Divide by zero: impossible. Or rather, invalid, illegal, forbidden. Because the result is infinity, undefined: beyond the realm of numbers. To choose to divide by zero: a refusal to follow the rules. And an error, a confrontation with a limit, a failure of intentionality. Potentially: a passageway to something other and beyond.

*  *  *

The music on this CD was composed using division by zero – along with various other operations, including: converting the raw data of computer programs into soundfiles; recording the audio output of a malfunctioning computer; performing arbitrary mathematical operations; generating extreme fragmentations and jittery loops; writing algorithms to control hundreds of rapidly shifting filters and transpositions.

These are mostly unstable processes with multiple, conflicting levels of control – gestural, algorithmic, graphic, parametric, musical, mechanical. The uncertainties of their interactions give rise to interpenetrations of  the willed and the arbitrary, the foreseeable and the unpredictable, the carefully controlled and the uncontrollable, the human and the non-human. Leading to a point where the sounds begin to speak – or sing – for themselves, where the work begins to form itself of its own accord, where the music begins to emerge as an inevitable, impersonal life force. Where – maybe – truth begins to happen. 

*  *  *

This music is very “black” – harsh, violent, extreme. Yet at the same time, it performs a kind of sonic incandescence: applying heat to matter until it gives off light. Beyond mere blackness and yet emerging within and through it, at the utmost limits of energy and intensity, there is “... a secret light that came from the black... a light transmuted from blackness... another realm, another mental state...” (Pierre Soulages, “Du noir à l'outrenoir,” Écrits et propos, 59.)

Because music is transcendent: beyond sound; beyond all symbols, concepts, numbers, ideas; before language and beneath it. It is inexplicable, unsayable, unknowable: satori – blinding illumination. 

Benjamin Thigpen
June 2010

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Released on the CD “divide by zero” (Sub Rosa, 2011).
https://www.subrosa.net/en/catalogue/new-series-framework/benjamin-thigpen.html
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Buy CD from Sub Rosa

divide by zero   (2003-2007)

Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur michi.
　　　– Dante Alighieri, Nuova vita

"It starts out quietly — almost imperceptibly. The nature of the small bouncing sounds that open the piece, however, should put us on our guard: tense and nervous, they announce the catastrophes to come. Because "0.95652…" is a catastrophic, cataclysmic piece. Its very substance seems to be catastrophe. Relationships are inverted. Tumultuous, roaring upheavals, increasing throughout the piece, are, paradoxically, its moments of calm. Which may shed some light on its title — enigmatic and unpronounceable (like the name of God in the Old Testament?). This almost one speaks the limit, the smallest difference, which is also the instant of maximal intensity. And "0.95652..." places us within this instant as if within a nest. (After, there will be one: completion (?), silence (?), death (?) — domains beyond our reach.) The “total sound,” immobile and solar agitation, is detached from all causality. It appears brutally (increasingly brutally as the piece advances), and stops just as abruptly, without reason. — Or at the very least as a displaced and disproportionate consequence of what could be its cause: iterations of white steel, mechanical frictions of poor children's' toys unexpectedly skidding out of control, exploding into intergalactic rodeos, into crackling, rattling epics, comico-cosmic. Possible images among others left to the listeners' imagination. The whole speaks of a fundamental ambivalence between ends and means. The almost one's “total sound” is not the result of a learnedly elaborated construction (à la Beethoven or Wagner, say): it is already there. It takes the place of silence. This music inhabits a complexity that it acquires and accepts — indecipherable – and there, very naturally, it finds stillness, calm. Which is what gives it its most unexpected quality, its “moral”: the lightness and transparency of this extreme power does not overwhelm us. Instead it leaves us free and invigorated, as if we had been bathing in air."
　　　- Régis Renouard Larivière

Commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture, 2005.
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Released on the CD “divide by zero” (Sub Rosa, 2011).
https://www.subrosa.net/en/catalogue/new-series-framework/benjamin-thigpen.html
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divide by zero

0.95652173913   (2005)

"Some things are hurrying into existence, and others are hurrying out of it; and of that which is coming into existence, part is already extinguished. Motions and changes are continually renewing the infinite duration of ages. In this flowing stream, then, on which there is no abiding, what is there of the things that hurry by on which a man would set a high price?  It would be just as if a man should fall in love with one of the sparrows that fly by, when it has already passed out of sight."

– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
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Most of the sounds of "brief candle" were generated by recording childrens' toys and then modifying them through extreme spectral and temporal transformations; others were generated by reading computer programs as soundfiles. All percieved spatial movements are produced by varying the phase relations among 6 independent channels. 

Composed at Djerassi, SCRIME, La Kitchen.kom and in my bedroom. 

Selected in  the Concours Internationaux de Musique et d'Art Sonore Electroacoustiques de Bourges 2006 and in the contest CIMESP 2005.

Commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture. 
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Released on the CD “divide by zero” (Sub Rosa, 2011).
https://www.subrosa.net/en/catalogue/new-series-framework/benjamin-thigpen.html
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brief candle   (2005)

"Les bleus chez vous dansant la ronde
Boiront le sang de votre coeur.
Nous n'avons qu'un espoir au monde,
C'est le coeur de Notre Seigneur."

Performed by the Front National, 1 May 2002, Paris. Distorted by division.
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Released on the CD “divide by zero” (Sub Rosa, 2011).
https://www.subrosa.net/en/catalogue/new-series-framework/benjamin-thigpen.html
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espoir   (2003)

"Si ambulem in medio umbre mortis."

In May 2004, I recorded the sounds of a malfunctioning computer in Ircam's Salle Varèse. Three years later at the Visby International Centre for Composers, I used this material to compose "malfunction30931." The only processing applied was filtration.
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Released on the CD “divide by zero” (Sub Rosa, 2011).
https://www.subrosa.net/en/catalogue/new-series-framework/benjamin-thigpen.html
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malfunction30931   (2007)

For Iannis Xenakis

This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made; 
but it was ever, is now, and ever shall be:  everliving fire, 
with measures of it kindling, and measures going out.
　　　– Heraclitus

Nearly all the original sound material for "incandescence" was extracted from "Persepolis" by Iannis Xenakis, to whom the piece is dedicated. This material was transformed by such processes as fragmentation, scrambling, distortion, comb filtering and reverberation. 

Composed during a Djerassi Artists Residency in May 2003.

Chosen as a finalist in the competitions Musica Nova 2006 and Citta di Udine 2006.
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Released on the CD “divide by zero” (Sub Rosa, 2011).
https://www.subrosa.net/en/catalogue/new-series-framework/benjamin-thigpen.html
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incandescence   (2003)

Benjamin Thigpen. Nomad, born in the United States, naturalized in France. After dropping out of conservatory, he studied literature and aesthetics and travelled extensively. He gradually returned to music though electronic composition.

He creates music for loudspeakers – as a composer and as a performing electronic musician. He composes in various European electroacoustic studios (GRM, VICC, EMS, STEIM) and gives concerts throughout the world. 

He has taught computer music at Ircam (Paris), at the University of Washington (United States), and at the Conservatorio di Cuneo (Italy); he currently teaches at Arts2, in Belgium. 

He has put out two solo CDs – "human for scale" (EMF Media 2005), "divide by zero" (Sub Rosa 2011); a third, "flux," will be released on empreintes DIGITALes in  2017. His music also appears on various compilations. 

He performs in the duo "Rust" with instrument inventor and composer Jean-François Laporte, in "Fluid Identities" with cellist Benjamin Carat, and in "Les Frères Bobine" with composer and electronic musician Stefano Bassanese.

He thinks that music is not a language but a lived visceral experience, and that it is not the art of sound but the art of the transcendence of sound.

divide by zero (2003-2007)

benjamin thigpen