Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Music Media

lowercase music 352

tregoweth writes "Wired News has an article about "lowercase music" -- electronic music made with itty-bitty quiet sounds."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

lowercase music

Comments Filter:
  • for the endless stream of posts in lowercase.

    ha ha, get it? tunah

  • Damn, I just went to the doc yesterday and they said that i got hearing problems in my left ear. kinda unable to hear anything below 25db. Guess hearing this is the same as hearing nothing :)
  • by Maiko ( 534130 )
    I hope this means we won't be able to hear Britney or Christina as much as we already do...
  • If only we could get rid of that goth/death/I hate everyone electronica, or at least replace most of the noise with lowercase music, that would be awesome.
    • by uebernewby ( 149493 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @05:23AM (#3608078) Homepage
      Well, you *could* of course try to find some non-goth/death/I hate everyone electronica yourself. It's not exactly rare, you know. Pay a visit to a good record store near you that imports European electronica. I dare say you'll be in for a little surprise.

      In fact, in the US (I'm assuming you're in the US on the basis of what you say - no European would ever make the statement you did), Nothing records (of NIN fame) does quite a good job releasing the more popular Warp-esque artists.

      You could also fire up Audio Galaxy and download tracks by (off the top of my head) Plaid, Squarepusher, Wagonchrist, Jaga Jazzist, Kim Hiorthoy, Tipper, Four Tet, Akufen, Daedelus, Andrew Pekler, Pole, To Rococo Rot, Pan American, EU, Arovane, Mouse on Mars, etc, etc (this list is completely random - pls don't flame me for leaving out your favorite artist).

      Just to get you started.
  • uhm, yeah...dude takes a frigging mixing board, jacks it back into itself and calls it music? Sure. plenty of silence in between beats. Guess I am just not artistic, but if this qualifies as art, then me drinking a bottle of water is worth millions. Ok troll time over, but this is a little silly. If this is designed to keep people calm and on focus (coding, problem solving, what-have-you) then I personally feel they are barking up the wrong tree...ok, well, not barking, but whispering. As anyone who has listened to Pink Floyd albums can tell you, if you listen hard enough, you can hear some crazy sounds in the background. Which is all this music would do, force me to listen intently for that back ground noise.

    Kids these days ;)
  • "One recent album was so quiet, listeners wondered whether it actually contained any sound at all."

    The RIAA strikes again!
  • Anyone notice that the article is as minimalistic as the music?
  • by FranChycka ( 582341 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @04:46AM (#3608003)
    itty-bitty quiet sounds.

    I've been listening to this for quite a while, and I must say it's been a good change from the usual stuff labelled 'electronic'.

    thats what I thought anyway, until I realised my headphones were broken...
    fran [hotkey.net.au]
  • holding my overclocked TI-85 within 3 ft of a walkman? =] *remembers playing TI-85 asm games in high school*
  • Well I downloaded the ones linked to the wired article, and I cant say that I liked any of them.
    • I just went back and listened to them. One problem I had was that the computer was louder than any sound being played. The noise of the cheap speakers drowned out anything but the loudest clicks and taps.

      I've always thought that electronica was one of the closest relatives to traditional classical music where the meter and timing and beat were very similar in both styles of music. But this new electronica doesn't seem to have any of that. It's more like... random recordings of random sounds, no better than the background noise of your room.

      This fad will hopefully pass quickly.

      It one is really interested in some interesting electronica, there's a really great sound coming out of India or at least is based on Indian music. Very cool. I wish I could remember the term off the top of my head.
      • The Indian flavored music you're talking is often called "Bhangra" or "Asian Underground". It's mostly coming from the UK.

        There is always more than one "fad" going through what you call "electronica" and I call TECHNO.

        You can easily choose to ignore the ones you don't like, unless you get all your music news from Slashdot.
  • by Ted Maul ( 582118 ) <thismustbeanacceptablename@hotmail.com> on Thursday May 30, 2002 @04:47AM (#3608010)
    I've got a tape by these guys called "Head Cleaner". It's very quiet. I've got their video as well.
    • The last band I knew with a song called Headcleaner was Front242. And that song REALLY was a headcleaner! I think it was called "upper case" music...
      • front 242 is still my favorite all time band (and skinny puppy) but i still listen to industrial cds from the late 80's early 90's over and over. the music is so well put together it never gets old.

        actually my best friend owns a record label [lotek] and we sample some ofthe sounds out of old industrial for hardNRG uk hard house - from bands like coil, 242, skinny puppy etc...

        at one point skinny puppy was the band that held the record for the most samples in their music - then 242 took the lead. love these guys...
  • Herbert (Score:3, Informative)

    by proj_2501 ( 78149 ) <mkb@ele.uri.edu> on Thursday May 30, 2002 @04:48AM (#3608012) Journal
    Reminds of Matthew Herbert does.

