‘Many Enemies (and they’ll give you pleasure and interest)’ is an electronic music composition formed from the sampling and manipulation of two audio files from the National Library of Scotland's sound archive and original synthesised sound.  Ideally, the piece is envisaged as an acousmatic work for concert presentation or for personal listening with a speaker set up capable of faithfully reproducing the recurring low bass frequencies that are an essential component throughout much of the work. 

Working with archival sounds from the National Library of Scotland's sound archive, I was compelled to explore the criticality of archiving, and considering which sounds are represented and preserved in archives and the identities at play in this process.  

This drew me to off air broadcast recording the BBC educational film on birdwatching. (BBC NLS_AMS-2019-016-1-042a_s2_f02_v1).  I became interested in the sonic qualities of the presenter’s voice, the class and social dynamics of his kindly, broadly RP vocal utterances for the ears of children, as well as the strangeness of some of the words and phrases used.  I was drawn to this voice presenting the recordings of various birds, as well as categorising people into ‘friends’ or ‘enemies’ of birds based on whether or not they participated in the illicit activity of collecting eggs from birds’ nests.  

Underpinning this interest were thoughts around Britishness and Empire and the idea of categorising and naming subjects whether they be different types of birds or human ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’.  I had in the back my mind that symbol of empire invoked by Mark Fisher in the opening chapter of Capitalist Realism:
	‘the British Museum, where you see objects torn from their lifeworlds and assembled as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft.’ (Fisher 2009, 4).

I considered this theory of decontextualization alongside the Schaefferian concept of the ‘sound object’  (Schaeffer 2004, 98-100) and how cast in this light the manipulation of sound sources can take on a somewhat sinister connotation.  I was drawn to the birdsong, also contained in this audio recording and decided it would be fitting to include some human song in the form of Sydney MacEwan’s rendition of ‘She Moved Through The Fair’ accompanied by Donald Morison. (NLS_WILS-786-2-MOR-24_s2_f01_v1.m4a)

With the specific sound object of my attention being vocal utterances I made connections with Dolar’s analysis of the ‘acousmatic voice’ (Dolar 2006, 62) where ‘the spirit is all in the voice, the voice suddenly endowed with aura and authority.’  Dolar goes on to say that the uncanny power of acousmatic voices made possible through technological means ‘gradually waned as they became common and hence banal.’ (ibid. 63.) However I believe this uncanniness is still palpable for the contemporary listener in the archival recordings, made stranger again and more ghostly by the passage of time.  These were the foundational underpinnings for my sound source selections and the beginning of my compositional process. 


'Many Enemies (and they'll give you pleasure and interest)'

The prompt was to choose a sentence which described your musical practice, record yourself saying the sentence and use it as your only sound source.

I recently acquired a SOMA Cosmos drifting memory station, which acts as a type of looper. The left and right channels contain discreet loops which fall out of sync, drift and blur together. The unit also includes a granular mode and something SOMA calls a giant reverb. 

When I read the prompt, I immediately remembered an online convo I had with someone last year where they humorously described their own practice. While funny, it also fairly described one that I use quite often.

So for this piece, I recorded it in the three following parts, each into the Cosmos and on to the DAW: 

F'd Around
Until I Heard
Something I Liked

(FAUIHSIL) 🙂

Once there, I added some reverb, eq and compression. I hope you like the result.

FAUIHSIL_disquiet0707

An eye-to-text-to-heart-to-non-eye-to-non-text-to-still-heart series.

https://www.instagram.com/dpg8000/

GORTYNIA PATRIA 003 w/ DPG8000 (22.07.25)

SINGLES 4

Behind The White Chalk (Live)

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The Focus Group: Pan Calling
Mira Calix: Le Jardin De Barbican
Andrew Pekler: Hy Brasil
HTRK: Feels Like Love
Subsided: Green
Björk: Hyper - Ballad
Aphex Twin: Xtal
Photek: Smoke Rings
Source Direct: The Cult
Alva Noto: Prototype 02
Meitei: Ike

pink waste w. seawood young - August 2025

0x134FFED

Gesang der Jünglinge (literally "Song of the Youths") is an electronic music Karlheinz Stockhausen. It was realized in 1955–56 at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk studio in Cologne and is Work Number 8 in the composer's catalog. The vocal parts were supplied by 12-year-old Josef Protschka. It is exactly 13 minutes, 14 seconds long.
The work, normally described as "the first masterpiece of electronic music" and "an opus, in the most emphatic sense of the term", is significant in that it seamlessly integrates electronic sounds with the human voice by means of matching voice resonances pitch and creating sounds of phonemes electronically. In this way, for the first time ever it successfully brought together the two opposing worlds of the purely electronically generated German elektronische Musik and the French musique concrète, which transforms recordings of acoustical events. Gesang der Jünglinge is also noted for its early use of spatiality; it was originally in five-channel sound, which was later reduced to just four channels (mixed to monaural and later to stereo for commercial recording release).

Karlheinz Stockhausen - Gesang Der Jünglinge

made this in a park a few months ago. had the mic on was whistling and fucking with samples in fl studio and on my computer and recording all my computer audio in audacity.

Janitor

scarecrow

Walking down 7th Avenue on October 28th 2023, around 6 pm. Even though it's autumn, the temperature is high. It feels like summer. It's very humid and the street is crowded.
My phone (tucked in my pocket) starts to record on its own when I reach Times Square. 

The resulting one and a half minute long recording is the material for this particular soundscape, which I think captures the eeriness and the uncanny feeling I had that day. All sounds were processed on a Roland SP-404A sampler and recorded live to a stereo track. More soundscapes from various locations: https://isakanderssen.bandcamp.com/album/there-are-places-i-remember-2

New York City

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 Cwiar Anthropocene Bard 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿
🎶 Singer, Songwriter, Producer 🎶
Betwixt Pop & Sonic Avant-Garde


The Implicit Order is not involved in any wave, stream, genre, or scene. 
CUT IT UP CUT IT IN

Sound artist. Experimental, Electro-Acoustic, Field Recording, Musique Concrète and Noise. 

Learn more here: https://stevenraysound.com

From May 2025 most of my official releases will only be found on Bandcamp and other streaming services. This Soundcloud page will be used mainly for unreleased tracks and demo-recordings.

Fade Radio is an independent platform that experiments with diverse music approaches expressed through DJ sets, live performances, podcasts, and art-related projects. Aiming to build a community-oriented network, it operates as a core that aspires to support independent artists and creatives.

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New tracks tagged #MusiqueConcrete