What do you think of Holy Fuck?

They’ve been getting a certain amount of press lately, partially because everybody likes an excuse to put “holy fuck” in their magazine/paper/blog, and partially because foodie Rachel Ray got them to play at her SXSW party.

They’re getting characterized as an electronica band, but they seem more like a jam band with a couple of synth players.

What makes them interesting to me is the way they are incorporate live noise jamming into a context that makes the music fairly accessible. Not really my thing – but it seems they could open up electronics to a new audience.

A tiny Digital Signal Processing (DSP) chip analyzes a built-in microphone’s sound and superimposes a layer of harmony and rhythm on top of the listener’s world. In the new context, some surprising behaviors take place. Listeners tend to play with objects around them, sing to themselves, and wander toward tempting sound sources

“With Ambient Addition, I’m hoping to make people think twice about the sounds they initiate as well as loosen up some inhibitions,” explains Vawter.

Everest is establishing a reputation for fearless releases, and this is no exception. Expedition_2 ranges from IDM to bizarre experimental electronica.

If you’re into edgier, more experimental sounds, this compilation is a great introduction to a variety of artists that you’re not going to hear on the radio. On the other hand, if you’re into new age, this CD will be like a trip to the dentist to get your teeth drilled.

Expedition_2 is fill of interesting work and is guaranteed to clean out your ears properly. You can check out samples at the Everest site.

Tracks:

• alpha 5-04 | 4:52 | alphatronic
• la fin des usines | 4:57 | d’incise
• i should have fucked you | 4:52 | [sic]
• saint automatic | 3:24 | meienberg
• tölt | 5:17 | softland
• r”mm”ave | 4:15 | falls of mute
• d flat 9 | 3:51 | hopen
• 12_jo71 | 3:18 | jotta
• parallel universe | 4:34 | paral-lel
• qaqortoq akazehe | 3:35 | op rechts / matu
• qatw (vltkmx) | 5:37 | eakui
• senrei | 6:22 | tsuki
• schnitt (+.++) | 5:15 | steinbrüchel
• how to destroy a piano | 4:24 | uniform
• crosswinds | 3:01 | misel quitno

General Fuzz

According to Kirsch, “It is electronic music with the emphasis on music. Its not so much dance music as music to zone out to.” GF’s tracks have down-tempo grooves and often have a jazz influence.

Check out unconscious alliance (MP3).

They have a variety of  experimental music videos available for download, along with a collection of free electronica MP3s.

Check out Playing By The Freeway, by Ryan Rapsys.

Sigma

Sigma’s music has strong ambient flavor, with an element of experimental electronic music. Live-shows are balanced between improvisational and composed parts creating long ambient soundscapes.

Human Trinity is a 100% improvisational piece recorded live in Kanneltalo in 2004.

The first EP from Irlos is described as “a journey of subtle and experimental textures, combined with complex beats and atmospheric touches. A great collection of tracks to simply sit back and relax to. Deeply creative, thoughtfully produced and a must for any down tempo or ambient fans.”

The tracks combine ambient bell-like tones and processed sounds with sections featuring driving percussion.

Tracks

• Linere
• Filoma
• Slow Burner
• Unity

The tracks are downloadable as a zip file of 128 kbps MP3s from the Artificial Bliss download page.

The track is the first part in a series of acoustic experiments in recording overtone music. All ‘natural oscillators’ played by Laugan Evil. More information is available at Auxar.com.

A podcast is also available of music on the Auxar label. Add this URL to iTunes or your podcast feed reader:
http://auxar.com/home/podcast.php

If you need more information on podcasting, check out Podcasting News.

“Every sound you hear that is not a vocal, was once live sex,” explains Vale. “We did not use a ‘traditional’ instrument on any piece.”

Vale and Ivan Evangelista collaborated with fellow musician Jean-Luc Cohen to electronically transform the sounds into a usable sonic palette. Vale notes, “The reaction to the music is affected by one’s voyeuristic tendencies, and a subconscious recognition of the carnal. It’s as if the listener is laying next to me.”

