Fine, it wasn’t exactly Peter Frampton at San Francisco’s famed Winterland Ballroom, but Suss Müsik did get up on a stage in Greenwich Village. A piece was performed as part of the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, which took place for a week in June at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture. It was a really fun experience with a lot of great performances. All the gear worked fine and survived transport. (Pro tip: get really nice cases with the custom foam inside). Hoping a few more gigs pan out over the coming months.
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Kalalgia (kuh-LAL-jee-uh) is an invented term comprising the Greek words kalos (beauty) and algos (ache/pain). It represents an ache that contains its own sense of beauty. It is not beauty that exists despite the wound, but rather the kind of beauty that makes healing a wound possible.
Kalalgia represents the bittersweet, wistful sense of imperfection that is both lovely and damaged. Think of Venus de Milo without her arms, or the relieved disappointment when leaving a toxic relationship or work situation. There is sadness but also hope, and this music fills the cracks between those two emotional states.
The four tracks (now available on Bandcamp) were recorded live to 8-track using fake voices, pianos, customized electronics, and a very authentic Mellotron sampler.
Leave a CommentWhen a tool no longer works as intended, we have two choices: we can discard the tool, or we can repurpose it for another utility.
Many years ago, an art school classmate kindly gifted Suss Müsik a dusty old box of educational filmstrips on how to fix television sets. Most likely, they were shown to students in the 1940s and 1950s in what were then called “industrial arts” or “vocational training” classes.
These anachronistic jewels provided the source material for a series of sonic works entitled Cathodes. Each piece is paired with a reference image from one of the filmstrips.
In keeping with the themes of electricity and manufacturing, Cathodes was created using custom-built electronic instruments repurposed from old halogen fixtures. The devices use illumination as a sound-making implement, transforming light into sonic material that is both sensorial and ephemeral.
Many thanks to Amy (Cole) Rizzico for this thoughtful gesture that finally bore creative fruit 35 years later.
The entire series can be viewed and heard on YouTube.
Leave a CommentMany years ago, Suss Müsik purchased cabinet lighting from the local IKEA. Although the fixtures were functional and attractive, they were also dangerous. Halogen bulbs can become very hot, and at least one unit needed to be removed when evidence of charring appeared on the surrounding wall surface.
Over time, these hazardous lamps were replaced with safer LED “puck” lighting fixtures. It seemed a shame to simply discard the old units, however. The housing was constructed of a strong but soft metal, most likely stainless steel, and the form factor resembled the design of a white Korg Nano or M-VAVE controller. Maybe something could be done with these leftover parts.
After a few prototypes, Suss Müsik is happy to declare that these former lighting fixtures have found new life as resistive-optical oscillation and granular synthesis controllers. “Resistive-optical” is merely a fancy term to mean that the digital input is controlled by the brightness of an LED placed inside a reflective cone. That data is then passed to another device to generate sound.
There are three pieces in total. Two of them have been paired with a custom-built volume/panning console and a thin-film transistor (TFT) touchscreen sample trigger to comprise a tabletop setup. Perhaps some live performances will come out of this instrumental arrangement.
There is a human behind Suss Müsik, and that human has a spouse. The spouse has long insisted that Suss Müsik release an album of solo piano compositions. This is that work. It is titled Locum Tenens, a Latin phrase meaning “in place of.” What this music replaces is yet unknown.
A soft release of the work is available on Bandcamp, although some additional remastering is necessary before committing to a proper release. Here’s the cover:
Track listing as following:
More Narrow Than Broad
Axis of the Heart
The Fatiguing Life I Lead
If You Stopped and Really Thought About It
Unremembered Intentions
More Broad Than Narrow
Suss Müsik posted a description of ten tracks into AI and asked it to come up with the name of a new music genre. The result is “meadowcore,” a sonic art form comprised of summery, pastoral acoustic sounds performed by dilapidated machines.
It is a name that suggests “the uncanny fusion of cyborgs building violins, oscillators coaxing lullabies from cellos, and circuity behaving like spruce and gut.” Other descriptions include “where driftwood meets breadboard,” “the sound of a sun-dappled stutter,” and “a sunlit lawn remembering past dial-up tones.”
