Friday, September 30, 2011

A VOICE FROM THE ETHER?

 Comp 49 / ZEROZEROZERO by ether^ra

A track from ether^ra's forthcoming EP, STOLEN FROM THIEVES.  From what I understand,  spoken word will be "captured" from a variety of sources and placed in experimental sound settings generated by his Buchla 200e. While this may not be an entirely new idea,  both his unique aesthetic decisions and melding of the political and the personal should make for quite an aural treat.

Sunday, September 25, 2011

PIECE(S)



This is one of my first sound-pieces to use the Apogee One interface for Mac computers with my Buchla 200e as sole sound source.  I'm just beginning to get a feel for it, as can be readily heard in "Theoretical Chasm's" brevity and simplicity. A bit of audio processing was done using the Mac's Garageband app. The later "A Kind of Parallel" works much better to my ears.

This Second Sleep & ether^ra Collabration



An impromptu gathering of brother projects brought about this very brief sound piece.  I first produced a basic track using the Mark Verbos 258v and Buchla Source of Uncertainty as primary tools,  finding a glitchy netherworld that suited me just fine.  It was then processed a bit through various Garageband tools.  ether^ra then re-patched the 200e to his liking once again employing the 258v,  but with the Buchla Twisted Waveform Generator as CV output/modulation source.  We seem to have produced parallel audio disturbances that morph moments of empty space into an informal dialogue/argument.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

OPTIK COLLAGE



The original inspiration for this short bit of soundwork/video lies in the work of a little-known Swedish avant garde filmmaker with the unlikely name of Viking Eggeling (1880-1925).  His friends included dadaists like Tristan Tzara and Hans Richter,  yet he seemed more artistically aligned to non-objective painters like Wassily Kandinsky and the Russian Suprematist,  Kazimir Malevich,  whose use of non-referential geometric forms was certainly a strong influence. It was Eggeling's rhythmic use of those simple geometric shapes that really set him apart from those influences.  Yet much like those painters that preceded him,  Eggeling's style was completely devoid of naturalism or narrative,  and that is why his work has been aptly described as "absolute film and visual music".   He is most well known for "Symphonie Diagonale (1924),  seven and a half silent minutes of mechanically shifting geometrics that proved to be his requiem,  as he died six days after its premiere at age 45. He had only been experimenting with film since 1920. It is this piece (57 seconds of it) that provides the raw material for This Second Sleep's EGGELING,  a video that takes hard-edged geometry and morphs it into something far more organic and subjective.  

Monday, September 5, 2011

OSCILLATIONS: "Love Song For The Dead Che" by Northern Picture Library

This was the debut single (1993) by the Northern Picture Library,  an incarnation of the more guitar-oriented Field Mice.  Strings are entirely absent here,  replaced by electronic textures,  ambient sounds,  and noise.   This intriguingly titled song is from the only album (1968) by composer Joseph Byrd's United States of America,  usually seen as an attempt to fuse "serious" electronic composition with rock music.  Primitive oscillators join electric violin (played through a ring modulator) , electric harpsichord,  electric percussion, fretless electric bass and all manner of acoustic instrumentation in Byrd's quest for an early electronic/pop fusion.  Northern Picture Library take what is a gentle,  yet heartfelt love song and drain it of any emotion.  The dispassionate female vocals sound almost child-like against a curtain of  electronics and electronic percussion,  making the song a memento mori of sorts,  a memory and a reminder.

                                           I Remember the Warmth of You,
                                           Still in My Arms.
                                           Late,  Late in the Year.

Two versions of "Love Song For The Dead Che" were included in this release.  #1 starts surprisingly with an intense wall of noise before the familiar melody takes hold,  while #2 is more user friendly.  I must say that I prefer the contrasting sonorities of the first version,  as noise gives way to a  gentle drone. What all this has to do with Che is a mystery to me,  although the radical politics of the Sixties certainly had something to do with the song's gestation and birth.