Disquiet

The brief liner note for this manic bit of synthesizer cacophony, approaching serial orchestral music at times, is pure tech talk, so if you’re not regularly following the details of contemporary modular synths and electronic-music software, just suffice to say that the piece is pushing several items in popular use to their limits. And then give it a listen. The track is “Circuits – A Human Way to Play Them” by Duet Mysteron. The result is at times like dozens of quickly vibrating instruments heard at once, and at others like a small foggy town full of car alarms that all go off at once. Which is to say, it’s all about simultaneity, at a large and small scale. That orchestral comparison isn’t cross-genre hyperbole. There is a harmonic component at the start, all clashing maximalism, and a melodic component toward the close, a through line of gentle probing, that have an admirable amount of certitude to them.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/duet-mysteron](https://soundcloud.com/duet-mysteron/circuits). Found via a repost by [Anarchy4bits](https://soundcloud.com/anarchy4bits), out of Traunstein, Germany, who is half of Duet Mysteron. The other half is the Turku, Finland-based [Regenbot](https://soundcloud.com/regenbot).

SoundCloud has done something of a net-zero adjustment to its social aspect over the past few years. On the one hand, it diminished the presence of discussion groups to the point of making them nearly non-existent. On the other, it increased the means by which non-musicians can contribute. It accomplished this by making reposting a means by which someone can add something to a feed. The reposting has its demerits. Some rampant reposters — and they know who they are — can clog up your feed all too easily. The functionality is the equivalent of Twitter’s “retweets,” though of course it takes a split second to read a tweet, whereas a retweeted hour-long EDM DJ mix or audiobook sample can mess up your afternoon background listening. It’d be nice, as with Twitter, to turn off those retweets — or, in SoundCloud parlance, “reposts.” (It’d also be nice to have another Twitter feature, “lists,” both public and private, but that’s a whole other subject.)

In any case, whether or not reposts have expanded the SoundCloud user base’s sense of collective participation, another feature, used less frequently than reposting, provides a great means by which a listener can contribute to the listening of others. This is the “playlist” functionality. It’s the same tool used by musicians to collect tracks into albums, and it’s a way to make digital mixtapes of material from multiple accounts, too. A great example of the functionality is a new project by Audio Obscura, aka Neil Stringfellow of Norfolk, in the U.K. He’s begun producing short “Artist of the Week” playlists, the first of which features Yasutica Horibe, of Hiroshima, Japan. Horibe records as Stabilo-Speaker-Gain, and his music is a collage of tiny materials, scrapes and drones, threadbare waves and gentle percussives, just beautiful stuff. Stringfellow is onto something here.

More from Stabilo at [soundcloud.com/stabilo-speaker-gain](https://soundcloud.com/stabilo-speaker-gain). More from Audio Obscura at [soundcloud.com/audio-obscura-music](https://soundcloud.com/audio-obscura-music), where he’ll post more Artist of the Week playlists, along with is own music.