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A CONVERSATION WITH Wirephobia

This post is not to display an actual conversation with Wirephobia, but to announce the impending release of an album on CDr called “A CONVERSATION WITH Wirephobia”, which is by Kurdistani noise artist Wirephobia and should be an interesting listen for everyone involved. Barring calamities, it should be released within the week!

Welcome to the new Siccum Records blog

Dry Eyes speaking here. This is the second Siccum Records blog (the previous one was on Blogger.) This one has its own hosting, domain, and uses WordPress, and thus is potentially much more robust. The previous posts from the Blogger blog have been copied and pasted over to this one (with some modifications), so that they are not disconnected from this blog.

This blog looks sort of similar to the previous blog, and that’s intentional. I guess you could say that its a combination of brutalist and minimalist design that puts function far over form. I’m going to explore what’s available with WordPress plugins to see how the site can be enhanced, but expect similar aesthetics.

If it turns out to be viable, Siccum Records may sell releases on this site. For now go to the Siccum Records Bandcamp page at http://siccumrecords.bandcamp.com/

 

Interview with diigitae

Age, sex, location?

34,male,france
When did you start making music?
At the beginning i make mix tapes as child on a cassette recorder mainly using some tracks i like on the radio .
I do some magic tricks for my parents and grand parents and my sister make some dance as she practices on the conservatory from mets and i accompagn it whith some sound.
As teenager i make mixtape for me and friends with french hip hop old school and making my first. tracks with a bull shit tracks of a cd ,a thunder was recorded on the first track and i modify it i’ve lost it.
Then my best firends have a brother wo make music on computer with fruityloops and i understans for the firs time that i can make music on computer so when my father buy a computer i start making music with all sofware i can grab on internet at school.
I use at this time tuareg and synthedit after ,hammerhead,granulab,saccara,etc
What are you thinking when making music? What’s influencing you?
When i’m making music i think whith my ears it’s like a langage to me altrough i have to creates the words in fact the sounds are the words of the music.
i’m influenced mostly by the environment where i live the weather ,the birds sings,a birds alone is easy to hear bird but when i listen to all at the same times it’s chaotics and it appeal me.
it’s lie that no others guy’s influence me as i listen to lots of musics as yasunao tone ,chistian marclay for their use of physical glitch
philip jecks inflence me for my ambients tracks
i also have some influence of more noise people when i buy some tapes don’t know the names .
How do you make your music now ? It seems really noisy, like there is a tension in your tracks?
I make music with both hardware and the software depends on what i want at the moment.
As a hardware i have a minidiscs multitrack recorder ,two old sampler midiverbs an old procorat,contact ic.
at this moment i have found a do-it-yourself to make a cheap spring reverb,i have a cheap mixing board from beringher and making some feedback loop i use a cd player with prepared cd with my sound to alter it.
But in each tracks i use i’m making lots of fields recordings,tv random sampling and i use lots of raw sounds in fact it’s a file that i translate to sound with software .
For sequencing i’m using trackers like renoise ,milkytracker,radium ,etc
Where does your moniker come from?
In fact i like the digitale flower and when i wrote it on my computer screen i write quickly and i make
an error i and i like the word so i keep it .
How did you meet Dry Eyes, the creator of Siccum Records ?
In fact i was seeing on a forum of milkytrackers a message on the boards when a guy ask if someone making nosie music on tracker don’t know at this time so i contact it and he wan to hear my music so i send to him some tracks and he like and proposed to release a small batch of a cd when i’m ready so i send it the album and we released it on siccum records.
Where can we find your old musics ?
on jamendo (« he laptop are dreaming too » as moniker )for the old electronica projects(no noise here) on m bandcamp as diigitae and i think that in the next future i will release a free relase of tracks that i make in the past on internet archive but it would take time to upload as there is lots of tracks.
What are your projects today?
i’m working with a project with dry eyes we have a couples of tracks we create it as the game of bomb,
a child game,each of us send a debut tracks making on renoise and send it a the others and add or modify the tracks.
I have collab in the past with others guys mainly from my family .
I work to on a project that will be entitled extreme wendigo i thinks who are an imitation of the behaviour of cd glitch and real cd glitch with prepared cd i have some tracks in construction,some others finished.
You seem to be interested by some occult things like the wendigo?
Yeah,i don’ t believe on a religion on particular but i like the picture of the wendigo
i make some drawing (really basic) i have a process and when a shoot picture he make like a stained glass
with a wendigo as we could see with jesus on church.
As i’m schizophren i had lots of hallucinations with the Devil,shiva,a mix of human and wolfs
and as i’m stabilised i don’ have it anymore but keep interest for old shamanics things.
Altrough wendigo appears on the natives american when the white people came on united states .

Dry Eyes’ musique concrète and photography

As Dry Eyes, I release a lot of “Noise Improvisations” which, while most rooted in the “noise” genre of music, are technically musique concrète, or manipulations of sounds which have been recorded from real life. This type of music has its origins in the 1940s, and was invented by the French composer Pierre Schaeffer.

