THE PRESS RELEASE
eM is one of the artists included in Fällt's invalidObject series of limited 3" CDRs/MP3s. Each of the invalidObject releases will be a collection of 15 one minute tracks. eM's contribution is titled Import and should be available for download in the autumn of 2000.
From the Fällt website... "invalidObject is a sublabel of Fällt established to release a finite and self-contained series of .mp3/3" CDR releases. Each 3" CDR will be housed in a full-size clear jewel-case with two-colour (black + metallic) packaging and limited to 100 copies only. There will be 24 releases in the invalidObject series limited to the original 24 JavaScript reserved words (break; case; comment; continue; default; delete; do; else; export; for; function; if; import; in; label; new; return; switch; this; typeof; var; void; while; with). Each release will follow the same structure; 15 tracks x 60 seconds each (to enable fast, painless downloads, and to fit comfortably onto the 3" CDRs), and so the full release will comprise 360 tracks (24 artists x 15 tracks each)."
"Import was produced during an intense period," writes Michael Bentley (who records under the pseudonym eM), "full of tremendous creative energy, but also personal loss. Within a week of beginning compositional work my grandmother died, my last close relative on my mother's side of the family (my mother died three years ago). This event certainly influenced what Import became, and so this piece is dedicated to my grandmother and all she made possible for me.
"Sometimes I think of Import as a symphony in 15 movements, centered around repeating thematic material, but there are many ideas I tried to investigate here. One concept is that these tracks could be used as building blocks to create a variety of new pieces, assembled and reassembled in different sequences. I was also experimenting with new (to me) methods of producing audio, including a variety of software applications, field recordings and even some traditional synthesis. There is a lot of content (to use that dreaded web-inspired buzz word) kicking around the 15 tracks of Import, and my hope is that these tracks suggest to the listener a myriad of journeys across many seas."
For further news and details on the invalidObject series, please visit the Fällt website.
REVIEWS
eM, _Import_ (Fällt)
The tiniest little jewel box you're ever going to see. eM is The Foundry label's mainstay, a seeker of digital truth who from his West Coast eyrie tirelessly scans the horizons of software soundscaping. _Import_, released as part of the "invalidObject" project of the Irish label Fällt ("a self-contained series of mp3/3 inch CDr releases" limited to one hundred copies each), takes up but a mere fifteen minutes of one's time across as many tracks, but essentially it is a collage over the essence of loss. Unhurried yet restless, with churning ocean waves giving way to sinewaves, shocks of noise being torn away, revealing the smooth surface of ambient drift. A CD jam-packed with meaning rather than just programming prowess - how often can you say that about strictly computer-generated music? Please visit Fällt for news and details. You can download _Import_ from there. (Stephen Fruitman)
eM: Import (Fällt - 2000)
Don't be deceived by the mere 15-minute length of eM's newest recording... with a small-yet-full cargo of computer generated sounds, import delivers condensed ambient/electronic essences in the form of 15 one-minute tracks. The sounds are part of an ongoing series of such recordings available in limited 100-copy minidiscs and download from Fällt...
Watery splooshing and mechanical thrum mark the port of origin which leads into the fuzzy, rhythmically rippling echoes of 1st movement which segues (bringing that piece's faraway clatter with it) into the ghostly streamers of 2nd movement. Following "movements" more-or-less seamlessly merge into each other and include brief visitations with various electronic entities... stop-and-start blares, murkily submerged distortions, flurrious e-squigglies, binaurally buzzing pulsations, wavering oscillations, faint droning expanses, delicate trickling electrons and much more...
The 9th movement reveals a fragile shimmering of musicality, fragmented loveliness which creates a craving for more. Microscopic rhythms and small-but-powerful energies course through 10th movement. port of call brings us back to oceanic waves and distant foghorn and bell sounds. epilogue closes on a mechanically ruffling pattern and a few faded, but loving grandmotherly words... echoing the artists personal loss during the making of these recordings.
Import (and 23 other contributions in the series) are soon to be downloadble from the Fällt website...
Brief though they may be, eM's contemplative abstractions are bathed in an inviting, dream-like warmth, even in their more-mystifying moments. Intriguing bite-sized tastes of what could easily have been lengthier pieces make for tantalizing samples which carry a surprisingly "full" flavor. My only complaint would be the hunger for further development of some of these 8.4 importations from Michael Bentley's world.
eM's home on the Web is of course at The Foundry. (review posted September 30, 2000 on AmbiEntrance by David J Opdyke)
The Wire - September 2001
Matt Ffytche
Charting the 360 degrees of cuts, clicks and glitches contained in Fällt's series of two dozen 3" Discs.
If Harry Smith's 'Anthology of American Folk Music' attempted to preserve something of the land and the folk that was historically lost, the 'invalidObject Series', 360 tracks on 24 3" CDs by "some of the most respected artists operating within the field of '.microsound'", is a strange reversal of that concept - an attempt to make the present disappear into its own electronic micro traces, to hold a seance with the non-existant. Here one finds instant rituals derived from the most contingent or unlocatable events: from Steve Roden rubbing a contact mic on his foot for one minute to *0's bursts of barely audible extreme high and low frequency soundwaves. From 'folk' to 'invalidObject': an encyclopedia of non-events won out of thin air and electricity.