    For a live show, he will take samples of himself breaking stuff and do all sorts of things with the noises. Lately he has taken to ripping up bits of corporate branding (soda cans, mcdonald's fries, etc.)

  • by discogravy ( 455376 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @04:48AM (#3608014) Homepage
    cage did this, as the article points out. one of the main points behind his "silent" compositions -- aside from the obvious tongue in cheek 'let's mess with the critics' attitude it had -- was the use of ambient sound as part of the composition. brian eno was inpsired to make "music for airports" (for intents and purposes the first non-classical "ambient" record) when he was recovering from a car accident and asked a friend to put a harpsichord record on the turntable..but she didn't raise the volume high enough before she left so he had to put up with it at a very low volume, barely loud enough to hear over the rain on the windows in his room. the ultra-quietness of these recordings reminds me of heavy metal guitarists trying to out-"heavy" each other. these guys are just trying to out-"quiet" each other.
    • That was my thought

      sounds like they never heard of "Music on a long thin wire"
    • ``the use of ambient sound as part of the composition. brian eno was inpsired to make "music for airports" (for intents and purposes the first non-classical "ambient" record) when he was recovering from a car accident and asked a friend to put a harpsichord record on the turntable..but she didn't raise the volume high enough before she left so he had to put up with it at a very low volume, barely loud enough to hear over the rain on the windows in his room.''

      The recording you're thinking of was Discreet Music released in 1975 on the Obscure Label (Eno's label). If memory serves, the event you are referring to was either from the liner notes or the back of the album; can't recall just now. Music for Airports was released in 1978.

      But, as you said, Eno wasn't the first to get involved in this sort of music. Check out http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/ [hyperreal.org]. It has some pages that go into a lot of the background, thoughts, etc. about ambient.

    • brian eno was inpsired to make "music for airports"

      Ahhh, there's a name I haven't heard in a while. He produced several records for the Talking Heads and others.

      obTrivia: Didn't he composes the now-famous Windows 95 start-up sound?
  • Was anyone else able to hear any of those "songs?" from the article? I tried, and I couldn't hear anything other than the background hiss from having my speakers turned up all the way. I think this "music" may be about the same thing as the Emperor's new clothes story.

    I don't guess it matters, because after reading the article, It sounds even more lame.
    • z_gringo said:
      "...this 'music' may be about the same thing as the Emperor's new clothes..."

      This and much more. New art forms have about the survival rate of baby spiders.

      I am surprised that the phrase appeared so late in this discussion.
  • by pheph ( 234655 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @04:52AM (#3608018) Homepage
    While the idea of very quiet sound may appeal to some listeners, one cannot deny the concept that since this is recorded at a lower volume it is actually of lower representative quality. Why not record it at resonable volumes and play it at your desired listening volume level?

    In example, instead of your sample range range being from 0-65535 it is 0-4096, it may be 'lowercase music', but it could also be represented in just 12 bits instead of 16. The vinyl enthusiats must HATE these guys!

  • This is bullshit (Score:3, Informative)

    by uebernewby ( 149493 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @04:52AM (#3608020) Homepage
    This music has been around for quite some time. For a short while two years ago, it was called 'glitch' and it was the 'in' thing of the week - heck, 'Clicks and Cuts 2' got reviewed in Playboy magazine.

    It got to the point were everyone and their third rate techno musician was spicing up tracks with 'lowercase' sounds.

    Before the 'glitch' revolution, there was already a large scene of musicians who used computers to create tracks out of supposedly non-musical sounds. They were called 'experimental musicians', 'soundscapists' or 'musique concrete people'.

    It's nice to see Wired drawing some attention to these guys, but it's hardly new and I also dare say the scene of people who like this kind of stuff is quite a bit larger than '10.000 people world wide'.

    • by iapetus ( 24050 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @05:02AM (#3608046) Homepage
      They were called 'experimental musicians', 'soundscapists' or 'musique concrete people'.

      They were called plenty of other, more colourful things as well. :)

    • this isn't glitch.

      this is lowercase, or microsound.

      it might seem like an academic distinction, but glitch can be quite noisy and abrasive, and generally people lumped in this lowercase catchall aren't.

      This isn't revolutionary though. Kind of behind the times if you ask me... Weird that Wired chose to pick up on it now, next thing you know they'll be interviewing Kid606 and talking abou the rise of laptop punk

    • Re:This is bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jafuser ( 112236 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @08:00AM (#3608531)
      It's nice to see Wired drawing some attention to these guys

      Re-read the article and determine whether it was written to draw some attention to a music genre, or as advertising for DigiDesign and Apple.

