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:
- Personal
sound of morning piss on a Pik-Nik (original) can.
- Wine Glass
harping.
- Crumpled
newspaper.
- Rubber band,
plucked.
- Stapler,
pressed several times.
- Comb
scraping with hairpin.
- 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".
