Craft an alien signal. That’s the call for submissions put out recently by Primus Luta’s new label, Concrete Sound System, aka CS². Think of the request as a SETI-style search for intelligent life in the online-music universe. The project takes its cue from this comment by writer Adam Harper, from his book Infinite Music Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-Making:
With the alien we encounter strange new musical objects that repeat and differ across unexpected dimensionalities, images we may think we come to recognize suddenly dequantise, ranges of values never lie still in the ways we’re used to, complex new variables appear oddly significant and there seems to be very little order at first listen.The compositions should draw from these provided sonic elements, a quartet of flanged white-noise warbles that sound straight out of the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop:
A collection of submissions to the project will be released by CS², and one entry will be, as Luta puts it, “chosen by our judges as the song to be sent to our hypothetical alien.” The composer of that track will receive “a terrestrial prize package” that includes a signed copy of Harper’s Infinite Music book, the Audiofile Engineering Studio Life Package, a copy of Photosounder, and the 100th edition of the CS² Schrödinger’s Cassette limited series. Disquiet is proud to cosponsor this event along with the prize contributors.
More details at concretesoundsystem.com/the-alien. More on Harper’s Infinite Music at zero-books.net.