      • Picture with a Mac
      • "magnification of minute sounds through a computer, typically a Macintosh."
      • "...and amplify them with software such as DigiDesign's Pro Tools."
      • "...attracted about 100 people to see three performers, all using Apple PowerBooks. "
      • "Macs are central to the creation of lowercase sound ... and they amplify and edit the soft sounds on Macs. "
      • "this work has blossomed tremendously with the relative availability of Pro Tools (especially the free download from DigiDesign)"
      • "the lower prices of Mac hardware over the last few years"
      • "The Mac is the favored platform ... Most people who work with computer music use a Macintosh. "
      • "This grew out of putting powerful computers into the hands of ordinary people..."
  • cat /vmlinuz > /dev/dsp sounds better :-D
    • Aahh ... but what you *really* want to do is open vmlinuz in an audio editor (in 'raw pcm' mode) and snip the best bits from it to work into a composition using a regular sample sequencer. Or maybe some kernel modules. The USB module, for instance, sounds fairly pleasing but it has a certain crude, unpolished feel to it that reminds one of early punk records. *Very* nice.
  • Surprise! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Bitmanhome ( 254112 ) <bitman AT pobox DOT com> on Thursday May 30, 2002 @04:53AM (#3608024)
    It'll be great until some smartass makes a track that's 45 minutes of near-silence followed by A LOUD BANG! One more fad bites the dust.
    • You can achieve that effect by putting a computer disk in your old audio CD player. I did that once (by accident), with a magazine cover disk. I couldn't hear anything so I kept turning up the volume. Just as I got to max, I got an extremely loud bang, followed by more silence. I thought I'd blown something up, but it all seemed OK afterwards (except for my ear). I don't recommend it.
      • You can achieve that effect by putting a computer disk in your old audio CD player.

        Worse:
        I went to a screening of The Matrix on an IMAX screen, where the audio was farked up. They stopped the film to fix the sound system. Something went extra wrong, and they pumped digital noise (maybe the PCM audio stream directly into audio in) at full 50,000 watts volume. AAAAAAAAA!!!! All the tweeters blew out; not sure about my hearing.

    • by ColaMan ( 37550 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @05:52AM (#3608146) Journal
      Heh,
      one of the early phillips demo CD's did this to demonstrate the new-fangled CD players dynamic range... it went like this..

      Orchestra playing softly....
      Orchestra playing softly....
      Orchestra playing softly....
      Orchestra playing soft *********FUCKING BIG CANNON!************

      As I recall, a lot of audiophile's speakers were replaced after the cones practically leapt across the room.
    • monty python (Score:3, Interesting)

      by prockcore ( 543967 )
      Monty python wanted to do something like that, but the BBC wouldn't let them.

      They would start the show normally.. but throughout the show, they'd slowly turn down the volume.. causing the viewer slowly turn it up.. then at the very end they'd crank the volume.
  • My definition (Score:2, Insightful)

    by HiQ ( 159108 )
    If these people are happy making this, and other people enjoy listening to it: good for them! In my book however, this doesn't qualify as music. For me music has structure, meaning and most importantly emotion, and contains almost nothing but non-randomness. For me this only qualifies as sound. Definately not my cup of tea! (come to think of it, the sound of a cup of tea cooling down could make a nice record!).
  • It's one of Mick Harris' (of Scorn, Napalm Death, etc.) side-projects, available from Isolation Tank:

    http://www2.mailordercentral.com/isotank/
  • A favorite tool of folks on the Microsound list [microsound.org] is an audio programming environment named SuperCollider [audiosynth.com]. It is now free.

    (from the SuperCollider site)
    What is SuperCollider?
    SuperCollider is an environment and programming language for real time audio synthesis. You can write programs to generate or process sound in real time or non real time. SuperCollider can be controlled by MIDI, the mouse, Wacom graphics tablet, and over a network via Open Sound Control. SuperCollider can read and write sound files in AIFF, WAV, Sound Designer 2, and NeXT/Sun formats. SuperCollider supports sound cards using Steinberg's ASIO driver api.

    As for the microsound list ... very many people involved in lowercase, glitch, and experimental music in general are on there exaggerating the importance of the scene every day.

  • . . .then get ready for my upcoming album "The Sound of One Hand Clapping", and my new hit single "Average Global Rate of Trees Falling in the Forest When Nobody is Around to Hear Them in 2001".
  • by freakpower ( 451849 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @05:17AM (#3608069)
    . . . you should consider that an artist deserves some respect for being consistently unlistenable. How many of you out there like Aphex Twin? You have to admit that, though brilliant, tracks like "Bucephalus Bouncing Ball" probably wouldn't go over well with the average listener.

    Electronic music is the new outlet for kids who ten years ago would have sat in a garage with a bunch of friends and a guitar. It offers a sometimes cheap and always flexible way to release your musical boognish.

