Strange Attractors
Jos Smoulders
Strange Attractors is an example of what may be called Time Displacement Music. A varying mix of feedback, other noise sources, and found sounds are fed to a series of stereo digital delay units whose parameters (delay time, reverse, freeze, etc.) are manipulated in real-time via LFOs, sample and hold controllers, and so on, as well as live manual adjustments to produce an ever-evolving pastiche of sound washes. Sitting quietly (especially late at night) and listening to these compositions can be strangely exhilarating. My earliest involvement with electronics in music was the introduction of tape delay units. They utterly fascinated me: take a moment of time and store it, move it about, bend it into different shapes. Unbelievable! I spent hours unearthing the possibilities. Years later, technological advances have allowed much more complex capabilities in this realm, and modern versions of the time delay have always been at the core of my sonic explorations. Thus, Time Displacement Music. Taoism, Buddhism, and even contemporary physics state that fundamentally, there is no time, that there is only an incomprehensible eternally existing now, which we have little to no understanding of. But as a composer, I play with time. Unlike painting, for instance, all music is time-based. This creates a conundrum: if time does not exist, what is a composer working with, working upon? I cannot give a meaningful answer, but continue to play... Perhaps we can agree with William Blake, who stated, “The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.” (David Lee Myers) Crónica Electrónica David Lee Myers CD, PT, David Lee Myers, Crónica Electrónica, Electronic, Experimental, Noise, 2023 TRUE Formats CD / gatefold CRONICA203-2023 150 shopify 1.000 Deny manual 11.50 0.00 TRUE TRUE https://blog.flur.pt/CAPAS_IMAGENS/david%20lee%20myers%20strange.jpg 1 FALSE Kg 6.50 active 2025-01-10 00:00:00.000 2025-01-10 00:00:00.000
Jos Smoulders-Textuur 2 [IIII----]-CRONICA216-2024 Textuur 2 [IIII----] The Textuur project:
This album is part 2 in a series where I investigate processes to strip sounds from their original context and slice them into tiny bits. By doing this, sounds are separated from their source and as such severed from what they originally represented. What’s interesting and challenging for me in the project is to find the crossover area where representation disappears, and the sound becomes an abstraction. Where this is varies depending on the original sound. Already in the 1950s, Pierre Schaeffer investigated this and introduced the term objet sonore as an object that has a sonic quality of its own. In addition, Schaeffer also defined the objet musicale, which is the state after the sound object is manipulated and transformed into a musical entity. One could say that the objet sonore is the raw material and the objet musicale the intermediate or the final product. I started reading Schaeffer’s texts in 1981, after hearing Symphonie pour un homme seul and realizing that the wild sound experiments that I had been doing in my small flat had a history that went back to the late 1940s. Searching for more information, all I found was a single French text which I got from the library. I xeroxed all the pages and started reading, slowly, slowly, because I had not been paying much attention during French classes in high school. I have always found the idea of sound removed from its physical source to be problematic. Whenever I listened to musique concrète, I still recognized the sound source with all its physical and psychological connotations. So, what kind of game was being played here? I didn’t quite ‘get it’, apparently. But I loved listening to the recordings and through the years crafted my own musical style. In Textuur my objet sonore is not a three-dimensional object. It is a representation of something else, like a word, or a (endless) rhythm or a (endless) sine wave. The objet musicale is a (two-dimensional) surface. A surface with a texture. In my view the surface is completely immaterial but does present surface related characteristics, like smooth, rough, abrasive, uneven, adhesive, punctured, wet, et cetera. The idea of music as a representation of a surface arose from reading Carl Andre’s Yucatan poem series which he wrote in 1971-72. In true style of concrete poetry, Andre presents us with blocks of words in black and red carefully distributed over the paper surface. What struck me most about the poems is that the letters and the words seem to sink back into the visual form. Depending on their focus the reader either watches an abstract shape or reads words and letters. I found this very interesting because the (sound of the) human voice, words, meaning and representation often play a significant role in my work. Here a visual artist and one-time poet seemed to work with the same idea from a different perspective. Writing to Andre, I almost got in a heated argument with him because he strongly disagrees with being named a representative of concrete poetry (as I assumed) and when I made a remark to that effect, he metaphorically slammed the door in my face. Well, anyway. After deciding on the imagery of surface as objet sonore I have long thought about how to translate my interpretation of Yucatan to a musical dimension. In fact, the whole of 2021 and a decent part of 2022 was spent on thinking, experimenting, collecting, and discarding. Then, late 2022, I visited an exhibition of the works of Josef and Anni Albers in Den Haag. Although I primarily went to see Josef Albers’s paintings, the works of his wife Anni sparked the idea that I could use “weaving” as a way of producing the sounds I wanted. At least it was a metaphor that showed me a path out of my conundrum. A fabric shows a pattern on a surface but zooming in one can still see the original threads. Threads can be anything, of any width, any length. Weaving can be as loose and as dense as you need.
