www.aec.at  
 
 
 
 
Statement of the Digital Musics Jury

What about some of the rest?

One of the two distinction winners, Florian Hecker, works on several fronts: Hecker is in a dialogue with (digital) instrument developers and referencing an experimental academic aesthetic without all of the trappings of scholastic brainwashing. He emerges with a very customized purpose for altering software and sounds that don't follow the usual rules. Every track on Sun Pandämonium utilizes a different approach to a scientific synthesis that is raw, dense and sometimes even baffling. Even the clarity of intention expressed in his arbitrary formations blazes an intuitive trail through the inner worlds of microsound and its offspring.

Maja Solveig Kjelstrup Ratkje, whose extended solo vocal treatments form the foundation for her Voice CD from Norway, is the other recipient of the notable distinction award. This collaboration with Ratkje and Jazzkammer's John Hegre and co-producer Lasse Marhaug features furiously fucked-up and sample shredded articulations that squall, jabber, babble and bark over time-stretched layers of her clamorous percussive cutups and walls of noise. At first this dynamic downpour both riveted and repelled our startled panel. Repeated listening didn't seem to dispel the controversy either, but for some reason seemed to hold the mutual attention steadfast to the last. Whether these virtuoso implications seem overly dramatic to some or disturbing to others, it's hard to deny the power of her brave, possessed spirit of the tongues.

Another improvisational figure who made the migration from massacred guitar to laptop absorption is Kevin Drumm. His aptly titled Sheer Hellish Miasma combines these two approaches into a brutal, swirling chaos of grumbling distortion and swelling, piercing tones. It brought to the panel's mind the tradition of *Metal Machine Music*, as though it were run through a filter less explicitly tied to the strictly noise sector. Drumm's use of drones on this recording is treacherous, spastic and severely penetrating, pointing toward a signature position in his surging catalog.

The UK group Whitehouse are still too extreme to find a majority on this jury panel 20 years after their first appearance. They have shifted from the paradigm of being an ambivalent "80s industrial" band towards a contemporary-sounding digital blast. They focus on their issues more precisely than ever. Obvious, but not obvious enough, Whitehouse are one of the few collectives to twist political issues explicitly with their extreme and controversial works. Addressing topics of power, media, violence, abuse or fetish, Whitehouse caused the heaviest debate amongst our committee. The voyeuristic aspect to their work struck some of us as choreographed provocation and others as disgusting theatrics. But the very fact of the panel's polarization over the kind of abhorrence, rejections and fascination their music and dialectical message conveys raised the discourse to grant them, with our divided passions, a disputed place in the final honorable mentions. Their unrelenting live spectacles and savage soundworks are an inexorable testament to a brute strength. Let the outrage continue!

Gert-Jan Prins was taking his Risk to our incidental ears. He is using nothing you can buy in a shop as proper instrument. In terms of technology this could be a by-product of a customized mechanical process that assembles the likes of radio transmitters and other objects for aural projection of frequency interference onto crowds and eventually Pro Tools. This is sharp. There's a snap to it. It's really differentiated and shaped. It pulses madly and is very raw. No, this isn't music as we generally know it but it does utilize a technical structure that can be perceived as a nonlinear musical sound experience. Jump, cut and crazy whir. Are we judging artists, techniques, objects or pieces? In this unusual case of a person with small analog machines on a table we find him guilty of all the charges! Are we reacting to names or what we hear? Well, this wasn't just another electro-acoustic "squeaky toy" narrative – this was skilled in a blunt, rugged manner – these are fresh ways of connecting devices together – just who is this guy anyway? And what is this about? It’s not trying to put the listener into some special state that is supposed to tell you something. It's a direct impetus.

The sound work of Toshiya Tsunoda represents a radical rethinking of the concept of field recordings. With the meticulously scientific approach of a cataloguist, Tsunoda captures the depth of the landscape, the vital breathing of things. Each one of his works is similarly noted for the compositional structure that he discovers to be inherent in the sounds of found objects. The results are surprisingly beautiful electronic works that bear little resemblance to what we would normally consider evironmental recording. Tsunoda bases his methodology on electrically vibrating, found objects by attaching sensors to them that transmit weak electrical currents, which render them audible. Tsunoda then records the results, which are typically recorded out of doors, near bodies of water. Among the objects Tsunoda has used for the sources of his recordings are the motion of air inside a glass bottle, cracks in manhole covers, and the movement of air across – or in certain instances inside of – solid surfaces at specific site locations such as seaports and storage facilities.

