27 cents

until i drown

Radio Earthling 17-06-2024

Interpreting a palindrome through sound is almost too easy a challenge. Record some music, process it to play backwards, then butt the two ends together to arrive at a "forward + backward" outcome. Instant palindrome.

To our benefit or detriment, Suss Müsik doesn't do anything the easy way. A typical Suss Müsik piece improves reductively and methodically over many iterations. It takes a long time to filter out the dodgy playing and sour notes to reveal any good stuff buried within. 

In this short piece, Suss Müsik began with a simple "forward + backward" rule: whatever one plays, try to trace it back to the origin. A bit of reverse-reverb was applied to the guitar to create the effect of coming and going in equal distance. 

The piano and percussion bits came out of an attempt to play "five-prime to three-prime" phrases. The intention was to match the nucleic composition of double-stranded DNA when it forms a double helix. In genetic science, this is known as a palindromic sequence. Now you know.

Eventually, "fives to threes" became "sixes to twos." Both add up to eight, so we called it a wash and built upon it. The reverse-reverb treatment was applied to the piano chords for the ending, which at one point sounded exactly the same played backwards or forwards. 

The result is a sloppy, sentimental mess of a piece, pretty much the opposite of what one would expect for this exercise. We're not really sure how it happened. Suss Müsik in a nutshell.

The piece is titled Detartrated, a palindrome word to describe the process of improving the taste of fruit juice by removing bitter citric tartrates.

More on this 252nd weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Sonic Palindrome: Make music that sounds the same backwards and forwards” — at:

http://disquiet.com/0252/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

llllllll.co/t/make-a-sonic-palindrome-disquiet-junto-0252/

There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address totwitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

Detartrated [Disquiet0252]

Synthesizer improvisation using the Make Noise Phonogene. The sample is from Bugle Call Rag by Roy Smeck. 

Other modules used: Make Noise Maths, Make Noise MMG, Make Noise Echophon, Make Noise Erbe Verbe
Intellijel Rubicon, SSF URA, Bubblesound uLfo

That Oldtime Synthesizer Music (Dirtbag Rag)

There is a lovely moment beginning around the six-minute mark of "Chew Cinders 1" by C. Reider. What appears to be randomized white noise degrades softly into retreating tones, followed by the rumbling of a deep bass presence that explodes into blankets of industrial haze. The effect is both unsettling and restful, reminiscent of classic Zoviet France (for those unfamiliar, their album Shouting at the Ground is a good starting point and well worth your investigation).

"I believe in the future resolution of two states," wrote the Surrealist André Breton. "Life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease[ing] to be perceived as contradiction." Composers who work in such contexts remove sounds from their original source material, thus creating a dichotomy in which even the most experimental music can reside within the realm of familiarity.

For this weird piece, Suss Müsik adhered to a philosophy of "sharp attack, gentle decay" — an unfaithful reproduction of casually played instruments. You'll hear washes of synth, glitchy electronics, the tinkle of a piano, the heavy drop of a microphone. Deeper listens may reveal the distorted whine of a saxophone, or perhaps the rumble that occurs when a Boss RV-3 pedal is pushed to capacity. A chopstick is tapped on a piece of paper to replicate a snappy drum snare; somehow the hum of a dehumidifier sounds like a choir. Plus there's a guy talking. Instant dada. 

The piece is titled Creideamh, a derivative of the Old irish word creitem meaning "to believe." The image is a red baseball, torn in half, with a picture of Salvador Dali on its surface.

More on this 277th weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Chew Concrète: Make music inspired by C. Reider’s Chew Cinders album procedures” — at:

http://disquiet.com/0277/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

http://llllllll.co/t/chew-some-concrete-sounds-disquiet-junto-project-0277/

There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

Creideamh [Disquiet0277]

The first barcode was a graphical extension of Morse code. That's how Norman Joseph Woodland arrived at his barcode prototype in the 1940's while living in his father's beachfront apartment. One imagines Woodland drawing with a wooden stick in the soft Florida sands, extending a series of dots and dashes into the cryptic patterns we all recognize today.

