Act I: The Subterranean Chapter

"43684259A+!M"

Synthesist | Electronics

d[-_]b

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...".

data:::b.END.in_G

daemon

[binary:::poetry]

*still.frame//Maxwell'sDemon

 

_schema

[mode_rNO]

*still.frame//Maxwell'sDemon

<entropy>

[theo.r_eTiC.al]

*still.frame//Maxwell'sDemon

 

Codon (microsound/granular synthesis) ~ Gen Thalz

*Please use headphones

“Beneath the level of the note lies the realm of sound particles. Each particle is a pinpoint of sound.” ~ Curtis Roads (electroacoustic composer/computer programmer)
 

The idea is to apply the method of granular synthesis but we didn’t use any granulator or software synthesis available today. What we do is like a sonic pointillism, we grab a small pieces of sounds (about 3 to 30 milliseconds) out of our chosen sample sounds then clone or combine those sound particles repeatedly to achieve a desire sounds by doing some time and pitch shifting.

Then just like music concrete, we arrange those sounds rhythmically and randomly, time/pitch shift several of it again, and apply some delay and reverb into some of it.

The process is very tedious but overwhelmingly satisfying if you’re into sound designs.

Ingredients:

-          Sound Particles

1.Short porn video clip converted to mp3

2.Recorded sound under the bed at exactly 3am

3.Toy keyboard circuitbent sound

For the visuals, we cut a small part (about 27x15 in dimensions) out of our “Bits and Glitches 3” illustration then tweak it, rotate, rescale, and animate it. The result is very organic and mystic.

Lo-fi Digital Photo

ROM (Reboot Our Minds) ~ Gen Thalz

Another analog session

with live circuit bending and DIY kit

feat. the voice of Mr. Terence McKenna (shaman, psychonaut, ethnobotanist)

*This is the second part of his speech in the video:

Catalysts to say what has never been said, to see what has never been seen. To draw, paint, sing, sculpt, dance and act what has never before been done. To push the envelope of creativity and language and whats really important is, I call it, the felt presence of direct experience which is a fancy term which just simply means we have to stop consuming our culture. We have to create culture.

Don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time, where you are now, is the most immediate sector of your universe and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, you are disempowered. You are giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media, so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y or something. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking.

That is all cultural diversion and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, and your fears... and we are told no, we're unimportant, we're peripheral, "get a degree", "get a job", get a this, get a that, and then you're a player. You don't even want to play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world. Where is that at?

Glitch

Abstract Sculpture: Folded Magazine

Datamosh.01

Datamosh.001

Broken Pixel.01

Broken Pixel.001

minimalism

Electric Labyrinth

Telemetry

Binary Poetry

                                                                 Zero and One

Hex

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 

iLLUSTRATIONS: Bits & Glitches 3 and Strip of Codes

iLLUSTRATION no.28 (Musical Score):

"Bits and Glitches III"

*another Metaphysics of Notation but in glitch mode granular synthesis, using the minimalist approach of Pointillism.

ILLUSTRATION no.27 (glitch pointillism):

"Strip of Codes"

*allowing tadpoles

QR Code: Gen Thalz

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".