Month: December 2020

On the tube home from today’s class my thoughts became cluttered with questions about the attraction to and point of Power Electronics. This was a genre I had always found my heart and ears drawn to. I want to examine how and why I find this genre so important and inspiring to me. I want to analyse one of my favourite tracks in the genre, explaining how and why it is important.

The track I want to talk about is Pharmakon’s “Vacuum”, a noisy, anxiety inducing CBT therapy like session. The 1:31 long track begins with a quick, deep, clear sequence of breaths, then joined by a spiky pure minimal synth tone, the tone slowly rising in both pitch and volume – then a quick sequence of breaths over the original speedy pounding in and exhales – at this point my chest is feeling tight, I find myself unconsciously following the quick sequences and in turn, inducing finger numbing hyper ventilation. Another sequence of poly-rhythmic heavy breathing is then blended in, the track continuing to an anxious crescendo. Everything is nauseously swelling. Suddenly the tone pitch drops down and the breathing is slower, reduced to deeper, exhausted inhales –  you feel like you are catching your breath again with Margaret Chardiet. Breathing with the track does induce an anxiety attack – this was one of the most intense times I ever experienced music’s physical meta-ness – I was fascinated by this – how someone could use music to physically hurt someone?

To this day I find the experience tightening my chest and slicking my palms with a layer of sweat. Being in this, is totally connective to me, totally important and inspiring. I use techniques similar to this in my own work, experimenting with ghost tones and binaural technique to induce nausea or anxiety. Why would I do this though? Being able to control people’s physicality with sound interests me and allows me to be in a position to more impactfully convey a message. DJ’s like the acclaimed Paula Temple use techniques like these all throughout their live sets, sneakily playing a theta frequency under her main beats to help encourage a feeling of euphoria in the crowd.

I’ve always been inhumanly attracted to any kind of intense artistic experience, whether it be Basinski or Wormrot – to me, intensity unlocks connectivity.

During my listening through of the Sonic Doing and Thinking playlist I stumbled upon “Pain of Glass! Justice Yeldham at Club 85” and was immediately smitten. I was fascinated by the tumbling wales and howling of a person quivering a piece of glass with their mouth – biting and slicing their cheeks in the process. My interest was peaked when they proceeded to smash the piece of glass over their head. I love the guttural energy, the huge fuzzy tones and vocoded vibrations – but immediately I thought “How could someone capture this energy into a record?” surly this is a sonic spectacle, the records must be underwhelming.

While researching Justice’s work I suddenly remembered hearing rumblings of their music before – akin to “A guy who plays a piece of glass is going to be on a Death Grips record” I remember hearing that his recorded work was good, I was excited to check it out – but the question remained – can a piece that’s mostly spectacle still translate well onto recorded music, when the visual substance isn’t there to contribute?

In Justice’s case – kind of. Justice’s most acclaimed record “Cicatrix” feels like 60% fun, noisy, spikey textures and the remainder is filled with boring and usual noise. I don’t think this makes Justice’s work any less impactful – they are still a fantastic sound artist with great visceral ideas and sounds. I feel like Justice offers work that’s uncontrived, fun to watch and sometimes fun to listen to – overall I’ve found that in their performance, the spectacle tends to pick up the slack when the audio is lacklustre – it would be unfair to judge their work on audio alone. I learned a lot from Justice’s art, especially about how to incorporate spectacle into my own performance and using different found or reclaimed objects to record with. I’m certainly looking forward to more work from them.