    That being said, these people probably shouldn't have been written up anywhere outside of their best friends' websites. Any movement for which "there may be 10,000. . . fans around the world" probably isn't worth paying much attention to. The article seems to be more focused on the fact that the musicians use Macs. Surprise, nobody!

    I'm not making a "you don't know what the next big thing is" speech, because, quite frankly, this is far from it. People still prefer 4/4 beats and sound samples with the word "booty" in them. But I wonder how many of those out there ridiculing these guys now are going to be the same ones that whine to their friends two years down the road when their favorite minimalist techno band sells a song for a car commercial.
  • by spektr ( 466069 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @05:19AM (#3608072)
    I think this is an experiment by the RIAA to test whether they can leave out the music around their audio watermarks and sell them standalone. If the market reacts positive, their profit will skyrocket up to 100.05%, because they don't have to pay those greedy musicians anymore.
  • I can't believe you guys are posting links to websites that obviously hold illegal copies of the works I recorded somewhere in the 70's called 'Silence'.

    You'd better get ready for my RIAA lawyer, because everytime a moment of 'Silence' is heard, royalties are due! So the next time you hear nothing but 'Silence' think of me, the poor artist, who should be compensated for this (lengthy) piece of work, but who's work instead got stolen just because the compression ratios of the piece turned out to be particularly favorable.
    • You jest but... (Score:4, Informative)

      by alistair ( 31390 ) <(moc.padltoh) (ta) (riatsila)> on Thursday May 30, 2002 @06:45AM (#3608255)
      John Lennon did actually record a track called "Two minutes of Silence", which has been covered by several bands including Soundgarden.

      17 years earlier John Cage wrote "433", a work for no instruments which required the performer to walk onstage and do nothing for 4 minutes 33 seconds, there is an excellent introduction to Cage's work in this field in this Washington Post Article [washingtonpost.com].
      • Frank Zappa did a cover of 4'33" which was actually just a little over 5' long. I guess it was the extended dance remix.

      • I believe he wrote a composition that is being performed in Germany that begins with 16 months of silence, followed by a single note in January 2003, then 8 more months of silence, and another note.... It sounds rockin!!
  • I've always been into the whole techno thing. If anyone ever wanted downtempo, beatless music, there are a variety of options. This hasn't ever been called "lowercase", it's simply been referred to as "ambient" or "downtempo".

    The internet radio station Cryosleep is a great example. It's "100% No Beat Guaranteed." Listen at www.bluemars.org [bluemars.org].

    A lot of Underworld music is very downtempo and quiet. Try listening to:
    Underworld - Stagger
    Underworld - Thing in a book
    Underworld - Tounge
    Underworld - Skym

    Or you could always try the sounds of Autechre or Brothomstates. It may have somewhat of a beat but it's often extraordinarily quiet. Try:
    Autechre - Bronchusevenmx24
    Brothomstates - We kill da enemy

    Finally, there's a lot of old-school pre-Everything Is Wrong Moby out there that's really "lowercase." Try:
    Moby - House Of Blue Leaves
    Moby - Slight Return
    (Yes, I've been a Moby fan before he got popular. ;P)
    Hope this helps in your quest for fine music.

    -Evan
    • I was also thinking of posting about Cryosleep, which i have playing while I sleep and when I want to just really chill.

      iTunes users can go to Radio Tuner > Ambient > Cryosleep
    • oh, i was also going to say, that my absolute favorite Moby song appeared in the XFiles episode where Mulder finds the truth about his sister's death. The song is called "My Weakness", and it with that scene from the XFiles just made me weep.
    • by acidfast7 ( 551610 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @08:13AM (#3608620)
      TECHNO is not a genre, it's a subgenre within electronic music as a whole. Unfortunately, most people consider any electronic music "techno". The use of "techno" is usually accompanied with the famous line of "How can you listen to this TECHNO stuff."

      The fact that you've "been into the whole techno" thing demonstrates the usual laypersons' ineptitude in describing electronica.

      Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music [ishkur.com] should straighten you out a little. While I don't like Ishkur's attitude that he can classify music better than anyone else, it does serve as a goode exposure to what's available in the electronic genre. Also, the music samples are the BOMB.

      Techno is one of the major classes of electronic music along with breakbeat, house, jungle, and drum and bass.

      As far as ambient, or illbient for that matter, being considered the same as downtempo and lowrecase, that's crazy.

      I'd have to disagree with you that a lot of Moby's early works are really "lowercase." Most of his works are ambient and house(rave):

      Moby - Ambient
      Moby - Early Underground
      Moby - Collected B-Sides

      being three examples.

      Autechre, IMHO, should be considered Intelligent Dance Music (IDM) and it's not very "lowercase". I thought my head was going to explode listening to it and processing all of the sounds.

