Junto Project 0277: Chew Some Concrète Sounds [repost]

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.

There is a lovely moment beginning around the six-minute mark of “Chew Cinders 1” by C. Reider. What appears to be randomized white noise degrades softly into retreating tones, followed by the rumbling of a deep bass presence that explodes into blankets of industrial haze. The effect is both unsettling and restful, reminiscent of classic Zoviet France (for those unfamiliar, their album Shouting at the Ground is a good starting point and well worth your investigation).

“I believe in the future resolution of two states,” wrote the Surrealist André Breton. “Life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease[ing] to be perceived as contradiction.” Composers who work in such contexts remove sounds from their original source material, thus creating a dichotomy in which even the most experimental music can reside within the realm of familiarity.

For this weird piece, Suss Müsik adhered to a philosophy of “sharp attack, gentle decay” — an unfaithful reproduction of casually played instruments. You’ll hear washes of synth, glitchy electronics, the tinkle of a piano, the heavy drop of a microphone. Deeper listens may reveal the distorted whine of a saxophone, or perhaps the rumble that occurs when a Boss RV-3 pedal is pushed to capacity. A chopstick is tapped on a piece of paper to replicate a snappy drum snare; somehow the hum of a dehumidifier sounds like a choir. Plus there’s a guy talking. Instant dada.

The piece is titled Creideamh, a derivative of the Old irish word creitem meaning “to believe.” The image is a red baseball, torn in half, with a picture of Salvador Dali on its surface.