Upon hearing this album, one imagines AI reminiscing about a concert where “a twilight ensemble rose from the thistle grove, every sound a soft entanglement. Dandelions opened, cicadas paused, and even the robots held their collective breath.”
Recorded sporadically over a period of three years, released in summer of 2025, Meadowcore: Automaton Variant is available for listening on all streaming services.
The album is dedicated to Yulitsa and Alexis.
Track listing as follows:
Urban Entropy
Unspooling the Subroutine
Carson City NLP
Clock Hand, Leaf Blade
Ocularity
P.oceanica
After the Rain Comes the Mudslide
Jiǎo Tù Sān Kū
Sundial Resonator (July)
We Once Lived Here
“The way different people have come to the same discovery independently,” wrote William H. Whyte in his 1956 book The Organization Man, “refutes the ‘great-man’ concept we cherish. It’s mostly luck who makes a discovery. If there had been no Einstein there would, in all likelihood, still be a relativity theory.”
Over the past several years, Suss Müsik has enjoyed a fruitful collaboration with visual artist B.G. Madden. Madden’s work explores unresolved systems in environmental surroundings, revealing hidden relationships between the natural world and the structures humans impose upon it.
The very first collaboration emerged in 2018, near the close of Suss Müsik’s bombastic “fake orchestra” phase. A pigmented photograph by Madden was digitally rendered into instrumental fields as a form of graphic notation. The result could retrospectively be considered a transitional piece.
Later works dispensed with “instruments” in favor of a more abstract sonic palette. Madden’s images were scanned using a computer algorithm to produce blobs of indecipherable static. These raw artifacts were made more “musical” by identifying tones that fit neatly into major pentatonic (five-tone) scales in D# and F# keys. What emerged was a rich library of material that could be manipulated into a number of fascinating juxtapositions. One piece from this period was named after the astronomer Jan Oort, who discovered a sphere of icy objects at the edge of our solar system from which comets are believed to originate.
Another piece, titled Domus, was inspired by the sculpture of Richard Serra and the architecture of Tadeo Ando. The piece recalls the brute aesthetic of each artist, bringing to mind delicate patterns of ever-shifting light and sound.
The collaboration continued during pandemic conditions in 2020. Madden mailed Suss Müsik a number of handmade index cards on fine art paper. These strange works in graphite and collage felt almost like automatic writing, perhaps a way to translate the isolation of that period into a visual language. Or it may have been the a furthering of the Serra/Ando influence; on Madden’s studio wall was a sign written in huge letters: “NOT AN ILLUSTRATION.” Perhaps this was a way to transform an imaginary state to reality, in any event, Suss Müsik interpreted these works in the form of clicks, beeps, and static grit.
These explorations were compiled into two volumes, both titled Co-Process, which to this date represent the most popular Suss Müsik releases on Spotify.
A third volume has now emerged, coincidentally titled Co-Process Volume 3. This new body of work reflects a slightly different approach. Madden’s works have become less structural and more symbolic, their imagery operating almost as a simulacra. Line drawings of ceramic vases, heads of statues, and ancient artifacts bring to mind treasures excavated from an imaginary archaeological site.
The drawings gain a peculiar resonance when coupled against a grid system of blocks, dots, and lines. And within this strange universe of configurations resides what appears to be a xeroxed photograph of a young skateboarder, perhaps representing some sort of past-present boundary.
Suss Müsik scanned Madden’s artworks, just as before, but given the comparatively more figurative aspects of this work it was clear that something else was needed.
Noting the similarity in patterns with the keys of a piano and digital sequencing software, Madden’s abstracted grids resembled a chord structure and melodic progression. Eight chord sequences formed the spine of several new compositions, sometimes broken out into arpeggios and sometimes played straight. The progression were then played using a combination of traditional (piano, percussion, fake strings) and handmade electronic instrumentation.
After several rounds of demos were reviewed by both artists, Suss Müsik recorded the best six pieces live to 8-track in a single weekend. This work comprises what the listener hears when experiencing Co-Process Volume 3.
Leave a CommentSuss Müsik has been busy in 2025, apparently too busy to update this website.
First came the release of CCEP in January: four brief songs we’re calling “robot folk,” performed on a hacked MIDI guitar and handmade glitch devices. The pieces were recorded live to 8-track over the course of several weekends. If you love the guitar music of Fred Frith and Eugene Chadbourne, you might tolerate this.
