#47

Jon Abbey of Erstwhile, along with Matthew Revert and Vanessa Rossetto recently curated a ton of new music under the name AMPLIFY: 2020 ever since quarantine started.

https://amplify2020.bandcamp.com/music

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#48

This is really great, thanks for posting it up!

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#49

I remember listening to an album that pretty much just sounded like a needle moving over a blank record. Really textural, not much to it, but I would really like to listen to it again. Probably Japanese. Anyone know what I’m talking about?

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#50

Get Mini vMac or BasiliskII emulators, you can make a virtual 68k mac with more ram and disk space than was remotely feasible at the time, and can even cheat by artificially speeding them up to skip long render times :smiley:

I’ve even managed to get Mini vMac working on an ipad, tho I barely understand how.

(i’m definitely in favour of getting an actual old mac too, but the real classic ones almost certainly will need daunting repair of dried up capacitors and exploded PRAM batteries, not to mention the problem of figuring out a workflow for getting files on and off them to modern computers…)

from about 3.15 in my recent stream you can hear an anachronistic noise collage I recently made using SoundEdit on an emulated Mac Plus. Edited from sound FX files found on shareware compilations, some of my childhood audio files, and some newly synthesised on other rudimentary mac audio abandonwares. 11000khz audio + digital hard clipping aplenty :slight_smile: Not sure this would have even been possible on a real Mac Plus, or at least would have required some waiting overnight for the timestretched parts to render

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#51

if it was on LP and Japanese then very good chance it was Sukora’s Oeo. Not a lot of this kind of stuff got pressed on vinyl for pretty obvious reasons.

I was just listening to a Joe Colley interview this afternoon from Noisextra and he mentions seeing Sukora play live in Japan playing the runout groove on a record player and just wiggling a cable around on the connection. I had no idea Sukora had ever done live stuff so thats kinda neat to know now.

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#52

Maybe not exactly lowercase, but Institut Fuer Feinmotorik did exactly that on their “Penetrans” album:

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#53

Thats a great idea, ill try to get it working on the Ipad!

very interesting piece, i like the visual elements at the start. Shareware is an underated thing, ive found the most bisarre and broken video editing stuff from the depths of shareware hell…

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#54

very interesting, would love to find some more dokumentation of that performance

#55

Thanks :slight_smile:

Yeah there are some very interesting and weird obsolete sharewares out there.

This is a good forum for later OS9 era music software/abandonware: http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php

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#56

Ah, if you can share a “how to” if you get it working, would be great.

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#57

ill do!
but the tick is to get it working first haha

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#58

Pleased to see this thread! Very relevant to my interests in listening and sound-making, along with the general Erstwhile / EAI etc. area. For those curious I would absolutely recommend combing through the Amplify2020 collection: all the pieces are new and free to listen / download, and it encompasses so many amazing artists, veterans and up-and-comers alike. (there’s also me, for whatever that’s worth… https://amplify2020.bandcamp.com/album/music-from-box-file )

For myself, I think texture is mainly what I listen for in music / sound, and what I’m interested in making: I don’t have the inclination (or ability!) to make beat-based or melody-based material. It can be very interesting trying to persuade gear that’s designed and sold as e.g. a drum machine to behave in more abstract ways. One reason that I enjoy lines is that there seems to be more discussion and interest in more abstract / textural approaches to sound, compared to plenty of forums where more or less everyone is making house or techno.

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#59

That’s the one. Thanks.

Tangentially, the idea of listening to the format more than whatever was printed on the format is an interesting idea. Maybe. Or maybe just whatever’s present around the sound you ‘want’ or expect. I was using a Brüel & Kjær Random Sinewave Generator the other day in a studio setting, and of course it just has to produce a sinewave, but I found myself equally (if not more) interested in the noise and texture around the sine that the machine produced. The sine was a bit impure and with some mixing desk EQing I could get a nice texture framing the tone. 've often thought about similar scenarios where I’d want to notch out the actual tone of a recording and just listen to what goes on around the tone. Plenty of interesting things to discover.

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#60

This label mappa editions has some releases that might fall into the topic

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#61

Thanks for this thread!

I’ve already posted Haptic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2J3jJXNBK7k

Abeyance is an interesting composition. It shows how a field recording can have a deep, strong effect, even though it only contains recordings of empty rooms.

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#62

Back after a short break, this time with some samples!

