Avant Noise
Saw Biosphere at Mutek a while back, and I'm finally getting around to finishing writing this.
The show was excellent. It was low-key, often percussionless electronic music played loud with a large video backdrop by an artist. The art was... odd. It was a series of video clips taken on subways. But they were processed to show different time slices at different horizontal coordinates. So people sort of "stretched" through their walking. There were some other scenes, but I really want to talk about music right now.
Before Biosphere performed, there were two other artists performing: nAnalog, and Tiny Little Elements. nAnalog were the more interesting of the preceding two, because their visual presentation was more interesting. It was largely mechanical sounding noise modulated into more synth-sounding chord structures.
But TLE... Eesh. It was atonal, arhytmic, and VERY mechanical. The visual presentation was simple (which is often good) but looked unprofessional to my Game Programmer's eye. For example, it wasn't V-synced, so you could see tearing in the image as the computer redrew its frames. Diagonal lines that were to erase what was beneath them erased bounding rectangles around them, instead of just their shape. It looked cheap.
So without a good video presentation to occupy my mind, I was able to concentrate on the Avant Noise. Not sure if that's the correct term for it, but it sounds good. :) It just didn't appeal to me on any level. I think I'm pretty good at finding the music in compositions, even if I don't like them. Sometimes the music is buried very deeply in layers of droning synth, as in Biosphere's Shen Zhou. Music might be hidden in the interactions between repetitive layers, as in much of Orbital's work.
Try as I might, I could not penetrate the maze of bleeps, blips, and static. I tried hard, as when they were done, I felt tired from the effort. About 40 minutes in, a 4/4 house beat faded in. About 5 minutes later, they were done. The beat didn't match anything, it was just there. Later, I almost felt insulted. After inflicting seemingly structureless sound on me for 40 minutes, a beat just didn't mean anything.
As a funny epilogue, Biosphere came up next. The video hadn't started yet, and it was dark in the auditorium. From the speakers came 5-second long bass waves. They started with one very low note, and added layers of tones, then subtracted them. It was a very complex sound that was quite beautiful. After about 5 of these, I noticed that each wave was identical. After about 10 of them, they stopped. The video artist came on stage, then the show began. He was just testing the sound system! But Biosphere's sound test was a much more interesting listen than anything in the whole Tiny Little Elements show.
The show was excellent. It was low-key, often percussionless electronic music played loud with a large video backdrop by an artist. The art was... odd. It was a series of video clips taken on subways. But they were processed to show different time slices at different horizontal coordinates. So people sort of "stretched" through their walking. There were some other scenes, but I really want to talk about music right now.
Before Biosphere performed, there were two other artists performing: nAnalog, and Tiny Little Elements. nAnalog were the more interesting of the preceding two, because their visual presentation was more interesting. It was largely mechanical sounding noise modulated into more synth-sounding chord structures.
But TLE... Eesh. It was atonal, arhytmic, and VERY mechanical. The visual presentation was simple (which is often good) but looked unprofessional to my Game Programmer's eye. For example, it wasn't V-synced, so you could see tearing in the image as the computer redrew its frames. Diagonal lines that were to erase what was beneath them erased bounding rectangles around them, instead of just their shape. It looked cheap.
So without a good video presentation to occupy my mind, I was able to concentrate on the Avant Noise. Not sure if that's the correct term for it, but it sounds good. :) It just didn't appeal to me on any level. I think I'm pretty good at finding the music in compositions, even if I don't like them. Sometimes the music is buried very deeply in layers of droning synth, as in Biosphere's Shen Zhou. Music might be hidden in the interactions between repetitive layers, as in much of Orbital's work.
Try as I might, I could not penetrate the maze of bleeps, blips, and static. I tried hard, as when they were done, I felt tired from the effort. About 40 minutes in, a 4/4 house beat faded in. About 5 minutes later, they were done. The beat didn't match anything, it was just there. Later, I almost felt insulted. After inflicting seemingly structureless sound on me for 40 minutes, a beat just didn't mean anything.
As a funny epilogue, Biosphere came up next. The video hadn't started yet, and it was dark in the auditorium. From the speakers came 5-second long bass waves. They started with one very low note, and added layers of tones, then subtracted them. It was a very complex sound that was quite beautiful. After about 5 of these, I noticed that each wave was identical. After about 10 of them, they stopped. The video artist came on stage, then the show began. He was just testing the sound system! But Biosphere's sound test was a much more interesting listen than anything in the whole Tiny Little Elements show.
posted by Almo at 5:16 PM
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