Andrew Pekler has a synthetic menagerie, an electronic aviary. He has made “unreal field recordings” — his excellent phrase — that consist of chatty birdsong, except there are no actual birds, just his machines, his software, however it is that he constructed the sounds. They’re modeled, certainly, on familiar bird noise: the quick reverberating of their tiny speech organs, the inherent echo of the natural environment, the layered density of a forest. As the piece proceeds, his artificiality gets more self-evident, the songs bring to mind pictures not of small birds but of small synthesizers. At which point the brain switches from bird to synthesizer is unclear, and arguably unimportant. In either case, we simply hear Pekler’s lovely birds sing across the uncanny valley.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/pekler. More from Pekler, who has recorded for ~scape, Kranky, Entr’acte, Matador (under the name Sad Rockets), and other labels. at andrewpekler.blogspot.de.