Tristan Perich’s 1-Bit Symphony

Written By: evan on June 9, 2010 One Comment

For the past few days, the internet has been all aflutter about Tristan Perich’s new album, 1-Bit Symphony. The album combines an aesthetic awareness that will appeal to intellectual musicians, and catchy uptempo synth lines that will appeal to everyone.

1-Bit Symphony is unique because it is being released as a live album. The entire album is played by a small circuit that fits inside a jewel case. When you turn the circuit on, it actually performs the album live. This all works into Perich’s aesthetic, which he explains in this video.

Tristan Perich’s 1-Bit Symphony is an electronic composition in five movements on a single microchip. Though housed in a CD jewel case, 1-Bit Symphony is not a recording in the traditional sense; it literally “performs” its music live when turned on. A complete electronic circuit programmed by the artist and assembled by hand plays the music through a headphone jack mounted into the case itself.

A return to the format of Perich’s lauded 1-Bit Music (described by the Village Voice as “technology and aesthetic rolled into one”), 1-Bit Symphony further reduces the hardware involved while simultaneously expanding its musical ideas. 1-Bit Symphony utilizes on and off electrical pulses, synthesized by assembly code and routed from microchip to speaker, to manifest data as sound. The device treats electricity as a sonic medium, making an intimate connection between the materiality of hardware and the abstract logic of software.

While 1-Bit Symphony is purely electronic in its execution, its contents reflect Perich’s long-standing interest in orchestral composition. Since the release of 1-Bit Music in 2006, Perich’s compositional work has combined 1-bit audio with acoustic classical instruments, providing insight into the conceptual and aesthetic relationships between physical and electronic sound. With 1-Bit Symphony, Perich brings this insight back into the digital realm, juxtaposing the grand form of a classical symphony with the minimal nature of 1-bit circuitry. [1]

It is also worth perusing Perich’s 2006 album, 1-Bit Music, and his live music on youtube.