I had a bit of a “creative barf” over the last five days since the finding of a treasure trove of old Hindustani and “just Indian” classical music and field recording tapes. Someone left a whole basket of mostly home recorded tapes at a local thrift store, some untitled and others labeled “Bombay1992” ect. I spent the last days as splicing through them as much as i could, and have recorded aprox. 3 hours worth of material. I collected the best of this massive amount here, but it’s mostly regular sample based music.

I did however use the texture of one of the analog tapes as basis for This track, which demonstrates the use of my modular setup. The W/ is looping a sample which I achieved by trying the no input mixer technique, and then slowing it down to -x2 speed. This makes fundamental loop of the piece and gives it a grounded depth build upon. The Morphagene is fead with the texture of the tape, and then modulated by marbles which quickly modulates length and position. Morph is set roughly at 13 o’clock, making the stereo panning but without pitch. This is the second/microsecond layer of the piece, being just on the bring of granulation. Lastly Monsoon has very short a vocal sample from a tape in its buffer, being modulated by O_c for pitch and trigger. This is the final granular layer to my piece, having 3 different microsound scales incorporated and having micro amplified source material. So i think this qualifies as lowercase?

I have some more recordings i will share in the future, but for now its what i can offer composition wise :slight_smile:

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#63

probably not what youre referring to, but there is a mike shiflett album that reminds me of this. Merciless i think is the name

#64

I do like the approach of removing the ‘content’ of a sound and seeing what’s left behind. Seth Cooke does something sort of similar with his ‘No-Input Field Recording’, which involves making recordings with nothing plugged into the recorder, so what we hear is the empty channels and inner noise of the equipment. There’s a surprising amount of textural variety in the results: some is harsh whiteish noise, some is like minimal synth, some is very sparse and EAI-ish. All at least conceptually relevant though: this material is 100% textural impurities!

Here is a collection of these. I have the physical edition, which is a: “2GB micro SD card encased in a 4cm x 4cm x 4cm silicone moulded black concrete cube, painted with Stuart Semple’s Black 2.0. The micro SD is highly unlikely to work and cannot be recovered without destroying the cube”. It’s a good cube.

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#65

some of you may be interested in a “new” recording that richard chartier and i are releasing today:

it is a studio edit of an 8 channel installation we did at ICC Tokyo way back in 2003. richard had some recordings from the space and send me a bunch of individual tracks… i worked them up into this hour+ version and richard has put it up on bandcamp.

it definitely reminds me of this now-distant time… it’s a very very mellow piece and i think sounds quite nice. since you had to be in tokyo during its run to ever hear it, most people haven’t had the chance.

we hope you enjoy!

  • taylor
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#66

i think this might be more dub than lowercase, but i think it’s still relevant to the style. i’ve been thinking about when trying to push boundaries of sound design and create new textured sounds, the minimal approaches seem to work best. and i get the best organic results with friction by making contact between two objects and recording the resulting impact, slide, slap, scrape or rubbing sound. but then i think of jan jelinek or philip jeck and how they capture these extremely subtle fragments. like the ghost of a click or a small ping. and im trying to come up with some methods for how to either synthesize those types of sounds or capture & edit them. this is a good example i think::

it sounds like vinyl scratches/dust maybe? but low pass filtered and maybe pitched or stretched down? sort of tape-sounding also. i think it may be more in the processing. i do get close when i take some type of filter ping(or series of them), or something with a lot of transients but not a lot of tonal information, then loop that into particles with nebulae and bp filter that. and i dont know if its some crazy compositional technique, some sort of compression method, or what. but when i try to sample the resulting sound, it is almost impossible to get the right piece of that audio clip, or even if i think i did, to then make it fit in either a pattern or a mix.

it might help to study dub. because i really dont know the specific tropes and history of that genre. or any techno oriented genre, for that matter. but im more interested in the textural ambient design aspects of that sound anyway. so maybe there is something there that would help to understand it in context. i do like the overall muted sort of dub sound.

have you ever tried to capture just the very edge of a sound? like not the impact, but a short snippet like someone smacking their lips while eating and gasping in air, or turning the page of a book; but you dont want to use that entire sound. so you attempt to crop out just the intermediate(in-between)/liminal, (what’s the word im looking for here____?) part of it. like capturing dust. then without really smearing it, placing it alongside other small fragments of fragments or layering them together.

anyway, i apologize for the rant. like most of my posts, i imagine this was probably better left unarticulated inside my head. but if you know how pole made that sound, i could probably use that information. not that i want to adopt anyone else’s technique. but i think that being aware of useful workarounds can help get the gears moving and spark further exploration

i originally heard the sound in this, but he’s mostly talking about mastering here from what i caught of it

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