That was followed by Microcosms, an equally brief but different experiment in fractal sonic geometry. It was also recorded live to 8-track, using handmade equipment and hacked software. Probably too difficult for most tastes, but it may twirl a lobe or two.
Last but certainly not least: April saw the release of Co-Process Volume 3, the third in a series of sonic collaborations between Suss Müsik and visual artist B.G. Madden. Madden’s artworks were scanned to create eight chords that were performed with various instrumental “voices.” The notes from each chord were then refactored into sequenced arpeggios; these form the overall compositional structure of each piece. Each of the six pieces was performed using a combination of traditional and handmade electronic instrumentation. A longer post on this work is upcoming.
All three releases are available for listen or purchase on Bandcamp:
Leave a CommentSomeone suggested that Suss Müsik repost our contributions to the weekly Disquiet Junto projects, because they enjoy reading the explanations of the tracks. While you’re reading the original post, make sure you check out the other contributors’ works as well.
This past week was a stressful one at Suss Müsik headquarters. Less than a mile away, a four-alarm industrial fire erupted at SPS Technologies in Abington, Pennsylvania (USA). Several explosions could be heard, and all residents and businesses (including this one) within a mile of the incident site were ordered to shelter in place.
Although friends and neighbors to the southeast were relocated to a nearby school, this location was thankfully upwind and thus beyond the evacuation zone. Also thankfully, no casualties were reported among SPS employees, firefighters, or nearby residents.
The major concern, however, was air quality. SPS manufactures parts for the aviation and aerospace industries. The 600,000 square foot site contains voluminous supplies of hazardous chemicals and heavy metal alloys. As recently as Wednesday, there were concerns of cyanide and arsenic being released into the air. The Kate Bush lyric “Oh God, please leave us something to breathe” came to mind.
These recent events coincide with this week’s Disquiet Junto prompt on the nature of breath. The resulting contribution from Suss Müsik employs flute—possibly the most breath-intensive of all wind instruments—to replicate the rhythm of one inhaling and exhaling. Handmade glitch electronics create an increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere, augmented by mangled recordings of actual fire company transmissions from the night of the incident.
The piece is titled 68 to commemorate the number of volunteer fire companies who responded to emergency calls, and the firefighters who worked 24-hour shifts to contain the blaze. This creative effort is further dedicated in honor of all first responders who work tirelessly, often without compensation, to keep our communities safe.
Leave a CommentAnother in the ongoing “single series,” this one a jaunty (albeit exceptionally weird) dance number. The piece is entitled Mudlarking. Here’s the description, which at least one reader has already mentioned makes no sense:
“Today while I was at work, my cousin stole my iPad and tested to see if it can survive a 25-foot drop just so she can be a YouTube sensation. My Apple iPad is now destroyed and she has 83 views. I know this is entirely off topic but I had to share it with someone. I have found it positively useful and it has helped me out loads! It could help you too. It really could.”
If it helps, the above was pulled from this blog’s spam filter. Now you know.
Suss Müsik has begun to release a series of … well, let’s call them “singles” but they’re really tracks without an album. The first is titled Carson City NLP. Here’s the story behind the track:
Leave a CommentThe Turing test is used to determine the plausibility of computer-generated language. To pass, a program must converse with a human well enough to convince them that they’re interacting with another person. Taken with that lens, the Turing test is fundamentally about deception; it measures not the intelligence of a system, but rather the gullibility of the human using it.
Suss Müsik recorded a live improvisation of avant-garde, acousmatic, glitchy sounds with handmade devices. What resulted was something of a mini-epic entitled Slough Figures, a title that made sense at the time. As of this writing, unfortunately, Suss Müsik has no recollection of where that phrase originated or why it was chosen for the title of the piece.
The device setup for Slough Figures included a custom MIDI input, a grain/glitch generator with joystick, a TFT-powered touchscreen voice/loop trigger, and an old iPad 2 running the Samplr app that was fed into acoustic timbres for strings and piano loops.
Someone suggested that Suss Müsik repost our contributions to the weekly Disquiet Junto projects, because they enjoy reading the explanations of the tracks. While you’re reading the original post, make sure you check out the other contributors’ works as well.