      On a final note, I'd use Shoutcast radio [shoutcast.com] as a source of Internet Radio within the electronic genre. Highly Recommended:

      Digitally Imported [digitallyimported.com]


      • First off - thanks for underlining the techno thing. I find real techno very hard to listen to but when I try to explain to people the kind of music I play (as a DJ) they often go "oh like techno?". Jeez... :)

        But those categories you list seem a little iffy. You differentiate between "Jungle" and "D&B" (which IMHO is a fairly subtle distinction) but lump everything else into "House"? Hmmm.... what happened to Trance? Prog? Breaks? hell even HipHop & Rap are missing. I think you need to get some new categories :)

        One thing which also annoys me is the made-up word "electronica". I mean it's so meaningless - kind of a catch-all word for "all that stuff we don't really understand". How can one category cover everything from Moby to Scooter to Timo Maas and back to Eno? There's way more variation in there than even words like "Rock" can cover. For instance, I would liken the Prodigy to a metal band, just with no guitars. Yet that's "electronica". Yuck!

        Oh and DI is pretty good if you like cheesy euro-trance :)
        • You differentiate between "Jungle" and "D&B" (which IMHO is a fairly subtle distinction) but lump everything else into "House"?

          I know it is unorthodox, but I like to view "Jungle" as not a genre but a flavor of D&B.

          D&B is a genre, it is anything that leans more on the rhythm of the drum, uses the heavy bass for the "melody", and has that specific syncopation on every other beat that the rythmic structure is architected around.

          There are "flavors" you can mix in:

          Jungle - loose dirty breaks, ragga sounds, stratching and high pitched bleeps.

          Jump-Up - Simple, repeated rhythm. Rounded repeated bass melody. Gangsta rap, get up and dance.

          Techstep/Hardstep - Tight controlled breaks. Sci-fi samples, rolling bass, unadulterated computer evil.

          Atmospheric - Slowed down, relaxing bass. A few jazz or trance elements usually thrown in.

          Intelligent - Complicated non-repeating breaks to make your mind reel. DJ Unfriendly, who cares if you can dance to it.

          Most good D&B is a mix of these styles, and other styles that I don't know much about. Subgenrefication of electronic music is really more for giving people adjectives to talk about music in terms of style than for categorization. Each of these subgenres is a mix of things that go well together and produce a really nice feel in combination.

          Unfortunately, alot of people are so attached to "the new sound" that they only listen and dance to very specific styles/subgenres

          • That's what I love about dance music...so many genres, sub genres, sub sub genres. Your flavors make sense. I was listening to the new Kosheen album the other day. Great stuff, some of it laid back d&b, almost Roni Size style. Other stuff (some wicked prog remixes) going right back into 4/4 trance territory.
      • The fact that you've "been into the whole techno" thing demonstrates the usual laypersons' ineptitude in describing electronica.

        Someone can be 'into' a type of music, yet still label it incorrectly, because they are not into the 'scene' surrounding the music. For example, I could care less whether Smashing Pumpkins are Rock, Alternative, or Pop of some various sort... if I said 'Starting with Smashing Pumpkins, I've been into this Rock thing for a while' a lot of purists would leap down my gullet because I get the f***ing label wrong.

        Don't be so tightassed. Techno is what made 'Electronica' popular, before Techno it was fringe. Now a lot of people refer to all Electronica by referring to the first sub-genre that boomed. So what. A person does not have to read magazines, websites, and cd liners obsessively to like a genre of music. Telling someone 'they are not a real fan because they get a term wrong' is stupid, IMO.

        Raven
    • More great music (Score:3, Informative)

      by jcsehak ( 559709 )
      As another poster mentioned, be sure to check out the original masters of this stuff: John Cage and Brian Eno. I tend to prefer Cage's piano work (his "In a Landscape" is unbelievable), but Eno's ambient music is some of the best of any kind of music out there. I'm listening to his "Ambient 4: On Land" right now. Others of his to check out are "Discreet Music" and "Atmospheres and Soundscapes." Some more:

      Boards of Canada: In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country. This somehow manages to be ambient and melodic at the same time. I never get sick of listening to it. It's a 4-song single, so it should only be 5 or 6 bucks in a store (I got the vinyl for $6, and was pleasantly suprised to find a beautiful marbled light blue record). If you're into this kind of music, you need to buy this right now.

      There's a great 3-disc set called "Ohm" which has a huge cross-section of music spanning the history of experimental electronica (for lack of a better term). Some of it is kinda annoying, but some really gets under your skin, in a good way. I sometimes find myself hitting "repeat" on a song that doesn't even have one chord change in the first place.

      I don't like it as much as Eno's stuff, but if you're a King Crimson fan, you might want to check out Robert Fripp's "The Gates of Paradise." He experimented with some ambient stuff in "Exposure," and with this album has gone full blown.