The more one probes this project, the more unusual and admirable it is. First off, there's the penchant of Fällt's owners, Christopher Murphy and W. Conrad Röntgen, for giving obscure and often disconnected data a ritual form. 24 artists were approached to produce a 15 minute 3" CD, and each was to take as their title one term from the "original 24 JavaScript reserved words" such as 'default', 'do', 'void' and so on. Each 15 minutes was to be further subdivided into one minute segments, giving artists the options of producing 15 one minute tracks, which is generaly the case, or notionally dividing a single work into 15 segments. Such shared conditions create a strange and tantalising counterpoint to the sheer variety and contingency of the content.
More unusual was Fällt's decision to pre-release the whole set for free as downloadable .mp3s in October and November of last year. So the CD release is already a form of commemoration: a limited edition of 100 boxed sets, presented in a simple cardboard box, with a further 150 copies pressed of each CD for individual distribution; but the body of the project has already been exposed and digested on the Net. The free dissemination of the material was so important a component of the project that Murphy is again preparing to make the whole set available for download this month.
360 tracks, then, but just six hours listening. And yet this compact gazetteer of an international experimental and micrological network crams its fair share of eventfulness into a small space. The artists include Sydney based Pimmon, Kim Cascone, who formed the US label Silent, Scanner, eM (Michael Bentley of The Foundry), *0 (Nosei Sakata who runs the Mu label), Pita (co-head of Mego), Taylor Deupree (head of the minimalist 12k label in New York), Richard Chartier, Rsundin (a previous Merzbow associate), Manchester's V/Vm, Chicago/Vienna-based Warmdesk, Akira Rabelais (developer of the sound tool Argeïphontes Lyre), Dutch trio Goem, Ekkehard Ehlers (of the Frankfurt duo Autopoieses), Melbourne composer Cray (Ross Healey) and New York based sound designer Eloy Anzola. No Ryoji Ikeda, no Ø, but a stimulating mix of the well-established and the newly discovered.
Pita kicks off the series and is still one of the most aurally intelligent performers in the field of fragmentary, quickfire Powerbook improvisation; glockenspiel sounds give way to a whirring, flickering loop; a rasping screech is forced into a demonic whistling ditty, followed by the thinnest electronic purr, an abrasive, growling and and stretching of filtered low end noises, cyber-rattlesnakes and a record needle catching on dust. In similar found sound vein, Electric Company - "I am a berserk troglodyte with a PowerBook" - produces a cut-up of parps, squawks, xylophonic ripples and toots, tumbling across each other like a slowly cranked musical box. Warmdesk serves up a conveyor belt of abrupt, jangling, purring, croaking zigzags of sound: an audible Jackson Pollock. Cray's equally dissonant interplayuses close tones and half-tones in murky,impromptu rhythmic and percussive gestures evolving into cicadas and louring thunder. From the more minimalist side come Taylor Deupree's miniature fax scrawl, tiny bleeps, flickering pulses and single piercing sine tones, liminally poised between malfunction and rhythm. Besides *0's barely audible hums indicating powerful supersensible undulations, Rsundin develops his ultra-minimalist take on the unheard: events happening below the listening threshold, with only a rustle occasionally breaking the surface of perception; Richard Chartier explores slight fizzes and burrs, again, at the edge of listening, and Andreas Berthling's tracks have a delicate spikiness, able to melt away into gentle ringing drones and return to seeping hisses of intensity, or the colourful hum of a flourescent tube.
The project creates its own sense of order out of what is a very diverse field. Yet, though many of these artists have collaborated with each other in different contexts - indeed, they even share a kind of approach, - it is very difficult to identify their unifying commitments. 'Microsound' covers a range of possible reference points, all of which are in evidence here: Zen meditation, Webern, surrealist cut-ups, John Cage's aleatoric work, sounds that capture real world micro-ambiences or that hallucinate virtual micro-organic lifeforms. But the invalidObject Series also showcases the extraordinary range of practical approaches within contemporary electronic music: system and generative process, purity of sound source, PowerBook Improv, musicalisation of data from the everyday soundworld, pulses, a way of montaging field recordings, a medium for exploring reverberation and drone, the origination of weird timbres and nois tones for a musical alphabet, an anti-aesthetic weapon, or a way of preserving, transforming and distorting their various source materials.
Ekkehard Ehler's work stands out here as a complex reflection on music, memory, source and process in the digital age. Elsewhere he has released tributes to Robert Johnson and Albert Ayler. Taking samples from turn of the century compositions by Schoenberg and Charles Ives here, he metamorphoses them through particular procedures so that their expressive string section fragments, once symbolic of transformatory urges, become buried fragments within electronic processes that have far outflanked their ability to evoke the mpossible. But in a way all the musics here, to some degree, share an element of being continuously pitted against, breaking free from or mourning the loss of traditional notions of objective presence. Whether this comes through in the minimalists' reduction of objectivity to near absence or Akira Rabelais' more funereal, shadowy, reverberating drone subtitled 'The Book of Void', or eM's ghostly, half heard snatches of instruments and voices, "it's a collage over the essence of loss". But it's there too in the incessant repercussion of musical subprocesses, and second generation transformations of sonic gestures that are already disembodied and uncategorisable. The conscious body and its systems of placement are not easily capable of inhabiting this space of fleeting and partial moments of affect and sonic hallucination, alongside abstract repetitions, interfaces, opacities, liminalities and noise... or perhaps they are too close to give no respite from the real thing. Placing a powerful collective aesthetic stamp on the death of figurable events, the invalidObject Series probes and plays with odds and ends of sound, creating quesy sonic ambivalences, and evolving the eventfulness of the in between.