Morse code is commonly thought to be a mechanism of distress. Everyone knows the code signifying "SOS," for example. The lyrics of "Dot Dash," a song by punk legends Wire, appear to reference a more neutral approach to crisis. The narrator's indifference to an upcoming automobile accident is oddly casual, almost clinically observant: "Progressive acceleration / Skidding, but the expression / Remains pan."

It's interesting how, decades after Woodland revolutionized the transactional landscape, our emotional response to barcodes is one of lax familiarity. We get bored with innovation when we're constantly exposed to it. Using a self-checkout scanner at the local grocer has all the excitement of waiting for a traffic light to change. We simply go through the motions: beep, navel oranges, two for a dollar. Beep, bag of crisps for one seventy-nine. Whatever.

For this piece, Suss Müsik created a nine-part sequence based on three barcodes. Each "hit" was played using pieces of wood and overlapped according to variances in line thickness. As the rotation became more dense, a bit of reverb and panning was used to separate the layers and compress the more piercing frequencies.

Noting that one of the barcodes resembled an elongated set of piano keys, Suss Müsik identified individual notes and arrived at a somewhat accidental chord sequence that deadens the senses after two measures. Perhaps that's what Wire was getting at with "Dot Dash" and the lesson of Woodland's invention: random discoveries and events are unavoidably circumstantial, and the emotional responses they elicit can be surprisingly mundane.

The piece is titled Philco, named after the company who purchased Woodland's patent in 1962 after IBM declined to pay his asking price. 

Postscript: the wood percussion by itself is actually quite interesting, if a bit dry. If there is interest among Junto participants in hearing this part as an isolated track, let Suss Müsik know via comment and we'll post it.

More on this 285th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Live Barcoding: Make rhythms from your packaged goods. — at:

https://disquiet.com/0285/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0285-live-barcoding/

There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

Philco [Disquiet0285]

Suss Müsik knows all about insomnia for the mentally fragile. We’ll spare you the details, other than to say this: when one is dedicated to the craft of “post-classical ambient minimalism for crepuscular airports,” exploring the nuance between dusk and dawn is something of an occupational necessity. It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it.

“I fellowed sleep who kissed me in the brain / Let fall the tear of time; the sleeper’s eye,” writes the poet Dylan Thomas. “There grows the hours’ ladder to the sun / Each rung a love or losing to the last.” These two couplets succinctly describe the duality of insomnia, which in Suss Müsik’s experience takes two forms.

The first form of insomnia is a woozy precipice between not quite being asleep or awake — not exactly alert, yet consciously aware that time is passing. The second form (usually following the first) is a whirlpool of cognitive dissonance: the body may be tired, but the brain actively rages at an endless cycle of unanswerable questions. How many years do I have left? Did I remember to pay the insurance? Do I have cancer? What’s that sound downstairs? Who or what is touching my leg?

For this piece, Suss Müsik sought to represent both forms of insomnia through sound. The piece begins with the insistent tempo of a CR-78 drum machine, which signifies the ticking of a clock, its rhythm punctuated by jabs of piano. A field of electronic fog slowly emerges from within and builds to a quiet roar. With the whine of a saxophone, everything retreats back into the subconscious. The ticking CR-78 returns to close things out.

The piece is titled Chiasmus, named after a grammatical structure in which a phrase is reversed with no repetition in words. Next time you have insomnia, try to list as many of these as you can remember from when you were in school.

More on this 350th weekly Disquiet Junto project (Selected Insomniac Works / The Assignment: Make very quiet music for very late at night for very fragile psyches) at:
https://disquiet.com/0350/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:
https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0350-selected-insomniac-works/

There’s also a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet to join in.

Chiasmus

About:
Tulpa | Dusha projects are two worlds, expressed by Anna Martinova, DJ, music producer and a singer. Anna is originally from the Baltic Sea, born in Dobele, Latvia, currently living in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Her DJ career started in 2000, playing styles like Dark Psychedelic Trance, Tech Trance, Old School Goa Trance. Circa 2014, Anna started to playing around with Dark Progressive, as this this style was closest to her Tulpa DJ sets.

