Junto Project 0274: The Genre of Broken Sound [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.

Suss Müsik is egalitarian when it comes to concept development. We asked our friend Carvin to describe the experience of listening to a genre called broken sound. What does it sound like, Carvin?

“The sonic equivalent of H.P. Lovecraft’s description of the Old Ones,” he replied. “Incomplete, phasing in and out of dimensions, and the sight of which drives one to insanity.”

Love it. Tell us more.

“Tonally frustrating. The rhythm and phrases are out of time and place. They’re there and then they’re not. Cohesion and confusion buried deep. Like DNA with chunks of helixes missing and replaced with something else.”

For this project, Suss Müsik distorted the concept of a broken consort, which refers to Baroque music composed for instruments of more than one family (i.e.; strings and woodwinds). We used piano in addition to such nontraditional “instruments” as power tools, electronic gadgets and mechanical toys.

The result is an amorphous, glitchy mess of a piece: creepy, unstructured, atmospheric, dissonant and decidedly unrefined. It’s not exactly ambient in the usual sense, yet you’d be hard pressed to score any notation except in rare bits.

The piece is titled Nyarlathotep, named after the evil shape-shifting deity invented by Lovecraft who is capable of assuming 1,000 unique formations. The image is a blob of clear liquid soap.