[Back-track] The extent of Dockstader's experimentation with sound can be gauged by the fact that in the early 60s, when much of his work was 'constructed', there was no instant means of categorising such work. This was made more the case by Dockstader's straddling of the popular and high art cultural zones: working on the production of cartoons and sound-effects whilst scoring a Fellini film and having his pieces played alongside those of Varèse. Yet, in the mid 60s such 'musique concrete' experiments were more or less a very fragmentary and dispersed form a minor subset of avant-garde classical music. The centre of gravity may have been Schaeffer's Groupe de Recherche Musicales and there may have been other nodal points like John Cage's Fontana Mix and Steve Reich's Come Out, but what seems to be inflected in Dockstader's work, like that of Varèse, is just this sense of isolation and difference from the 'canon' of electronic music as it was becoming conscious of itself and establishing its paradigms.
Just as Varèse transformed the common conception of the orchestra, pulling it towards a liberation of timbre and rhythm, Dockstader's tape-splice music, by making 'noise' multifariously rich and organising it into highly spatialised compositions, not only insulates itself from being seen as a historic novelty, but presences its 'process' approach as running concomitant with the listener's own exploration of the sounds. Dockstader makes 'process' audible as that which actively resists becoming identified as the canon. To echo Morton Feldman, Dockstader's approach is a case of "vibrant musicality rather than musicianship" and this lack of a self-conscious aspiration to create a music of the canon is audible in Dockstader as the setting free of sounds rather than their being marked by the personality of the 'composer' or the 'musician'.
To say it is an idiosyncratic approach, one that multiplies the points of difference between categories, making the boundaries fuzzy, is something of an understatement. Dockstader's obsessive means of composition forms a direct link to the obsession of listening where a sense of focus and heightened attention is intimately operative. There is a sense of rapture induced by detail and an infusion of common objects with a poetic resonance that outstrip their 'real use'. Thus Dockstader's inclusion of such common objects as balloons and water as source-sounds for his pieces becomes translated into a sense of listeners not only being freed from traditional notions of 'instruments' and 'composers', but also their being given the option to hear music everywhere. Dockstader thus implies that music should be able to be constructed from any elements and, as with punk, needs only to be fuelled by the desire to express.
Thus we listen on Dockstader's terms, terms that our own in that they are premised by a more egalitarian ethos than that which attends on a normative classical tradition: the institutionalisation of reception. Dockstader, in succeeding to liberate himself from the need to make music via notation or by access to an orchestra and the sense of 'schooling' that this implies, by using and transforming such objects as balloons, brings the production of music much closer to those very listeners who would formerly be seen, condescendingly, as the 'audience'. His is a music on the interstices of time. On the interstices of expectation. On the interstice of listener and producer.