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farmersmanual bookend (albet lopsidedly) this comp; quiet, ruffly and short "shgreeshykt (live.wcrpt) part 2" (1:01) leads with its ephemeral audiovaguaries. Austrian soundsynthesist Albert De Campo does his thing by transmogrifying certain culturally significant soundforms (bells, chants and nightingales, for instance) into recognizable-yet-unreal deformations of themselves; my favorite part of "Imaon" is the gut-churning drop into a droning abyss. Wouldn't
"non-specific acoustic stimulation" just be a fancy way of saying "random noise"? Apparently so, as Phoenecia illustrate their knack of producing strange,wickedly shifting soundscapes with an arsenal of software on their Macs.
MetaSynth-creator Eric Wenger joins with Atau Tanaka in feeding a series of Japanese "Bondage" photographs into his image-synthesizing program; shimmering highs and twisting lows emerge in an often-haunting panoramic sound display. Chaotic molecules erupt in the contorted spasms of Jim O'Rourke's crisp, clean and utterly fragmented "like urine loves cold slate" (and trivia buffs take note, this would mark the first time the word "urine" has been used in this e-zine... well, twice, now counting that one.)
Tom Wallace (who gets scant notice in the disjointed liner notes, though delivers the longest track) emits a stream of unexpected occurences, from a million glassy shards to stark thumps to rock'n'roll bits to screeching steel to crazily exploding blurts of what-the-hell-was-that!? The several quiet sections of "givingup goingon" (13:24) only serve as paranoic anticipatory zones as one awaits the next assault.
Curtis Roads is not someone who takes microsound lightly; he's written a book on the subject and teaches it at the University of California. His minutely sputtering "Half-life" is a fairly gentle excursion into the effervescent spirals of miniature galaxies. With 12.5-minute long "shgreeshykt (live.wcrpt) part 1", farmersmanual reappear in a more-aggressive mode. Tickle your woofers with their throbbing bass ripples and glistening to-the-stars soundbeams which shapechange into other realms including found-sound episodes and bleep-otronic encounters.
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