      I picked up this great german LP at a records store in Minneapolis for $2 called Gas Pop. One of those might be the name of something, I don't know. It's wonderfully anonymous. I later saw it in a store in western Montana (albeit for $17), so chances are good that it wasn't just a, like, 10-record pressing. Very nice to listen to. Wait, there's a URL listed [mille-plateaux.net]. Apparently the band/guy's name is Gas and the release is Pop.

      It isn't quite ambient, but William Orbit's "Pieces in a Modern Style" evokes the same mood. It's basically a bunch of classical pieces that are arranged, performed and programmed by him with in electronic means. It effectively raised the ante for electronic music everywhere. I like his version of Barber's "Adagio for Strings" better than any symphonic version I've heard, and his take on Gorecki's "Piece in the Old Style 3" is likely to sit in your head the whole day. Yet, instead of being annoyed with it, like a jingle, you find that humming the melody actually calms you.

      My own music [rootrecords.org] falls right around here. It's somewhere between ambient and downtempo, maybe a cross between William Orbit and Moby. Plus it's open source!

      If you haven't gotten into the downtempo scene, now's the time. I've been addicted ever since I heard Thievery Corporation's "Sounds from the Thievery Hi-Fi." Chances are, you've heard it too (tracks have been in a lot of movies), but I get more out of it with every listen. Gorgeously complex drum beats. After the Thievery, get:

      Peace Orchestra "Peace Orchestra" when Kruder and Dorfmeister split up, Peter Kruder made this album under the Peace Orchestra moniker. I think it's genius. If you give it a listen, go straight to the song "Shining" and you'll be hooked.

      Nightmares on Wax "Carboot Soul" Contrary to the title, this album is the opposite of freaky. It's sort of a cross-over from hip-hop into downtempo, but it's its own thing and can't be pigeonholed. There are a few of the songs where there's a female voice that's either sampled or recorded, but whatever it is, he makes it so that the sound of the voice (and really the sound of every instrument on the album), hmm, let me put it this way: I can't think of anything more pleasant to listen to.
  • Distribution source. (Score:3, Informative)

    by fingal ( 49160 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @05:39AM (#3608120) Homepage
    Hum, well the whole lowercase or glitch or click or whatever you want to call it seems to be getting a bit of a slagging in the comments above. Fair enough 'cos it is definately towards one of the extremes of musical genres and therefore will statistically attract less folk who actually like it.

    However, if you decide that you do actually like what is going on with this and want to track down recordings of this nature then I would recommend that you go and check out smallfish records [smallfish.co.uk] (or even better drop in if you around the Shoreditch area [smallfish.co.uk] of London). They've got about 18,000 records on-line at the moment with short reviews and (albeit very low quality) sound samples of them all and they specialise in the more obscure electronica. Also there is a mailing list [smallfish.net] available that automatically drops off details of the new releases on a weekly basis (~150/week).

  • AND I SUPPOSE THESE ARE FORTISSIMO LETTERS?

    Head up arse syndrome strikes again...
    But then, this was found on Wired.


  • Kids these days...yeesh. We used to call this sort of stuff the "voice of God"...And used it as a crude diagnostic tool to determine if hardware was alive or not. You can get the same effect by holding an AM radio near a computer, and tuning the radio to a clear portion of the dial.

    Infact, I diagnosed a bad power supply in an SGI Indigo 2 a few years back using this method.

    What I would really like to see is a formal explanation of the faint warblegoogly noise produced by idle analog synthesizers with ring modulation.

    Cheers,
  • One one hand, it makes for great copy protection [bbspot.com].

    On the other, they'd compress wickedly well for distribution... :)
    • I know you're joking, but ....

      These tracks, like all 'noisy' tracks, compress like shit, actually. MP3 encoders completely destroys them, as (I'm guessing) they figure it's unwanted noise or something. Even at 256k, some 'glitch', 'micromusic', 'lowercase' or whatever the hell it's called today, gets mangled beyond repair.

      Which is just one reason why experimental musicians don't need to worry about losing sales to file sharing.
      • Heh, think of MP3 defects as an unintended remix. It's mostly noise anyway, so what's the problem with changing it around. There have been artists who distributed their (vinyl) records without sleeves, in the hopes that the inevitable scratches and so forth would add a little "character".

        I believe some of these glitchy folks have already played with encoding something over and over again until it becomes unrecognizable. MP3 decay does have a unique and recognizable effect on sounds (kinda like how JPG artifacts are recognizable).

        Of course the artists could just distribute PROGRAMS instead of audio files. I've seen a lot of that lately. For instance this CD by Kim Cascone [cycling74.com] that comes with some of the software used to generate the CD. I played with that shit for hours!

