Autistici - Detached Metal Voice â�� Early Works (Vol I)

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5...according to our Brian on Thu 15 Jul, 2010.

I'm no academic & I know little about music-making technology. I can only inform you of what I think i'm hearing. The first few tracks here conjure up, variously, an abstract cyber-conversation fizzes & rattles impatiently before finding its true rhythmical harmony within the framework of some dark ambience & fluctuating tonal exploration. A typewriter is kamikaze attacked by a load of spooky digital bees whilst someone plays some woozy wah-wah licks through a transistor radio. An abandoned space shuttle begins constructing its own DIY techno out of loneliness & boredom. Tiny metallic insect children skip on their way to school through a field a-buzz with brightly coloured digitized squeaky toys. Sound art, it's such a doss ain't it? The things a machine can do.....until you realise the relative limitations of artificial & processed sound when the cool, rolling jazzy drums & low-down double bass of Colonic People hit - then you're transported somewhere more thought provoking & organic. This track manages to maintain a cool funky feel whilst these fairly harsh, harrowing & neo-industrial ambient waves of sound assault the percussive mainframe. This track is totally great & pretty original. I cannnot be bothered with writing any more ham-fisted analogies about the diverse range of adventurous sound processing & curious drone elements/voice manipulation/tonal experimentation on this first volume of early works.

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A collection of tracks exploring the raw extrusion of the human condition. Bringing together early works, ‘Detached Metal Voice’ is characterised by an abstract narrative exploring the anxiety of disconnected elements striving to find connection in a world of digital communication. AT&T voiceovers provide threads of psychological association, rhythmic neo-classical arrangements and noise electronic jazz improvisations provide the backdrop. Many experimental techniques are in place within the creative process of these tracks. Laboratory sinewave oscillators sweep through many of the tracks, tones are produced from simple homemade synthesisers. There is a homage to voice synthesis including excerpts taken from many of the early laboratory attempts to produce the human voice through the mode of synthesis, including work pioneered by Philip Rubin from the Haskins Laboratories, Tom Baer, and Paul Mermelstein. This synthesizer, known as ASY, was based on vocal tract models developed at Bell Laboratories in the 1960s and 1970s by Paul Mermelstein, Cecil Coker, and colleagues. In tracks such as ‘Babyman’, Autistici illustrates a fascination in hearing machines talking about emotive subjects, emulating emotive tonal changes and yet having no real connection to the subjective emotional experience. Alternatively tracks such as ‘Whispering Mongo Man’ contains a 15 minute interview with John Lennon with all his words spoken deleted from the sound file, leaving only the intake and exhalation of breath. With the content missing we are left with a sense of emotion contained within the spaces – the working of a man’s body. The tracks encourage the listener to consider the complex question of how meaning, relationships and connections are constructed, communicated and perceived.

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