In this interview with Synthtopia, Vale talks about why she wanted to make an album from sex sounds, using vibrators to get bass lines, and her unusual recording sessions.

Background

Synthtopia: Tell us about your background. What led you to make this CD?

Jessica Vale: I’ve done a lot of work in multimedia, working with video in particular. There were a lot of concepts and ideas that I’ve been working on over the last couple of years. I’d actually been putting them into a screenplay I’ve been working on.

Ultimately, it wasn’t really working out. It didn’t feel like the right medium to get across what I was trying to say. Making an album seemed like the best way to do it, because of the sexual themes that I had in my head that I wanted to get out, and that I wanted to write on worked really well…That’s what started the ball rolling.

Then I found Ivan & Jean-Luc & talked about it.

Synthtopia: How did you come up with the idea for The Sex Album?

Jessica Vale: Originally, it began like any other music out there…the different tracks started as writing lyrics & what not, deciding what sort of songs I wanted to write. It seemed that they were mostly sexual themes. It seemed kind of obvious to try and go ahead and record live sex, and see if we could make that the source material.

We use it more as puncuation, to bring out what the actual content is. We weren’t really sure how it was going to work, right off the bat. It’s not like we set out to make an album out of sex sounds. It was more like, “Here’s the ideas that Jessica has, here’s what I’ve written, and what’s the best way for us to do this?”

We decided that, rather than trying to get a band together, why not actually compose it out of sex?

It’s one thing to write music with a guitar and know exactly how to make it happen, and another to want a certain bass line and have to figure out how you are going to get that out of breathing, smacks and various other things that are the result of sex.

Synthtopia: The CD comes out Feb 14th?

Jessica Vale: We’ve got a preliminary release online. It is a limited edition. We are currently weighing our options and negotiating for a larger distribution in coming months.

Synthtopia: What sort of reaction have you been getting from people?

Jessica Vale: A really good one. A lot of people are telling me that it seems very genuinely erotic, as apposed to cheesy, which is great…

Synthtopia: That’s always a risk when you are doing something specifically sexual – the worst thing you can do is try to be sexy and then have it be lame….

Jessica Vale: That was something that we really paid very close attention to. One fear I had, right off the bat, is that as soon as you bring not just sex into something, but sexual sounds, you run the risk of being very superficial, very cheesy, and even pornographic. I didn’t want that to be the case. So we really spent a lot of time, very meticulously, deciding how much to process the sounds.

It depends on the context. Do we process it so much that you can’t really tell what it is, or do we leave a little hint of what the sound is? In some cases, it’s pretty obvious…but it really is very difficult to make something sound sexual and not make it sound cheesy..

Synthtopia: Were there ideas that you had, or sounds that you put together, that you listened to and decided “Scratch that off the list!”?

Jessica Vale: Yeah…there were times when were were aiming for a certain sound. “What if we use a moan to create that?” and we put it in and in some cases it would just sound completely wrong. It was a very heavy step-by-step process, with every single sound, trying to make sure that it blended in with what the air of the song was.

Synthtopia: Did you come up with the idea or concept for the song and then go through the process of getting the sounds & working with Ivan and Jean-Luc to create the music, or what was your process?

Jessica Vale: I had a lot of the concepts of the songs fleshed out. I didn’t necessarily have all the lyrics written, but I had some ideas for most of them. We then went ahead and did the recording of the source material, and it was kind of a long, very awkward process, because we used a lot of couples that, in some cases, would be really into the idea, and then chicken out, so we’d be left with nothing. Then we had other couples that were great, and they went through with the entire thing. The agreement was that they would remain anonymous. We had to spread that out over a while. We initially wanted to get it out of the way right off the bat, but when you have people freak out and decide that they can’t go through with it, it kind of changes your plans a little bit!