  • My Compaq Evo Laptop makes chittering noises with network traffic and clicks on HD access in addition to the usual background of interference hiss.

    My favourite track is sharing files from the HD on a peer-to-peer service while a VNC terminal makes rythmic use of the spare network bandwith.

    But I guess it's too loud and intruding to be real low-key, so I've only got the slow oscillation in the flow of water through my apartements radiators - which only makes me sleepy at best.
  • by The Wooden Badger ( 540258 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @08:17AM (#3608651) Homepage Journal
    Do I turn it down?
  • And to think I was on the edge of a musical revolution back in 99. I think I invented this music. http://www.sexcowairlines.com/sept2999-cd.php3 [sexcowairlines.com]
  • by ellem ( 147712 ) <ellem52@@@gmail...com> on Thursday May 30, 2002 @08:45AM (#3608838) Homepage Journal
    Aged Hippie #1: Dude is this lowercase music? Well Crank It UP!

    Aged Hippie #2: Yeah man.

    Aged Hippie #1: No dude really, Ministry '94 really fucked up my hearing, you have to cank it up.

    Aged Hippie #2: (whispers)It is up.

    Ronco Announcer: This is lowercase music! Hear tea kettles as they cool off. Listen to the air inside a snare drum when no one is playing it or how about this classic; Mixer Feeding Back With No Inputs. Yeah, lowercase music rocks... (emphasized whisper)gently like a leaf on still water!
  • This is not music.

    Anyone who has bought this crap...you've been duped.

    I mean think about it this is no more music then me listening intently to my CPU fan. If I wanted to relax to the "sweet sounds" of a teakettle, I'd make some damn TEA! I can't believe people have actually spent money on buying these albums!!

    And as far as it being "art", I can tell you right now that this is simply going to be another thing for the "art people" to be pretentious about. So you can call it "art" and tell me that obviously I don't understand because I can't comprehend it's true beauty. But obviously you people are only intent on listening to the sound of your own heads up your arses.
  • ...really frustrating. I mean, what's with all the people getting on each other's cases about "this isn't ambient, how could you confuse it with glitch..." etc. Why are we incapable of listening to music as it is rather than dividing it all into little categories?

    Okay, before you give me a response, I've heard these things before:

    Point- It helps us understand what other music we'd be interested in and find it.
    Rebuttal- Why don't we compare musicians to other musicians? That's more accurate and would probably get us closer to something we'd like. Frankly, there are more similarities between say, some Aphex Twin and Stockhausen than Aphex Twin and Moby, but they are lumped together and you are less likely to find out about Stockhausen than Moby because of that. That's a shame, because Moby sucks balls ;). You are going to enjoy music more if you throw those categories out the window and just listen.

    Point- By putting things in genres, you can understand the lineage of music.
    Rebuttal- This is true only to a point. Unfortunately I think it's been a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because we've had these categories people have started classifying themselves and putting themselves willingly into little boxes. Remember though that the great musicians didn't give a shit about these categories...Coltrane, Coleman, Mingus, etc. weren't out to create 'Free Jazz,' they were just bringing in aspects of their culture and other cultures together. That's a much more broad-minded grasp of music. The really funny thing to me that people do today is take little bits and pieces of different genres very consciously and try to call it something new, they categorize it before it's even out there. "Yeah, it's my new Funk/Jungle/Experimental Digital Hardcore/Polka band!" Why not just play some fucking music??

    Anyways, this is a brief digression for a nerd site like this, but thought it'd be interesting to get some REAL discussion going about musical styles.

    BTW, I have to ditto the poster above who said that the article was little more than an ad for Macs. I guess more generally it was an illustration that Wired probably shouldn't be doing pieces on music. Or they should realize that the technology is just a tool, no matter how much it has empowered people to create new music. For real music coverage, instead check out The Wire [thewire.co.uk].

  • I think it's very interesting to note how the slashdot crowd doesn't have nearly as much trouble accepting this as music or art as they do accepting artists like eminem. The discussion about the early releases of his new album quickly degenerated into a discussion, or really a rant about the evils of eminem, and how what he doesn't music or art. But here's something that has no tune, is barely audible, and rather than blasting it for trying to corrupt/ruin/depress the children with it's emptyness and blank space or some other made up psychology, the slashdot crowd embraces as being a "nice break" from regular techno, and having lots of aura and a positive ambient quality. That to me is somewhat of a double standard...
  • If you really want to talk about electronic music made with itty-bitty quiet sounds, then you should check out this web site designed by a friend of mine:

    http://zor.org/synthesis [zor.org]

    or

    http://www.granularsynthesis.live.com.au [live.com.au]

    He creates music made out of itty bitty bits of music - 20ms samples (grains of sound), and just creates textures and sonic landscapes using these bits. It's all based on an old synthesis method called granular synthesis.

