At Curious Matter's "Terra Incognita": http://curiousmatter.org/terra-incognita-2/

Swinger Data began as a field recording of a pre-recorded liquidation advertisement on loop outside of an electronics store in Midtown Manhattan. The store’s closing sale was being broadcasted with the same wildly exaggerated enthusiasm as normally accompanies a grand opening sale, which was like listening to strategic effect announcing its ineffectiveness as strategy. This got me to thinking. So here was this ad eating itself, glitching away in some nonsensical feedback loop, but in relation to what; the expanding as-of-yet that we experience as reality, which is somehow supposed to be more logical, more stable in contrast? Trying to grasp the situation was like being in some kind of zero-coordinate perceptual gap, listening to senselessness as it infinitely reflects into a reality it can never catch up with while at the same time experiencing reality as it infinitely reflects into senselessness that already was. Pure mind rattling joy.

What Swinger Data became, then, is a celebration of this perceptual cavity. Every single sonic bit of the field recording – its recursive grammar, surrounding traffic, resonances and noise in feedback within feedback within feedback between microphone and source – was hacked further into self-referential nothingness; reassembled; disassembled; then reassembled again. The task was performed using spectral processing software. Like an audio prism, this software can divide a sound wave into the elemental vibrations that constitute it. BUT, and this is the truly wonderful part, as with any fine mechanism for measuring quanta, while the output phenomena can somehow be in two places at once, the input method, as of yet, cannot. In order to act upon the continuum of the wave, the software must either contract space or expand time – it cannot capture sound spectra in the present tense. In other words, dig into the hole all you want, but you’ll always only be left with what’s on your shovel and what you toss to the side. A loop for a loop and a cavity for a cavity. So the swinger data now traveling between your ears are not of the void, but sonic layers of distorted time and diminished space intersecting layers of constricted time and extended space, which shape its boundaries, and signal perception.


Swinger Data

A collaboration with Danny Powell: http://dannypowell.net/archive.html 

Music With Paintings, Part 1

Full work available at: https://liebowitzmatos.bandcamp.com/album/present-at-a-tremble

"Present, at a Tremble" explores the site specificity of web-based listening. Their seemingly disparate methods of musical approach provided a great opportunity to investigate the phenomenological aspects of interfaced listening. The question became: what exactly is the site or space of listening where file, server and listener meet? 

Attempts at depicting such a site seemed to end up referring to what it is not. It is not one location, but many, simultaneously. It cannot thus be measured in uniform time, but is the experience of time opened up. The site of listening does not emit a sound on its own. One does not listen to such a site, one listens through it. It is mediation as such. Tending in this context toward the visual trope of the screen, and even the data behind the screen, between listener and the site of listening is an infinite eclipse. 

The three pieces herein, achieved by audio processing, multi-channeling, and generative sampling, are then the result of an exploration of pluritopic and polychronous resonance.

Jaime Rodríguez Matos
https://soundcloud.com/rodzmatos

Joshua Liebowitz
http://joshualiebowitz.com/

Parallax

Generative Audio Processing. Telemarketing Voicemail.

Gross Domestic Product

"Life," 2012. Video loop, audio collage, 2:40 minutes.  vimeo.com/joshualiebowitz/life

Life

Full project available at: http://soundcloud.com/joshua-liebowitz/sets/behaviors/

The second collaborative effort between Jaime Rodríguez Matos and Joshua Liebowitz, Behaviors is as much audio research as it is sound composition. 

Using one composition of sounds as a parent, offspring frequencies were “grown” from it using spectral processing software, which gives us the ability to put sounds under a microscope, as it were, and split them into their components – frequencies and their amplitudes. Working with these elements, additional parts were then generated solely from the foundations of those sounds already present in the original composition. 

By using this method, we hoped to create a sonic environment where kin frequencies are not only the decedents of a common family of sound, but evolve and interact with their environs much as species do in an ecological system. Thus we placed each generated set of frequencies next to one another, unfolding them at either the same time as- or immediately following their parent sounds, to both evolve a new set of sounds, and listen to how they interact with their common family.

Because the additional parts consist of frequencies and amplitudes, and so act as the quanta of pitch and complex tones, their interactions with the latter also suggest a counterpoint that has evolved from, but also freed itself of traditional harmonic principles. In the interactions within this sonic structure, notions of melody, rhythm and chord progressions, which characterize classical counterpoint, have morphed into a counterpoint of frequency oscillations and timbre. Here, the behavior of duration and intensity below the surface of a sound is what counts, and any resultant melody is the effect of the collected frequencies' ability to self-organize. 

With these ideas of counterpoint and ecological systems in mind, we have grouped and classified the individual tracks into “species.” And taking into account that no dynamic system is fully determinate, the listener may notice that the species- or track-listings appear randomly ordered: they are. We didn't originally plan on this ordering; it was a surprise playback occurrence. We went with it.  


Jaime Rodríguez Matos
soundcloud.com/rodzmatos


Joshua Liebowitz
joshualiebowitz.com


Species 1 from "Behaviors"

"Dimensions," 2012. Video loop and audio collage. 1:32 minutes. https://vimeo.com/joshualiebowitz/dimensions. A video collaboration between the members of Bastardo International Art Group. https://www.facebook.com/Bastardo.Biz.

Dimensions

http://joshualiebowitz.com/sounds/show/Audio-Hacks-No_PoundPound_DiamondDash_0101Strikethru_YearofTheRat_Strikethru_YearofThePigeon

Audio Hacks No.##◊-010̵1̵YearofTheR̵a̵t̵Pigeon

All the hits. Backward. At the same time.

Wings Greatest Hits: All The Hits, Backward, At The Same Time

Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. 



