Having attended the University of York to study English in the early 90s, I’m actually surprised by how many times I see it mentioned in the press releases of the more experimental releases that land in my review pile: it was always a fairly traditional institution by and large, with a leaning toward the sciences. I genuinely had no knowledge of their Music Research Centre or the kind of experimental audio research that went on there.
‘MP3 Deviations # 6 + 7’ is the product of a collaboration between Yasunao Tone – renowned for his involvement of the Fluxus movement in the 60s – and members of their New Aesthetics in Computer Music team, and quite curious it is too. While most experimental music is reaching back to the days of analogue, NCAM is strictly digital, and devotes its time to pushing the parameters of digital frequencies and the like. When you know that Mark Fell – who is credited on this album for his input in some capacity – is a research associate there, it all begins to fit into place.
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‘MP3 Deviations’ explores the multiple and unpredictable aspects of a corrupted MP3 file, and throws in some specially-constructed software, plus a spot of channel switching, inverse phasing and differing playback speeds to create myriad effects, spanning stutters, glitches, bleeps, squiggles, something that approximates heavy rain, and various shades of distortion of the kind you might expect on a Merzbow album. Using the same raw material, the two tracks, recorded live a month apart, are completely different yet create the same effect, thus demonstrating the instability, the volatility and the variability of the corrupted sound file when spun through the software Tone and his assistants developed.
The result is predictably brain-melting, but then, I’d have been disappointed by anything less.
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