Textuur 2 [|||| - - - -]
With this project, I wanted to investigate the immersion of dance music into an electroacoustic environment. Like the other projects, here we first set the scene with several collections and then shred and dissolve that material in order to build up new sonic textures. The collections in Textuur 2 consist of the rhythmic parts as well as basic sine wave drones. The permutations are mixtures of those originals. The puncturing sounds of the various rhythmic elements encounter the heavy barrels of dense and dark sine wave drones. This periodically results in a nicely balanced soundscape, but more often one experiences brutalist clashes." (Jos Smoulders)
This album is part 2 in a series where I investigate processes to strip sounds from their original context and slice them into tiny bits. By doing this, sounds are separated from their source and as such severed from what they originally represented. What’s interesting and challenging for me in the project is to find the crossover area where representation disappears, and the sound becomes an abstraction. Where this is varies depending on the original sound. Already in the 1950s, Pierre Schaeffer investigated this and introduced the term objet sonore as an object that has a sonic quality of its own. In addition, Schaeffer also defined the objet musicale, which is the state after the sound object is manipulated and transformed into a musical entity. One could say that the objet sonore is the raw material and the objet musicale the intermediate or the final product. I started reading Schaeffer’s texts in 1981, after hearing Symphonie pour un homme seul and realizing that the wild sound experiments that I had been doing in my small flat had a history that went back to the late 1940s. Searching for more information, all I found was a single French text which I got from the library. I xeroxed all the pages and started reading, slowly, slowly, because I had not been paying much attention during French classes in high school. I have always found the idea of sound removed from its physical source to be problematic. Whenever I listened to musique concrète, I still recognized the sound source with all its physical and psychological connotations. So, what kind of game was being played here? I didn’t quite ‘get it’, apparently. But I loved listening to the recordings and through the years crafted my own musical style. In Textuur my objet sonore is not a three-dimensional object. It is a representation of something else, like a word, or a (endless) rhythm or a (endless) sine wave. The objet musicale is a (two-dimensional) surface. A surface with a texture. In my view the surface is completely immaterial but does present surface related characteristics, like smooth, rough, abrasive, uneven, adhesive, punctured, wet, et cetera. The idea of music as a representation of a surface arose from reading Carl Andre’s Yucatan poem series which he wrote in 1971-72. In true style of concrete poetry, Andre presents us with blocks of words in black and red carefully distributed over the paper surface. What struck me most about the poems is that the letters and the words seem to sink back into the visual form. Depending on their focus the reader either watches an abstract shape or reads words and letters. I found this very interesting because the (sound of the) human voice, words, meaning and representation often play a significant role in my work. Here a visual artist and one-time poet seemed to work with the same idea from a different perspective. Writing to Andre, I almost got in a heated argument with him because he strongly disagrees with being named a representative of concrete poetry (as I assumed) and when I made a remark to that effect, he metaphorically slammed the door in my face. Well, anyway. After deciding on the imagery of surface as objet sonore I have long thought about how to translate my interpretation of Yucatan to a musical dimension. In fact, the whole of 2021 and a decent part of 2022 was spent on thinking, experimenting, collecting, and discarding. Then, late 2022, I visited an exhibition of the works of Josef and Anni Albers in Den Haag. Although I primarily went to see Josef Albers’s paintings, the works of his wife Anni sparked the idea that I could use “weaving” as a way of producing the sounds I wanted. At least it was a metaphor that showed me a path out of my conundrum. A fabric shows a pattern on a surface but zooming in one can still see the original threads. Threads can be anything, of any width, any length. Weaving can be as loose and as dense as you need.
Textuur 2 [|||| - - - -]
With this project, I wanted to investigate the immersion of dance music into an electroacoustic environment. Like the other projects, here we first set the scene with several collections and then shred and dissolve that material in order to build up new sonic textures. The collections in Textuur 2 consist of the rhythmic parts as well as basic sine wave drones. The permutations are mixtures of those originals. The puncturing sounds of the various rhythmic elements encounter the heavy barrels of dense and dark sine wave drones. This periodically results in a nicely balanced soundscape, but more often one experiences brutalist clashes." (Jos Smoulders)