Beat the retreat, music snobs! Critical beats and sonic ruptures from our finest doctors of sound and video make no bar of music stay the same.
Sonic Surgeons:
JTNB (Ježíš táhne na Berlín) (Prague) [Breakcore, Glitch]
Caliph8 [Turntable]
Supreme Fist [Turntable]
Joseph Insect [Turntable]
Malek Lopez [IDM]
Luo Chao Yun (Taipei) [Improv]
Mu Arae Transmission [IDM, Ambient]
Terraformer [Ambient, Industrial]
Tengal [Microsound]
Eye Anesthesiologists:
Tad Ermitano
Edsel Abesames
Clang Sison
Damage: 150 PHP (plus drink)
SCHEDULE:
10PM: "Der Abgrund“
Terraformer
10:45PM: “Static Pursuasion”
Turntablist’s in an exquisite corpse like game using time-based algorithms
Players:
Caliph8 [Turntables, Electronics]
Joseph Insect [Turntables]
Supreme Fist [Turntables]
11:20PM: “Signals from a Monolith”
Mu Arae Transmission (CANCELED DUE TO HEALTH PROBLEMS)
replaced by Tengal Solo Set
11:40PM : “___”
Malek Lopez with Guests
12:15: “Jesus Marches to Berlin”
JTNB (Ježíš táhne na Berlín)
1:15: Tengal + Supreme Fist + Caliph8 + Malek Lopez + JTNB + Luo Chao Yun MASSIVE JAM
Over 12:45
DJ sets by: Minister Zero, Caliph8, Supreme Fist, Tengal
Visuals designed and performed by Tad Ermitano, Edsel Abesames, and Clang Sison. (Special thanks to Denis Lagdameo)
Notes:
Many have taken a utopian view of the deterritorialization of music production, as it is reterritorialized in ‘home studios’ or ‘bedroom labs’. As well as the evidence of Aphex Twin, Squarepusher and a good proportion of those involved in the nebulous genre ‘electronica’, Fete dela WSK! praises the creative potential of this underheard-of autonomy. American composer Kim Cascone sees computer technology as a liberating force, both creatively and in terms of eluding the dominant commercial industry, writing that “computers have become the primary tools for creating and performing electronic music, while the internet has become a logical new distribution medium. For the first time in history, creative output and the means of its distribution have been inextricably linked.” (‘The Aesthetics of Failure’, 396) Along with the rhetoric of freedom comes a puritanical praise for self-teaching, as techno-autodidacts master new machinery, software, concepts and programming. Access to and increasing control of digitally produced or processed music move computer music beyond structures of existing musical convention, and almost inevitably, it seems, to the digital dismantling of music, and ultimately, to the dismantling of digital music (music as presented digitally, or digitalized).
Beats are often there to be thwarted, either through complexity, or purposeful variation, often as an odd take on microsound, where dissected sound (or information) is stacked up like in the music of Ježíš táhne na Berlín or JTNB (translated as Jesus Marches to Berlin) or Malek Lopez. Beeps, clatters, and momentary granular synthesis bursts scatter through the carefully composed pieces.
Though Terraformer’s initial attempts were towards industrial music (offered an anti-aesthetic, using the tools of art to undo art: industrial music made its listeners aware of the fetid state of capitalist society), does not look to be a political intervention, but its beats are not only messy, they are overridden by hums, blasts, failings and direct glitch sounds, or hums signaling spaces between instrument and functionality. Elegiac tones build, there is still the jarring of back and forward movement, as even stasis cannot settle, and the whole clicks (is read as containing those clicks.)
Composer Tengal, often working with hundreds of short tracks prevent a unity forming, and glitch has become a component, in a realization it is now part of musicality rather than a gesture that takes the medium from music to being medium and failing at that.
The glitch ‘effect’ transfers into the relation between sound and listener, and, while losing the specificity of glitch, lets it play across tracks where glitch features (in the same way that noise in any ‘noise music’ plays across tracks featuring or consisting entirely of what are generally thought of as noises). Once away from the unwitting reification of glitch left to its own devices, we have something like hyperglitch, where it is an effect, not an essence of material and materialist commentary. Though these occur not only in sound but in the moving images, as 3D projections (or video mapping) of such kind are set-up by Tad Ermitano, Clang Sison, and Edsel Abesames.
Beatsmiths Caliph8, Supreme Fist, and Joseph Insect perform in an all-turntable trio set: wherein time-based algorithms follow common buildups, but cuts it, layers it on itself, time compresses parts and strecthes other sections of each player. Parts are made staccato, broken into fragments, with some of these forming perfrect new microrhythms that disappear in a second. Sounds are taken from something familiar (popular hit songs) and brought into unfamiliar yet exploratory territory.
Mu Arae Transmission’s beeps, clatters, and momentary granular synthesis that bursts throughout piece are like alien signals that await confirmation. Ambient washes and pulsing glitch rhythms; beautiful chords with sombre melodies are taken out of context and placed into eerie communal dialogue between the machine and humanity.
The very fact that glitch phenomena is not there to be worshipped as the means and end, but is to always already have occurred and be re-played, or be itself disturbed to have anything to do with noise. The same conclusion could be said to apply in attempts to find noise working, even if construed as always provisional, as yet-to-come, as gone, as dissipating, mounting, but never there.
*
Curated by Tengal
Poster design by Caliph8
"WE HATE WHEN PEOPLE MAKE TRACKS LIKE THIS" IS PART OF A TWO-DAY EVENT IN MANILA AND IS A CO-PARTNER EVENT OF AX(IS) ART PROJECT BAGUIO CITY.
