Disquiet

The effects of decay and error serve as an increasingly active realm in electronic music. Glitch has blossomed into a broad variety of sonic experimentation. In the hands of the French duo Art of Failure, decay leads to a contraindicative revelation: chaos, volume, resplendence. What in the hands of many musicians yields the wan detritus of dying bleeps here, instead, gains increasing density. “Here” would be Art of Failure’s “8 Silences,” which the Chicago-based radio show Radius recently focused on, in association with the work’s inclusion earlier this month in an exhibit, titled Bricoleurs, at the Independent Media Center in Urbana, Illinois.

While the duo provides a sizable amount of context for their work, technical specifics are scant. What “8 Silences” appears to be is the result of a signal, or signals, that in the course of traversing the Internet accrue imperfections, like some ocean-going vessel might barnacles.

From the artists’ statement:

8 Silences offers a sensible representation of the Internet by broadcasting audio streams that travel and reverberate trough the web. Initially silent, the streams progressively incorporate an infinity of transformations or “errors”that modify the sound as it circulates on the network. These alterations are comparable to a form of erosion caused by the network space — they are a key to allow different mental representations of this digital topography

At times, such as at about 18 minutes in, the sound approaches something along the lines of Electronic Voice Phenomena, when human-speech-like patterns are heard to appear from sonic noise — which makes sense, metaphorically, given the concept that a sufficiently complex computing environment might, some day, gain sentience.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/thethetheradius. More on Radius at theradius.tumblr.com, on the Laps project at laps.artoffailure.org, and on the duo Art of Failure (consisting of Nicolas Maigret and Nicolas Montgermont) at artoffailure.org.

They rattle like the wheels on an old covered wagon. What we’re hearing, though, is not wheels but what the wheels might have trampelled, the brittle foliage of the west. There is in the track, according to its brief descriptive note, “wild fennel, pine trees and thistle,” the latter of which provides the track’s name (MP3).

The result is a survey of rough scratching, tactile noises that edge toward erasing the ephemeral nature of digital recording. And while wagon wheels play no role in “Thistle,” which was created by Oakland, California, musician Jen Boyd, a record player (as pictured above) does (the liner note continues: “Additional sounds include multiple layers of a running hard drive and a thistle on a turntable”). It’s unclear if the intention is to associate the technology that enabled the vinyl record with the distant, rustic past of the western. But there’s certainly a celebration of the turntable’s mechanism (along with that of the hard drive) as a source of sound that’s essentially no less natural than weeds.

Track originally posted at touchradio.org.uk. More on Boyd at jenboyd.org.