Check this out… DataCent, a data recovery company, has started a catalog of common sounds heard on failing hard drives, and it covers multiple vendors and situations where things can be heard going terribly wrong. Best of all, they give full permission to use the samples as long as you contact them about it.
October brought many exciting things for me, including not only a new job, but also a new album that I’m very excited about. The Test Tube netlabel is featuring this new release, called Gamma.
Six tracks, mostly beat-driven, of downtempo styled expressionism ripe with electro-acoustic improvisation; acousmatica for the brainwaves.
I was also honored to have Matt Mercer (of Microfilm) write up the release on Under the Lens, here’s an excerpt from the full article:
Craque [is] a project of highly abstract instrumental electronic music that often defies easy categorization. He’s not afraid of melody or traditional rhythm, even at times can lay down a healthy groove, but most of his music is characterized by heavily processed and manipulated sounds derived from everyday objects. Typically, though, these sounds are far removed from the source and take on a weird, synthetic life of their own.
Also from the release page:
…Craque assaults our senses with an eclectic amalgam of rich rhythmic patterns that derivate from dub, hip hop, techno and other urban languages, but instead of driving us straight to the physical emotion center, they drive us to the ‘braindance’ center… Excellent and extremely elegant electronic music.
The .microsound community recently embarked on a new project to honor the life of writer David Foster Wallace, known widely for his intelligently sprawling novel Infinite Jest.
Instructions were to take one of the films attributed to the protagonist’s father and create a soundtrack. I was attracted to the surrealism in the description of Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators and almost immediately had an image of what the film would be like.
Not having read this novel yet, the source of my inspiration was the description itself:
“Baby Pictures Of Famous Dictators” - Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Documentary or uncredited cast w/ narrator P.A. Heaven; 16 mm; 45 minutes; black and white; sound. Children and adolescents play a nearly incomprehnsible nuclear strategy game with tennis equipment against a real or holographic (?) backdrop of sabotaged ATHSCME 1900 atmospheric displacement towers exploding and toppling during the New New England Chemical Emergency of Y.W. CELLULOID (UNRELEASED)
I took 45 minutes as my guiding point and imagined the film was a tableau, a “moving still life” of sorts. It’s a 45 minute long game, a slow motion still life of a disaster reflected in the childsplay of fooling around with physics.
We see a setting that never changes, of innocent children (we assume the same as in the pictures referenced by the title) against a backdrop that is ever changing, sharing an appetite for control. They become the embodiment of the Famous Dictators, playing games, like children, with adult toys of power and war.
A chemical emergency could imply this is related to nuclear power or physics. Are the children playing a game that caused the emergency? Are they blissfully unaware? Or are they working to solve the problem by a series of complex nuclear games? It’s unclear if we will ever know.
The soundtrack is not a reflection of the action seen onscreen, but rather the literal voice of each proper name. As their structures compost, weaving as they play the game, new forms are illuminated.
These nine names were used to drive various parameters specific to each person’s voice, guiding things like frequency, filters, delay effects and envelope (in each case, the longest, most familiar version of the English proper name was used):
The analysis of the text file containing the names was done with perl, which wrote out various ChucK files. The entire piece is one large ChucK session recorded to a file, then normalized.
When I started the piece was a lot less “bright” than it ultimately became, but in a strange way I feel like it took on its own character, and mourns both the tragedy of these dictators and the loss of DFW.
The player on the project page is a great way to listen to the soundtracks everyone has done, and allows for direct downloads of the works.
It’s true.
I’ve done some updates to the Audio Software page, including three new categories: “Looping and Performance”, “Free Players and Visualizers” and “Programming Languages”.
I’m very happy to announce the release of a project I did this summer called Tekuchesti (a transliteration of текучести, which is a Russian word meaning “fluidity”), a piece in shuffle time for listeners and improvisers.
Download the entire work, and remember to listen on shuffle. Weird request you say? Read the liner notes below for more detail…
Please also visit the release page at Constanta and check out the other artists on this new boutique netlabel, which features some unique approaches to the microsound/glitch/experimental/drone genres; beauty through subtlety and simplicity. I personally enjoy op.cit.’s and To4ka.Dna’s most recent releases.
Here is my description and instructions for performance (these notes are also available in Russian through Constanta):
In tectonics, slices of the earth can be reduced bit by bit to their constituents, all in motion consistent with the plate. Below these fractured mantle pieces is a thick world of geology: elemental chemical reactions, intense temperature changes, varying strata of materials. There may be violent upheaval or capitulation of forces, or just still and silent veins of metal. If we could travel as a massless beings through the earth to the antipodal, each layer of Hell opens not a Dantean dream, but a surreal tour of random pockets describing the origin of the solar system.