Once we had adequate source material, we went ahead and started doing the processing and writing, and in a lot of cases we had to go back and get more. It wasn’t very cut and dry.

The Sex Part of the Story

Synthtopia: Tell me about the process of getting the source sounds…that’s got to be one of the most interesting aspects of making the CD. What did you tell people when you decided that you wanted to get their input for source material?

Jessica Vale: None of them were close friends. None of my close friends wanted to get that close. Some of them were acquaintances that I approached and said “Listen, I have this album that I’m working on, and we decided that we wanted the source material to come from recorded sex, and we’re looking for people that might be willing to let us record them.”

I got a few people that were acquaintances that I went to right away. I had a feeling that they might be more OK with it than the average person, just from knowing them, and those people were. So I kind of asked “What is the place and setting that you’d be most comfortable with, so that we could come and do this, that is also conducive to recording?”

I didn’t want to just throw them into a public studio, and ask them to get into some pretty intimate situations!

We had to work around how they were comfortable, which also made the recording kind of difficult at times. We just worked as long as we needed to get what we had to.

Synthtopia: Were there any surprises in the process?

Jessica Vale: It was just a very fun process, I have to say. When it comes down to actually recording people having sex, it’s a very technical process on our end, so we’re trying to make sure they’re doing things that are appropriate for getting microphones in the right places. It’s sort of difficult trying to direct them, but also try to keep them having an air of intimacy. I didn’t want it to just seem very cold and calculating. I wanted it to sound somewhat real and natural and emotional. We tried to get as many people to be involved as we could, for that reason.

Synthtopia: Listening to the CD, the sounds aren’t obviously people having sex…it sounds like electronic music. If the sounds aren’t explicitly people having sex, what is the motivation for the process you went through to create the sounds?

Jessica Vale: It was very important to have the source material start from sex, given the subject matter of the album. We wanted the listener to pay attention and listen more closely than he or she would normally. These tracks work in a club atmosphere, over loud booming speakers…but they are meant for more intimate settings. We want the sexual sounds to resonate subconsciously. We want them to show themselves subtly. In certain tracks you really can’t tell it’s sex at all until listening a few times.

It lends itself to a more emotional and sexual experience, given it’s source. Even if your conscious mind doesn’t know for sure what that sound is, I do think that it affects you on a deeper level. There is part of you that will pick up on that.

The Songs

Synthtopia: Let’s talk more about the music. It’s really varied. There are some tracks that are ambient, some that are almost disco, and some tracks that are closer to performance art. How would you describe the music?

Jessica Vale: I didn’t want to pinpoint sex as being one particular type of experience, and because of that I didn’t wan the music to be just one type of experience. I wanted it to kind of move through different emotions. That’s why it starts off ambient and builds, not so much to represent one isolated sexual experience, but more just the different types of emotions that myself and most people have in relation to sex. The music has its ambient tracks, it’s got a few that are more along the synth-pop new wave side of things, and a few that are even more towards disco that I think would certainly work in clubs.

Synthtopia: Tell me about the track Welcome. It starts out sounding like guided imagery, and then adds sort of fantasy undertones. What was your concept with that?

Jessica Vale: Ivan and I sat down and were talking about wanting to do an introduction, something that would start you off, get you into the music. We decided that we wanted to make it sound clinical, like we were instructing . It ended up not being the first piece.

Synthtopia: I love the way you’ve got Ivan’s voice speaking the text, and it almost imperceptibly fades between his voice and yours.

How about Boy in Black. What were your ideas with it?

Jessica Vale: That track stems from something that I’ve thought about through most of my life, this idea of one projection of a person, that I didn’t necessarily think existed, but I had wanted to. The writing on that is basically stream of consciousness about this idea, because it’s not really a person, it’s just this idealistic perception of something that fulfilled a need that one might have.

