Greater Than Zero, Less Than One

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Perhaps one of the purest examples of computer music imaginable, this CD from the innovative Berkeley-based Foundry label often sounds like earlier experiments in the electronic manipulation of sound - an updated version of Morton Subotnick's "Silver Apples Of The Moon" perhaps. Yet the production process is quite different, being more a reflection of an existing digital world, than the intentional composition of computer-based music. For eM's M Bentley has constructed an album composed of raw data found on his Macintosh powerbook, translating digital information taken from files of all kinds into sound, into music. Like "Djinn", eM's earlier release, this is music reflecting an environment. "Djinn" sucked fragments of electromagnetic radiation, whereas this is musique concrete for a digital environment beyond human experience, constructing a voice for the invisible and inaudible ocean of zeros and ones which increasingly envelops us. Whilst the disjointed melodies and clicking rhythms do sound unfamiliar, alien to our world, occasionally the music conjures what one half-expects the inside of a computer to sound like, given fictional representations of digital environments and our understanding of more easily perceptible industrial locations such as the factory. The pounding rhythms of static found on 'Interleaved' and 'Shaker' echo a pacemaker-assisted heartbeat, or rhythmical industrial machinery, as much as what one expects the contents of a hard disk to sound like. Indeed, it's not difficult to imagine that these are the sounds to be heard on a Fantastic Voyage-like journey, streaming at light-speed along a crowded data bus, past the thunderous rhythms of the hard drive's fan, being shunted on and off stacks of data by the furiously pounding, overworked CPU. Other sounds are less violent, with 'Encircled's plaintive singing sounding for all the world like data fragmented and lost amidst the further reaches of a hard disk, yearning to be employed as much as the confident static-patterns (presumably rarely out of the cache) found on 'Crossing' and 'Tangled', perhaps the most accessible pieces here. With such an experimental project, I'd like to know exactly how Bentley constructed these sounds from the raw data. Whilst this music was assembled solely using Digital Performer software (no keyboards or samplers) there are clearly 'human' musical choices to be made in any such process. How did these raw electronic timbres emerge from such abstract source material? However, leaving aside such matters of construction, this is a fascinating and truly modern project.