Nymphomatriarchjust happened to be made from the physical alchemy of framing the sex sounds of partners Rachael Kozak (Hecate) and Aaron Funk (Venetian Snares). Freakish sets of moans, grunts and skin strikes were molded into choirs, drumbeats and other timbral constructions. Although the jury noted this sexual morphology, it did not get hung up in the intrigue. What jumped out from this personal investigation was the style and punch of the music itself regardless of the provocative sources. It stood on its own as a haunting, harrowing work dealing with breakcore dynamics and visceral mood treatments that had nothing to do with porno music, but everything to do with the organic musical expression of animalistic instincts.

Oren Ambarchi treats the guitar as a sound generator. His interpretation of the instrument sounds not unlike a Fender Rhodes at times, creating echo and reverb-drenched melodies that seem to suspend themselves, creating slowly turning narratives and repeating patterns that at times resemble locked vinyl grooves in whose repetition abstract patterns rise and fall. Switch clicks and cracks, string scrapes, cable noise and feedback rumble have a certain musicality to them, which Ambarchi captures and uses to compose with. The results are simply stunning, unique and at times sound like Ambarchi is playing a totally undiscovered instrument. To quote Ambarchi, his guitar technique *simply* involves "re-routing the instrument into a zone of alien abstraction where it's no longer easily identifiable as itself. Instead, it's a laboratory for extended sonic investigation."

Rechenzentrum engineer sound design, music and video images into bleak, emotionally complex melodramas where the events are joined in constantly shifting conflict. Sounds and rhythms become protagonists, creating barely resolved tensions, evoking scenes of subdued menace. There's something inherently alive in what their interdisciplinary work captures that transcends the distinction of their aesthetic hybridity. De-tuned strings, dance floor dub, minimal techno, hip-hop and post-industrial sonic collages combine with the imagery of text, freeways, machines and instrumental ensembles to create beautifully dark cinematic allegories which force us to reconstruct aesthetic experience through the narrative manner in which the group processes it's aural and visual source material. The systematic surplus of controlled meanings communicated by Rechenzentrum's productions points to odd manners of making art that fulfills many of the aesthetic possibilities promised by AV production and multimedia theory since the late 1960s.

From the songwriting sector we came across the personality of Tujiko Noriko whose Make Me Hard project focused on experimental orchestrations with bits of harmonies, noise, and beats. The challenge of forming something interesting out of this quirky blend of fairly straightforward elements seemed to be met as something different from much of the purely abstract works that the jury predominantly listens to. By applying her voice in so many ways, Noriko achieves a blurry romanticism occasionally disturbed by dissonance and intervention of unlikely arrangements. Whether one builds a relationship to the songs as people might with pop frameworks seems less important here. The overall atmosphere was compelling enough.

No one has taken the Viennese Aktionist tradition as a musical blueprint further than Rudolf Eb.er and the Swiss Schimpfluch ("abuse") artists who started in 1987. Particularly when you consider the themes of Eb.er's work: domestic violence, the re-enactment of foundational experiences of trauma, and purposeful regressions to experiences of sheer pain. In his other identity as Runzelstirn & Gurglelstock, Eb.er performs concerts that seek violent resistance from audience members by combining improvised immediacy, extreme taboo-breaking behavior and self-conscious theatrics. Audio documents of these events are marked by jarring voice punctuations, gasped breathing and extended tense silences. In terms of his compositional work, Eb.er's editing technique is unique in its deeply precise dissection of both his recordings. Using traditional analogue methods of editing – reel to reel tape with scissors and scalpels – the collages which Eber creates using this material are compared by him to biologically dividing and growing his own sounds. Given the visceral nature of his recorded output, and the extremely physical nature of his performances, the notion of growing musical cells, in Eber's case, is entirely appropriate.

Conceptually, the idea of Phill Niblock's piece, The Movement of People Working, struck a chord with our panel. This longstanding composer and filmmaker records the instruments from many musicians and assembles them into drone-like sound paintings which accompany his visual odyssey. The images on the DVD depict the workers from various global locales going about their daily repetitive tasks supported by a broad continuum of slowly evolving musical layers. A no-compromise aesthetic effect seems to permeate and resonate with many audiences who attend his ongoing live presentations.

Yuko Nexus 6 Kitamura composes works that remind us of a sound diary. Beginning her interest in music by recording over her father's Bach and Beethoven cassettes as a child, Kitamura now begins piecing together her work by exchanging cassettes with friends, each of whom records over the same cassette using source material recorded from diverse locations such as the street. Kitamura calls the music which emerges from this process "Kotatsu" music, named after a little Japanese table with a heater underneath it which Japanese families like to sit next to in the winter in order to stay warm. Kitamura's project has a particularly sociological significance as much as it has a musical one: through these collaborative recordings using the same recorded-over cassettes, her point is to recall music's relationship to the way that people live, and the communal function pre-recorded music has for them as they exchange it with one other over time.



© Ars Electronica Linz GmbH, info@aec.at