The first blast comes a few minutes in. Up until that moment, it’s all rough noise, certainly, but on a nanoscale, the rough noise of two dust mites going at it under your bed at 3am. Then comes this sharp, ragged, dastardly sound, like an unrequested wake-up call enacted vigorously with a torn paper bag — and from then on, all bets are off. There’s wild squiggles, and a thick white noise, and high-pitched tones to set off your inner canine, and an ever-present sense of warping that proves to be the work’s telltale component.
That warping is the sound of cassette-tape machines being artfully mangled (MP3). Occasionally there is the Chipmunks sound of a taped voice being played at a speed unintended by whoever first committed it to tape, squeaky-fast voices semi-buried amid all that chaos. This is “Cittacaura” by David Kirby, an Atlanta-based musician who runs the excellent netlabel, Homophoni, on which the track was recently released. “Cittacaura” is Kirby at work on his instrument of choice, a quartet of tape recorders, recording the material as he performed it, live, in early September in the confines of a studio.
More, including a recording of the track compressed in the “lossless” FLAC format, at the release page: homophoni.com.
(The above art, which accompanies the release, is by Andrea Sanders, at whose blog, iloveallofyou.com, there is a series of instructional artworks — art that is produced as a series of instructions that are can be enacted by anyone. Number six in the series is an intriguing project for multiple microphones.)
Not all the 11 tracks on the recent album Hip Hip by Jeff Morton, who records as Nuthre, take the sounds of electronic fidgeting and turn them into something rhythmic and song-like, even a little tuneful, but the two best tracks certainly do. Both “New Concepts at High Frequencies” (