Tekuchesti represents “fluidity” in physics, describing instability or fluid states. The piece consists of constructions mostly taken from free electro-acoustic improvisations, first recorded to create large elemental plates of experience, and secondly edited and combined into subdivisions of space. There were no structural or material limitations placed on the recording or editing of the improvisations, they simply happened.
Just as there are myriad structures and surprise events, there are the lack of these events, represented by the isochrons; dating scatterplots of history, constructions made from the lack of material to represent that which has passed on. The sonic architecture of each isochron in this piece is taken from relationships found in the five Platonic (or “perfect”) solids, found everywhere in nature, above and below the crust.
This piece is meant to be played in random order, where the slices intermingle anew each time to create an emergent form. Playing it in order will reveal some of the underlying structure, and is a perfectly acceptable way of listening - the shapes of the plates become much more clear, but it is an altogether different listening experience. Improvisers are encouraged to play along as well, but if done in a live context, it must be played on shuffle, as this will give the improvisers less expectation of what sounds will appear.
The work also ties in an immediate tectonic experience: I live only 10 miles from the epicenter of the 5.4 magnitude earthquake which hit the LA area on July 29, just shortly before the album was finalized. It also represents the “solid ground” - both as shared vision and literal Earth - between me and the constanta-label.ru headquarters in Perm, Russia.
Constanta on the web: http://constanta-label.ru
Constanta on myspace: http://www.myspace.com/constantalabel
In 2001 the debut 12″ for Craque titled Trolling for Olives EP was released on Metatron Press, and now it’s available for free on last.fm.
All five tracks are both streamable and downloadable, I figured I’d do them all since the original is still available for purchase on vinyl and it’s got some dope tracks!
And I don’t know how many of my fans actually read this, but here’s the first hint that you can expect several new releases coming up in the coming months. At least three different labels will be hosting new Craque albums, so keep yer ears open!
Tom Erbe is one of the members of the electronic music community whose work I highly respect. Not only is most of his software free, not only are they usable by any skill level, not only are they the most educational electronic music tools i’ve ever used… I could go on. But the end result is that they sound simple and great.
At long last Tom has released the SoundHack Delay Trio, the description of the algorithms is fantastic, from the announcement:
“All of these are derived from the same basic delay algorithm: a hermite interpolated delay line with variable modulation, and a feedback loop with dc blocking and saturation. Pitch shifting is achieved with a dual head crossfading delay (ala Eltro Tempophon/Dennis Gabor/Pierre Schaeffer phonogene) and is decidedly low-fi. The saturating feedback also allows them to be great drone and noise generators.”
Awesome work! Can’t wait to get this one in action, I have something going now that begs for some new delay. 
Two of my other favorites of Tom’s are decimate+ and of course the ubiquitous SoundHack, both available (along with a TON of others) on the SoundHack Freeware page.
As the summer begins its winddown, I’ve found that I’ve been writing some interesting beat-ful music at the same time I’ve been doing completely abstract sound works. It’s fun! Each opens the doors in the other, it’s pretty interesting the way the cross-over happens, and how: even moreso these days, things are sculptural and dimensional.
For long periods of time, I feel vaguely disinterested by dance music. It’s cyclical, and it makes me wonder what my music sounds like. I’ve never had a singular influence, things always become amalgamations of my experience. I never find myself “trying to do something like so-and-so” and rarely ever have a sonic idea in my head prior to composing (it’s happened, but i’m really more of an explorer/improvisor when it comes to expressing things musically - i just allow my subconscious to do the driving), but I always do seem to have a good sense for how it all goes together.
I’m usually happening upon all kinds of things while I’m across the Internets for work or play, and I’ll document the more interesting and pertinent ones here on sounding.com.
I keep my own list of interesting Audio Hardware, as well as links to useful Audio Software, a lot of which centers around open source or DIY.
Check out Audio Culture for general experimental audio society.
Get Some is my list of “obtaining” art and sound across the Internet, both pay-sites and places you can get free stuff.
Last but not least, I try to keep a tally of enticing online Music Labels where I’ve enjoyed releases and projects. Most of these are of the “netlabel” type and I’ve put some of my favorites at the top; the remaineder are those I tag with delicious.
Enjoy the links and don’t hesitate to drop me a line to suggest something.