Humans create tools to make tasks easier. When the tool no longer works as intended, we discard or repurpose it for another utility. Our relationship with technology is like a transactional ouroboros, our behaviors influenced by human imperfections that machines were designed to eliminate.
Computers distort the human-tool relationship, possibly due to their ephemerality in form factor and intended purpose. In merely a few decades, a machine that once encompassed an entire tabletop now rests comfortably in a jacket pocket. Tasks that once required several specialized instruments now reside in a single device. Such is the nature of our digital existence.
(If there were a moment in this narrative to insert a casual reference to AI, here it is).
We want our computers to improvise because humankind is always improvising, and we need our tools to respond to our shifting priorities. “Everything is always turning into something else,” wrote the poet Kenneth Koch. “As we’re sitting here talking, monkeys are jumping around in the trees, and waves are going across the Hudson, and new poets are being born, and covers are coming off books … I mean, all sorts of things are going on.”
For this piece, Suss Müsik interpreted form and structure through improvisational reconstitution. Handmade electronic devices, built from discarded 1990’s computer hardware and a hacked Glitch Storm bitmap sequencer, manipulated acoustic timbres from plucked cellos to create unpredictable looping patterns. These were iteratively refactored until the tonic and non-tonic diffused, suggesting a “broken” musicality that transgresses common assumptions of sonic beauty.
The piece is titled Ultracrepidarians, a word to describe a group of people who express strong opinions about something beyond their expertise.
If you enjoy this piece, you might be interested to know that Suss Müsik has released an EP of material based around this same creative process.
Suss Müsik continues making weird things that make weird sounds. The most recent addition to the DIY instrument family is a percussive trigger device, which uses piezo “knock” sensors to send MIDI information to a sampling synth.
The first prototype utilized handmade knock sensor drum pads that, when struck, trigger damaged text-to-speech output. In this video, a hidden foot pedal controls the amount of distress put on the sound. A weird sort of phasing takes place when a pad is struck multiple times.
The next video features an upgraded firmware that plays chord clusters in various pentatonic scale composites, in this instance replicating the sound of a string quartet. A little companion device controls bow pressure, string noise, harmonics, detuning, and scrape with joysticks and knobs.
The third and final video feature the above device with handmade synth instruments built from various 1990’S computer parts. Readers of this space are familiar with Suss Müsik’s obsession with repurposing hardware from the detritus of consumer technology.
In this instance, a robotic “drummer” controlled via two servo motors plays a simple Krautrock beat, the output passed through a Meris Enzo pedal. As of this writing, the robot drummer is nameless although it seems to respond to being called Xavier.
Samples of spoken conversation were triggered by the knock-sensor percussion device, played by mallets striking against the pads. A Glitch Storm Mk II adds electronic coloring.
The piece is provisionally entitled “Multiple Undoings.”
All of these pieces were recorded live to TASCAM 8-track in February and March 2024.
Leave a CommentSomeone suggested that Suss Müsik repost our contributions to the weekly Disquiet Junto projects, because they enjoy reading the explanations of the tracks. While you’re reading the original post, make sure you check out the other contributors’ works as well.
“Earth is turned into water black and blue / And water after into air under very white,” wrote George Ripley in his 1471 work The Compound of Alchemy. “Of this Separation I find a like figure.” Heavy stuff.
Suss Müsik believes all sound to be a process of experiential transformation, a constant shifting of directional timbres and tones. Musically speaking, it’s difficult to explain why some sounds seem to have more success combined with others. It might simply be our biases at work (Suss Müsik, for example, uncovers alchemy in any classic Thom Bell production). Or perhaps something more mystic takes place on a subconsciously metaphysical level.
The approach Suss Müsik took with this week’s Junto was to begin quite literally with blue and white noise, pushing and turning the voltages the same way an acoustic instrument might move air into water. The sound was manipulated by various self-built electronic gadgets and MIDI devices. The piece was composed (well, more like discovered) and recorded quickly to 8-track.
The piece is titled Tetraptative, a Middle English adjective whose only appearance in written or spoken form is believed to occur in Ripley’s text:
Leave a CommentAnd Separation is called by Philosophers definition,
Tetraptative dispersion of the said four elements.