    It is mostly computer generated, although some composers have been known to use this method on analogue audio tapes with a razor blade and sticky tape!


  • I wish I'd seen this topic earlier...

    The other name for the genre is MICROSOUND, I would know, I'm on a mailing list by that name, that Richard Chartier, Taylor Deupree, Kim Cascone, and other "big name" microsounders are on. The name of the list, by the way, is Microsound.

    Microsound is often a stark beautiful experience, akin to minimalist painting. I am very fond of Tetsu Innoue's "cuts and clicks" album, for it's ever shifting sound, and Bernhard Gunter's "Monochrome White / Polychrome w/ Neon Nails" double cd, which is a dense texture of sounds that are just outside the range of human hearing. The first disc is higher in pitch than the second disc, but it is the second disc that sounds higher, simply because you can hear it. Very moving, at least to me, despite all lack of melody.

    Another great record, one that took me about 2 years to appreciate is Otomo Yoshihide & Sackhio M's "Filament". Yeah, this involves one of those "no input mixer" people. It really sounds liek the private conversation of two computers, not meant for human ears. At the time I got it as a birthday present from a friend of mine (who shares my interest in fringe experimental music) I was listening to a lot of Merzbow, who is the "god of Japanese noise music", which is a great deal denser and louder than any of this stuff, and I didn't know what to make of it.

    A few years later, it clicked and now I love it, and even create some myself!
  • What's next? Laptoppers are really into glitches? Will the life and times of Jan Jelinek and kid606 make the front page of Wired? Because I sure hope so!
    If this barely-there variation on minimalist techno is all the rage, it's high time that I auctioned off my microstoria CD. The bugger's so goddamned quiet I can't make much out of it even with my headphones on. Infintely more aggravating than even the power electronics that I've got. Speaking of which, Wired should slap together an article on MSBR and Government Alpha.
    At any rate, since Mouse on Mars' brilliant _Iaora Tahiti_, glitch and its variants (looking at you, Vladislav Delay) has been downhill with few exceptions.
  • Hmm, another /. article about music I've been listening to for years. I hope some of you folks check this stuff and other electronic music out, there's so much cool non-RIAA stuff out there, and so much stuff that will challange pre-conceived notions, etc., etc.

    Though I always called this type of music "MINIMAL" (written in all uppercase for irony ;-) and it's been around longer than "Macs" (true, most electronic musicians use Macs but that's not important).

    Part of the appeal of this minimal electronic music for me is that it takes machine/electronic sounds and "places them with intent". Usually we are surrounded by noise that we have no control over, but what if you could control it. For example your P4 on your desk is making a bunch of noise, mostly fan noise. What if you could take that noise and chop it up and play with rhythms and so forth? Maybe make a short beep into a beat, make the hard drive access noise into another beat, etc.

    My favorite stuff is from Taylor Deupree's 12k label [12k.com] and mille plateaux [mille-plateaux.com].. I like to play it on the computer while working, just barely mixing with the sounds of the fans and the keyboard, and adding in a little rhythm or unpredictability to take away the monotony of the usual machine sounds. Was that little beep from the OS or the CD? Has my fan speed suddenly changed? Etc.

    My CD recommendation at the moment would be Frank Bretschneider & Taylor Deupree: Balance on Mille Pleateaux. It really isn't a pure minimal CD, it has a techno beat, but the sound is very clicky and micro, with static and beeps, etc. It's an awesome CD, very listenable, and comes with a video for one of the pieces consisting of pulsating white square on a blue background that visually represents the music.

  • by greygent ( 523713 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @11:53AM (#3610185) Homepage
    This has been around for decades. At various points its been labeled in the realms of ambient, glitch, discrete and others.

    I've done tons of experimenting in this area for probably 15 years, so have a lot of other people.

    If you want to join in this "new" fad, buy one of those nice PZM ambient sound microphones from Radio Shack. They're the small mics on the square metal plates, and they work well for picking up discrete sounds ("discrete" was always the term I used for this type of work).

    Gold mines of sounds I've found:
    - Water running in my metal sink
    - Hum of refrigerators and other appliances
    - Chopping up a fresh potato (especially the audio whilst knife is still slicing through potato)
    - Sound in underground tunnels under busy city streets
    - The sound in my front bathroom at work (great creepy ambient stuff there)
    - The sound of the air flow in the attic of a building near here
    - Socked feet walking on carpet
    - Sound inside a Pepsi can while blasting "Master of Puppets". (Resulting recordings don't sound even a hint like Metallica. Serious resonating going on here, the whole album is great for resonating soda cans, and other pieces of thin metal.)

    Nothing new, move along. Eno is god.

There is no opinion so absurd that some philosopher will not express it. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero, "Ad familiares"

Working...