Lowercase Music/Sound Art

This surprise us, our track Maxwell's Demon was featured in this Youtube blog (above). d[-_]b

To the team of This Exists Youtube channel, thank you for recognizing our humble and not so accurate (work) contribution to the Lowercase genre. Keep existing! :)

below is our track: Maxwell's Demon

Maxwell's Demon [Lowercase Music/Field Recording/Drone]

*Please use headphones

This is our attempt to explore the extreme ambient minimalism of Lowercase (music/sound). Lowercase music is a very quiet usually unheard sounds amplify to the extreme level, popularized by Steve Roden (sound/visual artist) where he records the sound of himself handling paper in different ways.

The sample sound we used here is a recording of generative sounds we capture inside one of the car of MRT we ride from Santolan to Cubao station , at exactly 1 O'clock pm. Although these sounds is not literally "lowercase" or unheard but due to the fact that people who rides MRT either listening to mp3s, playing games, reading text/ebook, voice/video call, or simply talking, the noises we collected were ignored - in a broader sense they were unheard consciously.

We processed those sounds to create - that for us a hellish soundscape reflecting the daily basis suffering of MRT commuters. The result is very organic, and the agony of pain on this track is the chattering of people inside the train heavily slowdown.

*For the visuals, basically it was a simple program we coded using Notepad, then exaggerate the code several times, processed the different results, and arrange it manually according to the sounds in a hope to sync them.

As they all says, "this sounds or music does not need a passive ears, but rather requires an active ears...".

CHAMBIRA: improvise Mbira + Monotron Delay (demo)

CHAMBIRA: an improvise ethno-industrial electronic music instrument (demo)

*This is our version of the native instrument Mbira and kalimba

*We used "tsane" or tweezer as a key hence the name Chambira (chane and mbira).

*The case is a hard carton box that we bought on Papemelroti.

*For amplification of the vibration, we just used a simple acoustic guitar pickup.

*We run it through a Monotron Delay analogue synthesizer to tweak and get some delay or echo effects and some noisy sounds.

*The tune is a short composition that we make just for this demo video and call it "Protocol".

Metadata (bytebeat, post digital, 8 bit/chiptune)

Music, Codes, and Video by Gen Thalz

Further down the hole of glitch, sound art, and minimal electronic music.

a sound/music from binary world.

Audio-Visual is purely made from esoteric programming language, random coding, and algorithm.

*No traditional music instruments, notes, scales, special effects, cut and paste, sound generator, circuit bending, editing, animation, paint etc. were used in the making of this music video.

Fact: We really don't know what we're doing here or how does it works, what we created here is just a result of observation, trial and error, and basic knowledge of the commands/arithmetics/characters for the program to function.

The code we used is one liner only.

axr9 M d9r10+&9*d3r&x60^9~~%3r|6 

Ang Pusa ni Shrödinger (a digital poem)

*No imaginary cat were harmed in the making of this video.

Dahil Linggo ng Wika ngayon...

Kami'y tutula pero hindi ganun kahaba...

Isang digital poem/electronic literature.

Tungkol sa aso? Hindi tungkol sa pusa...

"Ang Pusa ni Shrödinger"

poem, sound art, and animation by Gen Thalz

Karagdagang ambient/drone and beats na tunog ay likha mula sa home made analog synthesizer, toy circuit bending, and some glitches... Baw.

Everything is Sound (bmp version)

          *bmp's realization of our experimental sound art (same title, see the video to hear it)

Everything is Sound (digital radiophonic, glitch, databending)

Music, video, and lyrics by Gen Thalz

THE ALCHEMY OF SOUNDS:

I think sometimes the role of a person who makes music is to take these everyday noises that are ugly and make them beautiful, and by this they doing magic ~ Bjork (singer-songwriter)

*No well-known musical instruments were used in the making of this music or sounds. No notes, notation, complex scale, or any simple chords. All sounds were made of random noises we collected, recorded and mutated, except for the human voice.

Ingredients:

1. Personal sound of morning piss on a Pik-Nik (original) can.
2. Wine Glass harping.
3. Crumpled newspaper.
4. Rubber band, plucked.
5. Stapler, pressed several times.
6. Comb scraping with hairpin.
7. Shake water jug.

We call the technique used in this music or sound as “Digital Radiophonic” or “Databending”. It is a digital version of the original techniques such as Radiophonic and Music Concrete were composers use magnetic tape, morphophone and other recording devices available at that time to record and manipulate raw sounds from anything they could find on their surroundings or "found sound" like frying pan, spoon and fork etc. They manipulate these recorded sounds by changing its speed or tempo, altering the pitch, distort it, reversed, apply effects like echo, delay, flanger and so on to create new weird, strange, out of this world sound.

One of the key figure in radiophonic is Delia Derbyshire (musician, composer of electronic music, and music concrete), they call her “The Sculptress of Sound. Best known for her electronic realization of Doctor Who theme music (BBC science fiction television, 1960's).

The only difference between Digital Radiophonic and the original Radiophonic itself is the device use. Here we only used computer, music editor software, and a ordinary microphone use for chatting but the process is much like the original radiophonic, only we manipulate sounds as wave form on the music editor software and we want to be minimal in a sense, and to be sound more like glitch music similar to the works of Alva Noto, Ryoji Ikeda, Pan Sonic, and Kabutogani. 

However glitch music is primarily made of computer or any machine sound errors. So what we basically do here is creating a glitch sound using radiophonic/music concrete technique and databend digitally.

It’s not complex or technical and not so simple as well, but more detailed (fussy) and time consuming, so you would put a lot of effort just to create a 1 minute or 3 minutes music piece out of the abstract sounds you may find wherever they came from.

Digitally it’s not that easy, what more for the original radiophonic and music concrete were they cut and paste magnetic tape manually to produce unconventional sounds? But it’s really worth the journey, especially if you’re into experimental music or sound art.

Music concrete, radiophonic, glitch music, and digital radiophonic is a new look or another way of composing presented by means of non-traditional way of making music. Collecting any form of noises or sounds then turning it - the abstract, errors, and chaos of sounds into order. As Pierre Henry (pioneer of the musique concrète genre of electronic music.) states:

“Musique concrète, in my opinion … led to a manner of composing, indeed, a new mental framework of composing".