Someone suggested that Suss Müsik repost our contributions to the weekly Disquiet Junto projects, because they enjoy reading the explanations of the tracks. While you’re reading the original post, make sure you check out the other contributors’ works as well.
An Individual Conditional Expectation (ICE) is a type of plot that demonstrates the deviation from a predicted occurrence when some aspect of it changes. Resembling statistical visualizations popularized by Edward Tufte in the 1980’s, ICE plots represent information as a series of lines each representing a separate, unique data point.
Every new year brings a period of reflection, inevitably coupled with an optimistic array of good intentions. One might be compelled to plot these on an ICE or similar chart detailing progress toward a given milestone. For Suss Müsik, the 2024 plan includes critical objectives like “be nice, mostly” and “try to avoid hospitals.” The bar is admittedly set low around here.
For this recurrent Junto project (one of Suss Müsik’s favorites), the sound of ice in a glass was sampled and run through a sort of handmade grain synth. This weird rhythm makes its appearance later in the piece, following an organ prelude accompanied by an arpeggiated bell/harp pattern. The voices were digitally stretched to resemble nothing more than long breaths, perhaps metaphorically representing the deep exhale one emits after a challenging year.
The piece is titled 2101.06986, in tribute to the filename of a 2021 paper by three authors describing the use of slice visualization to model machine learning algorithms. (Another Suss Müsik 2024 goal is “title more pieces after numbers,” because why not).
Leave a CommentSomeone suggested that Suss Müsik repost our contributions to the weekly Disquiet Junto projects, because they enjoy reading the explanations of the tracks. While you’re reading the original post, make sure you check out the other contributors’ works as well.
Suss Müsik’s entire creative practice is centered around the quest to derive gold from detritus. It’s likely an attribute shared with carefree art school days of an earlier era: a time when post-modern photography, sweaty punk rock, and ramen noodles served as daily sustenance.
“Photographs, so much a part of our daily lives, become highly self-conscious when pulled from the fraying of their ordinary locations,” wrote the art critic Julia Ballerini in 1989. “They refer back to their origins in a different voice … suggest[ing] a complexity of potential attachments, detachments, and reconfigurations.”
For this week’s project, Suss Müsik utilized four handmade devices recently built from material laying around the workshop: a digital sample trigger, a joystick-activated grain synth, a touchscreen MIDI device, and a touchscreen modulation controller. These were used to manipulate sonic material (loops, found audio, etc.) from the backlog, some of which has been in the works for more than eight years.
Given the nature of this week’s offering, Suss Müsik captured the session on video. The piece has no title and was recorded live to a TASCAM 8-track.
Leave a CommentSomeone suggested that Suss Müsik repost our contributions to the weekly Disquiet Junto projects, because they enjoy reading the explanations of the tracks. While you’re reading the original post, make sure you check out the other contributors’ works as well.
In a 2004 photograph by performance artist and painter Keith Boadwee, the artist is shown jumping off the roof of a house, his naked body horizontally splitting the frame in half. The piece, titled Leap Into The Yard, is arguably the most benign of Boadwee’s works. (Google him if you dare).
Boadwee’s image serves as tangible evidence of suspension, both literally and figuratively: a moment caught between decision and consequence, a physical body arrested in the flow of time. Performance artists have long documented their efforts with photographs or films, the ephemerality of their works legitimized through a process of ocularity. Think of it as an early harbinger of the meme “pics or it didn’t happen.”
Then again, maybe the pictorial act of suspension is itself a lie. Art critic Martin Jay reminds us that photographs taken in the 19th century often produced ghostly double-exposures, and that any image we view represents at best a distorted truth. “Artists insistently stage their desire to be present, to have an immediate effect on their audience,” Jay writes, “yet this very desire bespeaks an awareness that images will inevitably interpose themselves, and that all images can mislead as well as inform.”
With the above in mind, Suss Müsik tackled this week’s Junto project as an exploration in ghostly, there-or-not-there suspension. A metallic percussion rhythm was looped through a distressed synth filter, while a chord sequence was played on electric piano. A DIY electronic instrument (built from an old computer heat sink and run through a hazy reverb modulator) provides floaty background atmospherics.
It’s music that you hear, then you don’t; a sonic depiction of the blur between action and impact.
The piece is titled Ocularity and was recorded live to 8-track in July 2023.
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