She began to have an interest in DAWs such as Reason, Ableton, and Logic. This interest eventually lead Anna to enroll in the SAE institute. After getting her Electronic Music Producer diploma in 2012, Anna started the MM - Micro Monkey project. The MM project explored her interest in deep, melodic aural journeys, and harmonically transformed into Dusha project. It was here she found her musical voice. Dusha is mainly ambient oriented subliminal audio journeys, which evolved into Anna's interest in modular synthesis.

Meeting Erica Synths visionary Girts Ozolins, Anna had the idea to start Modular Moon; a Modular Synthesis School, Teaching others has allowed her continue growing as modular synthesis performer. Through modular exploration Anna found herself evolving toward minimal techno live performances. It was here Tulpa DJ sets became modular live sets.
Tulpa live is psychedelic techno live performances, based on intuitive search of audio satisfaction, in a moment of time. Every recording is unique, no overdubbed and night dance powered. 

With the help of her   with her close friend and partner of Jacopo Fresia, Modular Moon | Modular Synthesis School continues to educate, and highlight the importance of live performance over pre-recorded laptop music. They dedicate their activity towards live performances, opening modular synthesis to public, supporting the industry and growing along with it.

Tulpa | Dusha currently performs worldwide with both DJ and modular projects. She is active member of Kyma Symbolic Sound and modular communities, mother of a son Tristan.

more about Anna:
www.chipeky.com

Modular Moon | Modular Synthesis School :
www.modularmoon.com 
www.modularsynthesisschool.com

more about Anna:
www.chipeky.com

Modular Moon | Modular Synthesis School :
www.modularmoon.com 
www.modularsynthesisschool.com

Data Cult Audio 0110 - Tulpa | Dusha

By the time each one of us is born, we’re already intimately aware of security. We sense our mother's heartbeat while residing in the womb, which carries us through childbirth. As an infant, when we hear a familiar voice—frequently that of our mothers—we begin to develop the rudimentary physiological responses that correspond to feeling safe and protected.

The human brain is remarkably adept at processing complex information, which arguably is what separates us from other living creatures. Plants have no parents and thus no thoughts or feelings—or so we assume. Suss Müsik poses an interesting philosophical dilemma: it’s a crime to harm a human being, and there are strong moral arguments for treating animals with the same level of respect. And yet, the ethical argument against plucking a tomato from its vine is considered an exercise in absurdity.

Clearly, one must draw a line someplace. Any living creature—human, plant, or animal—can only express the information it receives and internalizes according to its cognitive capabilities. That said, it’s entirely possible that the concepts of timbre, pitch, rhythm, tone and context are untranslatable between species. And none of us can formally declare that a plant doesn’t verbalize danger in its own fashion. Wasn’t it Roald Dahl who wrote a short story about trees that scream?

For this soothing yet quietly unsettling piece, Suss Müsik sought to create a concept known as “evergreen noise.” A soothing synth wash was played for an amount of time in one channel (the “human” side), then pitched downward with a dollop of static added in the other (the “plant” side). In the background are sampled female voices coupled with heavily treated audio recordings of deciduous foliage fluttering in the breeze.

The piece is titled Tomatis and named after Dr. Alfred A. Tomatis, a French otolaryngologist who specialized in the way infants use sounds produced by their parents in order to develop cognitive and social skills. The image is an organic “herb wall” in Austin, TX.

More on this 386th weekly Disquiet Junto project — New Colors / The Assignment: Out with the old white noise, in with the new — at:
https://disquiet.com/0386/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:
https://disquiet.com/junto/

Thanks to Todd Burns, a conversation with whom led to this project, and to Jason Wehmhoener for the use of his original art for this project’s “cover.”

Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0386-new-colors/

There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

Tomatis [Disquiet0386]

demoing some psyched out boogie in the time of covid

That Oldtime Synthesizer Music (Dirtbag Rag)

Mister_Niles

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