FREE SS 13
Olaf Hochherz
"hé, vous, là-bas !"
Fractured and minimal, this release is
the passing of time interrogating your patience.
Little sounds with no specific origin
dissolves your aesthetics into a void.
I am still a listener but what I am listening to?
Nevertheless it brings pleasure to my ears and ideas to my brain.
What do you want to find out about this music?
Do you want to feel attracted to it?
Do you feel that it tells you something?
Improvisation, concrete music, reductionism...
Nothing of these yet something different, hard, precise, uncompromising,
crystal clear in its generic essence.
We can learn a lot from Olaf Hochherz about maximizing the potential
of concision and geiz.
WTFPL
FREE SS 12
Phil Julian
"Low
Activity Computer Solo"
Philip Julian or Cheapmachines gets inside his cheap machine
to get a collection of luxurious sounds which are then
beautifully arranged for your expensive and qualitative
pleasure. Working concretely with the sound material of his computer,
Julian throws you deep inside the object that you might
spend most time with. You touch it, you carry it, you write
to it, you might even talk to it, but do you love it?
In fact, it is very likely that you might be hearing this
piece from a computer that makes similar sounds.
You might be working while listening to this but if you pay close
attention to this piece, you seriously get the feeling that
you are navigating inside your computer, and strangely enough
it's not so hectic down here. It's actually nice and quiet
especially now that the fan of my computer has stopped
while I am typing and listening to “Low Activity Computer Solo”.
There is a different sense of time going on; why do
I have to try to make things with my computer in
the fastest way possible?
Why do I need to squeeze as much activity out of this
machine? Why do I need a faster processor?
Why can't I just enjoy the way it looks, the way it sounds,
the craftiness of the engineers, designers and workers who
assembled this computer in China?
Why do I have to use the computer to communicate with the rest
of the world instead of having a dialogue with the machine
itself?
“Low Activity Computer Solo” is a masterpiece for all computer
fetishists around the globe.
Anti-Copyright
FREE SS 11
Loty Negarti
"Requiem for The Revolution"
Aitor Izagirre aka Loty Negarti originally from Getxo but
now living in Donostia, is one of the most active agents in
the Basque underground scene. His activities include
running the zines Soliloquio and Pidgin (experimental and
concrete poetry) and Hamaika, one of the best labels I have
encountered in years. After Negarti's very impressive
“antylogy ’0’, electronic chemical sound poem” published by
the Basque/Galician net-label Larraskito, “Requiem for The
Revolution” shows a cold but Psychotic, distant but
aggressive side of Aitor. The first track starts the war at
your membrane: if they are taking our senses, let's wake
them up, let's shake ourselves out of this boredom. So many
things are just for our superficial pleasure, but this
is not the case of "Requiem for the Revolution". No remorse, no
way back, listening to Requiem for the Revolution either you
press stop or you get addicted to it's malice. While being
short, "Requiem for the Revolution" is definitely nasty enough
to first damage your brain and then to comfort and
massage it with the cozy second part: never has whitenoise
felt so soft and nice! Now you are ready for the next
revolution.
Copyleft
FREE SS 10
Taku Unami
"malignitat
2"
When improvisation becomes psychological!
In this new recording by Taku Unami expectations are constantly twisted
leaving the listener in a perplex and uncomfortable position. We never
know what is next: a pig, the wind, a river, a beat, a nasty
noise, silence, clapping, impatience, pleasure, sadism, humor, good
taste, a
horror movie... or the very nice and polite Unami that we all know.
Taku Unami is a master of the on-off. The careful structure that holds
malignitat-2 comes from years
of investigating silence and tension in the very active Japanese
improvised scene that he is part of together with others including
Masafumi Ezaki, Kazushige Kinoshita or Taku Sugimoto (Taku has
documented these musicians on his amazing hibari music label). Once,
when we were about to play a concert, Taku went to the record shop and
rented a CD of sound effects, which he then ripped off and played in
the concert. This was later to become the famous helicopter sounds from
his 1st malignitat record. Of course the CD contained other sounds
which are further explored here. So many records of improvisation are
about producing "good quality experimental music". The problem with
this type of experimentation that tries to achieve certain aesthetic
forms, is that it becomes too self-enclosed and too precious about
refined and well worked out sounds. Instead Taku poses questions of
what elements can be brought into improvisation and how we perceive and
judge them in different ways. Taku Unami is opening up possibilities in
improvisation through
exploring new ways of appropriation.
Anti-Copyright
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FREE
SS 06
Hometown Feilding
"Simulations"
Hometown Feilding is the artist name from Mark Sadgrove,
a New Zealander living in Tokyo. We all know
about the whole kiwi noise scene but while most
of it is rock orientated, New Zealand has some of
the greatest musicians working with computers such
as Rosy Parlane, Dion Workman, Richard Francis
and Sandgrove. Mark is the probably the only programmer
of all of them. Simulations is a playful collection of
pieces with a warm and natural feeling to it.
The more you listen to Simulations, the more you can relate
to the New Zealand aesthetic but in a different and very
personal way. What at the beginning seems to sound like an early
electronic version of African music then leads to a second
half that, under a kind of dirt behind the digital sounds,
demonstrates an exquisite sense of time, pace and
development.
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike
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