Keroaän – Untitled (excerpt) (Copy For Your Records)
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Wow. Just… fucking wow. This is awesome. Reed Evan Rosenberg and Ian M. Fraser have created a musical AI by “implementing XENAKIS’S Dynamic Stochastic Synthesis.” That means this shit wrote itself. A computer composed this. And this is INSANE. Crazy computer noise that borders on unlistenable, except for the fact that it’s totally fucking listenable. Sounds of all sorts in here, helium struggling to escape from balloons, metal coins scraping against hard plastic, hail storms & train wrecks, avalanches & atomic bombs, DIY prop plane motor whir, NES consoles aflame, ancient computer hardware disintegrating before your eyes, even a brief techno interlude. Absolute aural destruction. Daunting In Its Variousness is a goddamn workout and a half. 100% intense & 200% amazing. And apparently the live show is just as nuts, “lasers, strobe lighting, and fog synched to both audible and structural qualities of the music as an infinitely morphing chorus of digital voices croon, cry, scream and everything in between.” FUCK these dudes need to send their genius computer on tour and hit up Boston stat.
Richard Kamerman – I Stayed In The Apartment For Thirty-Two Days Without Leaving (excerpt) (Copy For Your Records)
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A swift kick in the junk. Less than 20 minutes on a mini CD-R of abrasive as fuck electronic glitch. Like a hundred cats scratching at your microphone while it’s hailing outside. Scratch pop scar city with what sounds like a completely distorted and incomprehensible growling. It could actually be vocals or it might just be an homage to power violence. And it’s fucking relentless. It kicks in immediately and it’s in the red the whole goddamn time. The especially difficult part is the millisecond (and multi-second) pauses dispersed throughout that act like reset buttons. You can’t just zone out to this and ignore the caustic static. He’s a tabula rasa master.
The title of this makes me like to imagine Kamerman going all sorts of insane in his 32 day homebound stint. It’s fuckin raw as hell and beautifully destructive. Plus, it’s only 20 minutes so even those with the most delicate of eardrums don’t have an excuse not to cop this.
Apparently these 20 minutes are an excerpt from a 2+ hour long piece Kamerman made that will be released in differing formats on varying labels. A very strange approach but I kinda dig it.
Corey Larkin – Source/ .pdf
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Corey Larkin has a history of making intense & not so easily accessible electronic music. As I’m sure you might expect from the title, Raw Data Studies is more of those wonderful sound experiments.
There’s only 2 tracks, the first is a mere 35 seconds long. It’s a quick brittle static blast sourced from a PDF file. The second, titled “Dissipative Music/ µũ Law Algorithm,” is wayy longer, clocking in at 15 minutes. This is some HARSH shit. Abrasive squelches, piercing glass & blade tornadoes, lo-fi robot blurts, and ghostly electronic chatter, this runs the gamut on cold, inhumane, & antiseptic noise. It’s like dipping your amputated limbs in Clorox.
I’m not entirely sure how these sounds are made. They’re primitive & digital and my guess is Larkin is using some traditionally non-audio data to make noise, similar to Steven Flato’s transformation of “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge” .txt to an .aif (Larkin even thanks Flato for “directing me to the medium of raw data” on the disc). This isn’t easy listening, this isn’t even pleasurable listening, it’s startling & painful but goddamn if I’m not still drawn to it. It’s not just the intrigue of the creation, it’s actually a varied & compelling experience, one that I probably won’t listen to on a daily basis but will no doubt peel away at its layers and get more out of it with every listen.
This is the first of four releases in Copy For Your Records‘ Fan CD-R Series. They’ll all be a 3″ inside a 5″ CD-R, limited to “no less than 100 copies, and cumulatively, as a complete series, totalling an edition of 500.” Strange, but whatever. This is totally fucking rad, major props to CFYR for getting brilliant future-noise glitch in the physical hands of those who care.