Synthtopia: How about Sweet 16. It’s way outside the norm of what you’re going to hear on pop radio…

Jessica Vale: That is the most personal piece on there. It’s sort of read as a diary entry.

Synthtopia: It sounds like an audio diary that you might have done….

Jessica Vale: That one definitely has the more serious weight to it. It’s sort of about the experience of having sex, especially as a very young person, and the strange reaction that young girls have to this. It’s sort of a comment on that.

Synthtopia: One of the things I like about the track is that it’s sort of the complete opposite of what you hear in terms of the way popular music normally tries to deal with sex. It’s usually very one-dimensional. Sweet 16 seems like it talks about desire, but also a lot of complex emotions that come with desire, like responsibility, regret, and all of these things….

Jessica Vale: That’s correct. It fits into the idea of the album. I obviously wanted to portray sex in a beautiful, loving way, because that happens plenty, but sex can also be very dark. Sweet 16 has very dark elements, but also a very raw, very real element to it. Ultimately, that’s what I wanted to go for, something that’s not sugar-coated in any way, shape or form.

Part II: More Sex Talk

The theme this year is Singing Robots. Pavarobotti may hit the high C’s, but hasn’t found a place yet in any of the tenor supergroups yet. GTRBOT666 (shown in photo at right) and his robotic bandmates may know how to rock, but even they still use a human vocalist. Cyndustries hopes to change all that!

Listeners from all across the web will vote for their favorite aleatoric pieces, and the top three winners will receive a half-off discount coupon on any Cynthia brand synthesizer module! In addition, the first place winner will win the highly coveted and prestigious new BUG MUSIC Award Trophy for their mantel or trophy case!

Aleatoric Music: Music in which either composition or method of performance is determined by elements of chance or unpredictability. Terms such as chance music, indeterminate music, or aleatoric music are applied to many works written after World War II, the pioneers being Cage, Lutoslawski, Stockhausen, and Xenakis, each of whom approached the technique in his own way.

Cyndustries’ Cynthia Webster notes “It’s time, once again, to harvest the mystically marvelous power of those synths you’ve got and put them to use making strange and haunting tunes that are wacky, alien, and totally obtuse!” Can’t argue with that, can you?

The 2004 Aleatoric Music Contest entries are available for download as MP3 files.

Contest Rules

• All entries must be no longer than exactly 3 minutes in length.
• Equipment wise, anything goes! Analog or Digital, Softsynth or Hardware!
• Cyndustries has the right to reject any material deemed offensive.
• 3. Only those who own the rights to the music may submit their music and in the interest of a clear playing field for all, we ask that the submitted piece must be originated with this contest in mind, (please do not submit any masterpieces that you have previously labored on for many months or years).

The deadline for entries is February 12th. Voting will commence immediately on the 13th.

Visit the Cyndustries site for more information and to enter the contest.

Eno was born Brian Peter George St. Baptiste de la Salle Eno in England. As a child, he was fascinated with recordings of American pop, because he felt that they seemed mysterious and without a context. He studied art in Ipswich and Winchester, where he learned about avant garde composers such as Cornelius Cardew and, especially, John Cage. Eno participated in performances of avant garde works, and became interested in systems of generating music and art. In 1968, he self-published a book titled Music for Non-Musicians, exploring a theme that has carried through his career.

After he graduated, he joined Roxy Music, as a technician. He contributed signifantly to their early sound, but his flamboyant image (he cross-dressed) and theorizing put him at odds with leader Bryan Ferry.

This was the beginning of Eno’s explosion of creative work in the seventies. In 1973, he collaborated with Robert Fripp on the album No Pussyfooting. The album features Eno’s tape-loop treatment of Fripp’s guitar improvisations. The result holds up very well as a precusor to the ambient music that followed. He also released a string of LP’s that showcased his quirky approach to pop music, including Here Come the Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), Another Green World, and Before and After Science. These albums are exciting and frustrating, innovative and strange, and have been tremendously influential.

