The Numbers Stations [industrial techno|noise-glitch|minimal] ~ Gen Thalz

*This is an acousmatic techno track. All sampled sounds is from different mysterious Numbers Stations on radio and internet. Sound collage/concoction into something minimally aggressive-harsh-noisy and glitchy with a feel of lo-fi industrial rustiness and dirtiness.

Bandcamp download: http://genthalz03.bandcamp.com/track/the-numbers-stations

Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/genthalzspace

Credits:
released 24 August 2015

Track: The Numbers Stations
Creator: Gen Thalz
Genre: Electronic
Style: industrial techno, noise, glitch, minimal
Year: 2015
Type: single release

_Special Thanks to:
The Lincolnshire Poacher
The Swedish Rhapsody
UVB-76 (The Buzzer)
Webdriver Torso

Re-sample, mixed, and arrange by Gen Thalz
Produced by Marlon B. Zoleta

*The video clip is from AT&T archives - Telephone Switchboard (Old and New), from the 1920's onward. We just cut and select a few scenes and speed it up a little bit to sync and match the timing of our audio. We immediately like and chose this AT&T video clip for this track because it really (obviously) has the feel and vibes of the sound per se.  We also like the lo-fi look of it and the patching of cables and dialing on those massive machines.

d[0-0]b

i18n [organic/sound texture/breakbeat]

*please use headphones

This is just another sound design/music concrete experiment that leads into a beat oriented atmospheric way.

Most of the processed found sound here is a sound of birds chirping and rooster cocking nearby that we accidentally captured while recording a sample intended only to pickup the gentle ambient sounds of the morning on a rooftop drinking coffee and turn it into something harsh, dirty, and gritty.

The visual is an actual steady footage of the recordings on the rooftop that undergo through a over-acting processing until the video turns into white, we really want it to be minimal. The grainy, sand, dusty figure that coming to and fro throughout the video is actually our shadow - as we move around the place or pressing the "record" button. As someone see or notice this is really not meant to be sync with the audio.

And the verse at the near end of the video is from our poem/song title "Through the Broken Glass".

"The silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun. ... It doesn't really mean anything. I just liked the sound of it" ~ Morton Subotnick [electronic music composer]



　 

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".