Taking the live setup through its paces. A little number for piano and electronics. This track is entirely live. The only editing is the courtesy top and tail.

Earthquakes Behind Closed Doors

This work is part protest piece and part ode to the unique aesthetics and idiosyncrasies of the virtualised, digital hyperreality. With the death of John Perry Barlow in February of 2018, it seemed fitting take make a work from his famous "A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace". 

On February 8th, 1996, John Perry Barlow, the founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote this declaration. The paper was a direct response to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which was the first legislation that sought, among other things, to regulate the Internet and its content. Barlow's paper presents a revolutionary, idealistic vision of the Internet, where ideas and information can be freely exchanged and that the Internet can self-regulate under its own sovereignty rather than through government. The paper opens: 

"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."

22 years on, the digital landscape has changed significantly as the gulf between JPB's idealistic vision of the Internet and the current reality continues to expand. The fight for online freedom presses on as issues of copyright, net neutrality, data collection, privacy, censorship and regulation are fought out amongst governments, corporations and users alike. These issues have become increasingly important as the internet is no longer just a place someone goes and dials into in the corner of their home or office. Now "cyberspace" surrounds and consumes everyone having not just psychological effects but also real material effects as well, winding its roots around physical space and sometimes choking it. 

Int_rf.renCe is an abstract reflection on these issues as it weaves these ideas into its structures and processes. The primary material of this work is a recording of John Perry Barlow reading "A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace". The speech exists almost in its entirety in this piece and yet none of it is decipherable. The speech recording underwent a number of different processes to fragment the material and reorganise it, in effect censoring the speech through fragmentation and layering. 

In the first section, the primarily voiced parts of syllables and words were edited out leaving only the sibilants, plosives, glottal stops and tails as well as breaths and background noise. Various thresholds were applied to retain different durations between the words and syllables which could be extracted. The removed material was gathered together, time-stretched and layered forming all of the pitch material in this section in the form of various drone-like textures. The speech plays a major role in every aspect of this section, not just in terms of the sound objects from it that furnish this section but also elements of the structure and the effects processing itself. Elements such as breaths and background noise from the recording were used as impulse responses to create the reverbs in this piece. With JPB's voice at the centre of this section, it focuses on the human and the organic.

In stark contract to the first section, glitch art methodologies of sonification and data-moshing contribute to its distinctly digital feeling. Various raw digital from hard drive images data was read as PCM audio to create a large library digital sounds which form the primary material of this section including a PDF of the entire text of the paper itself, which was also sonified and used in the piece. This section is also the only instance where sections of the recording are played in order without editing, but are distorted through spectral processing and aggressive downsampling as another form of censorship.

The final section combines materials of the first and second sections, placing the aggressively digital sound world in dialogue with distinctly human vocal sounds.

Int Rf.renCe

Kevan is a composer, sound artist & musician.

Kevan Atkins

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