His interest in more mellow sounds continued, with more albums with Robert Fripp, and his Discreet Music, which some consider the first ambient music. His ideas about this type of music came together with Ambient 1: Music for Airports.

He founded Obscure Records, and released several albums by experimental musicians. Eno also began handling production for many significant pop musicians. He worked with David Bowie on some of his best albums, Low, Heroes, and Lodger. At the end of the seventies, and in the early eighties, Eno continued to produce, working with Ultravox, Devo, Talking Heads, and U2. His work with David Byrne on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was some of the first pop music to explore found samples and the idea of “world” music.

More recently, Eno has worked extensively in the area of video installation, and has applied the same ideas he explores in his ambient music to video. His more more recent ambient music is extremely minimal, which makes it very functional, but maddening to listeners looking for traditional “musical” signposts.

Eric Tamm has written an excellent book on Eno and his work.

Recordings:

• 1973 No Pussyfooting (with Robert Fripp)
• 1974 Here Come The Warm Jets
• 1974 Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)
• 1975 Evening Star (with Robert Fripp)
• 1975 Another Green World
• 1975 Discreet Music
• 1977 Cluster & Eno (with Cluster
• 1978 Before and After Science
• 1978 Ambient #1 / Music for Airports
• 1978 Music for Films
• 1978 After the Heat (with Roedelius and Dieter Moebius)
• 1980 Ambient #2 / The Plateaux of Mirror (with Harold Budd)
• 1980 Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics (with Jon Hassell)
• 1981 Ambient #3 / Day of Radiance (by Laraaji with Eno producing)
• 1981 My Life In The Bush of Ghosts (with David Byrne)
• 1982 Ambient #4 / On Land
• 1983 Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks
• 1984 Begegnungen
• 1984 The Pearl (with Harold Budd)
• 1985 Thursday Afternoon
• 1985 Hybrid (with Daniel Lanois and Michael Brook)
• 1985 Begegnungen II (with Roedelius and Dieter Moebius)
• 1989 Textures
• 1990 The Shutov Assembly
• 1990 Wrong Way Up (with John Cale)
• 1992 Nerve Net
• 1993 Neroli
• 1995 Spinner (with Jah Wobble)
• 1997 The Drop
• 2001 Drawn From Life (with Peter Schwalm)
• 2003 January 07003 | Bell Studies for The Clock of The Long Now

This self-produced CD displays a stylistic boldness and confidence that is unusual for first releases. SourceCodeX makes no concessions to popular tastes. The music is devoid of melody and rhythm, and many listeners would question whether or not many of the tracks on Codex Hypnos are even music.

For fans of dark ambient music, though, Codex Hypnos is a refreshing breath of dank air. The music is languorous, murky, and hypnotic. Comparisons could be made to some of the music of Giles Reaves, Brian Eno, Steve Roach, Michael Stearns, Robert Rich or even the soundtrack to Eraserhead, but SourceCodeX creates its own style.

SourceCodeX is a recording pseudonym of John W. Patterson. Patterson has been a guitarist since 1967, but only recently began to create music purely electronically. According to Patterson, he began working with various software-based synths and sound editing programs in 2002. “CodeX Hypnos is the results of decades of listening and a few months of learning the right software. No external hardware was used! This music’s origin is 99% from the silicon cities of a very basic, outdated, personal computer.”

Their are eight tracks on the CD. The tracks range in length from about four minutes to over sixteen, making a total running time of over seventy-five minutes. Patterson uses this time to let each track unfold slowly. While each tracks uses different ideas and sounds, the pieces flow together effectively and create a sense of traveling through various ambient spaces.

The CD starts off with “Sleep Til…”, which introduces the musical territory that Patterson wants to explore. The track is similar in style to some of the work of Steve Roach, made up of continuously evolving drones. Roach calls his works soundscapes, and that seems like an appropriate categorization for this cut.

