NUMBERS.FM: The name of the station comes from those so-called “numbers stations,” shortwave radio broadcasts of people reading lists of numbers — probably encrypted dispatches to spies — that have been going on for the last 70 years or so. [...]]]> Evan Merz: Why? Why start this sort of radio station right now? What was the inspiration?

NUMBERS.FM: The name of the station comes from those so-called “numbers stations,” shortwave radio broadcasts of people reading lists of numbers — probably encrypted dispatches to spies — that have been going on for the last 70 years or so. The messages in those broadcasts are encrypted using a technique mathematically provable to be impossible to decipher, so stumbling across one is an encounter with some human-generated but ultimately unknowable audio composition, something that really blows our minds and reminds us a bit of experiences we’ve had discovering experimental music and sound art.

More directly, we are inspired by our experiences on glitch.fm where
we do a weekly radio show from the perspective of our label Southbridge Slow Electronics. We are really into a lot of what happens on glitch.fm but also we wanted to pursue a more open and experimental format, such as those used on radio stations like WZRD, the Wizard, in
Chicago. We started to think of online stations such as rand()% (which was an automated net.radio station streaming realtime generative music) and Resonance. We also draw from our experiences with online platforms for Noise or Glitch musics such as furthernoise and microsound. As we discussed all this we imagined an actual “numbers station” that would also feature experimental shows.

EM: How does this project relate to Southbridge Slow Electronics?

NUMBERS.FM: Southbridge Slow Electronics is the record label we run, and also “Slow Electronics” is a genre we set out deliberately to create at the intersections of experimental Media Art and Noise. Many of the folks who will be performing and DJing on NUMBERS.FM are artists connected to Southbridge or who we’ve met through our long-term involvement in noise & experimental music scenes, i.e. here in Chicago. Also there’s a way in which Southbridge’s existence as both an experimental music project and a conceptual/media art project is something we really want to keep pushing with NUMBERS.FM, and create a platform for artists who have that same kind of sensibility.

EM: Can you explain slow electronics a little more?

NUMBERS.FM: Slow Electronics is a genre that we set out explicitly to define and produce within the record label Southbridge. It’s about playing “slow” noise music — records at 0.01% speed, sonic events that take a lifetime to ensue, processes that are too simple to codify but take too long to repeat — and also about “slowness” as an inversion of the claim to “power” in the genre Power Electronics, which we consider to be a theater of misogyny and fascism. So one thing we do is these Slow Electronics “remixes” of Power Electronics records — usually playing them slowly and/or backwards & thru other processing.

EM: My Pandora station for experimental music doesn’t work so well. Can a radio station like numbers.fm succeed when listeners all have such different views on what electroacoustic music is?

NUMBERS.FM: Pandora works great for music that has really mass appeal, where it’s possible to think “I’m looking for something light-hearted with guitars and lyrics about broken promises” (the kind of categories Pandora uses to sort its music catalog and relate tracks to one another) and still come up with something that two people could agree upon just by virtue of having a huge pool of listeners to draw from and pluck some consensus out of. But stuff like noise music, weird dance music sub-genres, sound art, etc. is much more niche and so individual voices, tastes and other quirks are all above the noise floor. So this kind of more bespoke, handcrafted — not to mention *live* — approach is much more natural to the kind of music & sound we’re all invested in.

EM: Going forward, how is numbers.fm going to change and expand?

NUMBERS.FM: Right now we’re figuring out our process, getting all the tech in place and documenting it for new DJs, and generally finding our voice. We have a handful of shows scheduled to start with that we’re totally thrilled about, and look forward to building that roster out as we go. We also hope to do some weird stuff with the station as a platform for our own mysterious encrypted broadcasts and we already have all the code for the station’s online platform (for the playlist/archive tools & and website) available openly: https://github.com/jakevsrobots/NUMBERS.FM

EM: What else are you guys working on?

NUMBERS.FM: Lisa Slodki’s limited edition VHS videotape artwork on Southbridge is coming up next on our label. Lisa also works under the name Noise Crush with the band The Fortieth Day and under her own name with the band Haptic. She is a Chicago-based artist who has exhibtited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago with Haptic. She makes VHS tapes as individual “loops” with samples on them taken from her own and other sources. During live performances she runs a series of VCR’s through mixers in an analog video world! Her work is flowing and slow-moving video which has been referred to by reviewers as dissonant, hypnotic and haunting emotional states, so we’re really looking forward to that!

Imperceptible Time by Evan X. Merz

Becoming is an algorithmic composition program written in java, that builds upon some of John Cage’s frequently employed [...]]]> Black Allegheny is one of the first albums made up entirely of swarm generated music. The album was created using a swarm-controlled sampler called Becoming, which was programmed by the composer.

Becoming is an algorithmic composition program written in java, that builds upon some of John Cage’s frequently employed compositional processes. Cage often used the idea of a “gamut” in his compositions. A gamut could be a collection of musical fragments, or a collection of sounds, or a collection of instruments. Often, he would arrange the gamut visually on a graph, then use that graph to piece together the final output of a piece. Early in his career, he often used a set of rules or equations to determine how the output would relate to the graph. Around 1949, during the composition of the piano concerto, he began using chance to decide how music would be assembled from the graph and gamut.

In Becoming, I directly borrow Cage’s gamut and graph concepts; however, the software assembles music using concepts from the AI subfield of swarm intelligence. I place a number of agents on the graph and, rather than dictating their motions from a top-down rule-based approach, the music grows in a bottom-up fashion based on local decisions made by each agent. Each agent has preferences that determine their movement around the graph. These values dictate how likely the agent is to move toward food, how likely the agent is to move toward the swarm, and how likely the performer is to avoid the predator.

Yes, this is my new album! Thanks for reading and listening!

On CDM, with a great comments thread

On Make Online

Swarm Sampler On MatrixSynth

On Noise for Airports (a great intellectual music blog!)

On Califaudio

1-Bit Symphony is unique because it is being released as a live album. [...]]]> 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.

Notes

1. http://bangonacan.org/store/product/181 Accessed on 6/9/10