The last time Anton Holota‘s music was mentioned here was back in 2008, on the occasion of his album Products of Passed Days, on the Complementary Distribution netlabel. Turns out that Holota’s latest free web release, a half-hour live performance presented as part of the Crónicaster series at cronicaelectronica.org, dates from roughly the same period. Though it just popped up on Crónica’s RSS feed, the set was recorded back in October 2008 at a club called Cinema in Kiev, Ukraine (MP3). It seems to be a soundboard recording, because there’s no apparent crowd noise — which is for the best, because much of the sounds from which Holta makes his music could easily be just the sort of chance noise we’re trained from birth to ignore: the hums of a dying HVAC system, snatches of partially overheard conversation, shuffling handheld items, the static of faulty transmission. That latter element, the way error becomes an aesthetic, casts a spell over the entire proceedings — “glitch,” as it were, in various ways serves as a shared aspect to the performance. As such, it turns the idea of error on its head: what is supposed to be a broken transmission in fact is exactly that which manages to take disparate elements and find common ground for them, that which turns noise into something more immediately comprehensible as signal.
More on Holta, who records as .at/on, at myspace.com/antonholota (from which the above photo, shot earlier in 2008, is borrowed) and 14circles.org.
Otomata is a simple generative audio app, in which chance collisions yield unexpected patterns, both visual and sonic. Its arrival on the Internet a month ago has, in turn, yielded unexpected flowerings, from myriad new patterns generated and shared by users (pictured here is one such example), to its employment in fixed sound recordings, to its inspiration of new software development. What follows is a survey of just some of those efforts, much of it (audio and software) downloadable for free. (Meanwhile, 
There are splits, and then there are splits. There are splits that have songs by two different musical acts, and then there are splits that make good on the tantalizing suggestion that the two acts actually interact. A relatively recent six-song split by Vertex Germ (of Mexico) and Lo Fi High (of Germany) includes two tracks each by the acts, and a pair of collaborations, one of which is the highlight of the set. Titled “Wonderland 8763,” the track mixes squawking field recordings and pulsing techno loops into a chaotic noisefest that takes on the vibrancy of a Charles Ives composition, owing no doubt to the incompatible elements of the two acts coming up against each other.