The next cut “HALsleep” uses multiple drones that vary in pitch. The effect is somewhere between muted sirens and the sound of a windstorm. The sounds have a metallic edge that lends an eerie feel to the music.

“DreamingHyperSleepDawn” is reminiscent of some of the early work of Giles Reaves. It combines dense synth pad sounds with noise effects. The effect is lush and beautiful, giving the track a soundtrack quality. This is one of the strongest cuts on the CD.

According to Patterson’s site, the next track, “Dark Star Voids”, reflects the immensity of the Cosmos. The track definitely has an ambient space feel to it, similar to some of Steve Roach’s work, and Michael Stearns’ early modular synth pieces. Throughout “Dark Star Voids”, noise sounds fade into complex pad sounds, and then fade into chaos. It’s evocative music, and effectively captures the mysterious spaces of the title.

“Arrival and Fly-by” draws on some of the same techniques that Patterson uses on the earlier cuts, including the chaotic drones and pad sounds that vary in pitch. Some of the sounds seem like they could come from huge machines. The way that Patterson varies some of the pitches result in a Doppler-like effect, like something massive is moving by. 

“ForbiddenAmbientPlanet” is pure dark ambient music. The track seems to descend from the style of music that Brian Eno created on Ambient 4: On Land. Halfway through the track, the sound of a clock ticking is heard for a few moments, but the rest of the cut is made up of unidentifiable sounds. “ForbiddenAmbientPlanet” sounds like it could be an environmental recording from a science-fiction world. This is ambient music at its darkest.

“Nazgul Caves” is probably the most haunting track on the CD. Patterson says that it was created after seeing the final movie in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. He says that “This is a very dark piece and almost was too creepy to be kept in this release.” It does have a very scary feel to it – the track includes sounds that seem like otherworldly animals.

The Final track, “InnerWorldStopTime”, recapitulates many of the ideas of the album. It also includes samples drawn from some of Patterson’s favorite movies. Patterson has great taste in movies, but the samples seem to put too concrete connotations on the track, where all the other tracks have a more abstract feel.

Codex Hypnos is a very interesting release. It’s beautiful in spots, haunting in others, and occasionally disturbing. Patterson’s work as SourceCodeX won’t be for everybody, but will be a treat for fans of the dark side of ambient music.

Information and free MP3 samples for Codex Hypnos are available at Soundclick.

The website provides web radio streams of minimilism, ambient, electroacoustic and other modern music. The site provides hours of listening. In addition to the streaming radio, you can listen to all 13 programs in their entirety. Many classic works of modern music are available in their entirety as Real Audio streams.

The most important section, though, has to be the large collection of interviews with giants of the modern music world. These are source interviews for the series, so you can listen to extended discussions of these composers and performers talking about their music. The interviews include Milton Babbit, Harold Budd, Wendy Carlos, Aaron Copland, David del Tredici, Lou Harrison, Joan LaBarbera, Steve Reich, Peter Schickele, Morton Subotnick, La Monte Young.

Epitonic features independent and underground musicians from around the world. They try to find quality MP3’s, so you don’t find yourself wading through a bunch of junk to find a few good tracks.

While you can download tracks from Epitonic, its focus is on helping you find interesting new music. They’ve got a good range of new electronica that you can stream, and lots of MP3 samples. Epitonic provides streams for house, techno, breakbeat, ambient, trance and other types of electronica. Their goal is to introduce you to new music and encourage you to get the music at one of their affiliated retailers.

Free downloads are provided for classical “experimental” composers, like Henry Cowell, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Lou Harrison, and Charles Dodge. Popular electronica is well represented, too, including Air, Bjork, The Black Dog, BT, John Digweed, Gorillaz, Ladytron, Timo Maas, Paul Oakenfold, and Orbital.

Epitonic makes it easy to sample a wide range of interesting music. Best of all, you can download free MP3’s, and know its legal and its helping independent musicians connect with new audiences.