetorical relationship between sound-troping devices and the tropes of collective composition and improvisation (jazz) that Davis and his collaborators draw upon, experiment with, and contribute to during the Jack Johnson sessions. In particular, Davis' "Willie Nelson" ensemble produces numerous "takes" and "inserts" and "remakes," and these aggregate performances, being an overall "entrainment to itself," involves, therefore, the development of symmetries that incorporate machine-produced modifications of the space of performance. These pedals are noisy, too: the management of the symmetry-breaking effectuated by a common feature of analog-delay pedals, circa 1970. The "predictable unpredictability" of this effect in certain repeats/time configurations allows signal flow to run wild, which allows the performer to quickly introduce and take away stochastic elements, but the tactile gestures of these performances orient the body more towards a typewriter posture. In other words, knob twiddling, yes. But the tropes of knob twiddling, which are hardwired directly into most histories of sound engineering, and build a model of exchange that is dynamic and nonlinear; "Willie Nelson" galvanizes an extraordinary and powerful sonic space of mutual response patterns. Delay technologies, I argue here, amplify and draw attention to the importance of sampling for commons practice. Therefore, these easy-to-use technologies (turn the knob, listen) enter into the ecology already well-equipped for entrainment with the paradigms of jazz are also built on tropes of repetition and sampling. One of the specific pedagogies Miles Davis' "Willie Nelson" offers to composition studies hinges on the way these performances reveal ways that rhythmicity that is "built into" a delay technology. Defined as an analog sampling technology, the prominent use of delay in "Willie Nelson" invites the listener to engage in anticipatory and delayed modes of response. Such modes necessarily work through and celebrate an asignifying but fundamentally productive select-and-mix and interruptive approach to information that is, today, both the paradigm of collective creativity and a primary causal factor in controversies that swirl in the wake of a university in flux

Infodynamics of Sound