Pierre Schaeffer recorded sounds such as trains and used tape manipulations and various other techniques to make new sounds. This kind of treatment of real life noises to make music is the essence of musique concrète. 

While the technology of the 1940s was limited in what could be done in terms of sound manipulation, there has been a continuous stream of advances in sound manipulation techniques. In our current time, all or most of these effects are available as software which we can use in robust music-making programs called DAWs or “Digital Audio Workstations”.

Noise musicians from the late 1970s and the early 1980s developed a technique of using a feedback loop which was fed through many effects in sequence which were being constantly manipulated to create different sounds. This “playing the effects as instruments” turns the studio itself into an instrument, with various knobs, sliders, and switches creating Noise Music. Many people, who could not afford a full-fledged studio, found other means of creating this kind of music using, for instance, guitar effect pedals and recorded it to audio-cassette. Through the tape trading scene of the 1980s, an underground form of noise music was born.

Instead of creating a feedback loop, I feed actual, recorded sounds into a stream of effects and use a MIDI controller attached to a computer running a DAW to manipulate the sounds in real time. This is not a new technique, but it is the one which I have chosen for Dry Eyes’ Noise Improvisations, as I think it provides one with the ability to playback recorded sounds on the one hand, and if one creates a wall of sound by playing many sounds at once, this undulating, multi-rhythmic layer of noise can be fed into a chain of effects which offers many possibilities for interesting sounds.

My noise music uses sounds that are easily produced in the universe. It is a music of real life, and to me the effects are like different perspectives on life. This brings me to the other aspect of Dry Eyes, which is photography.

Photography has some similarities to musique concrète. All of my photos are black and white, so if the photo is the “sample” of real life, black and white is the “tape manipulation” or “effect” that has been applied to it. While I do not usually create the things that I photograph, the way that I capture them is my own.

My photography is black and white because this to me strips objects down to a more primitive, less vibrant essence. It shows the object as it is, but in a different way. I think that black and white can be used to show power relations and contrasts between different dualities in life if one is clever in what they show in a photograph.

Photography more directly shows the real world than musique concrète, but as artforms they both use the raw material of the universe more directly than say, traditional music or painting. My music and photography as Dry Eyes, aims to show the beauty in the mundane, and to work with it to create interesting things.

Dry Eyes’ music and photography at: https://dryeyes.bandcamp.com/
Also, many more photographs on Twitter at http://twitter.com/DryEyes4096/

The Noise Improvisations of Dry Eyes

First of all, the owner of Siccum Records = Dry Eyes = Me

I’d like to talk about the Noise Improvisations that are released frequently by me. Currently, there are 21 of these noise improvisations. Except for the white noise improvisation, these are all made by recording short sounds (around 10 seconds usually), then looping and crossfading them. This creates for each sample a continuous stream of sound, which is played back with other sounds which are given the same treatment. Then, in real time, the volumes of the samples are manipulated, creating different combinations of noises.

VST effects are applied to the stream of sound created, making for different soundscapes which evoke different mental states when listened to. Sometimes the sound is a calming drone, at other times, it can be quite harsh. Many rhythms play independently of each other, just like the rhythms of every day Real Life.

Often I find that when a copious amount of reverb is applied to the mess of sound, it creates what sounds like a train rushing through a tunnel. To me, this sound is hypnotizing, and I use this effect quite a bit.

This kind of musique concrète is for me a celebration of mundane things. The sounds are for the most part created using mundane objects, and I try to make each object shine in a beautiful way through sound manipulation. Making this music is very enjoyable because it turns anything that makes sound in the environment around me into a potential musical instrument that can be recorded.

Noise music to me is a way to make any sound beautiful; it is to me music, not “just” noise, or not “noise not music”. Echoing the predictions of the Italian Futurists, modern technology has enabled us to turn any sound into music, and to me, noise is the future of music in this respect. I prefer to use mundane sounds, but noise is so great because literally anything can be used, and this freedom is a great thing for music.

If you listen closely, the universe is playing a noise performance to you; appreciating this and other noises leads to the appreciation of beauty in what actually exists in real life. In this respect, a noise album is like an extension of what the universe already does, and this is a great thing, in my view.

Anyways, if you want to hear my Noise Improvisations, check them out at http://dryeyes.bandcamp.com/

Also, check out the black and white photograph prints I have for sale too!

Why diigitae’s Extreme WEN§Digo VOL.1 is an album you should listen to

While judging simply from the tracklist one may surmise that someone simply put a folder or two full of noise experiments on a CD and called it an album, one should not count this as a mark against the album, but rather, part of its charm. There is variety in the types of sounds presented, from fear-inducing, surreal noise in the opening track to well-sculpted mixes of tones and static, to improvised pieces which take the listener on a noisy journey to strange places. The whole point of this album is that it IS a snapshot of a budding artist, and it should be taken as such. Refinement is not necessary here: this is the raw chaos of creation, and it is a great listen.